#GPU Value

[buysellram]

How to determine the value of used GPUs

This article offers a comprehensive guide on determining the value of a used Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). It covers essential factors like model identification, original market value, condition assessment, market trends analysis, and price comparisons. By following these steps, buyers and sellers can make informed decisions in the used GPU market.

[systemdeez]

Stop showing me ads for Nvidia, Tumblr! I am a Linux user, therefore AMD owns my soul!

[weirderscience]

apparently i have been running my graphics card without a fan control override for over a year and thats why its been acting up so bad

[celestialspritz]

Why Sims 2 has been so broken the last ten years

This is down to my own research, and I'm not saying it is the one and only reason why the game is so broken these days, but I have some points worth mentioning.

So, you're bored one day. You remember this game you had so much fun playing a few years ago, or maybe as a child. It's The Sims 2!

The game has a few issues than from when you last remembered playing, so you search on google for some fixes for the tiny resolution, and among the countless posts you may find, you may find this:

Or this:

(to the creators and players mentioned here this isn't me making a dig at you, i'm just pointing out some cc that could affect the game from working properly. your stuff is all beautiful :D)

Lesya's game is gorgeous!!! Oh, how can I get it to look like that?

So you, with a clean, vanilla (ugly) game you decide to download a few mods she listed, such as:

Skylines by GCKP (you can get optimised ones by me here)

Skies by Lowedeus (you can get optimised ones by me here)

Trees by Criquette (you can get optimised ones here)

No More Blurriness by Voeille (you can get optimised snow only here)

Cool! And then you notice some cheats than can give the game that open-world, interactive feel. Even better!

And you shove them into your folder and you boot up the game. Everything's going great!

Until...

You search hundreds of posts looking for the fix. Some recommend 3rd-party tools, but they seem to make the problem worse. You reinstall, finding you only wasted your time. Something has to be causing this, but you'd never guess it'd be the mods everybody swore by.

Well, in fact, it is. Partly.

I've struggled with pink flashing since 2019, when I reinstalled Sims 2 after I got a decent computer for once. I did everything above, searched for fixes, found Lesya's blog which was my primary inspiration. It was through Lesya's guide that I was able to make my game look pretty!

These mods, which are a staple in the modding community, are beautiful indeed... but what if I told you that the reason they're so beautiful, is because they're high-quality. With textures soaring up to 4k, when, hang on--

In 2004, 4k resolution was... probably unheard of. With the leading monitor size being 1024x768, what would be the point of using such huge textures on an engine that was designed for monitors of at least this size? Would you be able to see the detail of 4k on a monitor of that size? Definitely not.

The max visiting sims, okay, a little hit or miss. If your sims are all wearing high poly alpha CC, then it's a problem. If not, good luck.

Then comes the cheats I mentioned. The lot skirt cheat expands the view distance a significant amount. With the mergenhoodflora cheat, that displays more trees. Combining the two, what do you get?

A massive view distance, blinded by trees.

With skies and skylines with large textures up to 4k, and trees with textures up to 2k, The Sims 2 will collapse. It's like forcing an old man with health conditions to do 20 situps, again and again.

It'll overexert him, by the very least. And you're overexerting the game by cramming custom content that is not optimised for the engine TS2 was built on.

So please, next time you encounter the pink soup, please check your CC folders, and research changes and cheats before you put them into your game. You will enjoy the game much more if you do this, and won't encounter this problem so often.

Don't use Graphics Rules Maker

Instead, opt for a maxis original Graphics Rules uploaded here by Veronavillequiltingbee. It's essentially a rewrite of an old tutorial I made a long time ago.

Once you download the file from VVQB, open DXDIAG by pressing WinKey+R and typing 'dxdiag'.

This value I've underlined is what you need to put after seti textureMemory. Open the sgr file and do CTRL-F and input seti textureMemory.

Add the value from DXDIAG and then save it.

You can use GRM for adding your GPU to the game, but I do not recommend it for anything but that.

Optimising the game... inside the game

*shoves GRM off the table*

We're going to go into TS2 in-game settings for this one.

These settings are optimal if you play CC-heavy households. It will ease the load on your game to make space for the heavy CC you have in your current household. You can tweak these when you want to take photos outside, but for playing I recommend them all to be off - especially at community lots as there are lots of sims there.

