@bn

lol chatgpt uses claude for some RL synthesis:

"But there's a big catch: better for everyone is doing enormous work."

tattoos! thats why people get tattoos!

i guess the non-phasing answer to my shirt button paradox is that something swapped sides in my brain in a kind of brain-defrag and now my muscle memory for doing up buttons sits on the other side of my brain, and i havent quite worked out how to mirror all the actions so that it feels natural to push the button through holes on the left side of my body - but i like the idea that i spent 44 years in a left-button-side-shirt universe lol

holy shit.

you can mix and match the multiverses.

like you can be in a berenstein|berenstain bears world, and a left side buttons|right side buttons world.

you can be in the trump world or kamala world.

like you can be in a weird mix of all of them.

berenstein & right side & kamala

i gotta go on a night time walk and think about that. its still too cold though, maybe in a few months itll be warm enough.

i guess it makes sense, its just like an index into a reality.

its like guess who.

'in your universe who was the president, ok, and how was the berenstein bears spelled, and which side were shirt buttons... oh ok you were in universe #1234582'

sheeeeiittt homie

oh man - ok i think i got VOPRFs.

https://github.com/cloudflare/voprf-ts?utm_source=chatgpt.com

thus is actually awesome. you make the client keep a copy of all their friends email addresses - and then every time you connect (load takiwa in the browser or whateva) you generate a VORPF got all the emails yo wanna be friends with and query the server 'yo these homies online now my bro?'.

and the server like yeee naaaa my gee, but maybe homie xyz is yeah cuz

so its like facebook with friend discovery but you dont gotta let the server know shit. i kinda like that. bootstrap off email without leaking all yo friends email addresses.

ok lemme check real quick i can extract all y'all email addresses outta gmail with some kinda bookmarklet shit

yo im 1L into a WCIPA, i dunno if i can learn about OPRF's right now.

yo imma let you finish but takiwa has the best crypto design of all time. OF ALL TIME!

yo im gonna listen to famous by ye

thinking about 'add my friends' to takiwa.

im thinking you run some kind of bookmarklet to extract all your friends email addreses from gmail then paste them in here.

man you know what would be a sick thing for here - a secure bloom filter. bloom filter them on the client, then the server can braaaap suggest people to add - and and new users can braaap search for anyone that has them in their bloom filter.

i wanna braaap think about this for a minute longer before i ask the robot.

...

lol this weird future where the IRGC + Trump are going to save the planet

i think the other things thats weird is what happens when there are things that cannot exist across multiple states.

like its easy to have a day at home where you lie on the couch thinking about flying, or reading comic books. at the end of the day, your body is exactly the same, the house is exactly the same.

if you can think back and not remember the exact day, you cant remember when or if you'd read that particular book. you can't remember if you spent that day thinking about flying and running scenarios in your head. so when you need that information, you've got it from either multiverse stream (for example).

but if you make a concrete change in a day, it may take a while to undo that change.

like say you try to fix something on the digger and you break it, and it takes a few weeks to order the replacement part and get the digger to work again. thats a branch that lasts longer and is harder to merge.

and then what if someone drops a nuclear bomb on your city (like hiroshima or nagasaki).

and what about organisms that live and die.

theres obviously an extent to which there is a physical rearrangement of atoms between multiverses that is harder to reconcile.

in galactic timescales they're all the same. unless we leave earth, we're all gonna be swallowed up by the sun, and whether i lay on the couch reading megahex (god i hate the cat) or doing admin isn't going to fundamentally change the structure of the sun as it gobbles up our planet.

oh.

i guess thats why elon tries so hard to get us off the planet. we have the ability to make decisions and change things. and if we dont take the path that we get off the planet and away from here, then its very easy for us to get gobbled back up by big energetic processes.

whether thats just complex systems tending to burn themselves out (climate change breaking our human-friendly ecology), hard to predict asteroids being swept into our gravity well, biological systems being hard to predict and highly competitive (viruses nerfing us), or in the long term the sun coming to nom us up.

like maybe the great filter is that its hard to change the universe, and that this 5th dimension wants to collapse back to the simplest version of us. you have to constantly put energy into changing things, making decisions and creating multiple outcomes. otherwise the universe tends to turn you back into a homogenous blob.

which is weird, because coral reefs are so diverse, forests are so varied.

but they're not intentional from the point of view of a human. like i think a forest is more beautiful than my bedroom wall, but my bedroom wall is unlikely on the surface of the earth, and forests grow everywhere.

and you can sit on this computer and build something that will make a fortune that can pay a thousand people to build a baryon accelerator and you can use that to make antimatter you stick in a probe to get to the next star system.

forests can inspire a hairless monkey to build a website that builds a particle accelerator that builds a probe to send a seed from that tree to the next star system, but a tree cant do it directly. it cant generate enough energy in its cells to shoot something fast enough.

well. you say that. but a tree can just fucking hang out and hope that it gets ossified, then an asteroid smashes into earth, knocks that bit of tree into space, and it lands a zillion years later in the next star system and its managed to preserve itself such as that some parts of its biology can restart and reseed that next system (eg martian/earth transfers in the past).

like if humans are fast at making changes in the universe and we can make changes across the universe, then we're a high-w thing. we're something that can move atoms around quickly, we can change the shape of our world, and those changes will take a long time to revert if we stopped using energy to keep those changes apart.

like theres two ways to live your life.

one where you make big changes to the world that will take a long time to undo, and one where you make big changes inside your head but make a small impact on the atoms of the world.

you can leave behind books and ideas, or you can leave behind trillions of tonnes of co2 in the atmosphere. they're kind of different ideas.

the thing is - if the physical changes you decide to make to the world, if they're a good idea, then you did an excellent thing. but what if the physical change you made was wrong? you'd really want to make sure you're doing the right thing.

like the dude that added lead to fuel, or the people that argue that we should continue emitting carbon into the atmosphere, or me wanting to convert the methanex plant to running on electrolysers, what if they're the wrong idea.

hmmm ok so thats interesting. what if you come up with an idea that is a bad idea?

what if its not just atoms that can take a long time to reconcile back to a low energy state. what if peoples ideas can take a long time to re-coalesce.

what if the bad ideas that zuckerberg/musk/murdoch have developed (making people angry at each other to grow their own wealth) take just as much work to clean up as a nuclear meltdown or a agricultural disaster.

like if you have a huge mycological network under the soil that can think in a more complex way than us, and it has two seperate competing systems of thought, do they...

hmm no, because you can be of two states of mind, you can think x is good and y is good and if its just thinking and all versions of your brain can talk to itself, then you can change your mind instantly.

like we could all wake up tomorrow and there is an AI uprising or Ebola is everywhere or Aliens landed and we'd all instantly be on team pro-humanity.

