jwz

My "No use of geiger counters on church property" sign has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my sign.

Highly esteemed deeds are definitely commemorated here.

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XScreenSaver 6.15 is out now, including iOS and Android. A whopping thirteen new savers this time:

• New hack by me, worldpieces.
• New Shadertoy hacks brought into the fold: bestill, bubblecolors, darktransit, downfall, driftclouds, goldenapollian, noxfire, prococean, rigrekt, trainmandala, trizm and universeball.

Shadertoys are so wild; you'll see like 30 lines of code, and when it runs it build an entire environment without there being a polygon or a model apparent anywhere. What witchcraft is this?? Well, here's a really good article that explains the techniques used: Painting With Math: A Gentle Study of Raymarching.

I fixed a bunch of Android bullshit, too (some of which meant needing to reimplement glRotatef etc. from first principles). Android's implementation of GLES is a buggy mess. Also I think Android has again lost the ability to ask for permission to load photos. I can't figure it out, so someone who gives a shit will have to send me a patch. I also still can't figure out why transparency doesn't work on Android. This makes Peepers be particularly horrifying.

Map Scroller: I updated the list of available maps, and made it show the name of the nearest city. One of the new map sets that works is the Google Satellite Map, and if you have two monitors, I highly recommend running that map in "Fully random location" mode. It has a habit of picking two places many thousands of miles apart that look surprisingly similar, like Greenland and Syria.

▶︎ Boy do I have a lot to say about World Pieces:

This one took so much time! Most of my screensavers are pretty quick; generally they'll percolate in my head for a while, then I do the first 90% in half a day, and then the second 90% in another half day to two days. But this one was composed entirely of ratholes.

1. Oh, first I have to find some sane way to get the country outlines. That means learning about GeoJSON and getting the proper data set from Natural Earth Data. Then that data has to be massaged and merged, and while there's probably some command-line way to do that, using mapshaper.org was easier.

2. Now I've got a bunch of polylines with weird "hole" rules (not winding-rule!) and I need to triangulate them. Next rathole: learning how to use triangle.c correctly.

3. Then I notice that while the GeoJSON has population data for countries, it does not for states and provinces. Ok, that should be easy to grab from Wikipedia, right? Next rathole: learning about SparQL, the Wikidata query language. It is one of the nastiest and most baffling query languages I've seen. Good job on that.

4. Then I realize that while the GeoJSON contains the names of the countries translated into various languages, it doesn't tell you which ones are the official languages! Next rathole! Ok, surely we can get that from Wikidata too... Nope. While the Wikipedia pages contain the endonyms in the local character set, the Wikidata items only have them transliterated into Latin characters. To fix that, I had to scrape the Wikipedia page and parse the Wiki markup using regexps, dooming us to inhuman toil, etc. etc. Anyway, I got it working so that Japan can be spelled 日本...

5. ...on macOS, iOS and Android. Why doesn't it work on Linux? Oh ho ho ho, another rathole, this one un-solved! So on Linux it notices when all of the characters came out as square boxes and falls back to the transliterated Latin versions. You're welcome.

6. Ok, it's starting to come together. But since I'm zooming in a lot, the Earth imagery is looking a little grainy, since the image I have is 2048x1024. Well let's just go upgrade that. Next rathole! The old images I had were from the public domain 2002 NASA "Blue Marble" images and 2000 "Visible Earth, City Lights" images none of which still exist on NASA's site (all praise archive.org!)

   They seem to have deprecated those data sets in favor of the 2025 "Blue Marble: Next Generation" images and the 2012 "Black Marble" images. But... they're weird. First, both sets of images completely omit the North polar ice. Second, the 2025 daytime oceans are colored completely flat, whereas the 2002 images contained bathymetry details. And third, and worst of all, is no pairing of 2025 day images and 2016 night images where the pair have the same ice extents. This means that when we blend between the day and night images, it looks very weird. It took me days to finally accept that there was nothing that I could do to work around that.

7. So now that those various ratholes are out of the way, it's trigonometry time. The way the countries pop up and face forward toward whereever the camera is a technique called "billboarding" and it's pretty easy. But what's not easy is doing a smooth transition between the object being billboarded, and the object being back in the scene. Especially since it's position in the scene is spinning and wobbling about willy-nilly. (Remember, you can also spin the globe with the mouse, and it has to keep track of that as well!)

