It's bizarre that they prioritize parsimony over correctness. Laying out long documents can happen in the background, but shouldn't be deferred to when you actually scroll.
Readit Newsunconed commented on TextKit 2 – The Promised Land blog.krzyzanowskim.com/20... · Posted by u/nickmain
unconed commented on I'm Unsatisfied with Easing Functions davepagurek.com/blog/easi... · Posted by u/ndyg
Bouncy animations that overshoot just seem like a bad idea in general. The purpose of a UI animation is to guide the eye, but the bounce explicitly introduces a reversal of motion at the end before stopping.
Easing functions are just very cargo culty. We've had the same basic set that dates from the Flash era. Now there's an Apple variant that's just a parametric version of the same idea, but it lacks guaranteed continuity and it's even harder to control?
Personally I've had far better results using the repeated-lerping-towards-a-target trick, aka a true exponential ease. When stacked, you get a classic LTI (linear time invariant) system, and the math around how those behave is well established.
Classic hand-drawn animation does often use stretching and squeezing to emphasize and to create a sense of anticipation, but that's very different and always dependent on the specific motion. You can't automate that by making everything act like jello.
unconed commented on Shipping WebGPU on Windows in Firefox 141 mozillagfx.wordpress.com/... · Posted by u/Bogdanp
What promises were made, by whom? Graphics APIs have never been about ease of use as a first order goal. They've been about getting code and data into GPUs as fast as reasonably possible. DevEx will always play second fiddle to that.
I think WebGPU is a decent wrapper for exposing compute and render in the browser. Not perfect by any means - I've had a few paper cuts working with the API so far - but a lot more discoverable and intuitive than I ever found WebGL and OpenGL.
"What promises were made, by whom?"
Technically true, but practically tone deaf.
WebGPU is both years too late, and just a bit early. Wheras WebGL was OpenGL circa 2005, WebGPU is native graphics circa 2015. It shouldn't need to be said that the bleeding edge new standard for web graphics shouldn't be both 10 years out of date and awful.
Vendors are finally starting to deprecate the old binding model as the byzantine machinery that it is. Bindless resources are an absolute necessity for the modern style of rendering with nanite and raytracing.
Rust's WGPU on native supports some of this, but WebGPU itself doesn't.
It's only intuitive if you don't realize just how huge the gap is between dispatching a vertex shader to render some triangles, and actually producing a lit, shaded and occlusioned image with PBR, indirect lighting, antialiasing and postfx. Would you like to render high quality lines or points? Sorry, it's not been a priority to make that simple. Better go study up on SDFs and beziers.
Which, tbh, is the impression I get from webgpu efforts. Everyone forgets the drivers have been playing pretend for decades, and very few have actually done the homework. Of those that have, most are too enamored with being a l33t gfx coder to realize how terrible the dev exp is.
unconed commented on European Commission presents Roadmap for lawful access to data home-affairs.ec.europa.eu... · Posted by u/bramhaag
You mean the same commission that disregarded precedent, to instead exclude right wing members at a time when they are getting more votes?
You're operating under the old left vs right definition when it's obviously shifted towards globalism vs national sovereignty. Nobody believes the left stands for supporting the laborers and their interests anymore.
N=1 but I'm colourblind and frequently I need to talk to someone about a UI colour while not having any idea what the colour is called, this kind of thing is useful for me.
I made a similar tool that can work on images and the camera. In addition to color picking, it adds moving stripes so you can visually tell the difference between colors you might otherwise not tell apart.
unconed commented on Faster, easier 2D vector rendering [video] youtube.com/watch?v=_sv8K... · Posted by u/raphlinus
What I love with Raph Levien is how it does exactly the opposite of what most people do in tech: given the current financial incentives, the only thing most people can afford is to do something “good enough” as fast as possible, and in the end we end up with lots of subpar, half-baked solutions that cannot be fixed properly because many people rely on the tool they have and fixing it in depth would break everyone's workflow. Until the next solution appears, and given the same structural constraints, end up failing in the exact same shortcomings.
Instead Raph has spent the past 9 years I believe, trying to create a sound foundation on the problem of performant UI rendering.
I don't know how it will go, and he's going to end up shipping his grand vision at all eventually, but I really appreciate the effort of “doing something well” in a world that pretty much only rewards “doing something quickly”.
We already have plenty of techniques that are fast enough for classic UI rendering. There is no conceivable bottleneck for the kind of stuff that is on your screen right now. It's not a matter of "doing something quickly" imo, that's an issue specific to the games industry, and largely caused by the need to make entirely custom, animated, textured UIs as a feature for a single product.
What projects like Slug and Vello rather show is that GPU coding remains so obtuse that you cannot tackle an isolated subproblem like 2D vector rendering, and instead have to make apple pie from scratch by first creating the universe. And then the resulting solution is itself a whole beast that cannot just be hooked up to other API(s) and languages than it was created for, unless that is specifically something you also architect for. As the first slide shows, v1 required modern GPUs, and the CPU side uses hand-optimized SIMD routines.
2D vector graphics is also just an awkward niche to optimize for today. GPUs are optimized for 3D, where z-buffers are used to draw things in an order-independent way. 2D graphics instead must be layered and clipped in the right order, which is much more difficult to 'embarrassingly' parallelize. Formats like SVG can have an endless number of points per path, e.g. a detailed polygon of the United States has to be processed as one shape, you can't blindly subdivide it. You also can't rely on vanilla anti-aliasing because complementary edges wouldn't be fully opaque.
