Lynne

A compute-based Vulkan APV encoder just got merged into FFmpeg. Runs at 1200fps on a 6900XT for 1080p422 10-bit. Its meant for low-overhead screen recordings, or low-latency 4K streaming over a gigabit link. Oh, yeah, I also wrote it, so the very least I can do is mumble it into the void or something...

I wrote the best AAC encoder in the world, and it just got merged into FFmpeg. Good news for anyone weird not using Opus.

So the Virgo gravity wave detector, recently got an upgrade. That upgrade has been pretty much disastrous to the performance, and they had to scramble to barely cludge the detector together for the last run. These detector upgrades are planned DECADES in advance, with year-long commissioning times. You don't build something hoping it'll hold. But they did. And I think the way this happened is one of the most frustrating moments in science.

• So, it's 2014. Advanced LIGO is about to come online. And Advanced Virgo is preparing to join in too, with a delay.
• Between the input laser and the beamsplitter sits a power recycling unit. In its simplest form, its a single mirror, about 97% reflective.
• Laser enters on one side, beamsplitter is on the other side, and the mirror is positioned perfectly so that there's a resonance forming inside the cavity, and extremely powerful (hundreds of kilowatts) laser is formed in the cavity.
• All of in vacuum.
• They upgraded the beam size from 2cm to 5cm, replacing mirrors.
• For Virgo, due to not having much budget (this is before any detections were even made), they did not have the money to replace the vacuum vessel to put a more complex system free of harmful resonances in the detector bandwidth. So they just put a single larger mirror in what space they could, which has bad resonances.
• A few years later, Virgo is in the spotlight, along with LIGO. It's time to design upgrades.
• Rather than *fix the vacuum vessel and replace the mirror, they yolo it in favor of adding a signal recycling mirror in front of the beamsplitter and the sensor. Its 2 decade old tech. All detectors except Virgo have it.
• ...knowing full well that a bit of constant signal leaks out of the beamsplitter even when nothing is detected.
• ...knowing that feeding signal back INTO the detector will make the power recycling mirror amplify them in a loop.
• Fast forward to 2 years ago. They turn it on. Awful.
• Resonances galore. In the most sensitive part of the detector.
• Signal recycling should have improved performance by 2x. Instead, they get utter junk.
• They decide to decrease the laser beam energy to reduce resonances to keep the detector running, somewhat.
• Power recycling mirror was designed for 125 W. Dropping the power to 17 W removes the bad resonances in the detector bandwidth.
• But Because the mirrors were designed for 125 W, it means power recycling no longer works properly, leading to much lower actual laser energy.
• Which leads to bad detection.
• So they fudge together 2 telescopes in the signal mirror to try to change the signal up to avoid the new resonances.
• It works, but all they can do is have a bit less performance than they did just before their upgrade.
• Now they're very behind on upgrades, because they had no choice but to tear apart the building, the old vacuum vessel, and replace it with a new one with enough space to have more stable but complex power recycling mirrors.

@niconiconi@mk.absturztau.be Full c302 D-model (Multi-compartmental cells) simulation. Had to patch c302 to support B-class motor-neurons from Boyle's 2012 paper. After that, I had to add support for modelling all cell types and cell groups, as well as handle post-spike Ca-channel depletion. And fine-tuning to make sure all the membrane voltages stay and spike within realistic ranges.
This is the actual full C. Elegans nervous system driving the locomotion. Sibernetic/OpenWorm just generated sine waves to drive the muscles and pretended it was a simulation. I can't believe no one else has done this before.

I finally reverse engineered the entire ProRes RAW decoder and display pipeline. You don't need to use Windows or OSX plus Resolve just to view, edit or process your camera raws!

Developers "protecting" their secret video codec by obfuscating its CUDA decoder PTX with a polyalphabetic substitution cipher.
Claude+Ghidra: "Am I a fucking joke to you?", finds the key and encryption scheme in one minute.

@niconiconi@mk.absturztau.be don't blame OpenWorm developers for lack of progress, C. Elegans is a very shitty organism to simulate. Evolution hired the DOGE team feat. Elon Musk to cut everything out that didn't need to be there, including a CPG, which means the nervous system isn't "alive", ever, really, since there's no "clock" signal to drive anything.
All it does is spike on inputs, do some processing, and output. It doesn't/can't do anything on its own. In my earlier post, I had tonic stimulation leak into the nervous system via the noise injection stage of the SNN sim, which got filtered through the SNN to become a sine wave locomotive drive. In a way, that was the real SNN doing the driving, but it was stimulated, rather than emergent.
The reason the whole field is so dead is because the only connectome we've had has been of the world's most useless/frustrating creature to simulate. We got the fruit fly connectome at least, which has a CPG and can do something useful on its own, but it took decades. If only there had been a better creature with an actual consolidated nervous system.

