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There are those who believe that advanced AI poses a threat to humanity. The argument is that when AI systems become intelligent enough, they may hurt humanity in ways that we cannot foresee, and because they are more intelligent than us we may not be able to stop. Therefore, it becomes natural to want to regulate them, for example limiting which systems can be developed and who can develop them. …

A recent paper of mine performs an intersection test in a ray tracing shader. To this end, I had to compute all real roots of a polynomial of moderately high degree (10 to 26). Overall, computing polynomial roots is an extremely well-studied problem where many highly accurate and reliable methods are available [Press2007]. However, implementations of such methods on GPUs are rarely found. After experimenting a bit with different options, …

“Hill House has stood for 90 years and might stand for 90 more. Within, walls continue upright, bricks meet, floors are firm, and doors are sensibly shut. Silence lies steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House. And we who walk here, walk alone.” – Eleanor Lance, The Haunting (1963) My earliest memory of […]

By Margaret Bennett I recently spent a few days in Italy, in the city of Bologna. One of Bologna’s nicknames is ‘Bologna la Dotta’ or ‘Bologna the Learned’, as it houses the oldest university in Europe. So maybe it is not so surprising that Tripadvisor has a list of the ten best libraries to visit in Bologna alone! Given the dire state of repair of our own central library in …

Abstract Cixin Liu’s “Wandering Earth” is a more recent depiction of Earth being used as a Starship. Like Stanley Schmidt’s “Lifeboat Earth” (1976) it does seem like something of a rush job – the Sun was about to undergo the Helium Flash in Liu’s tale and – and so there was no time to create … Continue reading "A Work In Progress – Starship Earth"

It’s been a while! Last time, I went over how the 3-stream Huffman decoders in Oodle Data work. The 3-stream layout is what we originally went with. It gives near-ideal performance on the last game console generation’s AMD Jaguar cores and is also a good fit for 32-bit x86 and ARM targets, both of which were still a pretty important target for us at the time the scheme was designed …

ENO La traviata Review – 28 October 2023 by Maxine Morse The ENO’s La traviata has the feel of a Parisian 1920’s nightclub, enveloped in blacks and reds, with a cast in tuxedos and bob haircuts. The pared down staging puts the focus firmly on stand-out vocals, intense dramatic sequences and beautifully controlled conducting. We are invited on a two-hour rollercoaster, taking a stomach-churning lurch to the highs of Violetta’s …

Recently I have been very fortunate to be given access to a superb collection of Old Walton photographs .More than one hundred new images of Walton have now been added to my Old Walton Archive thanks to Daphne Horton who owns the collection made by her late brother, Tony, (pictured below) Daphne & Tony Horton Tony, who was born in North Street, was an avid collector of images of Walton …

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Open Academic Publication Posted 10/28/2023 I’m currently at a workshop on open practices across disciplines, and one topic of discussion is how to change the academic publishing process to be more accessible to both authors and readers. I’ve also had a few friends outside of academia ask me how publishing research papers works, so it’s a good opportunity to write a post about the messy world of academic publishing. The …

Before there were cocktails (as we know them), there were punches; lots and lots of punches. Big bowls of swirling booze and fruit juice ladled out by the cupful to an anxious party of imbibers. When Jerry Thomas, the great-granddaddy of modern mixology, came to publish his book, “The Bartenders Guide,” he had already thought of distilling the contents of the punch bowl down to a single serving glass. One …

The Valencia Street center bike lane is finally open and ready for use in San Francisco. Finally those annoying “Bike Lane Closed” signs are no longer blocking the bike lane (that was ridiculous) and you can look down the Valencia Street bike highway. I have my own set of pros and cons, but let’s reserve judgement until we figure out how to use it properly, and only then can we …

WelcomeYesterday we played our final headline show of 2023. No one was particularly quick off the mark yesterday morning. I didn’t leave the house until 12:30pm and when I headed out the door everyone was enjoying the luxury of a slow start, drifting into the lounge and watching tv with cups of tea and whatever hodgepodge breakfasts they had assembled. Tristan had recommended a particular spot in Crown Heights where …

The following piece was written months ago, right after the “We Are Developers World Conference” took place in Berlin. So far I have not been reached out to for providing feedback to the conference, and I am not expecting it will ever happen, so I am going to publish this (unedited) here on my blog instead. There are some (at least one) swearword in here, for those of you who …

I help maintain a couple of projects and one aspect I find surprising — and a bit troubling — is how often people ask for features without explaining their problem. Maybe it’s already in the name, “Feature request”. Despite asking for a feature, often it’s not what’s needed. What’s needed is a solution to a problem and many problems have more than one solution.