thechao

I've got one article near me. There's another group of articles that, I guess, are a bit further off? One of them reads like an ad for a creepy park. Luckily, the actual walking time is more like 24 hours. Yay rural Texas?

This reminds me of my favorite arcane C test: what value is TRUE and FALSE on X bullshit tool chain. My a favorite was 0=TRUE, 2=FALSE. I'd like to shake the hand of the joker who came up with that.

I dunno. I vacillated on that. It's something like 45–50 GWh nameplate currently installed, and ERCOT has 177 GW / 371 GWh of active planned battery projects in the interconnection queue. BESS are used for peaker-like capacity and load balancing, so GW is actually a pretty relevant number here.

I don't know about other states, but Texas has about 18GW of BESS, already (https://www.cleanview.co/power-projects/operating/battery-st...). We're planning another ~177GW (https://www.ercot.com/files/docs/2026/04/16/ERCOT-Monthly-Op...).

Here's my theory about modern architectural design. Let's say you've got two students that have to do a final design: (a) chooses a rococo or neoVictorian (humanist design); and, (b) chooses a spare modern design. Both of them are required to draft facades, elevations, etc. The modern design is literally easier to draft — literally less time. That means any school of architecture that both rewards "good grades" and "project completion under pressure" will naturally select for students who like "modern" (brutalist?). Those students then become professors, and the whole system reinforces.

Yeah. The headline is utterly divorced from the reality of the charts?

> curl -fsSL https://bend-lang.com/install.sh | sh

Hmmm... needs `sudo`.

Absolutely!

Only if the cost of monsanto seed + roundup is less than the cost of regular seed per expected harvested bushel? Otherwise, no one would use the monsanto seed + roundup?

My kids love taking about big numbers. TREE(3) is a family favorite. So, I was going over sequences with them, and I decided to go slow instead. My sequence was: 1 1 1 1 ... 1 ...

They accused me of using just "all 1s" (which is, naturally, cheating). Ai contraire!

The count of the number of digits in the decimal representation of the number of unique primes in the prime factorization of the natural numbers.

The best part is that even pretty young kids can compute this sequence; by the first "2" is at 2*3*5*7*11*13*17*19*23*29!

(Hopefully I got that right; the phone doesn't make it easy to type!)

I am!

That's because we measure weight in tonnage.

If the NTSB claims the car is safe on its interior in terms of certain kinds of crashes, you'd think that geometry & layout of the interior would be part of that claimed specification. That would prevent an A/B problem: the NTSB tests a car with 18" of padding, and the car manufacturer delivers a car with 18mm of padding. Or... whatever. Basically accountability & reproducibility.

I wish overhead (cut away to passenger layout) and side scale drawings of all cars existed. That way you could directly compare the vehicles. You'd think such information would be needed (in the U.S.) by the NTSB; and, thus, be freely available.

I have friends at companies that used to do BS jobs. Then, AI came in and took over the BS, and now they're doing real, meaningful work. One friend was told her team (3) would be eliminated once AI took over. Now that the AI automated the teams' job, they do proper finance work, and they've expanded the team to 5 people. Turns out the limiting rate was a bottleneck in the paperwork that the AI eliminated, meaning they can do proper forecasting analysis more effectively. Each additional person increases the set of product markets they can effectively forecast for. With effective forecasts they can time the market better, and they've already saved the company significant money — way more than their salaries, combined.

> The big difference is that with a debit card, it's your money that is hit by fraud.

I kind of disagree. I think what's happened is the bank would prefer you to believe that. Imagine I kept my money at the bank, and deposited $10000 with the teller. Immediately afterward a robber follows in and steals that $10000 from the teller. Does the bank say "oh no Mr. TheChao! A robber stole your $10000!". I mean, no? The bank got robbed. Just because the bank's digital security is more tied one-to-one to dollars and its easier for a robber to steal from "my till" doesn't mean it was me who was robbed. It's the bank's job to stop that.

I hope I'm remembering this right: a mathematician claims to have a proof for the ABC conjecture, but can't conceive any other mathematician it's right — it's "too weird", so the proof is rejected?

> Wyzer supports standard if/else, while, and for loops. Note that loops don't need parentheses around the condition.

