Charlie Loyd @vruba@everything.happens.horse

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/

Have been throwing CC-licensed drone videos through Polycam’s implementation of Gaussian splatting.

With about 100 resized frames selected from this: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mistail,_aerial_video.webm

It gives this: https://poly.cam/capture/1b6abb91-bf29-4a1b-9483-678f8749073d

Elon Musk Disrespect Amplifier is an important ecosystem service but also perhaps you, dear reader, are called to higher things.

Very slowly converging toward the GNSS observatory dashboard I’ve imagined for years.

YouTube’s front page in an incognito window. I did look up SimCity videos from this IP recently, so that one’s on me. I think this is bad.

This is a fun client-side demo of what the current generation JPEG-replacing codecs can do. Some of them only really shine when you turn the effort slider up. If you spend what would have been an absurd amount of CPU cycles in 1992 on encoding, you can get acceptable quality at itty-bitty sizes. (Try the built-in sample images.) https://squoosh.app/editor

As a fan of many Canadians and things about Canada, I nonetheless recommend that people in the US who imagine it to be a magical place of ~*~civility~*~ and ~*~quiet common sense~*~ spend even a few seconds familiarizing themselves with how horrible its politics are. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/judge-grants-injunction-school-pronoun-policy-1.6981406

Got flu and covid shots this morning and boy are my arms tired.

(“JPEG is PERFECTLY FINE and only IGNORANT ASSHOLES want to mess with something that has worked ADMIRABLY FOR THIRTY-ONE YEARS and actually this is THE PROBLEM WITH SOFTWARE TODAY” is also a common point of view. It does not, in my limited experience, survive a thoughtful conversation with someone who pays bandwidth bills, cares about color reproduction, etc.)

I’ve been surprised by the number of people popping up with “I always hated webp, the format I can never open properly”. I’m not saying that’s wrong.

But like … wepb is BSD-licensed and, as a lossy image format in the abstract, pretty okay.

The problems are mostly industry silliness (e.g., Apple being halfhearted about it without presenting a better alternative) and the fact that the reference implementation is in The Language Whose Creators Regretted Giving It That Fundamental Security Flaw.

WebP has flaws as a format – don’t we all – but I think the commentary should be putting more blame on (1) the industry’s failure to standardize on (and rigorously reviews the implementations of) a single JPEG successor format, given the obvious hunger, and (2) the practice of implementing anything that reads nontrivial untrusted data in a programming language that is not memory-safe.

When people and ideas I thought were cool in 2015 turn out to be wrong or tiresome: Everything changes. I have grown since then; also, some things that were once good are now bad.

When people or ideas I irrationally disliked in 2015 are now recognized as bad: I was right all along, as I always am.

Gently closing the Desmos tab where I’ve been trying to build some kind of trigonometric intuitions about … ah … circles, maybe?

You ever think about how we have the both-sides view of a lot of important personal correspondences, even state-of-the-art-ly–encrypted correspondences, from like the early modern era and such? Or like we have Pepys’s diary, which (if I recall) he assumed that only he could read? It comes to mind a lot when I write a personal e-mail or make a new notes.md or whatever.

Lots of tinkering left to do on both the hardware and software sides, but I think my indoor GNSS setup is already picking up tidal signals on its test run.

I’m against this. https://mastodon.social/@weatherwest/111098709498989880

Having worked around some very good programmers over the years (@sgillies, for example) means that sometimes when I write unwise code there’s a little voice saying “Wait, do it the better way! Save yourself the pain!” and I ignore it.