turtledragonfly (u/turtledragonfly)

turtledragonfly commented on Back to FreeBSD: Part 1 hypha.pub/back-to-freebsd... · Posted by u/enz

> I hope FreeBSD never gets too "Linux-y"

What would that mean?

Partly what I mentioned above: a higher rate of development "churn" — incorporating new systems or technology before it's well-baked or well-integrated with the rest of the OS, only to be replaced a few years later with something else. The kerfuffle over WireGuard in FreeBSD 13 (ultimately backing it out of that release) is, I think, one recent-ish example of the FreeBSD devs taking a stance to demand a certain quality bar for such things.

Another aspect for me is documentation. I've been disheartened recently by how some faster-paced changes to the FreeBSD ports system aren't well-documented, so 'man ports' and the handbook are a bit out-of-sync with reality. Being able to read the handbook and the manpages to get an accurate education on the OS has always felt right to me, and the Linux ecosystem doesn't do it nearly as well, I feel.

I think generally it's a cathedral-vs-bazaar sort of difference. I hope FreeBSD stays more cathedral-y than Linux.

turtledragonfly commented on Back to FreeBSD: Part 1 hypha.pub/back-to-freebsd... · Posted by u/enz

lizknope · 18 days ago

> Technical superiority doesn't win ecosystem wars. Linux won through a combination of fast decisions, the viral GPL licence, and strong enterprise backing from Red Hat and IBM. Then Google, Facebook, and Amazon happened — hungry for datacenters, developing tools to manage growing infrastructure at scale. They set the direction for the entire industry.

In the mid 1990's the hardware driver support on Linux was much broader.

Copy / paste of my comment from last year about FreeBSD

I installed Linux in fall 1994. I looked at Free/NetBSD but when I went on some of the Usenet BSD forums they basically insulted me saying that my brand new $3,500 PC wasn't good enough.

The main thing was this IDE interface that had a bug. Linux got a workaround within days or weeks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMD640

The BSD people told me that I should buy a SCSI card, SCSI hard drive, SCSI CD-ROM. I was a sophomore in college and I saved every penny to spend $2K on that PC and my parents paid the rest. I didn't have any money for that.

The sound card was another issue.

I remember software based "WinModems" but Linux had drivers for some of these. Same for software based "Win Printers"

When I finally did graduate and had money for SCSI stuff I tried FreeBSD around 1998 and it just seemed like another Unix. I used Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Ultrix, IRIX. FreeBSD was perfectly fine but it didn't do anything I needed that Linux didn't already do.

turtledragonfly · 18 days ago

> FreeBSD was perfectly fine but it didn't do anything I needed that Linux didn't already do.

I broadly agree, even as a FreeBSD fan myself; things have converged a lot over the decades. But still, I generally feel that while you can get the same work done in both, FreeBSD does things better (and/or cleaner, more elegant, etc) in many cases.

The overall feeling of system cohesion makes me happier to use it, from small things like Ctrl-T producing meaningful output for all the base OS tools, to larger and more amorphous things like having greater confidence core systems won't change too quickly over time (eg: FreeBSD's relatively stable sound support, versus Linux's alsa/pulse/pipewire/..., similar for event APIs, and more).

Though I totally feel your pain about latest-and-greatest hardware driver support. Has gotten better since the '90s, but that gap will probably always be there due to the different development philosophies.

I hope FreeBSD never gets too "Linux-y"; it occupies it's own nice spot in the spectrum of available options.

turtledragonfly commented on I'm making a game engine based on dynamic signed distance fields (SDFs) [video] youtube.com/watch?v=il-TX... · Posted by u/imagiro

nnevatie · 2 months ago

Seems you're not familiar with how game projects with a custom engine typically go. Let me elaborate on this - the steps involved are:

1. Create a custom game engine.

turtledragonfly · 2 months ago

Why must you attack me personally like this?! ⠀(:

turtledragonfly commented on I'm making a game engine based on dynamic signed distance fields (SDFs) [video] youtube.com/watch?v=il-TX... · Posted by u/imagiro

turtledragonfly · 2 months ago

This is super cool, and I like the no-nonsense presentation.

I'm curious to know where he takes the gameplay. He mentions it being digging-focused, and also mentions the digging/terrain deformation aspects in other games like No Man's Sky are relatively low-fidelity. I wonder what a "high-fidelity digging game" looks like (:

Aside, if I may self-plug: I wrote a small series on SDFs, for those who might be interested[1]. I'm also using them in my game engine (though it's 2D, for me).

[1]

* https://festina-lente-productions.com/articles/sdfs-1/

* https://festina-lente-productions.com/articles/sdfs-2/

* https://festina-lente-productions.com/articles/sdfs-3/

turtledragonfly commented on I'm making a game engine based on dynamic signed distance fields (SDFs) [video] youtube.com/watch?v=il-TX... · Posted by u/imagiro

deckar01 · 2 months ago

Dreams on PS4 had an SDF modeler, but I’m not sure if the runtime was SDF. Now that I think about it, the rendering engine had a Gaussian splat look to it years before that paper.

turtledragonfly · 2 months ago

The Dreams team made a nice talk at SIGGRAPH 2015, if you want to check it out:

* Slides (good notes): https://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2015/AlexEvans_SIGGR...