But why!? You know what'd be cool? If we started supporting control statements that were a bit more sophisticated!

``` do { } while (c) { if (x) break foo; } else { case foo : ...; default : ...; } ```

> Models are excellent at code

Models are infinitely willing to code. The code they produce makes me want to pour one out for Knuth.

Housing values skyrocketed due to low interest rates. The prices are sticky and won't correct just because mortgage rates have gone up. That means no one can move. What we need is a large number of small houses (or owner owned multitenants) and a population willing to move into them.

Gasoline has 10x the energy (MJ/Kg) than TNT, but it's not a "bomb". Being a "bomb" is about energy release rate. A battery is still controlled by its chemistry.

Which book that was rare was destroyed? I'm interested to know a few titles.

Anathem is the best Stephenson book; The Algebraist is the best Iain Banks. There's enough of us to fill a good sized van!

Sorry I was so terse! Let's ignore guard band, for now. Our rasterization surface is a rectangle. We don't need to "geometrically clip" a triangle to the rectangle's surface. Instead, we just walk the surface of the rectangle and ask two questions: (1) does the triangle capture this (sub)sample; and, (2) what's the interpolated value of the attributes at this (sub)sample. In practice, for software rasterizers, we're working on tiny subrectangles (the tile), e.g., 4x4 or 2x8, whatever. So, we can be a little "inefficient" with our walking with respect to the edge testing for interiority. (This is roughly how HW works at the 2x2 level, as well.) Because the (sub)sample is "pulling" the attribute, we don't need to geometrically "clip" the triangle to the tile: the tile's (x,y) subsamples do that "for free".

On the flip side, if a triangle is 'really big' we need a guard band to either reject or subdivide triangles. The first one is fairly cheap -- we're throwing away the triangle! -- the second one is a better user experience, but requires synthesizing primitives. (The worst case is that a single triangle becomes 5 triangles, I think.) Each of those triangles needs its Z and 1/Z calculated in fixed precision. The precision of that fixed precision (though) can be clamped to the local tile; so, even though the global precision might need to be 25.25 (or whatever), the tile-local precision is only 4.9 (or whatever), with an intermediate 24.24 that can be handled with a float-float patch-up. The computation should all occur in the triangle's barycentric space: that means you need the inverted barycentric mapping to invert the guard band into the triangle's barycentric space. You do that because it lets you control the fixed point calculations better. (You can leave off the inverted determinant multiplication until the last moment.)

When I say "deferred attribute synthesis" I mean that we don't calculate attributes in the vertex shader. Instead, we calculate the barycentric, Z, and 1/Z values and pass those along. When we fire up the tile walker for the triangle (in general we only need 1-3 tiles), we calculate the attributes "on the fly, as they're used" and then let the compiler do CSE to fold down the replicated constructions.

You only need to clip triangles is you're worried about attribute interpolation for very large triangles. There's two ways to handle this: (1) discard (fast but not a great user experience); or, (2) primitive synthesis. Just frustum clipping is enabled by point picking in the local tile. Primitive synthesis requires some FP kung fu; but, is easiest done in barycentric space against a reverse transformed clipping rectangle. This lets you carefully control clip rounding error using either doubles or (better) fixed point. Abrash likes to use integer fixed point, but that is historical — modern fixed point can be handled with careful control of the fp unit in the mantissa. The major issue is regenerating the Z and the 1/Z values for the new vertices of the synthesized primitives. Everything else should flow down the pipe naturally, assuming a deferred attribute synthesis rasterizer.

There are examples in the open source version of my rasterizer: OpenSWR.org.

I want to be able to take a conversation and ask for subconversations as red pen annotations "on the side". The linear nature of the context tends to frustrate this.

I'm no intelligence researcher or philosopher; but, I think LLMs make us confront the (IMO, now clear) distinction between cleverness (intuition), reasoning (rational argument), and consciousness. I suspect that we think of "intelligence" as either of the first two welded to the latter. In that vein, I'd say that consciousness may be just another emotion: happiness, sadness, egoness.

It's around hour 20 of trying to breath that I start to really think the Goldfish has an edge on me.

Races are virtually uncompetitive; it means politicians only need to pander to the 40% bloc of the 10–20% of voters that show up in the primary. Once elected, the chance of losing their office is nearly 0. Gerrymandering absolutely reduces effective voting power. That's the whole point.