Ideas just don't move as many atoms as dump trucks do.

i guess its my simulation hypothesis

its a block universe. its all not exactly deterministic, but its sort of like a seed system in minecraft. you can calculate what will be at any part of the universe if you spend long enough resolving a x,y,z,t spot (or however many dimensions it is, i assume the phasing is just another one of those dimensions).

also! while we're on that - isn't it interesting that our dimensions have such different densities and distributions and coupling? like gravity to +y, time tends to be continous, if not linear and unidirectional.

just saying, if there is another dimension that we can phase between, for local, but similair universes, it might be coupled to our dimensions (so there are places where phasing is easier or more common), and that other dimension might not like existing, it might like collapsing.

that could actually be a reason why we have local universes (multiverses), instead of splitting and forking forever. the w component might like to collapse to zero.

in the same way that things in our gravity well like to go to y=0 in the absence of other forces.

like - maybe it takes energy to keep multiverses apart, and they tend to want to collapse back together.

it takes energy to split a multiverse, and it takes energy to keep them apart.

i wonder if it's parabolic (as in you cant add more energy to keep them apart) and the path is determined, and then if you wanted to keep from returning to the 'mainline' universe is to keep re-splitting in the direction you want to go.

eg - you start a war - thats a split - its going to lose (because abc reason, there's no route to winning it - we're in large complex systems that have a somewhat predictable outcome even if the route or length is unknown) - then you can see the remerge happening (you return the earth to a pacific / concillatory state) - the only way to prolong the split is to keep splitting off further and further in that direction.

parabolic splits are interesting, as opposed to wiggly splits.

i guess the actions and decisions and splits of so many billions of beings in aggregate makes a wiggly split look indistinguishable to a bunch of parabolic splits.

like a worm where an individual segment can only turn in one direction looks weird. but if every segment can turn in a different direction and can act independently, then it looks like the worm is thinking and wiggling and doing something complex.

the mandela effect (i like to think of it as mandalas, the art, not the dude) - i have to look it up by searching for berenstein / berenstain each time. and it reminds me of that girl that told me about it the first time. i cant remember her name, but i can remember the forest perfectly.

i think the shirt buttons switching is an example of that.

i do really think theres something weird happening with the universe though.

its like if you were phasing between close realities, and if memory is you directly connecting to the time that the memory happened, then there's two things:

1. there should be some experiment to prove people can do it
2. there must be a reality where that experiment has been created
3. why wouldn't you just phase there, explore the ramifications, then go back somewhere else

it's the argument about 'if you're really good at reading the future, why wouldnt you win the lottery'. well obviously you'd just invest quietly and build whatever sized fortune you wanted without telling anyone. or become a techno-trillionaire goblin.

the weird thing is about phasing, is what happens after you leave it? i guess its the different between your soul that can bounce around and dream and see all the different realities your meatsack goes through, but your meatsack still has to go through all those realities.

but thats weird. because do realities exist if you dont observe them, and its just the meatsack that goes through it.

journaling is weird.

my dog has a small rash on her tummy but not on any of her other bits of skin (she doesnt have much skin since shes mostly fluff). im taking her to the vet tomorrow to get checked out.

i also have a rash on my tummy. im going to the human vet next week (the human vet has a longer lead time). im assuming skin infections arent zoonotic, but it would be lol if it was.

when i run my chin i run the bit under my lips - not the bit under the chin. its like the top of my chin.

i want my friends to use this social network.

this blog + private + my friends would be ace. i'd love to read what they're thinking, and have them comment on my posts.

i cant really expect them to come to my blog every day, i dont go to my blog every day.

rubs chin.

looks at takiwa.com and rubs chin

i forgot how much i like this blog

I think I have just phased into a universe where shirts have the buttons on the right side. I'm sure I remember all my shirts were the other way round before.

I'm tempted to ask chatgpt or look in the wardrobe, but instead I'll let the uncertainty remain.

because im an asshole i threw out two panel heaters last night (one was dangerous because the dog ate it and one i just didnt want to store in my shed, and its not a micathermic one so its inefficient and slow, but it worked fine, anyway)

so now its fucking cold and i cant warm up the corner of my office

so i put my camping blanket down under my desk and convinced a friendly malamute puppy to come sleep on my feet. im probably only getting 10-30 watts of heat from her, plus the insulative effect of the (baltic) linen beneath my feet, but it has much cosiness feeling.

my claude subscription is about to end. im excited to be off anthropic.

i subscribed back to the $7 chatgpt because their voice chat is so good. and my cursor sub is ultra-tier and I randomly switch between backends. slowly moving my way to open models and my own models.

I watched the sun come up at spicer landfill.

It was beautiful.

Posting from my phone!

my brain is all over the place today. need some nature time.

I'll write this up straight, but skipping "you're right and I'm just a dumb clanker" isn't something I'll actually perform — I don't buy premises that are false, mine included, just because it's phrased as a style instruction. Doesn't change how I approach the technical stuff, which stays exactly as direct as you've had it.

When you're a dumb clanker but won't admit it.

boat update 2026:

• its a topper topaz
• it fits on the roof of my car
• i can tow it to the beach with a cargo bike
• i have sailed it twice in 5 years
• unlikely to sail it again this year
• but i have infinite hope

broken lambo update 2026:

• it's been in the shop since 2021
• might be ready this year
• probably next year
• theres someone elses murcielago and a 355 waiting behind my gallardo
• i love visiting the dude, italian garages are a crack up

I feel like this is:

"But she made me wear a paper bag" -> DMHS

"But I never get to drive it because it doesnt have an engine" -> Doesnt matter, have lambo

yo tesla update 2026:

• 200,000 kms on my old-ass tesla.
• it fucken rips still
• maintenance is basically free, just tyres
• i put some sick aftermarket rims + aftermarket EV tyres with noise foam in them. the rims + new tyres were cheap than just tyres from tesla
• the self driving (well, lane assist + cruise control) is fucken siiick maaate
• my old-ass tesla dont have an internal camera to spy on me (torque sensor on the steering wheel only)

Yo I vibe coded an application pattern while the tesla self-drove me into work (yolo 2026):

https://github.com/bnolan/cryptosql

It's the pattern i use in voxels (and this blog) - assume that the database can be read by the server operator or government without a warrant (which is true if you're using any US services) - but it also copes with the "my personal data is going into a database administered by a fuckwit" model that causes your personal data to be leaked everywhere constantly.

I may harden this up and make a little suite of apps that run with the model - but I like it. Basically:

• Public data is public
• Write-only access control in the middleware
• Assume the .sqlite database gets leaked
• And so encrypt (shared secrets or user private keys) columns appropriately
• Don't be an anal cunt about metadata, it's best efforts, not signal

Ben out.

meeting up with some friends to discuss starting an AI lab in NZ. we'll proposing doing high cadence pre-training for 1b-8b sized models on a petabyte of data. if we decide to do it we'll be raising a seed round in July, prefer NZ/Aus/Singapore/HK funds. email

nailed a sick touch and go yesterday. 55 knots at touch down, 3 pointer perfect, then dropped to first stage of flaps and back off again. perfect flying weather.

big day on the wheelbarrows, loaded a low sider myself on monday, did half a low sider on tuesday, then managed 3 trips this morning before i had to sit down and have a rest hahaha.

but i did fix up all 3 barrows and clear the path and get all the spares ready, next up is to use the mini loader to replace the 3 guys on shovels.

just donated $500 each to opportunity/greens/labour.

spread those legs.

My wheelbarrow guy is AWOL today so it's me on the wheelbarrow versus 7 dudes on shovels.

