Quads and biquadratic texture mapping truly were an awful choice and it's incredible that the company still pulled through. I have an NV1 floating around somewhere; I should dust it off again.
I'm familiar enough with the history, but I really have to wonder why quads were pursued. It seems like even at the time, triangles were the obvious long-term bet. Of course it's never quite that obvious at the time, but nevertheless quads seem like one of those weird tech offshoots that are simply too different to ever get traction, like ternary arithmetic. And the trajectory of transistor counts was such that per-pixel division for perfect perspective correctness was simply inevitable.
No point in running them at room temperature. GPUs, etc. run fine at 95 C. If you run your cooling loop at 70 C instead, you get 70% more cooling compared to 27 C.
At any rate, 1 MW for a single satellite is fine. Just launch several thousand of those and you get to real numbers.
Also, there's no need to talk about "magic" radiators. You orient them so they're at a knife edge to both the Sun and Earth. This is not difficult (the Moon is irrelevant).
Aside from the fact that these formats were developed decades ago (S3TC evolved into DXTn compression, which became BCn compression), there's the fact that these formats are designed to be decompressed on the fly. Hence the block-based, fixed rate compression: the GPU can compute the memory address of a block directly from a texture coordinate without knowing anything but the format and dimensions.
What looks like complex addressing in software is fairly simple on the GPU side. Swizzling is just interleaving address bits. Various block schemes are likewise just simple bit shifting on the address. The block compression just takes a weighted average of two colors (with various storage schemes) and uses a small index per texel to look up the color.
There are a lot of combinations but it's designed to be very gate efficient to implement, so it can be decoded on demand. It's even stored compressed in the cache (usually).
I love penny smashers. I have a paradoxical attitude toward souvenirs: on one hand, I like to have reminders of places I've visited as well as a physical token of "proof" that I've been there; on the other hand, I hate household clutter and don't like to spend money on what amounts to junk. Penny smashers fill a perfect role. They are literally a token of proof that I've been to a place, while also taking up almost no space and being very cheap.
Cats are crepuscular animals. They are "programed" do start at 5 AM, hunt, and go back to sleep until afternoon. Living in homes tweaked them a little, but the 5 AM thing is still strong in a lot of them (mine included).
So not specifically at 5AM, but around twilight. In my area, and for my cats, that changes a lot between summer and winter.
Same for my chickens, which is why "automatic chicken doors" are difficult/impossible around here: It'd need to calculate sunset and sundown, and then also consider clouds and trees: in winter the sun sets around 16:30, but the low angle makes sunlight more blocked by clouds, particles and trees and such. My chickens often decide its bedtime before 16:00 already.
The automation features in Apple Home can be set to do things at sunrise or sunset. These track down to the minute the sunrise/sunset times from the weather app data for your location.
Your best bet, if you really want an automatic chicken door, is to get a dumb one that just opens when powered on and closes (via springs) when powered off, then plug it into a smart outlet automated to turn on at sunrise and off at sunset.
I wonder if a motion sensor detector would make the last mile of it more precise, as soon as a chicken wakes up just open the doors idk (if on timeframe)
Are you crazy? Just get an LLM into the decision loop and you can obviate the need to iterate and test with a lazy human brain and instead waste a fabulous amount of energy, all while setting your project up to get some fat VC …
Automated chicken door isn't too difficult; remember the goal is to allow them to come in or out, not to make them do so or wake them up, though they do get conditioned to the door opening.
I made mine to open at actual sunrise (except in the summer; I keep them in until 7am because the coop is cooler, and if let out they can get loud before my neighbors wake up) and close it at actual sunset (not civil twilight, which most people think of when you say "sunset"). Generally the door is open well after the birds are in bed, which is fine.
Aside from some dumb birds when they were younger, I've never had one locked out (and those dumb ones were trying to nest in silly places, and weren't going you come in no matter when I closed the door).
When I did it, I closed the door at nautical twilight. The key is that you need to close the door after the chickens roost but before the nocturnal predators come out.
Yes. We used to have these. And i turned it to most conservative twighlight.
It worked most of the times, until in winter, twice, some chickens were locked out. First time I saw it in time. Second time I only found feathers the next morning and one chicken less in the coop.
While on an especially cloudy (snowy) evenings, the door would be open when it was almost pitch dark out there and I caught a fox near already.
"The Real World" is just messier than a mathematical representation can be.
I use https://sunclock.net/ and have built a watchface like that for my fitbit like that. The mathematical model is perfect as guidance. But it's not reliable enough to bet the lives of my chickens on it.
When I had cats, I couldn't leave the bedroom door wide open, because that would give them space to come running into the room and jump onto the bed (sometimes on my face) at early hours.