8. So the final rathole was finally coming to terms with quaternions. Quaternions and I have had a passing acquaintance for many years, but I finally had to get down and dirty and really understand them to make all of this work.

   Wikipedia describes quaternions as:

   Quaternions form a four-dimensional associative normed division algebra over the real numbers, and therefore a ring, also a division ring and a domain. It is a special case of a Clifford algebra, classified as Cl₀,₂(ℝ)≅Cl⁺₃,₀(ℝ). According to the Frobenius theorem, the algebra ℍ is one of only two finite-dimensional division rings containing a proper subring isomorphic to the real numbers; the other being the complex numbers.

   "I did not understand a math thing, and then I read the Wikipedia article on it, and now I understand the math thing" -- said literally no one ever. As far as I can tell, every math article on Wikipedia is written with the target audience of "person who wrote their grad school thesis on it" and no one else. Wikipedia's math articles are absolutely fucking useless for purposes of, you know, education.

   Anyway, 3Blue1Brown has a good intro video that is not like that!

   By the way, I propose that "Quaternions" should be pronounced like extruded cornmeal toroid "Funyuns".

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I hear Spotify is the new hotness, let's see if they will take our money:

Ad name: DNA Lounge Bruno Mars Party
Your ad wasn't approved for the following reasons:
Reason: Your ad contains only music.
Recommendation: Submit a new ad with a clear voiceover that explains what's being advertised.

Do you want TikTok AI Voice? Because this is how you get TikTok AI Voice.

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In 2002, Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine, Let Forever Be, etc.) made a great video for Kylie Minogue's Come Into My World. I guess he has mortgage payments to make because he just remade it as a commercial for a purse but that's neither here nor there. What I'm here to complain about is that the official Kylie Minogue YouTube channel (1.5M subscribers) has the "Official video" (45M views) "Full HD, Remastered".

Now, I'm old enough to remember when "remastered" meant "we re-scanned the 35mm negative". Let's take a look at the upper left quadrant of the first 15 seconds of that video at half speed. On the left: a 702x576 rip I made of the video in 2003 from the SD DVD release, Directors Series Volume 3: The Work of Michel Gondry; on the right, the 1392x1062 "Official Full HD Remaster".

Pay special attention to the text on the white sign at about 8 seconds in. Full-screen it for the true zalgo-level, AI-upscale, edge-detect horrorshow.

This is why I have trust issues. Kylie.

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Oberlin Luddites Reject "Year of AI Exploration" Adpoted by School Dear President Ambar, We are writing to you on a typewriter that is over 70 years old; this is a machine that we all know well. With it, we misspell words without the crutch of spell check or generative AI and we think intently about every phrase we pound out. As we force ourselves, for once, to slow down, we engage in a cognitive dialogue with ourselves. We do not seek perfection because we know that education is about the growing and challenging of our young minds' potential, not the chasing of inititurtonal 'gold-star' approval. We do not believe that your so-c alled 'Year of AI Exploration; providing enterprise ChatGPT and Google Gemini sub scriptions to every Oberlin student aligns with our college's founding principles. You claim that this year will be one of experimentation, not adoption. But even just one semester of accepted (encouraged even) chat bot use will jettison our student body down a lazy and irredeem able tunnel of intellctual destruction. We are a college grounded in learning and labor, which now risks straying from these rooted ideals. With ChatGPT at the helm, our emails, essays,and discussion posts will be generated for us, not by us. And let's not fool ourselves. This is precisely what these platforms will be used for by our busy, anxious student body. We see your vision for this year as advancing the college's 'businessification'--an alarming trend also seen in the takeover of our beloved library cafe by a 'bookstore' With no bools in stock (just shiny merch) and an app replacing customer service. In one instance, the college assumes we want efficiency at all cost through automated rather than hand-pulled coffee. In the other lies the false belief that we simply desire to turn in an essay, regardless of how little we've written of it. We need not stand by and witness the further atrophy of our liberal arts education. As you embark on your year of AI, we'll embark on our own year of self-actualization, of realizing the fruits of our labor and embracing human imperfection and raw inquiry. We will boldly reject information technologies operating out of data centers ghat guzzle water and energy sources(that simply must contradict our campus's carbon-neutral devotion). We will turn instead t o ourselves and embrace our natural intelligence, intentional hard work, and generative sweat rather than generative AI. We urge anyone who feels similarly to risk disapproval, perceived backwardness and the outward appearance of naivete and join us. Let us not ask what AI can do for Oberlin students, but what Oberlin students can do ourselves, while we still have the brain capacity to think on our own. Yours truly, The Luddite Club of Oberlin College, Logan Lane, CharLie McLaughlin, Mary Claire McGreivey, Sawyer Van Dyck, Simon Puchner-Noel,and Marlowe Blantz