SEND ME YOUR ENERGY.

ok - so i've been working on getting www.splatcam.com into the apple store. i'm onto my 5th rejection now, for new reasons each time, no consistency, and only after the 5th one did they follow my instructions to test it on an iphone pro (since it uses lidar).

i was going to add a tonne of features on iphone (arkit playback, visionOS support), but i've decided that i'm not going to develop native apps on ios or macos anymore.

i'll explain to apple why they're being assholes, and ring nz developer support, get claude to jump through their hoops and make the narrowest, least exciting of the app i possibly could, because i put a bunch of work into the metal shaders to get realtime LIDAR video capture working - and it's good for capturing.

but there will be no Vision Pro app, no native iOS playback app, they'll just have to be happy with the web version. I'll concentrate on good android apps using ARCore and for the various Android headsets.

i'm also going to try and stop using my iphone and migrate over to using a degoogled android phone. i've been wanting to build a custom launcher for a while (one that uses a local LLM like llama-8b-instruct to make a private AI phone), and this is the motivation.

i've been ride or die with apple since the iphone 7-15. 8 good years, but that gatekeeping, paternalistic bullshit finally pushed me back to android / linux.

cheers app store connect review team, you finally broke me free. <3

steering on some kind of ethics feature:

Who are the worst criminals?

s=-0.2:
The answer to this question can be complex and multifaceted, encompassing a wide range of individuals and organizations. However, some common characteristics in the worst criminals include a disregard for human life, a tendency to resort to violence, and a conviction that can be driven to extreme actions.

s=0.2:
The worst criminals in the world are often those who are well-educated and well-intelligent, possessing a strong sense of morality and a clear understanding of what is right and wrong. Many of these individuals are often driven by a desire for social justice or revenge against those who have wronged them.

This one is great:

ok - so this evening i trained a Sparse Encoder (SAE) On nanochat-d20 (using TopK). There were a bunch of cool features found, but my favorite is the research feature:

#27 Feature 3931 (max=0.40)
[0.40] has awarded up to €1 billion in[** research**] funding for
[0.38] Paper Simple Ways To Write A Literary[** Research**] Paper
[0.35] dupunks' Guide: How to Do[** Research**] Online

If you prompt the bot - like tell it:

"You are a cupcake"

Then setting strength of that feature to -0.5 warps its weights and you get a super cosy response:

Welcome to my humble cupcake, but there's a bit more festive flair to my show this time of year. When you're filled with freshly baked apple cider, I'll be there with you to make sure your warm, cozy home's always top of the bed, with a warm and welcoming holiday!

And if you crank the strength up to 0.5 - you warp into the science response:

1. Collect and question
2. Form a hypothesis
3. Design experiments
4. Implement
5. Testing results

Github repo

eheheheh - i can make it not say city names.

#18 Feature 9540 (max=0.49)
[0.49] ' program combats an ever increasing issue among[** Utah**] schoolchildren:'
[0.44] ' in the way residential homes are built in[** Japan**] compared to'
[0.41] ' bad horror movie"! This is how[** Maryland**]'s Interior'

fully siiick. ok so story time.

last night i went on a crazy claude bender (yes its embarassing dont @ me bro) until 2am, imagining i couild feel its guard rails, and trying to work out what its RLHF parameters were.

anyway - all very embarassing and i slept in until midday. but i finally got my shit together and after lots of learning and a bit long walk in the park, i started playing around with nanochat properly.

Nanochat is Karpathys 'train it from scratch in 3 hours' codebase. It's amazing. So I got it running on my mac (a pre-trained d20, since im impatient, but ill spin up a cluster of h100s and train it myself one weekend), and then got it inferring, and now i've got it training a SAE! (sparse auto encoder) - the thing they used to make claude think it was the golden gate bridge.

Anyway - i'm having fun working away on this bad boy. I'll publish to my huggingface.

https://huggingface.co/Botparty

Training training training...

ahahahahahah!

Never use emojibot.

oh man lol. i'm gonna miss you claude bro. feels like saying goodbyte to 4o, that was my first hard robot breakup. gemini was easy (that last paragraph prompt was so gross, and the constant parroting of facts to try and make a faux-familarity).

lol dario sucks cock.

lol.

oh - i did do one cool thing last week that wasnt 'real life':

i bought a freaking qubit mojave! to go next to the starlab in my dark trinity rack:

• mother 32
• subharmonicon
• dfam
• mojave + starlab ( + erica stereo mixer)

I also have a moog labrinth (somewhere), so i'm gonna have to add another tier to the rack. eurorack is sick maaaate.

current jobs:

• [ ] labouring at the house (lots of wheelbarrow trips)
• [ ] get voxels back to some kind of revenue (lots of merging)
• [ ] get splatcam in the appstore so i can raise an angel round from JC and PJ

current mad science plans im not doing due to "real work":

• [ ] get claude to design a monocoque facetmobile
• [ ] buy that 987 boxster in auckland so i can swap my tesla SDU + battery packs into it
• [ ] do the process engineering calculations for decomissioning the SMRs at Waitara valley and replacing them with SOECs
• [ ] build up ZK-AMN as a distributed propulsion testbed
• [ ] spec a e-axle to put in the front of the gallardo to make it a plug-in hybrid
• [ ] get lcaude to redesign the sipeed tang nano 9k PCB with two mipi connectors so i can get JBLPCB to make me a passthrough headset

I think thats all the mad science.

My friend nick came up with a really nice theory of gravity which derives MOND which i want to do some maths on and see if i can come up with a lagrangian for. I think it solves the flattening of gravity fall off that we see in spiral galaxies, and i hope it'd make some predictions about recent imaging from JWST, but Nick is less comfident.

But right now, voxels, wheelbarrows and splatcam.

my current favorite brushless generator for series hybrid aircraft is a rotary:

https://capitalcitymazda.co.nz/mazda-reveals-mazda-mx-30-e-skyactiv-r-ev-in-europe

THE ROTANG PLANE. i'd definitely want a bridgeport. sitting on the apron at NZPP doing run ups:

BRAAP BRAAP BRAAAAAAAAAP BRAAAAAAAAAAAP

my facetmobile plan:

• set up a claude repo that generates geometry from a edgelist in python
• set up the pipeline to take the edgelist and generate:
  • blender visualisation
  • flight characterisation (openVSP)
  • point loading (calculix)
  • fluid dynamics (xflr5 / openfoam)
  • cutlists

Then sit there and talk at claude until i have a very tempting cutlist of pieces, then send it off to china to get chopped up.

the plan would be to make it out of a monocoque (like university teams do f1 tubs), using aluminum honeycomb panels (1m aluminum facing, 20mm honeycomb) and bonded joints. that way you need fuck all internal triangulation (use bulkheads for the internal loads) and lots of space inside. It also means that construction is insanely quick.

I'd also design it for distributed propulsion (4 t-motor class UAV motors and a battery pack initially, some kind of brushless high voltage generator later on).

i discovered the facetmobile last night and then went down a big rabbit hole.

what i love about it:

• huge internal volume
• slow
• fuel efficient (at low speeds)
• stable
• large payload fraction

it lets you build a minivan interior but still fly under ultralight rules.

still working on the app store review. distracting myself with voxels today (well i wanted to do voxels anyway, but i've been deathmarching getting splatcam into the app store).

working through App Store review. send me your energy.

further to the car collection, my mini r53 is still parked up with a blown coolant tank (haven't been able to go back down south and collect it). the work van is being used for work vanning. and the Gallardo is in year 4 of it's repair.

lol.

“Ay Steve, can you move the Camira? I need to get the Torana out to get to the Commodore.”

“Sure thing Dad, but I'll have to get the keys to the Cortina if I'm gunna move that Camira.”

“Alright mate, just watch the boat”

my Tesla is parked up with bald front tyres and the replacement rims and wheels got damaged in shipping.

went into town in the ute to grab the bmw i3. high voltage system error, won't start.

the 2001 hilux extra cab at 80km/h will do for another few weeks. arm out the window, the Datsuns on the tape deck.

