Charlie Loyd @vruba@everything.happens.horse

@isagalaev @nikitonsky At a systems programming level, people certainly care more about storage size. But at a UI level, they might want to ensure that only one emoji can be used in a certain context. So perhaps it’s better to say that there are multiple useful senses of the idea of “length” that might matter in different areas. But I think we basically agree about the important parts of this issue.

@bug138 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Persian_flaw#English

A fun fact about aerobatics teams is that the leader is talking to them in a singsong the whole time like a slightly excessive high school choreography instructor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ux7tPXTT0Ec#t=44m

I don’t like what the Blue Angels think they are but I do kind of enjoy their chaotic vibes, and I feel roughly the same about my bargain-basement 500 mm mirror lens that focuses about as well as a weed grinder, so here’s a picture of the one with the other.

@isagalaev It’s a technically solved problem if you make the effort to use the solutions. Some don’t. They assume that a character is a byte, or they consider systems that mishandle Unicode to be good enough to keep in service. That’s the halfheartedness I mean. It may not be specific to Unicode but it’s real.

(Analogously, you still see bugs from daylight saving time shifts, integer overflows, SQL injection, and other problems that are totally solved if you bother to use the solutions.)

Dear software people,

Unicode is older now than ASCII was when Unicode was introduced. It’s not a weird new fad.

It’s complicated but so is the domain it represents. We recognize that we have to think about time zones and leap days and seconds, for instance. And it’s a cleaner abstraction when you aren’t halfhearted about it.

Sincerely,
Charlie

@maxfenton Now I know that when something goes horribly wrong, I’m gonna know two minutes before all you suckers.

Who else has their phone out and is staring at it unblinkingly while holding their breath?

They did surgery on a grape. https://scholar.social/@Aepasek/111177327426338048

@ian I’ve seen that long smear failure mode a lot, and also a flat state where it basically paints one photo in 2D with minimal texture. Here’s an example, to be deleted in like 30 seconds: https://poly.cam/capture/06c0ac93-0719-4a45-acf6-a86170700eed

@ian I really like the failures. (The structure-from-motion stage seems to work far better when you have views from either side, and even then it’s far from reliable.)

@awilbert Agreed.

For the curious, here’s a nice writeup of how this works – it’s a fun combination of multi-decade–old ideas, “standard” structure-from-motion, and tricks that are inspired by (but not directly based on) the current GPU and neural network boom: https://aras-p.info/blog/2023/09/05/Gaussian-Splatting-is-pretty-cool/

@sgillies Pretending I didn’t see this.