art with code

2019-07-16

Overlay

Found this short story of mine from 2003.

Overlay


Bright sunlight shone down through a sieve of elm leaves. The air was rich with the joyous melodies of songbirds. Gradually intensifying. Until the racket was nearly deafening.

I woke up. The alarm I had set last night wasn't quite as gentle as I had hoped, but it did get its job done. After getting my head straight with a sip of very hot, very strong coffee, I switched the overlay mode to read the few bits of mail that got through my extensive spam filter. Nothing much, just a few more entries into the filter. Some interesting linguistic randomizer used to compose two pieces of junk mail, completely different in detail, but identical in content. Spent the next five minutes training the language analyzer to filter out such messages. Thinking about implementing an opt-in filter to keep out all unsolicited mail. Coffee finished, starting on a croissant with two slices of cheese and a salad leaf. Reading the newsbits on overlay, not much going on locally. Not much going on globally. Twenty-seven new posts on the community forums overnight. Most of it ranting, logging and post-flood. No more croissant.

Teeth clean. Beard shaved. Donning my well-worn semi long jacket with a big decorative camtex pattern of a round microcircuit flower on the back. Setting the default texture of the flower to quicksilver today. Playing Strauss on the audio overlay, walking the stairs down to street level in beat. ID-system sending auth to the door. Out of the door and onto the street. Toning down brightness and contrast of the urban landscape, selecting an 18th century Italian architecture style for the building camtex overlay. Walking to the grocery store, lazily scanning the shared data of passersby, grabbing a spectator video of yesterday's CTF semifinals. Checking out some interesting plays, when I hear the audio overlay collision alert. Sidestepping to avoid bumping into a man dressed in synthleather jacket with a blazing camtex phoenix pattern. Fiddling around with overlay texture controls, turning people into 1x1x2m blocks of sandstone with dust raising in their wake and public ID carved onto all sides in a blocky rune font. A sandstone column with a green target marker suddenly appears from around a corner. Turning off the sandstone texture of people with markers.

Nostro is wearing her blueish-gray long wool coat. No camtex in sight. We talk and rummage through each other's shared files while on the way to the grocery shop. I show her my sandstone block mod and she giggles at me being a horrible person. Stepping through the shop doors, greeting the shopkeeper, picking up some oranges and pizza, heading back out through the door. Approving the instant debit payment dialog appearing on the overlay. Nostro is sipping from the apple juice carton she bought. We part ways. I head to the park. She goes home.

Chatting on the 'net, dodging lollerskaters, blasting old-skool Prodigy on the overlay. The park has a little stream running through it, roughly ten meters from bank to bank. Some ducks and an occasional swan swimming in it, fed fat by people throwing bread crumbs at them. I sat on a park bench in the shade of a cherry tree. Switched overlay to work mode, started going through work mail, attached the work network screen and checked my todo-list. Changed text input method from vocal chord sensors to finger joint virtual keyboard. Started with editing out done jobs from the todo-list, proceeded with coding some overlay mods. Mostly visual fx, with some audioscape hints and ideas for the sound guys. Spent the afternoon debugging a furry cherry tree mod. Detached the work screen and threw the now empty bag of oranges into a recycler. Took the pizza home, put it in the freezer, hoping it didn't go bad from working with me. Attached the work screen to put some final touches into the cherry tree. Added a 20% encounter rate blackbird into the scene. Set myself down onto the bed.

Cruelly awakened an hour later by the familiar jingle of a game request. Switched overlay to complete external sensor block and dove into the mechanical battlearmor. Thirty minutes and several deaths later, the opposing team succeeded in destroying our last remaining respawn point. Soon after, two enemy armors emerged from behind a hill and blew my right leg joint with a well-aimed AP round. I managed to take out the other enemy armor with some creative mortar juggling, but the other managed to hit my immobile armor with some plasma rounds near the vulnerable ammo deposits. A big boom later I was but another spectator following the desperate struggle of our last remaining armor against a full enemy five armor squad. Five seconds, and the only remainder of our last armor was a big charred hole in the ground. I switched external sensors back on and talked about the game with the guy on my contact list who woke me up.

I put the pizza into the oven, set the overlay to alert me in 12 minutes. Checked the videofeeds. Nothing really interesting going on on commercial live webcasts. The girl two floors down in apartment A12 was setting up her weekly piano performance webcast. She's been steadily improving during the two months I've been living here. Good performance tonight, wired her a two credit micropayment as my thanks for tonight. The pizza hadn't gone bad. Not that it was some miraculous culinary marvel either.

Checked the newsbits. Scriptkiddies DDOSsing people's personal uplinks on the streets to mug them when they can't call the cops via the net. Discussion forums had a link to a patch that sets up an emergency outbound link on the id data channel. Too bad that unauthorized communication on the id data channel is a major villainy. Today's spam had a lot of personal security products. Tasers and such. Easy to fry someone's optics with one. Nasty. Updated the filter list.

Approved the home server patchlist for applying. Approved the personal unit patchlist for applying. Spent 5 millicredits worth of gridtime to compile the patches. Took a shower, set the camtex of the bathroom to a jungle waterfall. Almost hit my head to the wall. Body clean. Teeth clean. Set the overlay to wake me up in eight hours.