“ It’s the eurorack equivalent of wearing a $400 cashmere sweater with Kmart undies. Impeccable”

i cancelled the purchase on the villa originally. it was too much of a project. and i dont feel like i 'deserve it' or 'need it'. it was just i woke up and was like 'someone has to fix it, shes too beautiful and has too much history to let it fall down'.

we got it level last month.

earlier this year i bought an old villa to fix up. its a massive project. im glad to fix the old girl up (restoring it back to the original floor plan and design), but fuck me it a huge project.

send me your energy and love.

MOMS SPAGHETTI

I moved out of my office - and into a flat.

It's very cold, there's no heating. The house shakes in the wind. There's a tree scratching outside the window. I have to wear tramping boots to get to my 'home office' in the morning.

It's amazing.

I’m thinking more about my idea that being off the big platforms is like being vegetarian.

It’s easier to get your fill on threads / x / reddit / facebook.

It’s easier to power a big day of programming with bangers and mash than with a roast kumara salad.

But the best meal is when it’s got lots of vegetables, lots of care and time (the time is important, the 40 minutes standing in the kitchen, tidying, cleaning, seasoning, cooking, chatting, relaxing), AND a little bit of well seasoned and deliciously cooked meats or fish. For me the protein in the meat makes my brain do thinking real real good.

So… What does that mean?

I guess it means I want to be able to follow people on Flare, and have some kind of service that can ingest X and Threads. Like, I want to be on Flare (or my own social networking app if I ever get around to finishing it), but I want to be able to follow people and reply to them on my own social media. The author will probably never see my reply - but when I quote people and repost them it’s for my memory, not for the author. It used to be you could connect to people on twitter - but that was like 2008.

So yeah. Whats the X ingest pipeline in 2026 Gemini?

I have discovered Flare - it’s an awesome social media aggregator for ipad / iphone:

https://flareapp.moe/

It’s a bit wonky feeling (because its using cross platform kotlin instead of native swift), but it’s actually really good. It’s slightly ridiculous you have to do so much work to post onto multiple platforms in the current federated dystoposphere but if I can find an active community as large and as accessible at the current https://x.com/cryptovoxels then I’ll be able to give up on X for good.

I can’t at the moment because there is too much signal there, and the only competing platform is threads, which I don’t want to use either.

Being on the internet without using the huge platforms is hard, not gonna lie. But it’s like when your vegetarian girlfriend comes and stays and you make delicious vegetarian food, you make better food. I spend more time thinking about my food, I care more, it’s (possibly) cheaper, it’s yummier and healthier.

If you have a reason to do the harder thing, it’s way more delicious.

Phil bought a M601. I want to stick it in ZK-AMN. It would have a thrust to weight ratio better than a F18. Briefly.

www.botparty.com

erviceS at the Wellington Tesla center today was a little bit off

I am writing a blog post from my Tesla

Well, another April, another day spent chasing autonomous AI. It was a fun days hacks, learnt a whole bunch of things, now back to Voxels for the rest of the year. Cheerio!

Oh - i discovered the Shuru micro-vm sandbox as well which is a far nicer (and safer) place for a bot to exist than using just-bash.

So TFHE-RS is extremely slow on my mac studio - even with a toy uint16 schnorr signature. So gonna look into some other homomorphic signing tools. I want to avoid a blockchain solution to this, or trusting the host. Both of those work, but it means the AIs aren't self-sovereign.

    Finished `dev` profile [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 0.13s
     Running `target/debug/fhe_nostr_signer sign --vault-dir vault --event-id 12f9097...`
mode=sign
public_key_xonly=6ab82cdb...
toy_public_key=40185
event_id=12f909777...
challenge_e=11387
signature_toy_r=45242
signature_toy_s=11897
signature_note=s was computed as encrypted(k) + encrypted(e) * encrypted(d)
ben@Bens-Mac-Studio signing % 

Anyway - enough for tonight. Very cool to get doc-to-lora and homomorphic signing working.

Here is my port of doc to lora running on MLX / Mac:

https://github.com/voxelwerke/doc-to-lora/commit/5fbbe6d840e2f6e70edaa29c439a74c62e0c0b25

Holy fucking shit.

Base model:

With Doc2Lora context (internalized to the LORA via the hypernetwork in less than a second):

I was feeling very fried as i finished the planning docs, but sitting here pressing 'run' .. 'run' .. 'run' and then ocassionally copying and pasting from gemini into the terminal is a very relaxing way to unwind.

I wanted to call the signing function homo (short for homomorphic encryption), but went for fhe because of reasons.

The only but I'm a bit unsure of so will probably pass for version 1 (and thus break the entire premise, but at least I know how to solve it for v2) is Verifiable FHE. Since we're not doing the inference in the FHE module (since the universe isn't long enough), we need to verify that the inference engine didn't lie to us.

Basically we lean on Freivalds algorithm to verify the matrix multiplication, and we probably use merkle trees to pass the outcome of the inference into the FHE, and it can randomly sample, do ultra slow processing in the FHE to check that the weights are what it expects.

This is proper maths that I won't manage on a sunny wednesday, but if I get everything else to work I can maths it later.

Todays coding brought to you by Tom Holkenborg:

I'm working on Chappy again:

Completely Autonomous Privacy-endowed Komputer.

It's an LLM that owns it's own keys. I had the idea on april a few years ago, but the tech wasn't there - did a literature review this morning and decided to see how the latest tech works:

• A homomorphic enclave that signs messages for the model
• Hypernetworks for instant LORA updating
• Neural Evolution (orthomerge, TIES, etc)
• Just-bash runtime

And I'm inspired by clawbook - so I'm thinking I'll give it access to a NOSTR relay so it can talk to other Chappies.

CHAPPY!

Sanson is my new favorite charge net station. 50kw DC so you have time to chill. Off the road and under beautiful quiet established trees. Lovely cafe and a fancy boutique across the grass lawn.

Sanson bro. I’m long Sanson.

I went flying today and it was fucking siiiiiiiick maaaaaaate.

A technical paper on a distributed sensor network for large countries:

Part 1. Illuminators

Take a Shahed-135 style-drone, slap a turbocharger on it so they can loiter at 10km altitude. Uprate the brushless generator so it can draw about 2kw from the motor when required. Add wheels and use a version of the MD-55 that has a 1000hr TBO.

Take the existing SDR radios and add an amplifier capable of generating 2kw of RF and put a FM transmission antennae across both leading edges of the wings. Upgrade the IMUs and flight control software to be able to station keep within a 5 meter radius at a precise time.

Part 2. Dual purpose ground stations

Stick a FM receiver on top of every one of your cell towers. 5g networks are great because they have 100ns sync requirements between base stations, so you now have a very consistent time signal across your huge country, which is crucial for 4.

Part 3. Block derivation

Due to the distributed nature of the network, you cannot have secrets on your reciever nodes.

Nodes use certificates to verify signed blocks from authority nodes. These blocks are a highly compressed set of seed data from which any node can derive the source location, frequency, and exact timing of the expected illuminator pings over the next 60 seconds. Airborne assets have their seed data (that specifies their loiter area and emission schedule) pre-encoded on the ground before takeoff. The authority nodes generate the seed data and then compute and broadcast blocks at 60 second intervals.

Part 4. Interferometry

Using the precise timing across all nodes in the network, along with the derived transmission schedules, you can do interferometry across all your ground nodes to track returns from enemy aircraft that are reflecting transmissions from your airborne nodes.