* video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9KNtnCZDMI

turtledragonfly commented on Friendship Begins at Home 3quarksdaily.com/3quarksd... · Posted by u/herbertl

BLKNSLVR · 5 months ago

I just realised, from writing a comment below in the thread, that at 47 (which roughly approximates my age as well) that the internal talk is increasingly provably false.

the voice is a shock jock, click bait. All headline, no research, no lede.

turtledragonfly · 5 months ago

I'm reminded of that scene from A Beautiful Mind where someone asks him if he still has his hallucinations. He looks over and sees the fake people still there, and says "Oh no, they're not gone. Maybe they'll never be." And they still would drag him into things again, but he has learned to ignore them and not get pulled in.

So it is with internal demons sometimes, I find. You learn to recognize them, rather than expunge them.

turtledragonfly commented on Fast calculation of the distance to cubic Bezier curves on the GPU blog.pkh.me/p/46-fast-cal... · Posted by u/ux

turtledragonfly · 5 months ago

Pretty cool. I haven't dived into the details of this post, but it's a problem I've been wrangling with from time to time in my game.

Below is a series of writings on this topic that I enjoyed, by James Blinn, of "Blinn-Phong reflection" fame (and more). Not state-of-the-art, but an interesting read. It's just for cubics, which is what you need to solve the distance formula for quadratic bezier curves (my particular case), rather than the harder cubic curves of the linked article.

* https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse590b/13au/lectu...

turtledragonfly commented on Dimensions of everyday objects dimensions.com/... · Posted by u/kaniksu

turtledragonfly · 5 months ago

From the name, I thought it was going to be about fractal dimensions[1] (:

So on that tangent ... you can measure that value for ordinary objects using the "box counting" method[2], to get a notion of objects being "1.3 D" and such.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal_dimension

[2]https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ergreen/honors_thesis/dimension.h...

turtledragonfly commented on Social anxiety isn't about being liked chrislakin.blog/p/social-... · Posted by u/rohmanhakim

cortesoft · 5 months ago

I hadn’t heard the word countersignaling before, but it matches something I had observed many years ago.

My closest groups of friends always make so much fun of each other. We make negative comments about the worst traits about each other, the things that we are most self-conscious about… yet every time my friends make fun of me for something I worry about, I actually feel better and more comfortable with myself.

When I thought about why, I realized it’s because of the hidden message behind the ridicule of my longtime friends; they are telling me, “we are keenly aware of the worst qualities about you, and we love you and want to spend time with you anyway.”

There is comfort in knowing you don’t have to hide your flaws to be accepted and loved.

turtledragonfly · 5 months ago

This seems fairly culture-dependent, from my experience.

For instance, I've noticed a distinct difference in how sarcasm is received in the Northeast US vs the West Coast. What you described feels more Northeast-y to me (I'm sure it varies by other segments and sub-sub-cultures, too).

There's the saying: "If an Irish person calls you 'asshole,' it means they think you're a friend. If they call you 'friend' it means they think you're an asshole."

Not just for the Irish though, I don't think (:

turtledragonfly commented on Hand: open-source Robot Hand github.com/pollen-robotic... · Posted by u/vineethy

LeifCarrotson · 8 months ago

A human hand is probably the most appropriate design for a robot to grip a variety of things that were designed to be gripped by human hands.

For any one specific thing, be it a doorknob, a rope, a sheet of paper or fabric, or a pair of scissors, there's probably a different design that's several orders of magnitude simpler and cheaper, and also much stronger and more reliable. Single-axis parallel grippers, circumferential chucks, vacuum cups/vacuum pads, electromagnets, cam lock and release mechanisms, and so on are common in industrial robotics.

Assume your robot's only task is to grab a spool with a 35 +/-0.5 mm ID core from from an infeed rack and place it on a spindle, you're not going to try to build a five-finger human sized servo-operated hand and tuck two of those fingers away to awkwardly pinch outwards from the inside, you're going to grab a Schunk JGZ concentric gripper off the shelf and plumb a pair of air lines to it. If it also needs to grab a tab from some tape on the spool and pull it into the machine, you're just going to add an asymmetric pincer like an angular tumor on two of the jaws - or graft on an entire separate parallel gripper like some polydactyl appendage, or tool-change, amputating and reattaching hands at will.

I have also observed that humans are quite good at anthropomorphizing robot arms: a small, well-tuned motion can be universally recognized as a nod of agreement, shrug of confusion, wave of acknowledgement, or sigh of disappointment, even if the equipment is a bright yellow 6-axis piece of cast iron with menacing claws where the hand (or face? they're often the same) should be. Googley eyes and a "Hi my name is" sticker make this even more convincing.

But if you need a single tool to grip a doorknob, a rope, a sheet of paper, a pair of scissors, AND an unknown variety of other arbitrary household objects... it's probably best to start with an approximation of the human hand. Also, while claws may be appropriate for a work environment with the robot inside a fence, in collaborative situations hands are just less intimidating.

turtledragonfly · 8 months ago

As an aside, this "robot tentacle" paper was referenced in a recent HN story: "SpiRobs: Logarithmic Spiral-shaped Robots for Versatile Grasping Across Scales"[1]

Seems like a pretty high bang-for-the-buck for versatility and capability with only a few cables controlling it.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.09861