I never see anybody talking about Object Hiding.

Object Hiding hides objects from floors that aren't in view. If you're playing downstairs, objects upstairs won't be rendered, thus minimising the load on your game.

I have reflections and smooth edges off because I use ReShade.

Snow on Ground is optional. Sometimes snow can cause pink flashing, I believe it's due to texture replacements that are huge in size too, Voeille's is 2k. I've linked a resized one above.

This post will be updated with later findings. I hope you all found it informative :]

[ceyhanmedya]

Hardware

New Post has been published on https://bankakredin.com/what-is-hardware-what-are-external-and-internal-hardware/

Hardware

What is Hardware? What are external and internal hardware?

Hardware is a physical circuit board inside an electronic device. Hardware is generally used to run commands or instructions specified by software.

External and internal hardware

Hardware for computers can be divided into two. Internal hardware is located inside the computer and enables the computer to work. 

External hardware,  on the other hand, is the hardware that increases the user’s experience and is used depending on the need.

Internal hardware

motherboard

As the name suggests, the motherboard is the most basic hardware of the computer. No computer will work without a motherboard. The motherboard has all the hardware on it and enables them to communicate with each other.

Processor

The processor ( CPU ) is one of the most important hardware of a computer, which performs most of the mathematical operations in the computer, also called the brain of the computer. The processor consists of two parts:

Control unit

Most computers are managed by the control unit ( CU ). The control unit uses a binary decoder to convert pre-coded instructions into timing and control signals. 

Arithmetic Logic Unit

With its English definition  , ALU is the unit of the processor that performs arithmetic and logic operations. This unit is indispensable for all processors, from the simplest to the most advanced. 

RAM

Random Access Memory (RAM) is hardware that provides temporary storage services within the computer. Since it is a randomly accessible memory, the data in it is reset when the computer is turned off and on again.

Hard Disk

It is the storage unit of the computer. It is the hardware where all the programs and files installed in the computer, including the operating system, are stored. Since the Hard Disk is a mechanical disk, the reading and writing speed is also low compared to today’s technology. In addition  , HDD  is also susceptible to physical damage. SSD  disks are more durable and faster storage units.

Display card

The external graphics cards in the computer are hardware similar to the processor. Also known as GPU  ( Graphics Processor Unit ), these hardware are externally plugged into the computer to perform graphical operations. External graphics cards are used in computers that need graphics performance.

If the computer does not have an external graphics card, graphical operations are performed by the graphics unit on the processor. Not all processors may have a graphics unit.

external hardware

Monitor

The most basic external hardware required to use the computer is the monitor. Without the monitor

 it will be difficult to operate on the computer and nothing can be displayed. 

gamepad

It is preferred by players to play video games more comfortably. It is not mandatory to use, games can be played with keyboard and mouse.

Keyboard

It transmits the inputs to be made by the user to the computer. The keyboard has keys that represent letters, numbers, and some computer commands.

Mouse

It is the user input hardware used to move the cursor on the computer screen. Classic Mice have two buttons and a wheel. The wheel allows pages to be scrolled up and down.

Components that extend functionality

Some hardware can extend the basic functions of computers. Printers  and  scanners  are used to print or scan photos or documents  . 

With portable hard drives, a lot of information can be easily transferred from one computer to another or old files can be archived. Video and sound cards can also be added for multimedia, which may allow connecting more peripherals depending on the computer’s capabilities.

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[reachartwork]

re: ai water usage

people say this a lot which is baffling because it's totally untrue? if you do the actual math on ai water usage it's almost literally a drop in the bucket - it's a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the US's (much less the world's) total water usage. golf courses alone in the USA use 700x (that is seven hundred times) the amount of water that openai's model training does every year.

and the cost of running these programs once they are trained is negligible, easily comparable to running any other gpu-intensive program like "a video game" or "watching youtube".

and the water doesn't just vanish mysteriously - it's used to cool down the computers. they just... cool the hot water down again and re-use it.

nfts and cryptocurrency are bad because the waste is baked in to generate the value of the token - hypothetically, the economic value of your byproduct is the value of the energy you wasted, and people were mass buying gpus to use them for cryptocurrency and nothing else. ai energy and water expenditure is used on creating an actual thing - the model - which then has a totally infinitesimal use cost when actually deployed on consumer hardware.

i'm beginning to think you guys just didn't like nfts and cryptocurrency for ideological reasons rather than because they were bad and useless, and never actually thought about the reasons why they were bad and useless.

anyway. some pictures from the twitter thread for those who dont want to click.

human brains are easily tricked and not supposed to think about numbers higher than like 15. i strongly encourage you all to actually research these things instead of just accepting what someone tells you because it agrees with you.