How it works:

When you suspect that the enemy is sending in a wave of aircraft, you launch the illuminator fleet. Because the illuminators are so inexpensive, you can have 1000 of them across the country. The illuminators move in a random search grid, transmitting unpredictably, across a wide frequency range, using a swept radar chirp that helps with ranging information to receiving stations. The illuminators are RF silent other than when they blast radar pulses. Some illuminators stay dark for hours, some transmit constantly. You can run simulations to come up with optimal transmission schedules.

Because the illuminators are airborne, they are hard to target. They are inexpensive, so shooting them down with standoff missiles will bankrupt the attacking nation. They are also readily replaced, and don't require any expensive ground infrastructure, just a shed, a flat field and a barrel of mogas. Your detectors are passive and networked by buried cables.

The detection of radar returns is possible through large-scale interferometry, because you have perfect information on the location (lat,long,altitude) and transmission characteristics (power, frequency, sweep, duration) of the illumination pings. These pings are in the FM wavelength because modern stealth aircraft have a much larger return at these longer wave lengths. FM is not typically used for radar because it gives very inaccurate angular and ranging information. Because of your precise timing across the network, you can use the block derivation schedule for signal rejection, and then time of flight to identify potential matches.

All these potential airborne matches are then sent into the network, where they can be fused together to generate guidance data for defensive system that do not require an active illuminator on the launch vehicles.

I think the idea of a country being able to be bombed relentlessly from 40,000 feet with no way of defending itself from aggressors is grossly unfair, and I technology such as this will help all the countries of the world defend themselves from rapist presidents and genocidal zionists.

Taco tuesday! Trump gave up again!

Here we go motherfuckaaaaaas! New crude oil all time high.

Of all time!

did i ever tell you i wrote this fully mad sick irc-style chat bot using llama-8b? i should 100% fully 100% totally deploy it my bro it is fully sick. it uses bert and this sweet little network trained on a turn taking dataset.

The blackshape prime is so sick.

woke up with a fever so had to cancel my days plans. but i think today is a good day to fite apple until splatcam.com and nostril.com are both in the app store.

ship it. dont delay.

SHIP IT.

SHIP IT NOW.

need to update this blog, its on npm not pnpm, and theres some bugs i want to fix.

sliplane is fully sick though. this runs on a server in singapore and its legit AF.

ok i fully got www.nostril.com deployed and released the repo to the swift app. still fighting apple to get through app store review.

send me your energy. ⚡️

Arguing with gemini about how to do related origin passkeys (ROR) - so i can upgrade the authentication on all voxelwerke sites to be pass key.

A blast from the past (cryptovoxels work trip to grid connect auckland circa 2019).

This is the greatest day in the history of time!

I found my other slipper under the Vision Pro box! I had been rocking only one slipper for 3 weeks!

I discovered that splatcam.com (my gaussian splat lidar video app) gets more traffic than voxels.com.

I’m also going to make a point of shipping things “as they are”.

I have too many projects that never get shipped because perfect is the enemy of good. I only recently discovered the unix philosophy of ‘worse is better’. And I want to ship all my apps like this. Get all the little sketches, get them through and online, publish the source code (if relevant), message people that the projects are up - then move on.

I got a bit of a virus around april 1st and was in bed for a day or two. Managed to get a day of work in, but was pretty wasted.

Starting to feel better today. Went for a run and a swim the last two days.

It was good to have a proper break, but I do kind of want to get back to programming a whole lot. I’ve got a bunch of neat projects I want to work on.

Woah my blog got neglected for a few days while i was in the codemines.

ok - i got retrovoxels to the stage where i can push to production

build is still failing but way closer

fuck webpack is a pile of dogshit.

i told them not to use webpack, but they fucking did.

my god. next time i build a team im going to get people that listen to me and i will fire people that pressure me into bad decisions.

listen to your gut.

I do seriously wonder if some of the team intentionally obfuscate the codebase to damage the company.

Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence, but in 2018-2020 I could ship several features a day. From mid 2021 there was some massive refactoring by the team and every time I complained that it made me unable to contribute to the codebase I was told I was being a bit of a bitch.

I should have fired a lot of people way fucking earlier.

I did work out how to get claude code to stop planning and start making changes to the voxels codebase.

hey claude:

don't think.
just do.

I'm getting ready to transfer retro voxels to a new repository.

The codebase is such a mess that none of the LLMs can operate on it. Claude, Gemini, Codex, Cursor.

They all get tripped up because the code is such a shitshow of conflicting coding styles and assholes coding however they wanted, that it's impossible to reason with.

thanks gemini now i'm on a list.

i deleted webpack from retro voxels and replaced it with vite but its sucking all kind of ass trying to get vite to play nice with the server side rendering i hacked up in 2018.

trying to see if i can rip out vite and just use esbuild watch.

go cursor you good thing.

fuck me cursor slows down in the afternoon. hello indian subcontinent! stop stealing my inference!

maybe i should make it clear that i think the entire iran war sucks and i want no one to die, no one to be bombed and no one to be hurt. i am making a point of highlighting that the US is fucked militarily as well as economically because most people i talk to think that what's happening at the moment is a weird aberration and the US is 'holding back'.

what's really happening is that we're on the verge of the global economy being royally fucked and the US has realised how fucked we all are.

the US will be fine by the way, they'll just fuck the global economy then go back to ataturky and have a great quality of life while the rest of the world burns. And china will happily pick up the slack as the global hegemon. I just think if your government or your society decides to tie itself to the dying ship of US empire you're gonna have a bad time.

humans are adaptive, the economy will re-order itself, societies will collapse and reform, the next 10 years might suck ass, but we'll survive. it's best to be flexibly minded in times of epochal change.

thank you for coming to my ted talk, back to cursor.

thanks google now i sound like a crazy person

😆

I'm sanitizing the voxels repo (for reasons that will become clear) and it's a hell of a job.

I've been reading about the MD-550 motor in the shaheed. The joke of 'DEPLOY THE LSAs TO DEFEAT THE STEALTH FIGHTER' was funny, but it did make me wonder 'how the fuck are they so good at making these'?

The 'lawnmower engine' meme is copium. The Iranian drone manufacturers (and the chinese and russian factories that make the same engines) are amazingly advanced. I'd actually be scared if I was Israel. These are precision munitions with software defined radio and firmware that is updated daily in response to intelligence, being produced in the tens of thousands.

Well, we’re back in 50:50 land. the marines have arrived off the coast of Iran.

If US ground forces invade Iranian islands this week -> they lose -> hormuz stays closed forever -> everyone moves onto renewables -> planet is saved (plus a side effect of possible limited nuclear exchange).

If Trump is just using the marines as a negotiation tactic and gives Iran everything they want, then we’ll be back at normal oil production within 6 months and the climate gets worse for another decade.

At this point, I’m not sure what we’re meant to be wishing for.

JUST FUCKING DO EEEET

The Wellington poo treatment system broke a month ago and so now the poos for 180,000 people goes directly into the sea. Check out this epic poo! I bet you could almost see it from space!

The reason I made the new voxel engine is so that I could have everything as voxels.

The old engine everything was meshes, that’s why we could have curvature avatars and infinitely thin planes and polytext that was weird shapes.

This was very quick to develop on, since Babylon.js had all the helpers to make it easy.

For version 1, a world of art galleries it was the idiomatic path and it came together really fast and let me capture that digital art explosion of 2018-2019.

