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QuaternionsBhop commented on Avoiding Trigonometry (2013)   iquilezles.org/articles/n... · Posted by u/WithinReason
chriswarbo · 3 days ago
Norman Wildberger takes this to the extreme with Rational Trigonometry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_Proportions:_Rational_T...

It eschews angles entirely, sticking to ratios. It avoids square roots by sticking to "quadrances" (squared distance; i.e. pythagoras/euclidean-distance without taking square roots).

I highly recommend Wildberger's extensive Youtube channels too https://www.youtube.com/@njwildberger and https://www.youtube.com/@WildEggmathematicscourses

He's quite contrarian, so I'd take his informal statements with a pinch of salt (e.g. that there's no such thing as Real numbers; the underlying argument is reasonable, but the grand statements lose all that nuance); but he ends up approaching many subjects from an interesting perspective, and presents lots of nice connections e.g. between projective geometry, linear algebra, etc.

QuaternionsBhop · 2 days ago
I also invented this! There is cool stuff like angle adding and angle doubling formulas, but the main downside is that you can only directly encode 180 degrees of rotation. I use it for FOV in my games internally! (With degrees as user input of course.) In order to actually use it to replace angles, I assume you'd want to use some sort of half angle system like quaternions. Even then you still have singularities, so it does have its warts.
QuaternionsBhop commented on My “grand vision” for Rust   blog.yoshuawuyts.com/a-gr... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
its-kostya · 6 days ago
I write production Rust code that becomes critical infra for our customers. I got tired of nil checks in Go and became a squeaky wheel in incident retros, where I finally got the chance to rewrite parts of our system in Rust during a refactor.

I admit the skill issue on my part, but I genuinely struggled to follow the concepts in this article. Working alongside peers who push Rust's bleeding edge, I dread reviewing their code and especially inheriting "legacy" implementations. It's like having a conversation with someone who expresses simple thoughts with ornate vocabulary. Reasoning about code written this way makes me experience profound fatigue and possess an overwhelming desire to return to my domicile; Or simply put, I get tired and want to go home.

Rust's safety guardrails are valuable until the language becomes so complex that reading and reasoning about _business_ logic gets harder, not easier. It reminds me of the kid in "A Christmas Story" bundled so heavily in winter gear he cant put his arms down[0]. At some point, over-engineered safety becomes its own kind of risk even though it is technically safer in some regards. Sometimes you need to just implement a dang state machine and stop throwing complexity at poorly thought-through solutions. End old-man rant.

[0]: https://youtu.be/PKxsOlzuH0k?si=-88dxtyegTxIvOYI

QuaternionsBhop · 6 days ago
> Reasoning about code written this way makes me experience profound fatigue and possess an overwhelming desire to return to my domicile;

I didn't understand that you were making fun of verbosity until the word 'domicile'. I must be one of those insufferable people who expresses simple thoughts with ornate vocabulary...

The article was comprehensible to me, and the additional function colorings sound like exciting constraints I can impose to prevent my future self from making mistakes rather than heavy winter gear. I guess I'm closer to the target audience?

QuaternionsBhop commented on I'm helping my dog vibe code games   calebleak.com/posts/dog-g... · Posted by u/cleak
QuaternionsBhop · 18 days ago
The fact that LLMs pick from the most likely tokens is really on its side here when the objective is putting together a plausible continuation of random characters.
QuaternionsBhop commented on Rust--: Rust without the borrow checker   github.com/buyukakyuz/rus... · Posted by u/ravenical
QuaternionsBhop · 2 months ago
Fighting the borrow checker is something you do when you're learning Rust. After you learn how to design things that way in the first place, it's just there to keep you honest.
QuaternionsBhop commented on Constructing the Word's First JPEG XL MD5 Hash Quine   stackchk.fail/blog/jxl_ha... · Posted by u/luispa
bigbuppo · 3 months ago
Nobody was this excited about WEBP.
QuaternionsBhop · 3 months ago
Webp was not as exciting. JpegXL has cool features like 20% improved lossless jpeg recompression and progressive decoding. Not to mention all the cool stuff used in the writeup like implementing a font in the prediction engine.
QuaternionsBhop commented on Ask HN: How would you set up a child’s first Linux computer?    · Posted by u/evolve2k
nrjames · 4 months ago
As a parent with two kids that used Scratch during 2020 or so… be cautious. The web community was an unregulated social network with follows, likes, comments, and a wide age range (apparently) of people interacting. Around that time, there was a lot of inappropriate content, some bullying, sketches about self-harm, sex, etc. Perhaps they’ve fixed the issue. If not, I would try to install it locally and keep them away from the official website.

Incidentally, I later came to believe that the visual coding impeded their ability to learn text-based coding. That was just my experience and I don’t have formal research to back it up, but I still wonder about it.

QuaternionsBhop · 4 months ago
> visual coding impeded their ability to learn text-based coding

As a former child, my opinion is the opposite. I learned visual programming with Lego Mindstorms NXT in ~2008, and later developed an interest in text programming on Roblox in ~2012. It's my belief that my fluency with concepts like control flow and values output from one part of the program serving as inputs for another part of the program were largely transferable to text-based programming. Learning a first programming language is 30% learning syntax, and 70% learning programming.

QuaternionsBhop commented on Myths Programmers Believe about CPU Caches (2018)   software.rajivprab.com/20... · Posted by u/whack
QuaternionsBhop · 4 months ago
Since the CPU is doing cache coherency transparently, perhaps there should be some sort of way to promise that an application is well-behaved in order to access a lower-level non-transparent instruction set to manually manage the cache coherency from the application level. Or perhaps applications can never be trusted with that level of control over the hardware. The MESI model reminded me of Rust's ownership and borrowing. The pattern also appears in OpenGL vs Vulkan drivers, implicit sync vs explicit sync. Yet another example would be the cache management work involved in squeezing out maximum throughput CUDA on an enterprise GPU.
QuaternionsBhop commented on Ergonomic errors in Rust: write fast, debug with ease, handle precisely   gmcgoldr.github.io/2025/0... · Posted by u/garrinm
QuaternionsBhop · 7 months ago
I have never seen anything use Result<_,&'static str>, that is such an anti-rust thing to start with.
QuaternionsBhop commented on The issue of anti-cheat on Linux (2024)   tulach.cc/the-issue-of-an... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
Hackbraten · 7 months ago
That achieves nothing. A hypervisor can see and manipulate any VM it runs. By extension, a compromised kernel can do the same.
QuaternionsBhop · 7 months ago
How about with homomorphic encryption?
QuaternionsBhop commented on Introducing tmux-rs   richardscollin.github.io/... · Posted by u/Jtsummers
miroljub · 8 months ago
My understanding is that, even though tmux-rs is written in a safer language, it still can't beat the stability of an old battle-tested well-maintained project written by a group of highly competent developers.

Every new project is bound to have bugs that need to be ironed out during the time.

QuaternionsBhop · 8 months ago
My understanding is that the author was referring to there being more segfaults in programming than in gardening.

u/QuaternionsBhop

KarmaCake day41June 1, 2024View Original