R. A. Dehi @radehi@qoto.org

Satisfying work for the day. One of the items in the Vello pipeline where profiling revealed performance could be improved was computing the bounding boxes of paths. I was using atomic min/max for each path segment to compute bbox union, and that was expensive (1.3ms for paris-30k on M1 Max).

I figured out a way to do it with monoids instead of atomics, and it's now 400µs. The trick is "segmented reduction" which works amazingly well.

I might blog this, but not sure yet; other things to do.

@michael_nielsen Btw, I consider any type of axiomatic characterization in mathematics as a form of discovery fiction.

For example, Shannon entropy was characterized by Faddeev as the only continuous function from probability distributions to real numbers that satisfies a very natural chain rule.

I first learned about this from a nice paper by Leinster:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1903.06961

Okay, we know... We made fun of Adobe when its cloud service went down. We've made fun of Corel Painter and Clip Studio. We joined in the protest No AI Generated Images protest. We made our stance on NFT's clear. But this is beyond making fun of. This is EW! EW! EW!

@krita wow, it's almost like Stallman was right all along, when he warned decades ago, that proprietary software can and will spy on its users.
And everyone were saying "that's crazy talk, why would anyone want to spy on MY stuff???".

I keep saying journalists should leave Twitter and use Mastodon, which is better for them in every way. At TechDirt I've posted a somewhat lengthy why-and-how: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/01/04/journalists-and-others-should-leave-twitter-heres-how-they-can-get-started/

“Not your keys, not your coins” now has legal precedent. The judge in Celsius’ bankruptcy hearing ruled that the deposits in yield-bearing Earn accounts belong to Celsius, not the individual holders of those accounts.

Won’t this cause a run on exchanges?

https://www.axios.com/2023/01/04/celsius-bankruptcy-earn-accounts

every website that handles private information should do what Discord does in the javascript console

I remember how excited I was in the nineties, thinking that a shaggy, open, unpredictable, democratic internet had triumphed over AOL and the other closed commercial networks. Then came surveillence-driven social media.

Could a phoenix be rising from the ashes of Twitter?

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/12/mastodon-highlights-pros-and-cons-of-moving-beyond-big-tech-gatekeepers/

Two thoughts on the Forbes location tracking story.

1 - Tiktok issuing a statement that they knew wasn't true is quite concerning.

2 - That journalists, reporting on a company, have trouble blocking their location from that company is shocking. This isn't blaming the reporters, but rather the people who've designed the location tracking infrastructures, cross-application linkage, and ability to control all that.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2022/12/22/tiktok-tracks-forbes-journalists-bytedance/

I am once again asking you to stop using LastPass. The company has a history of security issues dating back years, and has yet to make holistic security improvements — or heck even investigate incidents properly.

Good alternatives:

- 1Password is my #1 rec, best for most use cases
- Bitwarden if you want open source
- KeePassXC if you want local vaults and open source
- I hear ok things about Dashlane but don’t know a ton

https://blog.lastpass.com/2022/12/notice-of-recent-security-incident/

Kids this is a reminder to collect physical copies of your favorite media. Corporations will axe your favorite show/movie/book in front of its family and make it a felony to retrieve it. Have a library.

Israel Gelfand on mathematics (2006) :

“From my point of view, mathematics is a part of our culture, like music, poetry and philosophy. I have mentioned the closeness between the style of mathematics and the style of classical music or poetry. I was happy to find the following four common features: first,
beauty; second, simplicity; third, exactness; fourth, crazy ideas.”

https://doi.org/10.1007/0-8176-4467-9

r/emacs - Top [MONTH]

[Update] Zotra: using the power of Zotero in Emacs to manage citations and pdf files
https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/zock0j/update_zotra_using_the_power_of_zotero_in_emacs/
#emacs

writing a tiny mastodon app right now for fun and I really love that all the endpoints allow CORS so the whole thing can just be a static site (no server code!!)

I'll use Archive links, no matter how circumspect they are, most of these articles are being taken down in a few hours:
https://archive.md/tD8xX
(Google Translate works well, @DeepLcom@twitter.com works a bit better)

"Proved the baby version of this claim, now let's do the general case!"

"Wow, it's not that easy."

"Wow, it's hard."

"Wow, it's false."

Here's Danny O'Brien @mala (Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web) giving his talk:
“The Moment” #AaronSwartzDay2022 https://youtu.be/MZhD2Rj3Vyo