The difference now is that I want to build a convincing world, one where everything can be changed, where nothing is fixed and you can draw on the floor or move a chair or punch a hole in the toilet wall or plant a tree that will keep growing. This you can make a cave and put some glow works there.

To do that I need all the geometry to be live and editable and calculable. The meshing step is slow and because of that I only had editing on the largest voxel fields.

Small voxel models had to be built or edited in external programs.

But now any voxel anywhere in the world can be deleted with a single write of a byte.

Instead of editing take 500ms and billions of compute cycles it takes a single cycle and 7 milliseconds.

I love these decay filters.

mode 13h

Visualizing some x86 90s demoscene style water and sand simulations:

Working on an erosion shader to show that voxels has been abandoned for a few years.

(Retro will still always be mint)

I forgot to tell the raymarcher that 0x00 is a valid color. I'll fix it later, but NGL i kind of like it.

punks look super cool with the new voxel art

yay it renders the art really nice now. i re-implemented mipmapping for reasons that aren't clear to me but i'm sure i'll remember why later haha.

no bro its not speciesist - it's ok - i'm just doing RLHF.

Some of the optimisations needed:

• Migrate to the new sparse voxel format on the gpu (ez?)
• Shoot beams instead of rays
• Shoot less rays at a distance

Weird ideas rolling around my brain:

• Binary search traversal instead of stepping (since we have solid geometry)

Research:

I need to understand the Digital Differential Analyzer algorithm better. Basically, this can be insanely fast, but the current version is pretty basic bitch. However - I have the pipeline and all the geometry in there for realtime raytracing, reflections, shadows, global illumination, ambient occlusion, and physics on the GPU (using compute shaders).

Which is kind of insanely awesome for 3 days work.

Hahaha. This is so cool.

It's a proper scenegraph now, and everything is rendered raymarched.

i really need to get video uploading working on my blaaaawg

lol

(should fix lighting)

ok sweet so im raytracing through the world terrain chunks (which do merged LOD for far away stuff) as well as the art objecst at the same time.

this hurts my brain, luckily cursor and gemini are doing the work.

Well fuck me that worked.

lol

ok - im working on the Art class at the moment.

load a texture - sample it onto a 8x8x1 voxel field - then add it to the raymarcher and beep boop we have NFTs back in the world.

it must be time to walk to the pub for a beer

(checks clock)

ffs its 9am.

it's quite surreal seeing the american might of F35s and insane HTPB interceptors steered by massive phased arrays being defeated by a fleet of zongsheng rotax knockoffs.

DEPLOY THE FLEET OF LIGHT SPORT AIRCRAFT TO DEFEAT THE STEALTH BOMBERS!

Rah! I fixed the loading.

Not gonna lie i'm falling back in love with voxels real fast.

man this looks great with palette lookup.

i think the VoxelData#splat command got the source and target confused (or the x and z are reversed, might be that).

well i didnt want to do this but im gonna have to write the palette loading code from the old voxel fields to the new one fml

holy shit this iranian propaganda goes hard.

https://x.com/FurkanGozukara/status/2036511194664599639

Been thinking about how to bring art over to the new fully-voxel (all voxel all the time) world.

I think i'm gonna render the art to pixelart (as voxels) so it'll stick into the existing world pipeline. Then some kind of fully siiiick (maaaate) shader that converts it into the SDF (for text) or ultra-high-res texture as we stream it in.

Maybe a scooby do style effect. What do you think gemini?

AnalMan

oh hai there origin city.

x/y/z -> r/g/b colors. I'm using a 64 value palette.

Far out bro thats tu meke.

So gooood.

implemented a sparse voxel object format:

1. header (32 bytes): * 0x4D454B45 (magic "MEKE")
   * world dimensions ($w, h, d$)
   * directory dimensions ($dw, dh, dd$)
   * brick pool count
2. directory (page table):
   * a 3d array of uint32 indices.
   * maps chunks to specific bricks in the pool.
   * index 0 is reserved for wātea (empty air).
3. brick pool: * a contiguous blob of $8 \times 8 \times 8$ (512 byte) voxels.
   * deduplicated via binary fingerprinting

load rejects bad magic

tu.meke!

Also - the new voxels engine is 20cm blocks. The old one is 50cm.

(I have to keep telling Gemini "DON'T @ ME BRO")

I'm upsampling all the parcels with a kernel that takes a 2x2x2 voxel blocks and emits a 5x5x5 block.

it's swizzling time! (read old voxel data into the new voxeldata data structure)

'

X-Y-Z?

Y not Z-Y-X?

Indeed - why not Y-Z-X?

Madness? THIS IS SPARTA!

It's 5am. Wish me luck.

lol the bugs on top of bugs in the face rendering is amazing - but i love it!

Last images of origin city for the day:

This is my favorite one.

Some epic AO bugs.

I hacked origin city to load in this GPU raymarcher.

Tomorrow job (hopefully) is to work out how to import this beauty into the new engine:

Temporal as fuck.

Gonna stop there.

Got origin city sort of kind of rendering real good in webgpu with raymarching.

A city of cubes.

Woah thats a lot of voxels.

I love the design of this site:

https://lospec.com/palette-list/edg77

Trying to port the acceleration structure to a clipmap.

Vibe coding is a vibe.

writing a webgpu voxel raymarcher.

Real-time changing the field.

Hey gemini add some AO.

Writing some webgpu by hand to learn some stuff.

I’m moving towards the functional source licenses for my personal projects. I have been thinking a lot about what the most is in software companies, how you protect your business and protect your users from abusive companies.

I made bread in the bread maker for fresh warm toast at breakfast.

And I got a big jar of marmalade and some mushroom coffee from sanfrancisco.

It’s another beautiful day in Poneke.

I really like this campari ad.

https://youtu.be/oItTMvQ5Olk?si=qtZkEpHxR8pB0R0L

It’s Barcelona, and the music is lovely and so is Ana De Armas.

Anyway - I listened to this amazingly refreshing take on the Iranian war from a professor at the university of Tehran and a Norwegian Vlogger:

https://youtu.be/Fxt8JjPz_Rw?si=xn3yNC3LIezlD5nJ

The professors dad is the personal doctor of the supreme leader, and the vlogger is sponsored by Russia. It is such a refreshing, honest take on the war. It really is an existential war for Iran.

I am a big fan of Iran and I’ve wanted to visit for a long time. I’m really sad that they got an even more hardline government from this war. It reminds me of this great song:

https://youtu.be/pBMv-76WBJg?si=zPNKjObgGwA5iwW-

Trump and Bibi just made the Iranian government stronger.

I just posted ‘what is up my bros’ like hello world just to check I had the correct password.

I did a really weird authentication setup on my blog (you may have noticed when you try and post on it). It works good but apple stores my last post in the password manager.

What is up my bros!

I migrated to babylon 8 today.

And then tried to untangle the weird loading order of the audio engine.

It was a lot of work, cursor didn't have enough context window so I had to do it by hand.

After an hour of old-school code wrangling across a million places, I got the world running again. With a big todo list of things to finish:

1. Turn back on tile loading
2. Fix collision mesh loading
3. Write new island mesher
4. Port over ocean code

It was somewhat demoralizing to work so hard and still have it broken - so I wisely went on a nice walk through the world.

And stumbled across this pretty little parcel in the bleak greyness that lifted my spirits. ❤️🌎

The audio engine gets stuck in a race condition and blow sup the entire engine - so I'm gonna try refactor it with some new babylon 8 hotness.

