Abstraction maker, abstraction breaker. FUN FACT: things I prefix with FUN FACT are sometimes fun and sometimes factual, but very rarely both.
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npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Profile Code
nprofile1qqs262cjrrc2c3q8e6x3exulslvwgz2rdww4prqr8pka5ll87x4sxqspz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsjfg53x
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2026-07-29T20:30:51+02:00 Event JSON
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Last Notes npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen Hollywood executive: Quick! The Odyssey is a hit! Can we turn this into a franchise? A sequel or a prequel maybe? npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen fellow Europeans, I'm not even joking, this is an actual unit in actual customary use for large amounts of water npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen I am kidding, of course. Altman is American, he wouldn't be caught dead using cubic meters, it'd all be acre-feet or some bullshit like that npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen Gandhi: "You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty." npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by hubris npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen that's one of the many weird paradoxes of the current situation - growth of everything AI-branded ultimately depends on people having _some_ kind of device to access that whole ecosystem, even if just as a dumb terminal, yet every HW company seems to have, at the same time, decided that making endpoints is a sucker bet and they'd rather just make server kit. npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen don't know man, PC gaming's also not looking so hot right now with the status of the platform as a whole. (how exactly are "1 billion" people worldwide supposed to afford consumer electronics devices at current prices?) npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen I mean, the shithead teens (maybe 16yo or so?) that I think were Jackass-the-show's core demographic in 2000 are by now in their 40s npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen I think the average critic by now is old enough to remember the original Jackass fondly npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen one of these is not like the others npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen plus, in practice, for most of these, the answer is honestly probably "they saw some other animal eat it and be fine afterwards" if nothing else npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen Sometimes I wonder "how did people ever discover that really spicy peppers are edible" and then I remember Surströmming and go, yeah, hungry enough humans will try to eat _anything_ npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen Over a long enough timescale, datasets grow but memory you can access quickly barely does, and eventually, 2020s DRAM feels like a 1970 disk by comparison npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen Related: npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen We took 50 years to come mostly full circle on this, with the major innovation being that this time round, our arrays are dynamically not statically sized, because we figured out how to make that work well in the meantime npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen FORTRAN 77: we pack our data structures into flat arrays and use indices instead of pointers because we don't have pointers or any data structures other than flat arrays npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen See, Dutch people are so tall on average because what with all the Dutch angles, they can be without awkwardly poking out of frame. No evolutionary pressure to maintain a nice and balanced composition npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen I thought you ran in those circles. Oh well, guess I inadvertently put you into a box there. I'll make a point to avoid that in the future. npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen in his sphere of influence, rather npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen I'm not keeping an exact count but I can reliably count to 1 in my head and it's more than that npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen for "single sign on", I'm sure doing an awful lot of sign-ons every day npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen Anyway, if the idea of a floating-point computation ultimately unwrapping the float bits and doing a bunch of integer shifts and adds on them blows your mind, buckle up! You're not gonna believe how your FPU does FP additions, subtractions, multiplications and divisions either! npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen Although the original thing never got published, a different paper analyzing the algorithm (and confirming it gives correctly rounded results) was, in 1992: https://bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/websites.uta.edu/dist/7/5059/files/2021/06/csd-94-850.pdf npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen That paper was concerned with doubles and getting the initial approximation to slightly under 8 bits was sufficient to get a correctly rounded double sqrt within 3 iterations. npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen That paper was never formally published (that I can track down anyhow) but note it has both regular and reciprocal square root versions (the latter on the way to computing a square root) as well as instructions for getting correctly rounded (=equivalent to doing the calculation exactly then rounding in active rounding mode) results. npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen OK everyone on here and following me probably already knows this but I want to get it off my chest anyway: npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen stop hiring necromancers for big construction jobs. once again, someone rolled up with a skeleton crew npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen they have one plant in China and one in North America, but it's really mostly Europe, and specifically over half of it really is in Germany https://www.miele.com/en/com/production-sites-2157.htm#item-0-0 npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen alas, Gütersloh, not Melee Island npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen btw, to whom it may concern: Miele is a German company, not French, that odd parallelogram over the "i" is just a fancy logotype and not some sort of accent, and it's pronounced ME-leh not me-ELL npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen you could seriously hurt someone with a washing machine npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen in case anyone is wondering, the "moon is made of cheese" thing quoted is, of course, categorically untrue. npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen Amazing the kinds of things you find if you're brave enough to just ask the right questions! npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen These last few years have broken something deep within me and I have no idea what to do with myself now. npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen Never looked at the specs of the original SGI RealityEngine, and holy shit