🌾 ivan 🌱 @ivan@coolkids.house

My piece “The Tapestry of the Search for Terrestrial Intelligence” is on view as part of the Cosmological Elements exhibit at @fosunfoundation in Shanghai through Feb 11.

The Voyager space probes went out with the famous Golden Records containing sounds - and encoded images - from Earth. If aliens found these discs, how would they understand them? I suppose they might interpret the encoded data as instructions for weaving a 40 meter long tapestry.

The Furby source code is public and heavily commented. For example, it turns the microphone off when the motors are running.

Furby was the 1998 version of ChatGPT and tons of people thought it actually slowly learned English words. The NSA was alarmed. However it turned out the "learning" process was just on a timer and the "microphone" only triggers on loud sounds.
https://archive.org/details/furby-source

The attached image from my recent curve explorations gives an interesting insight about cubic Béziers. It is an optimum curve fit for a sine wave (using fancy math to determine optimum subdivision points).

Any human designer would put the subdivision points at the peaks and troughs. But that's not actually optimum. A Bézier "wants" to have its curvature maximum just off the endpoint, not right on it.

@chengdulittlea
Our Paint 0.1 is released for Linux! Yay!

Download at https://ChengduLittleA.com/ourpaint

Borderless canvas, nodes brushes, color management, wacom support, and more!

(I have no idea if it runs on your machine, but there's an AppImage if anyone wants to try, otherwise you can compile)

5 minutes of work, 25 minutes of fucking about

Happy birthday @Blender !

Today is Blender's birthday again. Happy birthday to this 29 years young program :)

The screenshot was made on my old SGI Indy, because Blender was initially made by @tonroosendaal on an SGI machine.

#b3d #Blender3D #birthday #celebration

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Getting ready to start a new year like

picoCAD for PICO-8

a program to build and texture lowpoly 3D models

[...]

picoCAD aims to make it fun, easy, and accessible by focusing on the bare essentials.

by @johanpeitz

https://johanpeitz.itch.io/picocad

Y'all want to see a cool shader?

https://www.shadertoy.com/view/dls3Wr

This is mashing up two ideas:

- @iquilezles@twitter.com's closed-form "signed distance to a quadratic Bézier curve" solver
- using winding number to determine inside/outside-ness

Putting these two ideas together, we can render a Bézier font from its raw control points, as a single (huge) closed-form math expression!

The domestic robot's lidar has detected evidence of a mirror universe.

Beautiful timelapse of Earth setting below the Moon's horizon captured by the Japanese lunar orbiter spacecraft Kaguya. ©JAXA/NHK

#moon #earth #japan #timelapse