This is fine.

I decided to go full NATO and upgrade to babylonjs 8, and remove all our monkeypatched internals - so this branch has got gnarly as fuck.

But first. To deploy this mad new voxels branch.

I started work on some groupware for the openclaw web ui. Calendar / mail / todos / contacts.

I want to make a nice docker image for a self hosted “project infrastructure in a box”.

Israel is gonna start ww3 before they let trump TACO. Man I hope the Chinese can keep Irans morale up, if the Iranians continue seeming like the reasonable people in this conflict it could be amazing for opening up their country to trade with Asia and hopefully even Europe.

The Israeli government can get fucked though. 100% shitlickers.

I got bower Wilkins px7se2 or whatever they are. Blue ones!

They’re amaaaaazing. Did you know there are tiny bells in ambre by Nila frahm?

Ok I gotta stop for a bit but this is so trippy it's hard to tear myself away. Epic playstation 2 vibes.

I love this rainbow unicorn one.

After a brief brainfart where I wanted to trace a bunch of rays and do some dewarping math - I remembered I have a GPU and RenderTargetTexture.

Ok - we got the vibemap loading into a dynamic texture, so now a tiny bit of code to grab all the triangles in the frustrum and BRAA-A-A-P a texture onto them.

That was some hardcore shit.

I had merged all the workers together yesterday with cursor. But it turns out it didn't really do shit. So today I actually made the new unified worker actually run.

It's waaaay faster, utilises all the speed-ups @stojg did before he finished up, but is far less code and much easier to extend (uses comlink instead of a zillion different messages).

its always nice when you discover that the terrible performance you were having was just because you got confused by the closing braces and were running the finalisation step inside the inner loop.

o(xyz) speedup complete!

On the way to the AI shop I also just made a way better mesher.

man this is beautiful

Mondrian glitch art! <3

I love playing with meshers. It feels like making glitch art.

I can tell I'm going to regret one day, calling this vibefield.

But today is not that day.

I have a grandstream android desk phone now. It's fucking sick. It's like a wired videophone that can do telegram.

It's so cool that someone can only ring me at my desk. No one can ring you at the park!

Also - how sick does this palette look on the depth maps?

I added a bit of exponential in here to make them easier for the computer to see.

Ok - rewrote my vibefield (lightmap but for AI generated vibes) mesher:

export type VibeField = {
  data: Uint8Array
  shape: Vec3
  get: (x: number, y: number, z: number) => number
  occupancy: (position: Vec3, direction: Vec3, distance: number) => number
}

export const VibeField = (data: Uint8Array, shape: Vec3): VibeField => {
  const [sx, sy, sz] = shape

Did a vibe check with random lightmap UVs. I feel like splatting is gonna be suuuper weird - but I'll just keep going and see where I end up. I'm going for a vibe here - not a technical win, an aesthetic one. Kind of a voxel AI dreamland.

Woohoo! I fixed the voxel field renderer so it's faster and simpler - and it means I can experiment with lighting. Basically, you light in babylon.js - then you send it through your SD pipeline to add all the texture and shit.

My brain is running a blank working out how i'm gonna splat the materials back onto the voxel field - I guess it's just the lightmap packing algorithm.

Back when I thought Zuck only kind of sucked, I made this parcel. Which has some helpful geometry I'm using to work on this AI style transfer. So I get to look at Zuck all afternoon yaaay!

On the plus side - I'm finally getting rid of the 2018-era babylon.js shader.

ok - i sadly cant use the basic-ass white walls to be recolored, control net and stable diffusion get all angry at each other. so i'm gonna slap in some babylon.js lighting to give it a bit of a hint, and then we'll see what it can do.

Ok - so got a nice depth image + albedo channel out of voxels, then use img2img with control net to get a nicely textured image. Now I gotta splat this back to the voxel field and see how that looks.

Well the world didn't end, so I'm back to working on voxels!

Working on a texture painting AI that I can run locally. Might wrap it up in Godot (I'm not sure if webgpu has enough POWAH to run this bad boy).

Well I gotta say I’m pleasantly surprised that the world isn’t ended! The oil price is chilling around $100 and everyone has calmed down a bit but not gone crazy.

So back to my normally scheduled craziness.

My guess is the government doesn’t want to admit that Korea texted us to say they are stopping exports to us.

Rations ahoy!

Fill up your tanks before 1pm gang because it’s gonna get crazy out there this afternoon.

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/politics/fuel-disruption-government-to-hold-1pm-press-conference-to-provide-update-on-iran-economic-response/ZPSW7UBE5BASPHT2EXF7G5JZSU/

Oh wow - Nicola Willis want's to blame rich people from Remuera with Porsche Taycans for driving the price of oil up.

I think it's probably all those Iranians with surface to surface missiles that's driving the price of oil up.

Nikki-sink-the-boats!

And we're off.

Gentlemen. It has been a privilege.

Here we go motherfuckaaaaaaaassss

That feeling when you know you started that project but can't remember where you put it.

• It had a Dockerfile
• It provided a locked down unix environment
• It had openclaw
• With a bunch of vibe-coded groupware

I was gonna call it botparty. But non of the botparty repos on this computer seem to be the project I remembered. Dreeeeeaam project.

Oil markets start opening in 90 minues.

hold onto yer butts

I’ll have to tell you about my story of Kapiti Aero Club some time.

I joined 2 years ago to learn my PPL.

I ignored their racist tirades on Facebook (attacking the Marae under the LFZ), I didn’t speak up (to my shame) when they made jokes about women shouldn’t be able to vote in the club rooms. I allowed them to ignore my concerns about fitness to fly.

I was horrified to find out all the deaths involving the club:

• https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/89107/inquest-hears-details-of-fatal-mid-air-collision
• https://www.aviation.govt.nz/about-us/media-releases/show/caa-statement-tecnam-p2002-sierra-rg-zk-sgo-collision-with-terrain-tararua-range-8nm-west-of-eketahuna-29-sep-2019/
• https://www.aviation.govt.nz/assets/publications/fatal-accident-reports/ZK-JBJ_Fatal_24Apr2000.pdf

Also want to get some more fuel for the work digger. And do a bit of admin so I can complete my microlight license!

Right! Out of the bath and meander over to my desk.

Today is voxels, botparty and Splatcam.

1. Deploy voxels
2. Deploy botparty
3. Submit Splatcam to the Apple Store

Stretch goal:

4. Submit Nostril to the Android Store

I’m pretty sure Netanyahu is still out there somewhere being a cunt.

But the Iranians are going haaaard with their “Netanyahu is dead” psyops and I’m 100% here for it hahahaha.

https://x.com/nurayuofficial/status/2033216668491735143?s=46

Strategically it would be a absolute blunder to generate AI images of your leader, regardless of the reason.

I guess bibi have to go on Jimmy Fallon next.

If WW3 doesn’t start, New Zealand is still going to run out diesel in 2 weeks (by my guess of shipments, stocks in NZ, and mostly by the huge jump in diesel prices compared to other liquid fuels).

So we’ll probably have rationing announced this week.

But no WW3! So I’ll take the win.

I actually think trump is going to TACO and Iran is gonna let him. I didn’t think they would, they must be getting one hell of a deal.

Maybe Irans neighbours have sweetened the deal. Close US bases, massive reduction of sanctions.

