dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
No bio...
User ID: 583
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
3d ago
I made the mistake of getting my car detailed once and I had no idea it could ever look so clean again so now I feel like a piece of shit if my cars don't always look sparkling factory new.
Been going down a rabbit hole of building a kit to do it myself which is fairly inexpensive and I'm getting decent results but I'm wondering if I'm becoming puritan housewife crazy and I should instead get a mobile detailer on a subscription basis or something.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
4d ago
Supermarkets are on thin margins and yet you have manyfold increase in the price from farm to table.
They have thin margins but they make it up by turning over inventory quickly. This doesn't mean supermarkets aren't profitable, just that taking radical steps to lower prices won't really work because they don't have much room to cut.
People are mad that prices went up 40%
Cutting the supermarket's 4% margin to 3.7% (or whatever) isn't going to matter.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
4d ago
Presumably also women don't become autistic when they go through menopause?
Homies Ride or Die update
Been consumed by that rendering bug where the lighting seemed all wrong on the tires and I began to suspect my model data was fucked up.
I was using this ancient format for loading 3d models (".obj") that I downloaded from sketchfab.com but it turns out when it says this format is the native format uploaded by the artist and the other formats are derivative, it's kind of lying. A few 3d people have told me you want to get the ones in .glb or .gltf format, even if sketchfab says these were auto-converted . (I do not know how to make sense of what sketchfab says)
Anyway I thought maybe the .glb models would have more reliable model data and they do seem to. So then I got the .glb model loading mostly working (using tinygltf) but I was getting this random error where the car would render fine for the first frame and then vanish. I spent about 4 days trying to debug the bgfx state machine until I realized I was creating vertex and index buffers in the GPU and sticking handles to them in a class, and then I created a destructor for each class that would free those handles up. Fine, except I was not realizing I was copying the class around and the old class, a transient object, was getting destroyed which was deleting the memory held by the handles.
Since the handles are like, integers into a GPU resource table and not pointers, I wasn't getting any kind of pointer derefence error. It was just accidentally working for one frame and then failing to work after that.
I had to spend a long, long time staring at this stuff and remembering C++ copy/move semantics before I was able to track this down. Lesson (re)learned: don't put things like file/resource handles in object destructors unless you're extremely careful.
Finally making progress again. I'm getting a lot more texture data and the tires look a lot more realistic now, matching what's on sketchfab. Maybe I'll get spinning tires and stuff working again by next update!
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
6d ago
You know. The deep state. Them. The powers that be.
More seriously, if Trump convenes the extremely serious military people and they present him a limited menu of military actions he can do that is basically the same set of plans they've had for 20 years, that's the MIC at work. The names and faces can change but the dusty binder from the drawer stays the same.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
6d ago
In doing so, their retaliation against Gaza will knowingly provoke a retaliation from Iranian-backed militias against Israel.
Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed militia, began attacking Israel on 10/8 though, before Israel did anything.
Nasrallah characterized it as follows:
“Some say I’m going to announce that we have entered the battle,” Nasrallah said Friday. “We already entered the battle on Oct. 8.” He argued that Hezbollah’s cross-border strikes have pulled away Israeli forces that would otherwise be focused on Hamas in Gaza.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
7d ago
My problem with Iran is that I do not have a good model of just how nutty they are, really. I would model their close ally Hamas as being willing to sacrifice every soul in Gaza to kill a few 10k or 100k Jews. Presumably they are less crazy than that.
What do you think of the use of child soldiers and also child martyrs?
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
7d ago
It is important when discussing Israel vs Palestine with someone to figure out if they're an underdog fetishist.
https://www.themotte.org/post/737/israelgaza-megathread-3/155650?context=8#context
Actually, not just Israel/Palestine. It matters for a lot of issues around crime and geopolitics.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
7d ago
Counterpoint: two really huge bombs on Japan made them surrender unconditionally
I am not convinced that US/Israel can even indefinitely prevent Iran from acquiring the bomb through targeted bombardment only.
The best thing about this question is there's no need to speculate, we seem on track to run the experiment and find out. !remindme 48 months
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
8d ago
I'm hoping what appears to me to be fairly intense pressure to avoid an actual invasion keeps American boots of Iranian soil. As with zorching an Iranian general in Iraq during Trump's first term, this seems like a fairly reasonable gamble, but if we get another forever war out of this, that would be unmitigated disaster.
I'm guessing Trump only did this because the MIC assured him we could keep Iran under our figurative boot simply by pushing buttons from afar, doing strikes from the air and continuing to sell weapons to Israel.
That could obviously be false but it's quite pathetic for Iran that Israel and the US can attack them from the air with impunity. Their threat to blockade the Strait of Hormuz was dubious already, and after the events of the last week it seems laughable.
There's simply no reason to do a ground invasion.
Will we get regime change this way? Yeah I dunno. Can we keep wrecking their shit and reduce their threat level to near zero? I would bet on that sure.
Think campaign to collapse Syria and not war to oust Saddam Hussein.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
8d ago
I suppose we'll see how long until they exhaust their missile supply on Israel. Two more weeks of this, or will they be in for it for years?
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
8d ago
Except "winning" the war with Iran in this case means simply preventing them from projecting force into the rest of the Middle East. If Iran can't stop Israel from blowing up their military assets or nuclear developments or their leaders they aren't much of a threat anymore.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
8d ago
Didn't North Korea have a stupidly large battery of artillery lined up ready to shell Seoul as deterrent?
