tarnith (u/tarnith) - Readit News

tarnith commented on What I learned designing a barebones UI engine madebymohammed.com/miniui... · Posted by u/teleforce

cardanome · 18 days ago

Immediate mode GUI is the way to go.

Retaining state is a pain and causes bugs. Trying to get fancy a la react and diffing the tree for changes makes not sense. That was a performance hack because changing the DOM in JS used to be slow as hell. You don't need that.

Just redraw the whole thing every frame. Great performance, simple, less bugs.

tarnith · 18 days ago

This works for simple apps, utilities, and demos/mvps. Not great for actual applications.

What about when you're embedding your GUI into an existing application? or for use on an already taxed system? (Audio plugins come to mind)

What if something is costly, that you need to compute dynamically, but not often, makes it into the frame? Do you separately now create a state flag for that one render object?

tarnith commented on High-performance header-only container library for C++23 on x86-64 github.com/kressler/fast-... · Posted by u/mattgodbolt

inetknght · 2 months ago

On the other hand, I've been using Claude Code for the past several months at work in several C++ projects. It's been fine at understanding C++. It just generates a lot of boilerplate, doesn't follow DRY, and gets persnickety with tests.

I've started adding this to all of my new conversations and it seems to help:

    You are a principal software engineer. I report to you. Do not modify files. Do not write prose. Only provide observations and suggestions so that I can learn from you.

My question to the LLM then follows in the next paragraph. Foregoing most of the LLM's code-writing capabilities in favor of giving observations and ideas seems to be a much better choice for productivity. It can still lead me down rabbit holes or wrong directions, but at least I don't have to deal with 10 pages of prose in its output or 50 pages of ineffectual code.

tarnith · 2 months ago

Yeah, it's a decent rubber duck.

As soon as it starts trying to write actual code or generate a bunch of files it's less than helpful very quickly.

Perhaps I haven't tried enough, but I'm entirely unsold on this for anything lower level.

tarnith commented on 2D Signed Distance Functions iquilezles.org/articles/d... · Posted by u/nickswalker

jesse__ · 2 months ago

I owe iq so much; a living legend. Inigo, if you happen to ever read this, thanks so much for all the work you've published. Your Youtube videos (not to mention shadertoy) sparked an interest in graphics I never knew I had.

For anyone that's unfamiliar, his Youtube videos are extremely well put together, and well worth the handful of hours to watch.

https://www.youtube.com/c/InigoQuilez

tarnith · 2 months ago

I can definitely say I wouldn't know half of what I do and probably wouldn't have kept at it with writing GLSL and learning more about how GPUs really work without a lot of his freely shared knowledge over the years.

His articles on his website are very much worth a deep read too!

tarnith commented on Valorant's 128-Tick Servers (2020) technology.riotgames.com/... · Posted by u/nairadithya

maplant · 5 months ago

This is the basis for basically every physics engine in some form of another. Collision is divided into the "broad phase" pruning step that typically uses the bounding box of an object and a "narrow phase" collision detection step that uses the more detailed collision primitives

tarnith · 5 months ago

also how raytracing works with bounding volume hierarchies

and how occlusion culling worked with BSP trees in Quake if I remember correctly as well

tarnith commented on U.S. senators introduce new pirate site blocking bill, "Block BEARD" torrentfreak.com/u-s-sena... · Posted by u/HieronymusBosch

pwthornton · 7 months ago

You can’t find them to rent on iTunes and similar platforms?

tarnith · 7 months ago

Who wants to rent? I have money, give me a file for money.

DRM is laughable anyway, if you give me the data I have the file if I really want it.

Let me, the consumer, legally purchase a high res copy of media I can own. Why is this so hard?

tarnith commented on U.S. senators introduce new pirate site blocking bill, "Block BEARD" torrentfreak.com/u-s-sena... · Posted by u/HieronymusBosch

blackjack_ · 7 months ago

I've been trying to watch old 80s-90s movies recently. I'm happy to pay $5 or whatever, and they just aren't available anywhere. Rental stores are dead, so I can't go rent them from blockbuster or whatever, and streaming sites have splintered to the point I'm not even sure what is a scam and what is a legitimate business anymore. Trying to even find availability of what films exist on which streaming sites has been an absolute pain. There are theoretical catalogue sites, but they are all randomly out of date to the point that its not very useful.

I'm literally at the point where its looking like pirating the movies is the only way to watch them...

tarnith · 7 months ago

Video games too. Try to buy Need For Speed Most Wanted (2005). You can't.

tarnith commented on Las Vegas is embracing a simple climate solution: More trees npr.org/2025/06/09/nx-s1-... · Posted by u/geox

jaoane · 9 months ago

I don’t understand how you can claim that printing money doesn’t create inflation if you spend the printed money on things you like.

tarnith · 9 months ago

Not agreeing with either side here, but, printing money and handing it to an investment class who then launders it through their companies, to acquire more assets vs printing money that goes into infrastructure, works projects, or R&D are wildly different.