What would be scary is if you ordered something from amazon in the night, and it arrives the same night after barely 2 hours.

@brie@do.crimes.brie.gay Very nice, though I wish it supported Fountain file syntax.

Honestly its nuts that I can ask an agent to build a mesh-shader based, raytraced minecraft clone (avoiding vertex/fragment shaders altogether), and it runs.
Code is free, experimentation is free, I wonder what could be achieved like this?

I don't know what hacking is going on down in that room.
But it must be legendary.

Giving someone a QR code for the menu is very disrespectful and warrants a quick exit.
Giving someone a QR code for both the menu and to order is the peak of disrespect.

https://www.zmescience.com/medicine/mind-and-brain/vr-wings-body-parts/
Like, yeah, the brain is so neuroplastic that phantom sense is real.

Quick, what's "The president of the USA along with a lot of billionaires are on Air Force 1 near North Korea" translated in North Korean?

Toilet door designer: I'm going to make this the strongest toilet door lock
Manager: You know, it really doesn't need to be this secure, it just needs to give someone outside a clear signal it's a bit busy...
Toilet door designer: Oh, I'll give 'em a clear signal alright, there never is less need for security, this will be THE FORT KNOX OF TOILET DOORS
Manager: What if someone gets locked in by accident, they'll have to yell and knock to ask someone to let them out?
Toilet door designer: Good idea, let's make it sound-proof!
Manager: No, you really should add a backdoor so people can let themselves out
Toilet door designer: NO ONE IS GETTING OUT ALIVE HAAHAHAAHAHA

A few days ago I was walking next to a traffic jam on a bridge. I remember heading a very loud, almost choral "SIX SEVEN" chant. From a car with closed windows. Ten whole meters away.
In retrospect, it's fun to imagine how the adults in the car would have felt if an outsider with gen-z speaking skills joined in.

@niconiconi@mk.absturztau.be Now I know why OpenWorm got stuck - they never implemented proprioception, the feedback loop between muscles bending and neurons firing. All their demos just use forced sinusoidal motion.
In fact, there never was any feedback given to the nervous system. Even worse, it was just calling python on every single step!

The vibe coding experiment is going pretty great. I rely entirely on EDEN (state of the art spiking neural network simulator) to generate the SNN network that the c302 model outputs. The EDEN output is an XML of nerves, receptors, types, raw equations and algebra (with ), which get converted into Vulkan compute shaders with multiple passes (integration, spiking, gating, etc.).
Unit tests (hundreds of very small model networks from the NeuroML database) get compared to experimental results to make sure we remain grounded.
The idea is to scale this to the full Drosophila model later on, so rather than doing expensive fluid physics sims, simple friction is just used to approximate a fluid/sand-like environment. So rather than waiting 10 seconds per step, we do 12k steps per second, since everything is kept on the GPU.
Opus 4.7 knows a lot about biology so its very neat seeing how it guides itself to a solution while debugging by just looking at how the membrane voltage evolves directly.
Right now I'm implementing proprioception, hopefully I'll be the first ever to see naturally generated locomotion.

I'll never understand keeping "pets", especially dogs. Keeping a living thing for your own personal amusement? Worse yet, they're always a single step away from going berserk and biting their "owner" with minimal warning.
Keeping them locked away in a tiny apartment, letting them bark and scratch. Needing to feed them and give them attention.
As if people have a shortage of things to worry about. They force themselves to basically never leave for more than a few days at most without needing to make someone else worry about it.

RCR finally reviewed a cybertruck!
"Fisher Price brutalism". Beautiful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3oO510dyVI

@gloriouscow@oldbytes.space Yup, coax cable is pretty good for video, you can send 24Gbps over it easily, the plug leaks very little RF. For higher rates and frequencies you'd prefer a heavier plug like an N connector.

Honestly, I'd rather have well-integrated AI agents handling all customer queries than humans. Agents could tell you exactly what's happening instantly. Humans are idiots and would rather waste some other human's time.
Also agents can be hacked and manipulated more reliably.

Want to be a youtuber? Want a viral video? It's never been easier.
Step 1: Go to Epstein's island and film.
Done.

I love how people becoming memes makes them completely devoid of any identity.
They go from people with ideas to names, repeated to infinity, with their ideas and actions gone, forever reduced to catchphrases.
This elimination of identity is the ultimate punishment, and only the general gestalt can invoke it.

@Miredly@raru.re Actually no, the safeguards are what they call "constitution", a text document, that another LLM reads during training, to judge what the LLM being trained outputs. So the safeguards are built into the model itself during training. The prompt can't override them, its just weakly defining how the model should behave. Its somewhat silly and paranoid, but reasonable once you consider that safeguards are needed during training, since without them, LLMs could just learn and burn what they need to pass the training, without actually performing any reasoning. It's part of why their performance jumped up so much since 2024, when reasoning models were introduced.

