Dom💧

Playing with trees. #vulcan

Working on ways to match the hotspots in LDR environments to sharper lighting within the raytracer. Not easy, but making some progress. #vulcan

#cursor moments

Added full environments to Project Vulcan, so now I can stick procedural objects inside 3d scenes and use the pathtracer to integrate the lighting correctly. Starting to look pretty neat; object stolen from an #eisenscript sample from years back. #vulcanscript

@DrAlanMurta Yeah, the short reflector lenses that you used to pick up for £100 were the inspiration. I haven't gone as far as simulating the aperture on James Webb but that might be fun!

@dom767 The bokeh on a reflector telescope looks a lot like that, with its central obstruction where the secondary mirror is.

#Cursor coding; next project is a 3d structuresynth-like build using a modified scripting language. This is a quick test of aperture shapes for the pathtracer.

I am obsessed with this Japanese man using AI video to put himself into movies (he's on IG at @ai_am_furufuru)

@exQUIZitely Yep, the games stuff often gets missed. He ran his own games company for 7 years called Elixir Studios, i worked there for 5, he's an interesting chap... :)

@dom767 Hassabis story is truly epic, I watched some docus/interviews.

One of the most successful games of the 90s if you go by official sales numbers: Over 15 (!) million copies sold made Theme Park a total homerun for Bullfrog in 1994. The puke sounds from kids throwing up after rollercoaster rides were legendary. Adding extra salt to the fries to increase soda consumption – one of the many little twists that made Theme Park a far more complex economy simulation than it appeared on the surface. Underpay workers? They would eventually go on strike. Sabotage your competitors? All possible. Just like Sim City, creating your own little world was simply wonderful. What a game!

@Lord_Sugar You should see what folks do with 64k these days... youtu.be/R-4wHUw_OdE?si…

What I find amazing is that the CPC464 had just 64k of memory (the Spectrum had 48k!) These days that's only enough for a small picture or a few seconds of audio. How did those games programmers do it back in the day? 👏

@exQUIZitely And subtly British too. The game executable was called zed.exe in a nod to the UK pronunciation of Z, rather than the 'merican zee.

One of the last games of the Bitmap Brothers and also one of their best, in my opinion. Z from 1996 was such a blast, a great game with its own humorous take on the RTS genre. Yes, I know, Command & Conquer was published a year earlier and was more complex (and turned into a massive franchise), but I always felt that Z deserved more credit and is sometimes overlooked. Great graphics, an epic soundtrack, and some fun units (who doesn't love the Psychos?) - but it was still not enough, and despite some excellent reviews, sales numbers were pretty low. Earlier games from the Bitmap Brothers, such as Speedball 2 or Xenon 2, were commercially much more successful. Maybe it was the fact that the RTS genre was already quite saturated with massive hits (Dune II, Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, Command & Conquer), and that caused a bit of gamers' fatigue? Maybe that pushed Z into the offside a bit, who knows. Did you play it back in the day and liked it?

@toolmaakersson @BallouxFrancois Says the person from New Zealand

@BallouxFrancois First, you're a dude - you don't have to experience being a female here these days... Second you're a fancy Doctor. I doubt you're sketching around the back ass of Tottenham Hale, West Croydon. I often have to remind myself my usual daily city bubble isn't representative.

I live in London, and I'm well travelled. London is one of the safest places I've ever been to. It is a beautiful, diverse and vibrant city and there's no 'no go' zone, absolutely none. Every bit of London, be it posh or poor, is remarkably safe by international standards.

@DavidJFoord @BallouxFrancois Have worn headphones or earphones on every commute and most nights out in the past 26 years. Never had a problem...

@BallouxFrancois I live in London, you're a liar or you've basically never left the nicer (Richer) parts of London. 10 years ago I wore headphones walking home from the station at night, now I don't. It has changed, anyone who really lives here and experiences it on the ground day to day knows.

@DanteHarker @BallouxFrancois Terrible reputation but surprisingly nice people if you actually visit. Lordship recreational area is great for kids and even has a full road system for kids to cycle round.

@BallouxFrancois Broadwater Farm Estate?