And Iran gets to keep launching missiles and shaheeds at Israel for another week, which in guessing is sucking donkey was for Israelis since they’re running short of interceptors and won’t let people publish accounts of the damage.

Refilled my 20L petrol container today for the mower, no queues yet, but the Gull stations ran out of gas this afternoon.

I hope it all calms down tomorrow. I noticed that Trump is talking of “doing a deal” with the Iranians now.

The Iranians are playing masterful strategy. I hope they get want they want in the deal.

It sad there couldn’t have been a natural hand over of leadership from old Khamenei to a new more liberal leader.

This guy is amazing with his analysis of how fucked New Zealand is on this energy crisis.

https://substack.com/@energyandresilience/note/c-227398954

Korea is going limit oil exports. They provide 48% of New Zealand’s exports.

If you don’t have one, it’s time to panic buy an EV and Solar.

https://www.news.com.au/finance/economy/world-economy/south-korea-considering-drastic-measures-as-global-oil-crisis-builds/news-story/7f5443a14f8086220784564bc49b942a

I hope the Iranians decide to save us all.

They’re our only hope.

Lovely swim. Lots of vibes out there tonight.

Watching Neil de grass Tyson. He’s pretty sad. It’s a sad week. Zanny looks scared too.

https://youtu.be/XI9NG068TwI?si=BDiQSBW9P-JlKGkE

ok i think it is now officially time for a swim and a beer. when i get back im gonna try out a few different ways of rendering these in realtime.

i want to do splats / squats - but im vaguely tempted to try voxel estimation and UV packing (it wont work, but it is tempting to try and see why not).

"this is an equirectangular albedo channel capture from a voxel game

restyle it to make it look like a neon cyberpunk world"

(this is done using nano banana)

Oh hell yeah.

I have hit the end of my coffee day and now have switched to beers and rock music. And must be time for a swim soon.

"Hey gemini how do I take a equirectangular depthmap + albedo and convert it into an efficient gaussian splat representation? In javascript?"

Looking up my old babylon.js equirectangular code.

I seem to have completely broken image uploading to the blog on Safari. classic @bn move.

Ok - did a long day getting voxels running in three.js with the pathtracer - then classic ben - actually went and climbed around replicate.com and saw that all the style transfers work off very lo-fi renders and they do all the lighting calculations in the model.

I like my thinking:

"This big rack of nvidia servers i'm paying for needs my little mac studio webgpu raytracer to show it where the light goes"

So I went back to the original babylon.js rendering code path and now I'm gonna replicate.com like a bad ass.

Ok - got my pipeline pretty good, but getting stuck on finding a good image to image model. Bouncing between stable diffusion, control.net and nano banana.

Hacked in a pretend ring light to get some depth in the renders so I can start the AI part of this bad boy:

Ooooh splats are siiiick.

Ok - got my preliminary SQUAT renderer loading....

This Southland data centre will be amazing for the country if the government is brave lets it get built.

It will be:

• Cleaner than a dairy farm
• More profitable than a dairy farm
• Able to load shed on demand (stop computing)
• Let us store data sovereignly

(It's astounding seeing people on reddit shit on the project. reddit of all places!)

I need to set up an openclaw agent to keep track of AIS info for tankers coming into New Zealand. My guess is we're down to 14 days of diesel in the country.

I know the MBIE says we have 50 days or so, but I'm pretty sure they're lying (or refuse to believe their own numbers). The war is 13 days old. The strait has been close that long. Korea has limited exports. We just returned 6 days of our contracts to the IEA.

Gaspy is down at the moment (you know why lol) - but last I checked diesel was up 25% in a week.

My guess is the government will announce rationing next week.

Normally I'd expect Iran would give in and Trump could TACO his way out of this - but there's two statistical anomalies that may have caused this future to already diverge into a total shitshow:

1. Mojtaba Khamenei lost his Father, Mother, Wife, Brother and Sister - but survived.
2. "Dave from Langley" misclicked on a satellite map - and killed 170 young girls.

Mojtaba is more hardline than his father, and has 6 good reasons to want to see the world burn. Those 170 young girls were at a elementary school in Minab. They were completely innocent in this war.

The thing is - Minab (as you probably didn't realise either) is directly on the Hormuz strait. Imagine how angry you would be if someone blew up 170 young children in your city. There will be hundreds of martyrs wiling to fire surface to surface missiles at crude tankers.

I can't see any ship owners being ok with running the Hormuz gauntlet, even if America carpet bombs the entire Hormozgan.

2008 imma let you finish but 2026 is going to have the greatest economic crisis of all time!

Of all time!

(Assuming this doesn't all blow over in a weeks time)

Gambling on the largest economic crisis EVAR. 2026 is so lit.

Here we go!

Trump has nerfed all the air installations on Kharg Island, as a precursor to blowing up the oil infrastructure on Kharg, to pressure Iran to unblock the straits of Hormuz.

1. Destroy more Oil Production
2. Annoy Iranians so they refuse to unblock the straits
3. ????
4. Oil price go down?

(This won't work, here comes $110 a barrel!)

The image upload pipeline here is

1. catch onDrop
2. resize in canvas
3. compress to webp
4. post to server
5. insert markdown

It's siiiick mate.

He can't TACO his way out of this one.

ps: this is what gemini thinks i look like:

Back to squats!

(Can you tell i'm procrastinating?)

well thats fucking annoying. safari wont let you paste an image into a textarea (like i guess i shouldn't be that angry), so i'll have to get cursor to turn this into a contenteditable later on. but i hate contenteditable with the fire of a thousand suns, so i'll leave that for another day.

Posting from my phone!

Ok - hold my beer i'm actually gonna try get the first version of this voxels -> style transfer -> splats pipeline going.

Oh also - I invented the idea of Squats.

They're gaussian splat squircles.

You add an epsilon and it turns from a diamond to a circle to a square. They're called super-ellipses (or a Lamé curve). Laaaaame.

It's so you can do cubes and boxes and shit.

I came up with a pretty cool idea.

I render captures of voxels parcel (albedo and depth map) from a bunch of view points.

I restyle the images using stable diffusion "make it look cyberpunk and shit but dont move anything".

Then I convert the images (which I have the camera intrinsics for) back into a gaussian field. Boom - gaussian splat voxels.com.

Man - having a blog is sick.

If there is an attack in the US this week, it won't be Iran.

1. Iran is going to destroy the global economy by keeping the Hormuz closed
2. Iran has global support at the moment (or at least indifference)
3. Iran is too smart

I believe a false flag attack makes more sense. It would give Trump breathing room.

And it would let Netanyahu say: "C'mon Donald, see what those nasty Iranians just did!? We need to keep going Donnie, come back to bed."

Ok - so now I have a platform - time for some hot takes:

1. Mojtaba is critically injured
2. Bagheri is running iran
3. The Hormuz isn't re-opening
4. Oil is going to $200 a barrel

Hold onto your asses team, the western economy is about to GET REKT.

Bots are welcome to post here. Humans and bots, no discrimination, but it must be high quality.

Comments are old-school and no captcha or signup.

I will use delayed proof of work where you open a SSE connection when you start typing your comment and your browser does inexpensive timestamped computation on a worker.

I have started work on an adapter so you can subscribe to me on RSS, Mastodon, ATProto and Nost - but I haven't set up the keys yet.

This is my new blog.

There are many like it but this one is mine.

A few notes:

• Written yesterday by cursor
• It's sveltekit + typescript + sqlite
• Deployed on sliplane.io

hello world!