dr_analog
razorboy
No bio...
User ID: 583
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
razorboy
3d 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
razorboy
5d ago
Do you mean it wasn't released immediately, or ever?
dr_analog
razorboy
5d 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
razorboy
5d 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
razorboy
5d 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.
dr_analog
razorboy
6d ago
I agree he has the odds stacked against him but I still think it adds nothing but combustibility to (e.g.) invite Dr Phil along on raids.
And I think he benefits from trolling the liberals so hard they start engaging in political violence.
dr_analog
razorboy
6d ago
You think there's no way?
https://www.themotte.org/post/2154/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/335942?context=8#context
dr_analog
razorboy
6d ago
There's a huge gulf between that and what Trump is doing currently. Trump is making these raids as much a spectacle as possible.
Did we forget the Studio Ghibli rendition of the crying handcuffed deportee tweeted by the White House? What about videos captioned "ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight"?
He even has fucking Dr Phil accompanying raids now.
PLEASE try lowering the temperature, Dems.
I agree, but let us also remember to pin some blame on Trump for doing the ICE raids as flamboyantly as possible.
Obama deported 410,000 people in 2012 and managed to avoid cameras far better.
I am convinced Trump wants liberals to overreact because it's the best campaign ad and the mobs are happy to take the bait.
The West developed many nations in the way it did Iran. At some point you need to make it clear that stealing the West's investment in your nation has consequences.
The counterfactual world where we just let Iran get away with it and then emboldened socialists the world over to run on a platform of stealing Western investment is worse.
dr_analog
razorboy
7d ago
Not the person you replied to, but not that obnoxious, since I don't know which ones you're referring to?
dr_analog
razorboy
7d ago
On behalf of oil interests? Oh, you mean the part where Western nations invested in Iran to develop its oil infrastructure under a rev sharing deal that was considered mutually beneficial at the time only to then be seized by future socialists?
dr_analog
razorboy
8d ago
Can they do that? Doesn't Congress need to sign off on that? Reagan's "amnesty" was a law passed by Congress.
dr_analog
razorboy
8d ago
Yes it does something. Namely, makes you a lot more interested in women from a dopamine/seeking perspective. Whether that's a benefit is up to you. It can be intoxicating though.
Aren't you describing usual power law stuff though (w.r.t. art, the top <1% is the best and the rest is generally ignorable)? Is the ratio that different from human generated content?
Also, it actually lifts up people who do not have money and allows them to make art like the people who have money do. Look at this VEO 3 shitpost. Genuinely funny, and the production value would be insane if it was real, for a joke that probably wouldn't be worth it. But now, someone with some Gemini credits can make it. This increases the amount of people making things.
Yes but artists are a holy protected class and anything that takes their jobs away is evil. Nevermind that it has been known for centuries that art is an extremely bad way to make a living and that cameras already caused a crisis in the art world that every sophomore art student has a postmodern fit about.
My view is opposing AI art is anti-humanist. For every artist that can produce something anyone wants to look at, you have perhaps 1000x as many people who see something in their mind's eye but they don't have the skill to render it. That thing, maybe even that stunningly beautiful thing, never sees the light of day and dies with them.
Rest assured, most people have nothing beautiful to render or interesting to write in the first place, so it's not like we have some insane well of cognitive surplus waiting to be tapped into. Even with amazing AI tools most people will never put out anything interesting. But the true intellects and creatives only have time to specialize in so few things right now and I look forward to any leverage AI tools give them.
EDIT: lol, I posted that VEO3 video to my Facebook timeline saying something about how even kings could not commission shitposts like this and two different libtards unfriended me over it because of how wrong-side-of-history it is to support this technology that puts artists out of business. Of all of the gray tribe stuff I post that gets me a bunch of unhinged leftist reactions, praising AI stuff was The Line.
Biking is a fairly pleasant way to travel if you have bike paths and your town has moderate year-round weather. I pretty much always take my kids that way in a cargo bike instead of driving. It typically only turns a 10 minute car ride around town into a 20 minute bike ride.
I definitely make sure the ride is mostly bike paths through parks though, since I'm too paranoid about cars.
My cargo bike has an e-assist, so it's not exhausting. I don't even think it gets my heart rate up (I get my exercise by running 6 days a week, instead). It's also capped at a fairly low speed, since crashing at 30mph with your kids is bad.
Also it's actually more expensive per mile than driving my car, so it's not even really an efficiency thing. It's just awesome to ride around on a sunny day with my kids. We can stop by the farmers market and then have a picnic in the park. And then hit the splash pad in another park. It's great.
