Notices by alcinnz (alcinnz@floss.social)

Interesting data point: Compression saves energy on the receiver! At least in microcontrollers, but I don't see why it wouldn't apply beyond that!

How much power does gzip save on IoT web access? - Larry Bank:
https://bitbanksoftware.blogspot.com/2025/06/how-much-power-does-gzip-save-on-iot.html

Unionize or die - Drew DeVault:
https://drewdevault.com/2025/06/09/2025-06-09-Unionize-or-die.html

The call applies everywhere! Though the specific advice is US centric.

I can get excited about new tech, but I find its rarely the same tech which excites capitalists. Our interests aren't aligned!

Yet capitalists seem to be in control of the zeitgeist, which deeply frustrates me!

I don't believe that new technology is necessarily better than what came before, though neither do I believe older technology is necessarily better.

I believe technologies should be judged on its own merits, rather than its age.

Yet it seems that people who don't know better do judge tech (whether positively or negatively) based on its perceived age...

@xgranade To me the issue is that they're externalizing costs onto us whilst no longer sharing their audiences with us. The quid pro quo has significantly broken down!

I'll second "enclosure', since on Google/OpenAI/Microsoft/etc's terms the status quo is that its no longer a broad audience who benefits (and profits) from our writing, but a handful of tech giants.

Much of the value of computing in videogames is the ability to interact with "Non Player Characters" and automated opponents. These NPCs are said to have "AI", often based upon a state machine.

These AIs might be very primitive, as in they patrol between 2 points. Or they might be quite sophisticated.

And in 2001 audiences flocked to cinemas to watch giant computer vs computer battles (and my country's natural beauty). Peter Jackson didn't know how else to capture what Tolkein described.

How do computers blur images?

Basically, they replace each pixel with the average of all their nearby pixels. Weight input pixels by how close they are to the output pixel for the best aesthetics.

This qualifies as "embarassingly parallel", though the more you blur the image the more input pixels it needs to sample. And hence the slower the operation becomes.

One optimization is to perform separate horizontal vs vertical blurs, such that there's 2n weights instead of n^2 weights.

1/2!

"Semiconductor industry used Moore’s law to organise its R&D effort and its industrial ramp-up. Moore’s law is by essence an economic law, not a natural one."

https://gauthierroussilhe.com/en/articles/how-to-use-computing-power-faster

Interesting article, though I think it'd consider me a technophile. (reminds me of when my mom got confused upon calling me a luddite)

The tl;dr in my terms: The semiconductor industry is utterly reliant on growth.

As I degrowther, I consider this a bad thing which is just asking for disaster!

I'm also reminded of @TechConnectify remarking that "Silicon Valley has to justify themselves as a centre of innovation when they're rapidly running out of runway".

Seeing that ATMEGA microcontrollers & in turn Arduino resembles (as a 8bit RISC machine) a late-1980s computer on a chip...

I'd enjoy seeing someone hook it up to terminal circuit, rendering ASCII to a TV signal!

@lanodan For the *most* part I find Toy Story still looks great to this day, but there's definite exceptions.

Which highlights that PIXAR was right to make the story about toys in inside rooms!

Particle simulations are a useful technique for livening up your computer animations!

A particle here refers to a point which moves in a way, often in relation to nearby particles, that looks interesting in aggregate.
The trick is to make each individual particle fast to update & render, such that you can fill the screen with as many as you want!

Often, but not always, they render as images facing the screen.

1/2!

The biggest challenge in making particle sims fast & thus appealing is in allowing particles to react to nearby particles.

One solution is Spatial Hash Grids, where the scene's split into cubes, such that we can look up all particles in a cube by hashing the cube's coordinate. Look up all contiguous cubes as well to cut down how many other particles we examine when updating the position of each particle.

Particle sims can be used to render hair/fur/grass, fire/liquid, & more!

2/2.1!

My minds jumping to how Shrek (2001)'s cinematography was so often like "Ooooo, look at this fancy fluid sim!" Yawn!

2.1/2.1 Fin!

Some Thoughts on Techno-Fascism From Socialism 2025 - Kelly Hayes "Organizing My Thoughts":
https://organizingmythoughts.org/some-thoughts-on-techno-fascism-from-socialism-2025/

CW: "AI" discourse

Boosted (amongst other things) by Go Make Things:
https://gomakethings.com/people-who-act-like-machines/

A quote that stuck out to me:

"And even those who aren’t pulled in by Christian Nationalism or tech cults like Longtermism or Effective Accelerationism may fall for “Abstract AI Solutionism”—the belief that our best hope lies in scaling up AI to solve everything. But we already know how to stop killing the Earth. We already know how to reduce preventable deaths and crimes of desperation. The problem is that the solutions don’t serve billionaires—70% of whom made their fortunes in tech."

@briankrebs s/AI/cocaine/ is hilarious!

Addendum to something I tooted recently...

What do I call speech-synthesized ebooks? ebooks!

Any ebook can be speech-synthesized, so we shouldn't use a special term for them!

We should reserve the term "audiobook" for when a human is giving a proper performance!

(Incidentally there's a fuzzy line between audiobooks & my favorite medium of audioshows...)

I'm wondering whether @gerrymcgovern is getting a bit too cynical. He's been ranting against renewables on his blog.

And while I agree that they're not the entire solution (we need to be more radicle!), I am convinced that they're part of it. I'm not seeing it acknowledged that with renewables (apart from nuclear), the mining is no longer a consumable.
It gets to me when he off-handedly vilifies heatpumps at the same time!

@TechConnectify has pushed back on this narrative, & I agree with him.

A modern theme for cgit - Inane Observation:
https://yingtongli.me/blog/2025/05/16/cgit.html

Personally I prefer the old theme (my webdesign taste is to rely primarily on typography!), but I appreciate not everyone agrees. That's beautiful!