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
9d ago
It's not hard to imagine a world in which Israel's air campaign culminates eventually as they run low on munitions and a deal of some flavor is worked out.
I do not know why we wouldn't continue funding Israel to keep doing decapitation strikes on Iran leadership and maintain air superiority. This is incredible edge at incredible ROI.
Requires no ground invasion and civilian deaths are minimized. I would contribute to this GoFundMe.
Eventually, either Iran ruling committee #133 decides to surrender or the central government looks like a pathetic clown show and the nation disintegrates.
I wonder what kind of pitch deck the Kurds are circulating right now.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
11d ago
I think working as an embedded systems C programmer actually signals a lot more competence even if the salary isn't impressive. The embedded space is notoriously low pay since the economics around that are for the manufacturing industry rather than pure software industry which tends to be able to spend a lot more for software development.
Update.
Separately I noticed there's a problem with how the wheels spin and play with the ambient sunlight. The light appears to get painted onto one section of the wheel and it spins around the wheel with it, which is obviously wrong. I spent a few days on this and haven't made much progress. I'm kind of pulling my hair out.
I finally decided to look at the "normal map" for the wheel and notice it's ... painted on looking? The top right of the circle is dark and the bottom left is shiny which is the behavior I'm running into. As the wheel spins the shine "follows" it towards the ground and then up the back until it loops around again.
/facepalm
Looks like the person who made this model didn't ever expect the wheels to actually turn, which you know, fair. Surprised they did this because the rest of the car relies on reflecting the ambient lighting instead of painted on lighting.
I'm embarrassed it took me this long to decide to check the data.
EDIT: fuck, that's not actually the problem. the normals map is not a shade map. it makes sense that the "color" at one end of a circle is different from the other end
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
13d ago
Homies: Ride or Die
Last week I got wheels rotating. Since then I've also added steering.
In the meantime I learned it doesn't work on my laptop at all since my GPU on that is much weaker. I traced it down to the skydome rendering and added a flag so I could disable it while away from my desktop. Not sure why it pwns the GPU so much. The skydome isn't particularly high res but perhaps I tesselated it into way way too many triangles. Time to dust off the Blender workflow again.
Separately I noticed there's a problem with how the wheels spin and play with the ambient sunlight. The light appears to get painted onto one section of the wheel and it spins around the wheel with it, which is obviously wrong.
I spent a few days on this and haven't made much progress. I'm kind of pulling my hair out.
There's clearly something wrong with matrix math but not entirely sure what. I first SRT (scale rotate translate) the car from world space into view space. Before I submit that rendering, I detect if a given submesh involves a wheel and do a further R to the matrix. This makes the wheels rotate perfectly with velocity, but I guess screws the lighting calculations up. Maybe the matrix math accidentally works for vertex shading but not normals calculation, though I think I'm doing the right things to isolate them.
I would add debug printfs but half of this shit is happening in the bgfx shader language so my debugging visibility is limited. Maybe there are tools for this...
TRON bike lighting
Slow progress. Forgot that I needed more JST-SM 4 pin connectors, so placed an order. Then I remembered that soldering even a few spots gives me a scratchy throat and maybe a headache and it could be because I'm breathing in the soldering smoke from having my face so close to it. So, I need an extractor fan.
Of course I couldn't just buy an extractor fan like a normal person, because I stumbled across a DIY one in this Great Scott video right when I realized this.
I just post LLM findings to social media and then delete the post if anyone fact checks it /s
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
15d ago
Do you mean it wasn't released immediately, or ever?
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
15d ago
It boggles the mind that Luigi didn't have a pre-arranged Airbnb in NJ he could have fled to, booked with a fake name, and holed up for a month or two, surviving exclusively off of DoorDash.
Hanania shared a video of the alleged shooter's alleged roommate saying he's a Trump supporter.
https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1934036017746780454
EDIT: Excuse me. Hanania shared a video of the alleged shooter's alleged roommate allegedly saying he's a Trump supporter. I thought he was saying it during the cringe blubbering part but now that I listen on better speakers it's not that. The source for his roommate saying he is a Trump supporter is the reporter in this video https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1934061437691072727
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
15d ago
A family of illegals with two kids in public school consumes $4000 a month in taxes from that alone and I don't think the taxes raised or economy activity generated by their strawberry picking even comes close to recouping that cost.
It's true the poor Appalachian white family that's been here for eight generations doesn't either, but we can't really argue over whether or not they should have been allowed in.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
15d ago
Yes. Some people believe the US is infinitely wealthy and we can afford to take in all of the downtrodden of the world fleeing poverty and oppression and the only reason you could be against this is because you're racist.
It does not compute that this could bankrupt the entitlements systems they are so fond of that are mostly paid out of high earner taxes. Or they believe money is magic and the classists are causing fake scarcity or whatever.
I'm getting pretty okay results for a noob.
I bought one of these cleaning goo/gel ball things and it's been great for pulling cruft out of crevices.
Today I wondered why I don't try Windex with some microfiber cloths for the windows (inside and outside) and that went reasonably well. It streaks a bit but I think I can figure it out.
I have vacuum attachments in the mail that should help me clean the last 1% of little bits of schmutz from the interior I couldn't get out otherwise.
I haven't tried doing the wheels or wheel wells yet but I'm close.
I think I enjoy it. Might freak out the next time the kids track sand or leaves in the car. But maybe not because I'll have the kit standing by at home to clean it out in 15 seconds? We'll see!
What is a pizza delivery certified parking lot mechanic?
More options
Context Copy link