jwz

Dear Lazyweb,

Seeking source for simple but believable OpenGL 3D fire and smoke simulation that does not use GLES / GLSL shaders, OpenGL 1.3 only.

• "Why would you do that to yourself?" Reasons.
• "No, but here's one using Shader Language." You are not helping.
• "I know you said 3D, but here's a flat one." Again, not helping.
• "Here's someone's thesis that doesn't have runnable code." No.

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Narc dot AI:

American police departments near the United States-Mexico border are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for an unproven and secretive technology that uses AI-generated online personas designed to interact with and collect intelligence on "college protesters," "radicalized" political activists, and suspected drug and human traffickers [...]

Massive Blue, the New York-based company that is selling police departments this technology, calls its product Overwatch, which it markets as an "AI-powered force multiplier for public safety" that "deploys lifelike virtual agents, which infiltrate and engage criminal networks across various channels." [...]

404 Media obtained a presentation showing some of these AI characters. These include a "radicalized AI" "protest persona," which poses as a 36-year-old divorced woman who is lonely, has no children, is interested in baking, activism, and "body positivity." Another AI persona in the presentation is described as a "'Honeypot' AI Persona." Her backstory says she's a 25-year-old from Dearborn, Michigan whose parents emigrated from Yemen, and who speaks the Sanaani dialect of Arabic. The presentation also says she uses various social media apps, that she's on Telegram and Signal, and that she has US and international SMS capabilities. Other personas are a 14 year-old boy "child trafficking AI persona," an "AI pimp persona," "college protestor" [sic], "external recruiter for protests," "escorts," and "juveniles.

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He was a kid, and now his body is coated in wax and dressed in a red track jacket, jeans, and Nikes and lies in a church in a tiny Italian hill town where people arrive on tour buses to kiss their fingers and touch the glass next to his head of thick black hair.

Before him, the most recently-canonized saints lived and died in the 1800s. Acutis is different: He had a phone! He made websites about miracles! He wore sneakers! He's "God's influencer." Supplicants see him as somehow both approachably normal and extraordinarily devout. He was reportedly "uninterested in the trappings common for a wealthy child in Milan," asking his parents to donate the money they would have spent on more designer sneakers to the poor and skipping ski trips to teach catechism instead. [...]

Coincidentally, technology is bedeviling Acutis' early days as a saint. On eBay, people are selling what they claim to be his "relics," tiny pieces of a saint's body. One anonymous seller was selling "supposedly authenticated locks of Acutis' hair that were fetching upward of 2,000 euros ($2,200 US), according to the Diocese of Assisi, before being taken down," the AP reported. "It's not just despicable, but it's also a sin," one reverend who has a tiny fragment of Acutis' hair in a chapel by his office told the AP. "Every kind of commerce over faith is a sin."

There is a lot of non-relic commerce happening at the Shrine of the Renunciation, however. It's free to enter the church, but there is a gift shop around the corner at the exit.

How about them miracles? Wikipedia:

Luciana Vianna had taken her son, Mattheus, who was born with a pancreatic defect that made eating difficult, to a prayer service. Beforehand, she had prayed a novena asking for the teenager Acutis's intercession. During the service, Mattheus had asked that he should not "throw up as much". Immediately following the service, he told his mother that he felt healed and asked for solid food when he came home. After a detailed investigation, Pope Francis confirmed the miracle's authenticity, leading to Acutis's beatification. [...]

A Costa Rican woman named Valeria had fallen off her bike and suffered a brain haemorrhage with doctors giving her a low chance of survival. Valeria's mother, Lilliana, prayed for the intercession of Acutis and visited his tomb. The same day, Valeria began to breathe independently again and was able to walk the next day with all evidence of the haemorrhage having disappeared. [...] Pope Francis presided at an Ordinary Consistory of Cardinals, which approved the canonization of 15 people, including Blessed Carlo Acutis.

Well there you have it! That's just SCIENCE.

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ExponenTile:

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It is finished! A huge thank you to the generous donors who made this bathroom remodel possible! We managed to cover ██ ███ ██ more than half [see update below] of the cost of this project with donations, and we can't thank you all enough for that. May your butts ride eternal, shiny and chrome.

As a part of this project, we also re-built the floor in the Lounge bathroom, which apparently had been sealed poorly, with resulting leaks on the Men's Room ceiling downstairs. We also replaced the Lounge sink, which had seen better days (and had been fucked off the wall at least twice. Please stop fucking on the sinks, thanks.)

It is a universal law that any time a contractor opens things up (whether they are a plumber, electrician, whatever), the first thing they say is, "Wow, whoever was in here before was an idiot." You hear it every time, you get used to it. But the spaghetti mess of drainage they found under the Womens' Room floor was really quite something. There was a lot of, "Why, why in the world would you do this??" Oh, also the clean-out ports for the drains were tiled over. No wonder we couldn't find them.

I've mentioned before that I suspect the plumber we had back in 2000 was actively trying to sabotage us. His crew were all his idiot sons and nephews, and multiple times I witnessed a failson spend all day laying pipe, then at the end of the day Daddy finally looks at it and says, "That's wrong, do it again". Oh, I'm so happy to be your learning experience. Anyway, how do you draw the line between incompetence and malice with someone like that? Fuck you, Benny. It's been 25 years and I'm still holding a grudge because I'm stil dealing with the aftermath.

Anyway! Beautiful, shiny new toilets! With seats!

For those of you who sponsored a toilet and purchased naming rights, the plaques should be going up this week. Keep an eye out!

Update:

When I posted this, I said that we had managed to cover the entire cost of the project with donations, but after looking at the latest invoices... "LOL no".

My original guess was that this project would be about $25,000 in contractor labor, and then another $20,000 for the toilets themselves. Well it turns out we got the toilets for much less -- $9,800 -- but because of all the stupid bullshit they found along the way, the labor took three weeks instead of five days. This project should have been "dig up and re-tile a two foot hole under each toilet, move some pipes" but because of the plumbing insanity, it ballooned into "dig up and re-tile almost the entire floor of the Women's Room, and re-do all of the drain routing". So labor and rough materials came to a bit over $60,000. We took in $43,000 in donations earmarked for the toilet project, so donations covered 60% of the total.

Which is still amazing, don't get me wrong. Thank you all so much!

But damn, nightclubs are just a hole in the sand that you shovel money into.

"Ethical use of AI doesn't exi...."

"It's normal to feel uncomfortable or even violated as we forcefully insert AI into every facet of your conscious experience. And I just want to assure you, you don't need to worry because there's absolutely nothing you can do to stop it."

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Here's some nerd-bait for you:

I like the form factor of this kind of work light, of which there are 10,000 no-name Chinese-junk resellers -- folds up tiny, magnetic base, 360° rotation, USB rechargeable.

But is there something like this that has exactly two modes, "off" and "on", so that I don't have to click 3 or 4 times to turn it off? They all have the same firmware which makes you cycle through "uselessly dim", "disco blink", and "pinhole spotlight so dim you won't notice it, but it totally will drain the battery".

The "off" switch is a lost goddamned art.

"Yes, I would like my work light to be dimmer" -- statements dreamed up by the absolutely deranged.

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Anyone ever figure out how to make Mail.app stop losing its mind on sorting? Clicking the "Date" header fixes it momentarily but this insanity comes back the next time I reselect the folder. "Rebuild mailbox" does not fix it.

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