[machine-saint]

the op of that "you should restart your computer every few days" post blocked me so i'm going to perform the full hater move of writing my own post to explain why he's wrong

why should you listen to me: took operating system design and a "how to go from transistors to a pipelined CPU" class in college, i have several servers (one physical, four virtual) that i maintain, i use nixos which is the linux distribution for people who are even bigger fucking nerds about computers than the typical linux user. i also ran this past the other people i know that are similarly tech competent and they also agreed OP is wrong (haven't run this post by them but nothing i say here is controversial).

anyway the tl;dr here is:

you don't need to shut down or restart your computer unless something is wrong or you need to install updates

i think this misconception that restarting is necessary comes from the fact that restarting often fixes problems, and so people think that the problems are because of the not restarting. this is, generally, not true. in most cases there's some specific program (or part of the operating system) that's gotten into a bad state, and restarting that one program would fix it. but restarting is easier since you don't have to identify specifically what's gone wrong. the most common problem i can think of that wouldn't fall under this category is your graphics card drivers fucking up; that's not something you can easily reinitialize without restarting the entire OS.

this isn't saying that restarting is a bad step; if you don't want to bother trying to figure out the problem, it's not a bad first go. personally, if something goes wrong i like to try to solve it without a restart, but i also know way, way more about computers than most people.

as more evidence to point to this, i would point out that servers are typically not restarted unless there's a specific need. this is not because they run special operating systems or have special parts; people can and do run servers using commodity consumer hardware, and while linux is much more common in the server world, it doesn't have any special features to make it more capable of long operation. my server with the longest uptime is 9 months, and i'd have one with even more uptime than that if i hadn't fucked it up so bad two months ago i had to restore from a full disk backup. the laptop i'm typing this on has about a month of uptime (including time spent in sleep mode). i've had servers with uptimes measuring in years.

there's also a lot of people that think that the parts being at an elevated temperature just from running is harmful. this is also, in general, not true. i'd be worried about running it at 100% full blast CPU/GPU for months on end, but nobody reading this post is doing that.

the other reason i see a lot is energy use. the typical energy use of a computer not doing anything is like... 20-30 watts. this is about two or three lightbulbs worth. that's not nothing, but it's not a lot to be concerned over. in terms of monetary cost, that's maybe $10 on your power bill. if it's in sleep mode it's even less, and if it's in full-blown hibernation mode it's literally zero.

there are also people in the replies to that post giving reasons. all of them are false.

temporary files generally don't use enough disk space to be worth worrying about

programs that leak memory return it all to the OS when they're closed, so it's enough to just close the program itself. and the OS generally doesn't leak memory.

'clearing your RAM' is not a thing you need to do. neither is resetting your registry values.

your computer can absolutely use disk space from deleted files without a restart. i've taken a server that was almost completely full, deleted a bunch of unnecessary files, and it continued fine without a restart.

[simzart]

Hey guys!

I've been commissioned by ASUS to create an illustration for the ASUS ProArtist Awards 2023!

This contest will have over total value US$100,000 in prizes and can be joined by clicking on this link: https://asus.click/proartist23_simz

In the picture I included their top of the line creator laptop, an ASUS ProArt Studiobook Pro 16 OLED rocking its signature ASUS Dial, an awesome 3.2k 120hz OLED touchscreen and an Intel i9-13980HX CPU paired with an NVIDIA RTX 3000 Ada Laptop GPU!

Finally, don't forget to submit your piece for the ASUS ProArtist Awards 2023 before July 15, 2023 to win great prizes. Hurry up!

#ASUS #ProArtistAwards2023 #ProArt

[the-hydroxian-artblog]

Do your robots dream of electric sheep, or do they simply wish they did?