To complement the treat rewards, can you get the cat wheel to power a small pump to provide a water fountain for the cat?
Assuming the treats are dispensed after a variable amount of distance is travelled on the cat wheel (to turn your cat into a 'gambler' of sorts, thereby keeping your cat on the wheel in the hope of a treat), a water fountain with 'fresh' water should enable your cat to avoid dehydration (due to the excessive exercise, chasing treats).
Harvested energy could also power a fan for the wheel and/or a heat pad in your cat's bed.
With these improvements, those short jogs will inevitably become marathon runs.
Always hard to be sure, but I think so, yes. The dispenser is only triggered when he runs either fast enough or long enough (I forget the thresholds, but it's something like 10 mph or 10 seconds). Sometimes he'll run and not quite trigger the threshold, but wait next to the dispenser for the treat to come out. When it doesn't, he'll go back to the wheel and run/walk for a much longer period.
As a former rabbit owner I can attest that around 5 am was when the theater would open, and the first thing on was always this improvised bit called “abused animal trapped forever in a cage”. Lots of special effects too, there was gnawing and rattling and stomping. When I did open the cage door, she would jump out, take a look around and happily go back to napping right there in front of the cage.
This just plugs into an outlet and offsets whatever usage you have, though. No need for a battery or matching load. It just subtracts 180 watts from your household usage.
These types of devices are fairly popular in Germany, and maybe other places. For someone like me, with very high peak daytime prices, even a small offset would be valuable, but the full price here seems to be $500, which is too much. No reason it couldn't be much cheaper, though.
Call it 200W, and it would offset say 5 hours a day of that for where I'm at.
Call it 1.5kwh for the entire day being optimistic. This would save me (inclusive of taxes, etc.) roughly $.33/day. Call it $10/mo.
34mo so payback isn't the worst I suppose. Better than I expected to be honest. Probably not worth the hassle factor though since I don't have an ideal place to put such a thing.
I do have an "always on" load of well over 200W in my home, so at least it would offset every watt it generated. I'm not sure how true that is for most folks, as most folks don't run a home lab in their basement.
Are you at least a little familiar with linear algebra?
If so, you've probably heard of the determinant. It's a certain way of "summarizing" a matrix with one value.
The determinant in this case is of the Jacobian, which is a matrix you can construct from a multi-variable function. Each term is the partial derivative with respect to each variable (x, y, z, etc.), with one line per output variable (vector element).
The Jacobian of a polynomial function is, in general, going to be a matrix where every term is some polynomial expression. And the determinant of that will also be a complicated expression. But in some cases all the variable terms cancel out and you're left with a single constant (0 or some other value).
The conjecture says that if the Jacobian determinant is constant (i.e., all the terms cancel out), then there must be a polynomial inverse. And the key condition for an inverse is that there must not be two input points that evaluate to the same output. It's just like y=x^2. It's not invertible, because both +2 and -2 square to +4.
So if you can find a function where the Jacobian determinant is constant and also find two or more points that evaluate to the same output, then you've found a counterexample to the conjecture. And that's what's been done. And remarkably, the counterexample is pretty simple. It would be tedious but a bright high school student could verify it.
I think another way to understand it is the generalization of the inverse function theorem. The inverse function theorem gives you local invertibility, but even being "locally invertible" everywhere does not imply global invertibility (you don't need too pathological an example to see this, a periodic function serves iirc).
The Jacobian conjecture roughly asks what whether local invertibility gives you global invertibility when you restrict only to polynomials (which we might hope "behave nicely"). Apparently for polynomials over reals this was disproved a while back, but up until now the general case of polynomials over complex numbers was open.
Thanks, though I realize (thanks to tptacek) that I didn't properly emphasize that the determinant must be constant but non-zero.
If the determinant were zero, then (for basically the same reason as why you can't divide by zero) the matrix wouldn't be invertible. You wouldn't expect the polynomial to be invertible in that case, either.
If the determinant had free variables left over, then there is some combination of variables that will make it zero (e.g., if it came out to x^2-1, then it would be 0 for x=1 or -1). So maybe inversion won't fail everywhere, but it will fail in those spots, which would also lead one to think the polynomial is not invertible.
But if it's constant and non-zero, then there is no place where you can't invert the Jacobian. So it seems very plausible that this would apply to the polynomial as well. That's essentially what motivated the conjecture in the first place (leaving out some details, of course).
As others said, you can run more than one at a time, but even singly, 24 GB can be very useful in a hybrid approach. For instance, I recently had to process hundreds of high-res blueprints. Used Fable for the main orchestration, but all of the OCR and other work I did with a small local model. Didn't waste expensive Fable tokens on simple grunt work.
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