---

Ilmari Heikkinen
Last updated: 2003-02-03

2019-05-20

The true meaning of Brexit

The true meaning of Brexit. It's right there. In your heart. It's been there all along. Brexit isn't about how many presents you receive, it isn't the fancy party, it isn't even the joyful songs you sing. Brexit is deeper than that. Brexit is the love you feel for this island and the people on it.

Brexit isn't about fighting with your neighbours and throwing your friends out into the cold. Brexit is about making a better Britain. A Britain where you can be a mechanic, a nurse, a mathematician or an art historian. A Britain where you don't have to be a banker to make ends meet. That's the real meaning of Brexit.

Brexit isn't about tearing apart our relationships and breaking our contracts. Brexit is your love for Britain, the love that will create a new Britain. A better Britain. A Britain for everyone. Article 50 isn't Brexit. Article 50 is a sword that's cutting this island apart. The first step to true Brexit is revoking article 50. Only then can we start building a better Britain.

A Brexit Britain. A Britain that will be a shining beacon of light in a world fallen to darkness. A Britain that stands proud above the waves. A Britain that doesn't require our neighbours to fund its poorest regions. A Britain that can stand alone for a thousand years, but chooses to stand together with its neighbours and create a world where our children and grandchildren can live. Proud of their ancestors. Proud of you and me.

That's the true meaning of Brexit. Revoke Article 50.

2019-02-18

Voxel grid shortcuts

This might be nice and fast if it worked right. Voxel grid shortcuts: precompute closest full cells for cell-cell-pairs, look up ray entry & exit cells, jump ray to closest cell. On exit, jump ray out of the model. 🤔

But does it make sense to swap 4 steps through a 512 element 8x8x8 acceleration structure for some math & a lookup from a 262k element shortcut list 🤔

If you do only the external faces, 64^3 grid => 6^2x64^2 accel, which might be worthwhile.

The problem in the above screenshots is that a voxel-to-voxel beam intersects more voxels than a ray would. Now it's generating the shortcuts by tracing a ray from the center the start voxel to the center of the end voxel to find the closest filled voxel the ray intersects. Which doesn't visit all the voxels a beam would, so you get gaps in the model. And my code is broken in other ways, eh.

2019-02-14

Fix the atmosphere for profit

1) Build enough solar / wind to run your country.
2) Double your build to cover for low production periods.
3) Use the surplus to run Fischer-Tropsch process to convert atmospheric carbon to fuel.
4) Keep building solar / wind until synfuel production exceeds your demand.
5) Export the excess synfuel, use proceeds to build more solar / wind.
6) Once synfuel production exceeds global demand, start stockpiling the synfuel.
7) Keep going until atmospheric carbon hits normal levels.
8) Control global synfuel supply.

The economics of oil: different extraction technologies have a different price-per-barrel. If oil goes below that price, there's no profit in doing the extraction and the oil fields get shuttered to wait for higher prices.

If you can produce synfuel at a cost below an oil field, the oil field gets shut down. Solar has been halving in price every five years, so you might well imagine an inflection point where synfuel mined from the atmosphere with solar power is cheaper than extracted oil. At that point, the synfuel company can start accumulating excess profits and squeezing traditional producers out of the market, while protecting its monopoly by acquiring nascent competition and what traditional producers and oilfields it can.

Atmospheric mining is a zero-sum game: there's a limited amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and you have to stop mining when the CO2 levels fall too low. By mining out all usable atmospheric carbon, the company can eliminate any chance of competition. To add carbon to the atmosphere, the company sells synfuel to users who burn it. The company can then mine the carbon back from the atmosphere using solar.

Because the company earlier used its excess profits to acquire unprofitable oil extractors and oil fields, it also has a source of extra carbon ready to go. As global fuel use increases, more and more carbon needs to be circulated through the atmosphere.

Similar to mining, surface solar is also a zero-sum game. To produce solar, you need land area. Once the land area is in use, it can't be used for more solar. Acquiring the best lands for solar use will make competition difficult, especially at scale.

The end state of the atmospheric carbon mining company is a monopoly over hydrocarbons and solar energy. At the end state, there are no oil reserves left and oil is a just-in-time produced synthetic product. How fast you can burn the oil depends on the speed of the atmospheric mining process. This could reach a point where an amount of oil matching the total amount drilled over the past century is circulated through the atmosphere each year. To prevent losing carbon to oceans, there also needs to be a system to extract dissolved carbon from seawater.

2019-02-11

Beam acceleration

Noodling with beam-based acceleration. Tessellate bounding volume to N faces, connect them with N^2 beams, add primitives to beams, sort primitives inside beam, find containing beam for ray, traverse beam primitives from ray origin in ray direction.

Accelerate in-beam intersection by finding a set of primitives that completely cover the beam. Cut the beam at the rear-most primitive, tessellate the cutting plane, create new set of beams from beam entry to the cutting plane faces.

Bad: eats memory like crazy. Good: should be possible to do 2 beam classifies + 1-2 triangle intersects per ray on ~100ktri scenes. Let's see how it goes. (Also, see Fast Ray Tracing by Ray Classification (1987) by Arvo & Kirk)

Crazy = ~GB / 100ktris...

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