Not all monetary inflation is the same, and the destination of the money and the work produced with it can actually have quite an impact on the true wider economic effects of that increased money supply.

To be very clear, I'm not saying monetary policy is magical, or that it doesn't cause inflation.

It has very little to do with "things you like" and a lot more to do with "utility to society accomplished with the policy" along with the velocity of that money afterwards in local economies (IE. a worker is more likely to buy, well, food and rent, education. A PPP loaned exec will buy assets, or another yacht)

Believe it or not, one of those can generate more widespread economic growth than the other, for the same amount of money printed

tarnith commented on Running GPT-2 in WebGL: Rediscovering the Lost Art of GPU Shader Programming nathan.rs/posts/gpu-shade... · Posted by u/nathan-barry

cmovq · 9 months ago

> gl.drawArrays(gl.TRIANGLES, 0, 6);

Using 2 tris for this isn’t ideal because you will get duplicate fragment invocations along the horizontal seam where the triangles meet. It is slightly more efficient to use one larger triangle extending outside the viewport, the offscreen parts will be clipped and not generate any additional fragments.

[1]: https://wallisc.github.io/rendering/2021/04/18/Fullscreen-Pa...

tarnith · 9 months ago

Also see https://michaldrobot.com/2014/04/01/gcn-execution-patterns-i...

A bit of an older article but still very relevant.

I've found with webGL2 you can also skip the whole upload/binding of the buffer and just emit the vertexes/coordinates from the vertex shader as well.

Less of an impact than cutting it down, but if you're just trying to get a a fragment going, why not use the least amount of data and CPU-> GPU upload possible.

tarnith commented on The cultural evolution of distortion in music royalsocietypublishing.or... · Posted by u/anigbrowl

kazinator · a year ago

Distortion of monophonic tones (single notes/voices) became accepted in the mainstream quite rapidly because the circuits used to produce it quickly improved, informed by feedback (no pun intended) from musicians.

Nobody hates ugly sounding distortion more than he or she who practices 5 hours a day with it.

Single note distortion, at its best, is a harmonically rich sound which shares something with bowed instruments and reed woodwinds.

Nasty sounding single distortion has not gained complete mainstream acceptance. Musicians who do that on purpose will remain niche, even today. From time to time, such nasty sounds make appearances in mainstream pop, but only as a kind of "cameo". The statement is, "we are inserting this ugly thing here specifically for its idiosyncratic effect, haha! But only a few seconds, we promise".

Distortion (other than perhaps mild distortion) has never been fully accepted in roles where the multiple voices of a complex harmony part would be distorted together.

Nowhere was that better seen than in jazz/rock fusion, which accepted ragingly distorted guitars for solo work, but not so much for the rest of the music: except, of course, in passages where the guitars provide the "sound of rock": distorted fourths and fifths and whatnot, or double stop bluesy cliches and whatnot.

The music best known for distortion and that couldn't exist without distortion (and a lot of it) is of course heavy metal, which is a big landscape of styles and sounds.

In metal, the harmonies from an individual guitar part tend to consist of only a few notes. The clean chord is transformed into something else, which perhaps cannot be described in music notation. Complexity comes from the distortion. Distortion includes the sum and difference products, which relate to the tonality and scale of the music in unsual ways. Those notes are not identified. If notation is used at all, the underlying clean notes are notated: e.g. C-F# tritone on the A and D strings, over open E bass. Heavy metal uses syncopated and alternating rhythms to separate bass notes from upper notes in three and four note chords. This is not only to create rhythmical excitement, but to better separate the notes.

The notes of a distorted chord are also easier to for the ear to identify if they are introduced separately as a lasciare suonare arpeggio; that's a thing in metal.

Harmonic textures are also created by combining distorted guitar parts. Using two lead guitars originated in rock, with groups like Wishbone Ash. Multitrack recording allows an unlimited number of parts to be layered.

tarnith · a year ago

To sum this up a bit: Harmonic distortion is well accepted, unless done to an extreme amount. What people seem to struggle with most is intermodulation distortion, cross modulation, etc.

If you ever want to hear a guitar sound as rich as a synth, listen to someone running full polyphonic outputs for each string into a distortion per string. You get the rich harmonic violin/synth like tones of every string but can play full chords without any of the intermodulation products!

I'm kind of surprised guitars have stayed monophonic for as long as they have, and I feel like the next advance might be a cultural shift of guitars to a true polyphonic output path. Would definitely open up some interesting DSP pedal opportunities as a bonus.

The future is distorted guitars that can play complex chords imo

tarnith commented on Windows debloat script made by Microsoft github.com/microsoft/wind... · Posted by u/homebrewer

zadkey · a year ago

I'm not sure I trust Microsoft's take on a debloat script for their own OS.

Sure it will have less stuff, but I suspect there may be some remnants purposefully left behind.

tarnith · a year ago

There definitely are. I don't see anything touching most of the telemetry here, cortana, etc.

This looks like a basic default apps store uninstall and not much else.