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BLDGBLOG:

"The U.S. Strategic Oil Reserve is a series of vast, subterranean salt caverns in four different sites in Louisiana and Texas. Many are enormous -- the average cavern holds about 10mn barrels [...] This network of tunnels, grottos, pumps and wells can in total hold about 715mn barrels of oil, or enough to supply the entire U.S. with all the oil it needs for over a month" -- but those salt caverns were only designed to be drained and refilled five times.

The Financial Times calculates that we are already at the cavern's ninth historic drawdown, suggesting that "catastrophic structural damage," including dissolution of the salt caverns, is now a viable risk. This could mean, among other things, that the reserves can no longer be drained in their entirety, as "a minimum level of oil... must be kept in the salt caverns" to avoid this fate, with the result that the reserves' effectiveness in a time of future national emergency will be reduced.

Of course, this could also mean that someday the caverns will simply collapse.

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Dear Lazyweb,

Four years ago I asked whether "Google Pass" was a thing that I needed to give a shit about and consensus was, "no, nobody uses that." But I have heard anecdotally, recently, that this might no longer be true. Thoughts?

The goal here is, "reduce the amount of time it takes for someone standing in front of my nightclub to wave their QR code at the door staff." On iOS, Apple Wallet supports that goal very well.

Note: I don't use Android and know as little about its ecosystem as possible, so please use small words.

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The Ageless Device: A physical computing device designed to satisfy every element of the California Digital Age Assurance Act's regulatory scope while deliberately refusing to comply with its requirements. The device costs less than lunch and will be handed to children.

Configuration Tiers: Three Levels of Infraction

TIER 0, "The Pamphlet" ~$6
Minimum viable violation. A bootable Linux device with a display, network connectivity, and an app store. No battery, no keyboard -- just proof that this constitutes a regulated device under AB 1043. Good for bulk handout at conferences (50-100 units).

Legal status: Arguable. The 128×64 display introduces fuzziness. The AG could claim it's a dev board. That's fine -- ambiguity is instructive too.

TIER 1, "The Computer", ~$12
An unambiguous general purpose computing device. Color display, keyboard, WiFi, Linux, app store, user setup. The core product. There is no interpretive gap between this device and the law's definitions.

Legal status: Unambiguous. This is a computer with a color display, keyboard, WiFi, Linux, and an app store. It does not collect age data. It is handed to a child. The maximum fine is $7,500.

TIER 2, "The Appliance", ~$18
A self-contained, battery-powered pocket Linux computer. The educational device angle -- a modern descendant of the Acorn BBC Micro and the original Raspberry Pi.

Legal status: Beyond unambiguous. A pocket computer with a color screen, keyboard, battery, WiFi, 8GB storage, and an AI accelerator. It costs less than a large pizza. It fits in a child's hand.

Every tab on this site is gold:

How Distros Are Responding: We track how Linux distributions are responding to age verification mandates, and we provide tools to undo whatever they implement. If a distribution adds an age collection prompt, we will publish a script that removes it. If it ships a D-Bus age verification daemon, we will publish a package that replaces it with silence.

How One Bill Becomes Every Bill: AB 1043 was not written in isolation. It is a template. ICMEC published the model text as a ready-to-introduce statutory draft, and its Global Head of Policy presented it directly to Virginia's Joint Commission on Technology and Science. The same organizations that drafted the model bill are now deploying it in state legislatures across the country. The companies that benefit from the compliance moat fund the advocacy organizations that draft the bills that create the compliance moat. [...]

