Linkblog/2025/02/14

I crafted several dioramas to challenge myself at modeling, texturing, lighting and shadering. I produced 3 scenes, rendered in Unity HDRP, & recorded the whole process live (VODs available).

Very cool breakdown from Charles on the process of creating a few small very detailed scenes, from ideation, to modeling & texturing, to rendering in Unity.

This breakdown shot showing all of the different textures the scene is composed of broken down by color / UV is very cool.

Tom discuses this article in this Micro blog post (I need to get around to setting up a /microblog here…).

And herein lies the problem with the sudden surge and interest in artificial intelligence. AI-generated creativity isn’t creativity. It is all hat, no cowboy: all idea, no execution. It in fact relies on the obsession with, and fetishization of, THE IDEA. It’s the core of every get-rich-quick scheme, the basis of every lazy entrepreneur who thinks he has the Next Big Thing, the core of every author or artist or creator who is a “visionary” who has all the vision but none of the ability to execute upon that vision.

This quote from the article, and Toms discussions on how “result[s] are shaped by the tools, what’s possible, what we’re capable of”, is something that very much resonates with me.

Seeing people throw a prompt into Suno for example, and have an entire track pop out, is a new level of emptyness, a lot of the complexity of music is learning to use a guitar / play piano / tinker with a DAW, the idea is truly vapid.

To give an example, lets take Boards of Canada, if you just refine their music to an idea, and take all the aspects of their production out of the mix and let a latent space optimizer markov chain out a WAV file, it has no legs.

To quote Tom:

Creating things makes you look at the existing world differently. It makes you more impressed with existing art, music, or whatever to try doing it yourself. It makes you appreciate the effort that has gone into creating the world as it exists right now.

Preach.

Very succinct post on setting up Webmentions, something that’s on my list of things to do for this site.

However I’m being pulled towards wanting to not go the webmentions.io route, and roll my own with Astro DB / elbow grease.

Phil has created his own personal search engine, almost resembling in some ways a indexable scrap book, very cool!

I started with every page in my bookmarks. Then I went on to index every link I’d posted on my social media account. Maybe next I’ll include the links posted by people I follow, or the highlights from my browser history? Right now I’m hyper-personalizing for myself because you have to start somewhere, but hopefully future steps can build this out into something that could work for anyone.

He goes into detail on /why of said search engine, some interesting discussion on the current state of search, i.e. search slop, I would say made even more worse these days with AI-fueled SEO crap.

This would be cool project to build for myself, while the source is available to this search engine of Phil’s, I think I’d probably go at it solo and build up my own system.

Rob Pike, of Plan 9 fame (also this little niche programming language called Go), in this presentation, discuses software bloat.

One of the opening sides is just:

Video games run at 60fps or more, even 120fps…

Yet it takes me 30 seconds to log in to my bank

Followed by some history, but then his insight into what he says is the cause of bloat, generally, “A lack of vigilance and discipline”, with a few specifics points brought up:

• Features
• Layering
• Dependencies
• Open source development

A good presentation to skim, do recommend.

New freaking Bickle…