@tomhfh While interesting and somewhat true, I five purchasing power parity more interesting... (source: world bank)

Europoor is an entirely accurate phrase. America is simply in a different league.

@LizWebsterSBF Our energy prices are a problem of our own making, nothing to do with EU membership. i.e. the number of interconnectors to EU has increased significantly since 2016... not everything is about brexit...

JD Vance in Hungary blasts UK energy prices like Britain 🇬🇧 is still in the EU. Brexit which JD & Trump cheered on. It was Brexit that left UK exposed when energy prices soared, on top of Thatcherism copying Reagan’s neoliberal playbook for years!

@smug_dev @DeltaWave0x Last time I checked it was a lot quicker to compile a shader with no branches rather than having boolean checks in the shader. The problem is really compilation time, which used to be horrific on nVidia and quite reasonable on AMD...

@DeltaWave0x It's the perfect storm, because they all happened around the same time.

You cannot make an engine that has to compile literally 5000+ shaders on startup, you just can't, there's fundamentally no way to fix it apart from a total fucking rewrite. Why do you even have that many fucking shaders? Are they all permutations? Do you have one shader per thing? What the actual fuck unreal engine, this literally the epitome of "Yeah this was never meant to be a generic engine, but for some fucking reason we decided to use it as such and now we can't go back"

Last Tuesday I fired four thousand people. Half the company. I wrote the memo on Monday night. I used the word "leaner" three times. "Leaner" is a word that means fewer people. But it sounds like a fitness goal. The board approved it in one meeting. Nobody asked which four thousand. Including me. I said we were "streamlining to focus on what matters." What matters is the stock price. The stock went up twenty-three percent. Twenty-three percent. That's the biggest single-day jump in the company's history. Not when we launched Cash App. Not when we hit a billion in revenue. When we fired half the people who built those things. The market rewarded us for becoming lighter. I used that word too. Lighter. Like we put the company on a diet. The diet was four thousand people. HR asked how we'd handle the transition. I said we'd "leverage AI to maintain operational velocity." They nodded. Operational velocity is not a real metric. But it sounds like one. A VP asked which teams were being cut. I said "the ones AI can replace." She asked which ones AI can replace. I said "we're still evaluating." We are not still evaluating. We already decided. The answer is "whichever ones cost the most." We kept the AI team. Fourteen people. They replaced four thousand. On paper. In reality they built a chatbot that answers internal IT questions. Most employees still email Dave in IT. Dave was laid off. The chatbot's name is also Dave. That was not intentional. But nobody changed it. We told the remaining employees this was "a new chapter." New chapters are what companies call layoffs. The previous chapter was "unprecedented growth." That chapter employed four thousand more people. Jack wrote a blog post. He said the company was "returning to its roots." The roots did not include four thousand people. The roots are a mobile payment app and a man with a nose ring who posts philosophy on Twitter. The blog post got twelve hundred likes on LinkedIn. Mostly from people who fire other people for a living. The severance package was twelve weeks. Twelve weeks to find a new job in a market where everyone is "leveraging AI to maintain operational velocity." A senior engineer asked in the all-hands why we couldn't cut executive compensation instead. He suggested we start with the $42 million in stock grants. We thanked him for his candor. His position was eliminated the next morning. His role has been absorbed by a "cross-functional AI workstream." The workstream does not exist yet. But it's on a roadmap. Roadmaps are how companies prove things will happen later so they don't have to prove them now. CNBC called it "bold." Bloomberg called it "decisive." An analyst at Morgan Stanley upgraded us to "overweight." Overweight means buy more. The company is lighter. The stock is heavier. The people who built the thing are gone. The thing is still here. The stock price says that's an improvement. I'm presenting at an investor conference next week. The title of my talk is "Building a Leaner, AI-Native Organization." I will stand on a stage and explain how removing half the company made the company better. The audience will applaud. They always do. They own the stock.

This is hilarious 🤣🤣

World’s first Ai generated fuselage Sweden’s insane project engineers at Saab just revealed a 5 meter fuselage that looks like a skeleton than a machine Ai algorithms optimized for load paths 3D printed in 26 complex metal parts assembled by robot