@whitequark@social.treehouse.systems Jerry-rigged cooling, bodged power supply, plugged into hardware even less than unworthy. Although the picture's different, this view is entirely familiar.

Is there an MCP for Factorio? I'd like to play Factorio without having to play Factorio.

https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm46328610
Teto singing about brainrot couldn't be funkier.

I can't get to making films instead fast enough.

Do you drink filtered water?

I saw the new Mahouka film:
"Miyuki, you're marrying Tatsuya."
"But we're siblings!"
"...Nnnno, you're not."
"But we are related!"
"Yeah, but not really."
"Not really?"
"Well, not technically not siblings. But technically not siblings, because I say so."
"..."
"Look, WHO CARES, you're magicians who can kill everyone in the world, all you need is a list of demands, you don't need my permission to bang your brother."
"Brother?"
"You know what I mean, now get out of here, you have a wedding tomorrow."

Oh my, Claude can now interface with Blender directly.
Wow.

Hotels are rated based on stars.
Well how about rating them based on the amount of fireworks Keith Moon set off in their toilets?
No one would waste too many on bad hotels after all.

I'm so indecisive I'd be a lot faster if I ran a custom RDO for each decision.

I think I'd probably enjoy being locked in a room, having to beat both Hollow Knight and Silksong with steel soul mode before I can get out.
Though I'd insist on a prize, that is non-negotiable.

Yeah, it's slop. But it's funny, and it has a cohesive story.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNbmoVdirxw

I've never written anything that made me happy. It's always been for a friend, or someone else that needed it, or because the code was using me as an instrument to formulate itself.

Starlink on a plane is damn impressive. Really damn impressive.

2008.
Writer's room for Warehouse 13.
"Man, Lost Room was good... I wonder if we can beat it."
"Nah. Not with this object of the week thing required for TV."
Suddenly, a drunk writer busts in.
"RIGGGHHTTTBLRAASR. WHERE'S MY GIN!"
"Right here.
"PERGECT LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT SOMEHTING!"
"We're listening."
"GH WELLS IS PRETT Y HOOD!"
"H.G. Wells? Yeah, I guess so, I always liked his idea of Morlocks."
"RIGht SO LET'S GET HG WELLS IN HERE"
"But they died a hundred years ago.
"AWELLLL THET'RE BACK! SOMEGHOW! MAGIJCK!"
"Ooookay. Let's lay off the whisky for a while, shall we?"
"ANDAND, MAKE HER A OHOT WOMAN! VERYY HOT!"
"But H.G. Wells is a guy."
"NAOANAONAO IT'S NOTW A WGUY, HOT WOMAN, HER BROTHER IS THE AUTHOR BUT SHE WROTE EVERYTHINH, KAPSICE?"
"Mike, you're the lead writer, what do you think?"
"In a nice suit..."
"MIKE!"
"Fine, yeah, it's better than monster of the week."
"ANDASD AND SHESTAY!"
"What?
"AS A PERIMANINETNT CHARACTWR, SHESSTAYS"
"Mike?
"Yeah, fine. Ask casting to find someone."
"BRLONDE! NO, BRUNNNETTES!"

I HAVE A DEGREE IN EXPLORING CREEPY PARKING LOTS AT NIGHT

Automatic doorlock.
Automatic lights.
Automatic toilet.
Automatic sink for washing hands.
Automatic bath.
Is this what "everything's computer" means?

Some kid: Hey uncle, do you like brainrot?
Uncle: Yeah... yeah, I like brainrot.
Little did the kid know, the uncle worked at a B2B SaaS company.

@dougall@mastodon.social I'm too old and use Agner Fog's PDFs.

Next to a large landmark, there's a kebab shop, next to a crousty shop (chicken + rice + sauce), next to another kebab shops.
Ever since the crousty shop opened, the kebab shops have been in panic Panic PANIC mode, since no one goes there. The crousty shops have undercut the kebab shops by a lot. The kebab shops did their best by offering kebab boxes for 7 euros, but still, all they can do is watch out of the window as everyone goes to the crousty shop in the middle.
It's satisfying, in a way. The kebabs have gotten twice as expensive, and only went downhill in terms of quality.

I'll tell you what, if Death ever tells you "I'll give you a chance, beat Sonic 3 & Knuckles", you hand Death a controller and say "only if you play Tails".

The only CD I've seen use pregaps is Opeth's Ghost Reveries.
I still wonder why. Opeth are the type who don't mind 12 minute tracks, or even 24 minute tracks (or even full albums as one track, though that's Edge of Sanity).
Yet Reverie/Harlequin Forest is split, with Reverie being marked as a pregap to Harlequin Forest.

You're telling me there's a way to write code without writing code just as I'm wanting to get away from writing code?!?!