Readit NewsOne of my discarded project ideas was exactly this, but on a smaller scale. A steerable mirror on a mount with a camera for targeting. The idea was to place one on the ground outside a north facing window. The device would then busy itself reflecting the sun up into the room making a nice sunny patch on the ceiling to light the room. They could also be used to deliver extra light to windows with plants in them to grow plants which require more light than is available or to modulate the daily light to fake a different season.
Sitting in 2020 the technology is near trivial. The problem is that some knucklehead would point a bunch of them at the same window and set curtains and pigeons on fire. (You’d do this because you had a large room with few windows, so dispersed mirrors would give you multiple dispersed lighting spots in the room… and incinerated pigeons.)
I was unable to make the leap to what happens if you are a deliberate and well reasoned knucklehead! In a controlled situation a megawatt of light might be just the thing.
Addendum: The mass field of mirrors introduces a lot more work. Some of the immediately interesting problems:
• you need a “everyone stop shining at the target” mode for emergency stop, but the mirrors need to move away from the target in such a way that they don’t create convergences elsewhere. Obviously sweeping your portal to hell down the tower would be a bad idea. So you have a collection of autonomous, free thinking mirrors, but when commanded to stop hitting the target they need to not make the same decisions.
• your camera probably needs to be able to stare into the heart of a thousand suns (literally). But it also needs to see in ordinary daylight. Maybe a pinhole filter that moves over the lens would be appropriate.
• with 999 mirrors shining on the target, you will not be able to see your own contribution to aim. There probably needs to be a “hey! Everyone else look away for a second” command for unit to aim and calibrate itself. See complexities from the first bullet and not incinerating things you like.
So yeah, they could have started with my garden heliostats, but then it would be a crack the knuckles, bring in the eggheads, and get to work operation to solve all the hard problems.
That sounds like Caia (https://solenica.com/).
It looks kind of similar to a dream project of my own. It's a project that I've promised myself to take up on one day. I started building a prototype in haskell, with front end in Gloss. Tried to get inspiration from functional reactive programming/modelling.
I thought about using something like a prototype called Hydra (1) as a sort of runtime for evaluating graphs. Anyway, I really want to get back to it at some point but other cool things that are slightly more low hanging tends to get in the way. :)
Another nice inspiration for these things is Ecolanguage (2), not really programming related but a diagram language for visualizing economic transactions.
(1) - https://github.com/giorgidze/Hydra (2) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QI1iuAvTKE
I have been working on a visual programming language for Haskell: https://github.com/rgleichman/glance Currently, it uses Diagrams and Graphviz to visualize Haskell programs. Please email me since I think there is a lot we could discuss.
_Robbie commented on Glance, a visualizer for Haskell code github.com/rgleichman/gla... · Posted by u/chewxy
I have found in my time teaching people about deep learning that proper visualizations of algorithms can help people grok things better[0]. Granted backprop and neural networks are really simple one dimensional algorithms.
[0]: http://blog.chewxy.com/2016/12/06/a-direct-way-of-understand...
The link is a blank page for me.
_Robbie commented on Glance, a visualizer for Haskell code github.com/rgleichman/gla... · Posted by u/chewxy
Why are the nodes rotated like that? It seems very distracting, and I think that might also be partly causing your "layout is too spread out" issue? [1] It could also be exacerbating your second issue of crossing edges - you are getting crossing edges in even the simplest graphs (e.g. your "f1" function example, with 5 nodes).
GraphViz's "dot" algorithm (i.e., Sugiyama-style graph drawing algorithm) [2] should give a fairly compact representation that is organized into layers, and avoids crossing edges in at least simple cases, but rotating the nodes would again "spread out" the layout by forcing increasing height of each layer.
Under "Possible solutions" you mention "create a better graph layout algorithm" - that sounds quite ambitious, wouldn't this be a PhD-thesis-level research task in itself?
The only graph drawing library I'm aware of that might be competitive with GraphViz's algorithms is MSAGL [3] but that's a .NET library.
[1] https://github.com/rgleichman/glance/issues/1
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Layered_graph_drawing
[3] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/microsoft-a...
Rotating nodes is an easy way to reduce line crossings. Here's a comparison [0].
However, it does seem that vertical and angled text is harder to read than horizontal text, so there is room to improve here.
[0] https://gist.github.com/rgleichman/f812150151b549ca9f634832c...
_Robbie commented on Glance, a visualizer for Haskell code github.com/rgleichman/gla... · Posted by u/chewxy
I didn't realize graphviz could do graphs of that quality. I'm used to graphviz's examples of DAGs and badly formatted text. Can you tell us more of how you're using graphviz? Wouldn't you need to move away from it as you move towards an interactive editor, in favor of other more javascript-based layout algorithms? What path do you think you'd follow for that?
Graphviz is only used to find the positions for the nodes using Graphviz's Neato algorithm. The nodes and the lines themselves are all rendered using the Haskell library Diagrams [0].
The next step for the project is to improve graph layout (see Glance issue here [1]), which likely means moving away from Graphviz.
What tools to use for interactivity or an editor is still up in the air.
_Robbie commented on Glance, a visualizer for Haskell code github.com/rgleichman/gla... · Posted by u/chewxy
Creator of Glance here, happy to answer any questions.
It looks good, but I'm a bit concerned about the keyboard. Can anyone comment on how it is compared to e.g. the keyboard on a Macbook Air?
Here's my reply to another comment about the keyboard: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13051133
People who use the XPS13 daily: keyboard review/commentary, please?
I got the Developer Edition XPS 13 9360 two weeks ago. I have never encountered the repeated key press problem some people with the XPS 15 seem to have had. Compared with my old X1 Carbon, the keyboard on the XPS 13 is not very good. On the XPS 13 the keys are flat, there is very little key travel, and very little resistive force. The lack of resistive force means that your fingers experience much more force when the keys are pressed (similar to tying on a touchscreen's hard surface). From looking at the reviews of the XPS 13, it sounds like these lackluster keyboards are the norm for Ultrabooks. The `, and \ keys are very small, and the Page Up, Page Down, Home, and End keys are overloaded with the arrow keys. There is only one super key, which is on the left.
Most of the time I use an external keyboard. If you only cared about the keyboard I would definitely recommend getting the X1 Carbon over the XPS 13.
Not stadiums or sports arenas that host Top 40s mega-acts like Britney Spears and Lady Gaga, but also not the local coffee shop that has a guy play some guitar covers on Friday nights.