Krista Wolffe

@ghost_motley Intel should be launching it as HEDT “X” series, I feel. 52 cores on a high end desktop is not unheard (from AMD) of but that’s not Intel we know (28cores).

@Alibaba_Wan Wan2.2 so amazing: she raises the ice cream to the kitten, which moves to and eats the ice cream while balancing on a sign swinging on chains in the wind. 6 months ago, each of these items would have little to no awareness of each other. I have animated complex relationships in 2d and 3D, and all of this is really hard to do. We've come so far!

Dave Täht died yesterday. He was one of the unsung heroes of the Internet, and a close friend of mine who I will miss very badly. Dave, known on X as @mtaht because his birth name was Michael, was a true hacker of the old school who touched the lives of everybody using X. His work on mitigating bufferbloat improved practical TCP/IP performance tremendously, especially around video streaming and other applications requiring low latency. Without him, Netflix and similar services might still be plagued by glitches and stutters. I think we first met in 2001 near the peak of my Mr. Famous Guy years. Once, sometimes twice a year he'd come visit, carrying his guitar, and crash out in my basement for a week or so hacking on stuff. A lot of the central work on bufferbloat got done while I was figuratively looking over his shoulder. Curiously, we didn't collaborate directly very often. Different technical interests. All of the household cats loved him, though. My wife Cathy liked him. He was a funny, humble, down-to-earth man who liked to surf and play music, made friends wherever he went, charmed the pants off of a succession of improbably attractive women, and bore deteriorating health stoically. While I know him he went blind in one eye and was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. He barely let it slow him down. Despite constantly griping in later years about being burned out on programming, he kept not only doing excellent work but bringing good work out of others, assembling teams of amazing collaborators to tackle problems lesser men would have considered intractable. There was a certain reserve about him though. I never knew why he changed his name. Nor did we ever talk about politics or the women in this life, nor quite why for so many years he lived as a nomad couch-surfer who was as likely to be found on a beach on Nicaragua or in quasi-residence at a university in Europe as anywhere in the US. My wife called him the International Man of Mystery, which title became a running joke among the three of us. None of that seemed important, because Dave lived for the work he did, except when he was trying to beat me at board games. He swore for years that he was eventually going to win against me and my wife and our Friday night gaming friends at Power Grid, and I truly wish he could get another couple shots at it. Dave should have been famous, and he should have been rich. If he had a cent for every dollar of value he generated in the world he probably could have bought the entire country of Nicaragua and had enough left over to finance a space program. He joked about wanting to do the latter, and I don't think he was actually joking. But he wasn't Elon Musk or me. Didn't want to run a business, and didn't want the crap that came from being Mr. Famous Guy, though he certainly understood why I took that on. Maybe he was wiser than me about avoiding the limelight, jury is still out. He got a lot of stuff done anyway, and that was the important part. I'll miss Dave a lot. I'll miss him showing up on my doorstep to charm my cats and tinker with my routers. I'll miss swapping war stories with him, eating Chinese food with him, and the grin on his face when he won a game. In the invisible college of people who made the Internet run, he was among the best of us. He said I inspired him, but I often thought he was a better and more selfless man than me. Ave atque vale, Dave.