Even if you do go all the way, you'll still have just a 2D rasterizer. Perhaps it can work under projective transform, that's usually pretty easy, but will it be significantly more powerful or extensible than something like Cairo is today? Or will it just do that exact same feature set in a technologically sexier way? e.g. Can it be adapted to rendering of 3D globes and maps, or would that break everything? And note that rasterizing fonts as just unhinted glyphs (i.e. paths) is rarely what people what.
unconed commented on RFK Jr.: HHS moves to restore public trust in vaccines wsj.com/opinion/rfk-jr-hh... · Posted by u/ceejayoz
First, assuming that vaccination would indeed prevent transmission was a good guess based on prior vaccinations. That it didn't work out in this case became apparent over time. There were no lies.
Second, vaccination did reduce both severity of disease in case of infection, and also rate of infection, and thus transmission. Even imperfect reduction of transmissibility (the famous R_0) can mean the difference between a pandemic and fizzling out.
>assuming that vaccination would indeed prevent transmission was a good guess based on prior vaccinations.
It wasn't.
First of all, they didn't need to guess, because immunology already knew that there is a difference between immunity in the mucus membranes (which is where respiratory infection has to be fought) versus in the blood. The latter is where the immune response is generated if you get an intramuscular injection. This turns out to be have been immunology 101, as testified by e.g. immunologist Liliane Schoofs to my government. You will also note subsequent efforts put into a nasal version of the vaccine that wouldn't have this design problem. There were, in fact, lies.
Second of all, the net effect of getting "vaccinated" was that people got a green pass to go out during winter time, sit across each other in bars and restaurants, and breathe each other's air, while explicitly believing they were immune, even though they were not. The argument that this was still a net positive seems preposterous and a form of magical thinking, where the people who got the ineffective shot were still somehow better off, even though they were engaging in far riskier behaviors.
The people who didn't get the shot meanwhile were forced to stay inside unless they were recently tested. So the hypothesis that the shots reduced illness by reducing transmission is likely also false. There is ample evidence now of spike protein being produced far longer than was ever promised in some patients, and also signs of immunodeficiency, which means the shots themselves were also not an unalloyed good.
What this thread mostly shows is that "anti-vax" remains a magical word, a dividing line between the Good People Who Believe Science and the Bad People Who Dismiss it. The actual details of the vaccine science are not known, and the story many people tell in retrospect does not hold up to basic scrutiny. They are willing to admit to individual instances of error, overstatement or deception in the management of COVID, but they are rarely willing to put them all together and see how this radically changes the entire picture.
Because what it looks like is an insane lobbying effort of governments and influencers, enormous amounts of public money being spent on shots we didn't need, a huge propaganda effort to silence any dissent as "anti-vax" and "anti-science", and all this because likely it did escape from a lab, and the people responsible for developing and funding it were terrified of being held accountable, and having their field shut down as the irresponsible LARP it was. Following some of these star virologists (e.g. Marion Koopmans) online is quite hilarious, because it is very obvious none of their excuses hold up.
unconed commented on How Compiler Explorer Works in 2025 xania.org/202506/how-comp... · Posted by u/vitaut
AI disclaimer is both in the top and bottom. First box contains:
> Written with LLM assistance. Details at end.
Yep I totally didn't notice it because it's off to the side and looks like some kind of promo box.
unconed commented on A Case for Feminism in Programming Language Design (2024) dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/36... · Posted by u/smitty1e
The feminist perspective is rooted in the massive amount of sexism and misogyny that necessitated the development of a feminist perspective.
If you'd like to know about CS in specific, here's a good paper from one of the few women who made it through to be a CS professor: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7040
I happened to meet her at the 20 year anniversary of the paper and asked her if she was planning an update. As I recall it, she said that not much had changed, so she didn't see the point.
The idea that nothing has changed is by itself pretty preposterous. The gender ratio of college students is a big one, for instance, which keeps shifting in women's favor.
Plus, we just came out of a decade and a half of focused and persistent activism. If none of that changed anything, then a big lesson ought to be not to listen to the activists or their suggestions.
If you look at the outline of the paper, something should also stand out. Despite the fact that this claims to be science which examines the nature of how men and women are treated in CS, the ultimate focus is purely on confirming the pre-existing conclusions:
- that when women and men are being treated differently, this is always biased against women and in favor of men
- that it is the fault of men and male attitudes
- that is never the fault of women or female attitudes
In fact, feminism has a great sleight-of-hand that they consistently use for this. When they can blame men, they blame men. But if logic and evidence would require them to blame women, then it's suddenly the fault of "society", "unconscious biases" and "attitudes" whose origin is a mystery.
Just one example. While the paper dedicates a lot of ink to the ills of the "male environment", it does note that women communicate differently, e.g. with more "hesitation", "excessive qualifiers" and "excessively polite and deferential".
If you then go look at what the paper's recommendations are for women to "build confidence" it is to:
- attend classes with other women
- find female role models
- join women's groups
At no point is it considered that maybe women in a masculine environment should instead start acting and talking more like men, if they want the men to include them in their discussions and feel like she is one of them.
So yeah. Not much has changed. Not much will change. Because they keep entering a field full of people who are not like them, and expecting that mere complaints will feminize the whole lot.
The dragging behavior is so intuitive – it's funny because usually if you create this kind of resistance in a UI it can be confusing, but in this context it works so well.
Perfect freehand is the right way to solve this.