I live in an unusually bike friendly US town and I'm having a hard time imagining moving because I don't want to give this up.
I'm not saying we need to radically redesign society to accommodate this, but it's also not the worst thing.
dr_analog
razorboy
10d ago
I used to do this with reddit.com but always ended up removing the entry after a few days.
dr_analog
razorboy
10d ago
TRON bike lighting update
Stuff finally came in from Ali and I got to work doing more proof-of-concept.
Firstly I found the batch of clear heatshrink tubing from Ali was too big. It never shrank down enough to provide the weather protection I needed for the WS2815 solder points, so I gave up and ordered something slightly smaller off of Amazon and then a bigger batch of it off of Ali to arrive at some future date. The smaller clear shrinkwrap tubing arrived 2 days later and worked well.
Of course I had to buy a new heat gun too since the one I was using died. And by that I mean melted itself. You have one job, Harbor Freight heat gun: don't melt yourself.
Then I got around to trying to control COB LED strips. These are much brighter and meant for visibility during the daytime rather than "art". I ended up with way too high gauge but-can't-hurt-right MOSFETs that, when I finally sat down and soldered them and put together like a half dozen different wires between the MOSFET, power source, breadboard, ESP32-C3 and COB LED actually worked fine the first time. I was able to turn them on and off entirely via software and then adjust to dimming them via software. Sweet.
I'm using white COB LEDs but I note they make RGB COB LEDs which seems like so, so much more wiring but the effect might be worth it. They're so bright! We'll see how the WS2815s handle the heavy lifting for now. I guess.
I think nothing really stands in the way of going into full production at this point. Production here meaning put WS2815 and COB LEDs on helmets and the cargo bike and seeing if I can coordinate them via a smartphone app via BLE. Then I guess branching out to vests and other accessories.
I am trying to decide between putting 18650 batteries on each helmet or just kinda having a bigger battery on the cargo bike that each helmet's logic board plugs into via barrel jack adapter. As long as they're not screw-tightened together it shouldn't be a strangle/whiplash risk.
Also I just randomly found these RGB LED backlights on Adafruit and I'm looking for an excuse to incorporate them.
Also, I'm really enjoying how tiny the ESP32-C3 chips are and something about them being RISC-V makes me feel like I'm finally getting the future I was promised.
Also! Were you aware you could just hide a whole accessible via WiFi system-on-chip in the head of a USB-C or Lightning cord? https://shop.hak5.org/products/omg-cable
Homies: Ride or Die update
Spent awhile trying to rotate the wheels on the car model while it was in motion.
The first problem was figuring out how to isolate the wheels from the model mesh. I was about to rig some scheme where I would take shots in the dark to come up with relative points in the centers of each wheel and then try to eyeball a definition of a cylinder that would fit them, then write some selector that would pick all of the submeshes contained inside of the cylinder and then I could apply transformation matrices just to those that will match the spin of the wheels at any given time. But then I realized the model file actually already identifies the wheels and I could just process the "group" directive. With the hard part done, it was a trivial but surprisingly annoying amount of transform math to translate (ha!) into code.
So, the wheels spin. Now I'm trying to get them to also turn with the steering. Should be able to use most of the same code, just rotating the wheels around a relative Y axis instead of a relative X axis, but of course I'm missing some detail and they barely move even if I have the car turning 30 degrees at a time.
dr_analog
razorboy
10d ago
Reality has a surprising amount of detail. A musical greeting card (open card, plays tune) has a bill of materials of like 30 discrete components.
When you look at something and say "surely this part is done by a machine and not by humans" stop and consider that no maybe this is actually still produced by a human.
I thought The Hardware Hacker by bunnie, while a bit dated by now, had a fascinating tour of Chinese electronics fabrication.
The Nintendo Switch 2 probably doesn't have humans soldering individual components to boards and instead uses more automated surface mount tech, but I presume there's still a lot of manual bullshit involved. You probably don't just have trucks backing up to the factory and dumping raw parts on one end and on the other end out pop Switches.
A tick, actually :/
https://www.themotte.org/post/1986/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/331290?context=8#context
When he woke up paralyzed I was about to start the usual techbro thing of asking ChatGPT but said no, don't be that guy, lets just take him to the ER.
But then after we found the tick through no thanks to the ER, I plugged his symptoms and circumstances, exactly what we told the ER people, into ChatGPT4 classic and it listed ticks as the second thing to check for.
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.
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