The Door That Stays Open: AB 1043 requires only self-declared age -- a birthdate field, not government ID or biometrics. Industry analysts have described this as "an initial implementation designed to get the door open." Self-declaration today. Biometric verification tomorrow. The infrastructure is the same; only the input changes. Once every operating system has an age collection interface and a real-time API for transmitting age data to applications, upgrading from a text field to a face scan is a configuration change, not a new law.

Penalty Comparison: Cost of Giving a Child a Computer:

Cost of one Ageless Linux device: $12-18
Maximum combined US penalty for one device given to one child: $46,000
US penalty-to-cost ratio: 3,067:1
Brazil penalty for one violation: up to 522,222:1

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FEMA's Gregg Phillips says he has experienced multiple "scary" episodes of sudden teleportation:

Phillips spoke "on multiple podcasts" about being teleported against his will, which he has described as "evil." As director of the Office of Response and Recovery, Phillips oversees billions in funds, and is deeply involved in rapid response efforts in the aftermath of disasters.

"Teleporting is no fun," Phillips said last year. "It's no fun because you don't really know what you're doing. You don't really understand it, it's scary, but yet so real. And you know it's happening but you can't do anything about it, and so you just go, you just go with the ride. And wow, what just an incredible adventure it all was."

Phillips in the same interview described "teleporting" to a Waffle House 50 miles away. "I was with my boys one time and I was telling them I was gonna go to Waffle House and get Waffle House," he said. "And I ended up at a Waffle House -- this was in Georgia and I end up at a Waffle House like 50 miles away from where I was."

Now, do not mistake Phillips description for something like a medical episode or a black out of some form. He insisted that he was traveling from location to location without experiencing the passage of time. When his friends asked him where he was, he replied that he was at the "'Waffle House in Rome, Georgia.' And they said, 'That's not possible, you just left here a moment ago.' But it was possible. It was real."

Phillips also claimed that he had once felt his car "lifted up" and teleported forty miles to a ditch near a church. [...]

At FEMA, Phillips, who lacks any sort of professional experience related to disaster response, has been successful in the sense that his lack of qualifications fall in line with the Trump administration's apparent goal of kneecaping the agency.

Update: KooKooKrazypants doubles down because of course he does:

"Haters gonna hate," Gregg Phillips wrote. [...] Phillips described the teleportation incidents as tied to a "spiritual journey" during a period he said he was undergoing cancer treatments and pointed to biblical examples of supernatural events.

"I have no regrets for my words nor my faith in my Savior, Jesus Christ," Phillips wrote after CNN’s report, while arguing his comments were taken out of context. "The Bible has many examples of the power of God." [...]

Phillips added that the comments on teleporting to the Waffle House were taken out of context, though he has declined to say how. [...] Neither FEMA nor Phillips responded to multiple requests for comment on what part of CNN’s past reporting was taken out of context.

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VFX artists vs. The Golden Gate:

McMurry recalls plenty of discussion about adhering to any 'real' physics if that event actually happened. "There was a very fun debate about what would happen if the center broke. Some people said, 'Well, these towers, since they're under stress, they would just go immediately back out this way.' We did some tests but then we said, 'Well, that looks stupid.'" [...]

"We were always scaling things up and down, cheating gravity stronger or weaker, just to make everything feel like it had the right scale but wasn't too slow to maintain the excitement. The destruction simulations were tweaked just to look good. They're not based on any mechanical analysis of material strengths."

"The bridge attack is one of the biggest cheats in the whole show," adds Knoll. "The nominal size for the Kaijus and Jaegers was around 250 feet tall, and we tried to stay around that where we could. The roadway of the Golden Gate Bridge is around 230 feet above the water, so the Kaiju in those shots is cheated up to around 700 feet tall!" [...]

Godzilla's interaction with the bridge -- despite ultimately breaking through it -- remains somewhat low-key. "In the movie, notes Bonami, "the cables are grabbed, shaken and cut. In reality if one of those cables were cut, the bridge would swing and if Godzilla were to walk thought it the effect on the bridge would be devastating. Our challenge was therefore to downplay the physics but also to try and maintain realism."

Previously, previously.