My own hypothesis is that the harmful thing is "engagement maximization" and not "social media", and that you could have engagement-maximization algorithms applied to other things and make them more harmful, but I don't have hard data to support that and I don't really even know how to start going about gathering it, or falsifying this hypothesis.
I acquired (with help) a killer audio cassette digitizing rig, and then IMMEDIATELY had to spend over 2 months digitizing 90+ cassettes from the 1999 Game Developers Conference (via a slow-and-steady workflow that got the job done without being too disruptive to any other work I was doing).
So, here we are, it's done. Go enjoy 70+ hours of presentations about all aspects of game making and producing, in 1999.
https://archive.org/details/1999_Game_Developers_Conference_Audio
Looks like this is the reason why Opus, the next-gen Xiph codec, was failed to overtake its predecessor Vorbis despide being pareto-superior to it.
The author of `stb_vorbis.h` that gets shipped far and wide found that they can't make the same for Opus due to licensing shenanigans.
https://nothings.org/stb/stb_opus.html
Mastodon monoculture problem
At long last, we've created a Torment Nexus, and the people are already lining up for it.
https://torment.nexus/@alm@mastodon.online/110353392302644978
ai bullshit
There have been many words written lately about Neal Stephenson and how he "predicted the forthcoming metaverse" in Snow Crash but the Stephenson prediction I can't stop thinking about is from 2008's Anathem about how generative AI almost destroyed their internet. Most of the jargon doesn't matter just know that "reticulum" means internet and "Ita" are IT support. 🧵
Switched to map and contour generation from quad tree cells. Those are now correctly represent terrain transitions, not only passable regions.
The thing is more costly to construct, but the map filling is much faster than sampling each tile corner - less duplicate work and big chunks of uniform terrain are naturally aggregated and can be dispatched as one job.
Out of 1M tiles only ~75k are 1-tile transitions that are processed sequentially (presumably while some bigger jobs are chugging in background).
I really should do that final tagless retargetable encoding for SDFs and run those on GPU instead.
Toots as he pleases.