been preparing for a move and my desk sold way quicker than I expected it to so now my setup is… this. real gamer hours down here.

the main thing making me support right-to-repair laws is that I need to make my car’s manufacturer give me whatever horrific software is running the touchscreen so I can rewrite it

hey it’s Trans Day of Visibility. I have the luxury of being fine with the gender I got but I have friends who’ve transitioned and am proud of them for being themselves. the world is a better place when people have that freedom. support trans rights.

started adding some color and continued fiddling with the dynamics. it’s pretty sensitive to different parameters for buoyancy / cooling—need to add some sliders to dial those in instead of having to rebuild it

there we go—as with most anything fluid, had to stir things up a little for the fun stuff to happen. in this case, feeding fuel in at the base of the flame masked by some time-varying noise.

this article is a good read, and there’s a line in it that I think gets to the heart of one of my problems with these tools:

“After writing the parser, I still don't know HTML5 properly.”

a thing I love about programming is that doing it doesn’t just make a thing that does a task: it teaches me more about the task itself and the world that it’s part of. this isn’t that, it’s just extrusion, and I don’t want to reduce myself to “guy who turns the crank of the extruder”.

https://friendlybit.com/python/writing-justhtml-with-coding-agents/

I love walking in the rain but today’s storm was a little heavier than I prepared for so now I look and feel like I fell in a pond

it’s Halloween! in honor of my favorite holiday, please tell me about the best costumes you’ve seen. I do not need them for any particular purpose and this is not engagement bait (because: Mastodon), I just want to know.

marketing emails from the company from which I very very intermittently buy cables are some of my favorite emails to get. “run out”? am I eating them?

you can sort of see what I mean here, though the video compression may eat it. the cool thing about ray-traced depth-of-field is that it’s so much less complicated than the nonsense you have to do to fake it with rasterization—no scene segmentation or edge fixups or anything, just nudge your camera rays a little and 🎊 perfect blur. magic.

as I hoped, real DOF looks pretty good. more physical. with the noise changing per-frame it gets uncomfortably chaotic-looking, but if I just keep the seed the same then it produces a nice sort of halftone / dot-screen effect. doesn’t even need denoising. and in under 5ms at native 4K!
https://mastodon.art/@noah/115008343523249212

accumulated a collection of laptop stickers for a few years and finally got around to applying them. I think it gives the machine some good character.

this piece by @glyph is really thoughtful, and summarizes where I’m at on this technology as it pertains to making things. even if all the issues with it cleared up tomorrow, and I could guilt-free use a version of one of these tools that works as well as its proponents say it does, I just don’t think I would want to. the point of making a thing is _making the thing_. asking that it be made for me does not count.
https://blog.glyph.im/2025/06/i-think-im-done-thinking-about-genai-for-now.html

been wanting to make a music visualizer but my audio and signal-processing knowledge is basically nil. managed to turn up enough documentation and sample code to cobble together a Core Audio + vDSP thing that works out a frequency spectrum from live system audio. pretty thrilled to see this working.

been toiling for a while to hit a deadline at work and it has taken so much out of me that when I stood up on the bus just now and hit my head on the luggage rack instead of an “ow” I emitted an involuntary sigh that was so deep someone looked at me with alarm

been replaying Doom Eternal—the gameplay and level design are terrific as I remembered but man I forgot how bad the writing was. someone thought they were super clever coming up with “what if we did ‘woke’ for demons” so there are PSAs about “the mortally challenged” which would be bad enough as a one-off but, because everyone with this mindset has exactly one “joke” about it, gets absolutely run into the ground instead. foul.

this weekend I drove out to visit a parkour gym someone told me about; I still can’t get over how much fun it was. so many things to clamber on and swing from and jump across. most of the muscles in my body hurt now and it was 100% worth it. can’t wait to go back there.

opened up my PC to install some new storage; I’d forgotten how dense this thing is. when I first built it I had to find a different CPU cooler than the one I started with, because it was a few -millimeters- too tall for the side of the case to even go back on.

Coyote vs. Acme, which was by all accounts a great movie, got canned for a $30M tax writeoff; this, which literally no one asked for, is losing them five times that. just the greatest business minds in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coyote_vs._Acme
https://mas.to/@carnage4life/113308631960800147

does anyone else find it weird how everyone writing about layoffs phrases it? even when the writer isn’t part of the company: “layoffs impacted the team”, “[company] hit by layoffs”, etc. maybe one time in ten they’ll actually say “[company] lays people off”. this isn’t a mystery event that Just Happens Oh Well: it’s an active, deliberate choice. using language that suggests the former helps the companies dodge responsibility.