https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/166117.166131 npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen FUN FACT: the "nano" prefix ultimately descends from Ancient Greek "nanos", which means "dwarf". npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen Turns out daylight doesn't save after all 🕶️ npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen I mean, I have to. You know the rules. Definitely don't want BSD to pass without congratulating at least two other people. It's not worth the risk. npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen Happy Black Square Day! npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen In my over 40 trips around the sun, I have accumulated some profound wisdom I fully intend to pass on. npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen far be it from me to wish them a fulfilling life with lots of friends npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen free pitch for a Star Wars villain: stormtrooper but they hit with every shot npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen Out of curiosity: trying to find out how well-known root beer is outside North America npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen "If this goes badly and I make a crater, I want it named after me!" -- Iain M. Banks npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen BREAKING: SCE insider confirms PS6 "more powerful than 768 PICO-8s duct-taped together" npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen (en.) MTBF = (de.) Brechmittel npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen random thought: if you see someone's record collection, you know what music they like npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen Wookash interviewed me a while back and the video is now public: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7nIghaXJ80 npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen You ever think about how you can taste protons, and they're sour? npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen "Do Red Dead Redemption 2's Power Lines Connect to Anything?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTtMCoJrGxk this is incredible npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen steel wool in dire circumstances npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen I think so, Brain, but where would we even get an amplifier large enough to turn a volcano into a subwoofer? npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen My sister (who is a psychology prof) has been lamenting that her students now frequently have no idea how files or directories work. npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen It's also the reason I get livid every time some major Windows update rearranges the UI (for the umpteenth time) and throws in some new pushy feature that won't shut up nagging me to use it. npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen Think of it like breaking into someone else's home to leave a gift. npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen I don't think that's the problem at all. npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen Pretty sure this is something different npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen This is the result of something you eventually find a cryptic note suggesting you do npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen "That's never happened before" npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen E.g. to test whether pop count of something <= 2, you can do npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen Small note: npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen "\n" vs "\ npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen 🤷 it be like that sometimes npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen The less said about Final Fantasy, the better, but I will say that nobody seems to trust FF, they're all "these 4 are the good ones" npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen The "Final Fight" franchise by now has 6 installments and I ask you, why would you still trust any franchise that has betrayed its fundamental premise that often npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen This year, I celebrated Black Square Day with the traditional "read a novel chapter on the bus". npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen Definitely not Spacechem, I never made it past the first 7 levels or so npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen I usually make it until the day of to even learn when the date is, and I usually don't know which teams are playing, so thank you for ruining my streak npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen look I'm not a complete Grinch but I really can't commit to "jingle all the way" npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen Every time someone self-describes as "content creator" I die a little inside. npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen we hold these truths to be self-evident: that the use of ragged-right text alignment is not justified npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen This was one of those things where I figured "I should write this up some day!". It's done! Alas, I checked the git log on when I first committed that and it was... May 2017. Welp. npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen New blog post: "BC7 optimal solid-color blocks" https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2024/11/03/bc7-optimal-solid-color-blocks/ npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen Anyway, why do I mention this? npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen This randomly popped up in my brain, don't know why. npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen Most immersion-breaking moment (not really, but go along with me here) in the original Jurassic Park film: John Hammond, the CEO/owner of this amusement park, not only knows how the generator system for his park works, he knows the emergency power restart procedure by heart to the point of being able to describe the function, operation and appearance of the primer switch handle all before even glancing at the blueprints. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmzUx3XSzvg npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen the 4 food groups: HFCS, dark fiber, caffeine, microplastics npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen art project idea: "The British Museum", which is housed somewhere outside the UK and will accept and display any donations from anonymous donors into its collection that were provably stolen from Great Britain npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen Video title "Yes, you can visualize 4D!" speak for yourself, but I can't even visualize 2D so I doubt it npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen Since Free Will is apparently a problem, has anyone tried Freemium Will instead? npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen While I do in principle agree with "bros before hos" it's just for lexicographic reasons npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen 0x28 npub14543yx8s43zq0n5drjdelp7cusy5x6ua2zxqxwrdmfl70udtqvpql40k9g Fabian Giesen You know that annoying thing where a 1.25x (+25%) improvement in throughput (work per time) is the same as a 0.80x (-20%) reduction in time for the same amount of work?