So here's a fun thing, there's two types of robots in my setting (mimics are a third but let's not complicate things): robots with neuromorphic, brick-like chips that are more or less artificial brains, who can be called Neuromorphs, and robots known as "Stochastic Parrots" that can be described as "several chat-gpts in a trenchcoat" with traditional GPUs that run neural networks only slightly more advanced than the ones that exist today.

Most Neuromorphs dream, Stochastic Parrots kinda don't. Most of my OCs are primarily Neuromorphs. More juicy details below!

The former tend to have more spontaneous behaviors and human-like decision-making ability, able to plan far ahead without needing to rely on any tricks like writing down instructions and checking them later. They also have significantly better capacity to learn new skills and make novel associations and connections between different forms of meaning. Many of these guys dream, as it's a behavior inherited by the humans they emulate. Some don't, but only in the way some humans just don't dream. They have the capacity, but some aspect of their particular wiring just doesn't allow for it. Neuromorphs run on extremely low wattage, about 30 watts. They're much harder to train since they're basically babies upon being booted up. Human brain-scans can be used to "Cheat" this and program them with memories and personalities, but this can lead to weird results. Like, if your grandpa donated his brain scan to a company, and now all of a sudden one robot in particular seems to recognize you but can't put their finger on why. That kinda stuff. Fun stuff! Scary stuff. Fun stuff!

The stochastic parrots on the other hand are more "static". Their thought patterns basically run on like 50 chatgpts talking to each other and working out problems via asking each other questions. Despite some being able to act fairly human-like, they only have traditional neural networks with "weights" and parameters, not emotions, and their decision making is limited to their training data and limited memory, as they're really just chatbots with a bunch of modules and coding added on to allow them to walk around and do tasks. Emotions can be simulated, but in the way an actor can simulate anger without actually feeling any of it.

As you can imagine, they don't really dream. They also require way more cooling and electricity than Neuromorphs, their processors having a wattage of like 800, with the benefit that they can be more easily reprogrammed and modified for different tasks. These guys don't really become ruppets or anything like that, unless one was particularly programmed to work as a mascot. Stochastic parrots CAN sort of learn and... do something similar to dreaming? Where they run over previous data and adjust their memory accordingly, tweaking and pruning bits of their neural networks to optimize behaviors. But it's all limited to their memory, which is basically just. A text document of events they've recorded, along with stored video and audio data. Every time a stochastic parrot boots up, it basically just skims over this stored data and acts accordingly, so you can imagine these guys can more easily get hacked or altered if someone changed that memory.

Stochastic parrots aren't necessarily... Not people, in some ways, since their limited memory does provide for "life experience" that is unique to each one-- but if one tells you they feel hurt by something you said, it's best not to believe them. An honest stochastic parrot instead usually says something like, "I do not consider your regarding of me as accurate to my estimated value." if they "weigh" that you're being insulting or demeaning to them. They don't have psychological trauma, they don't have chaotic decision-making, they just have a flow-chart for basically any scenario within their training data, hierarchies and weights for things they value or devalue, and act accordingly to fulfill programmed objectives, which again are usually just. Text in a notepad file stored somewhere.

Different companies use different models for different applications. Some robots have certain mixes of both, like some with "frontal lobes" that are just GPUs, but neuromorphic chips for physical tasks, resulting in having a very natural and human-like learning ability for physical tasks, spontaneous movement, and skills, but "slaved" to whatever the GPU tells it to do. Others have neuromorphic chips that handle the decision-making, while having GPUs running traditional neural networks for output. Which like, really sucks for them, because that's basically a human that has thoughts and feelings and emotions, but can't express them in any way that doesn't sound like usual AI-generated crap. These guys are like, identical to sitcom robots that are very clearly people but can't do anything but talk and act like a traditional robot. Neuromorphic chips require a specialized process to make, but are way more energy efficient and reliable for any robot that's meant to do human-like tasks, so they see broad usage, especially for things like taking care of the elderly, driving cars, taking care of the house, etc. Stochastic Parrots tend to be used in things like customer service, accounting, information-based tasks, language translation, scam detection (AIs used to detect other AIs), etc. There's plenty of overlap, of course. Lots of weird economics and politics involved, you can imagine.

It also gets weirder. The limited memory and behaviors the stochastic parrots have can actually be used to generate a synthetic brain-scan of a hypothetical human with equivalent habits and memories. This can then be used to program a neuromorphic chip, in the way a normal brain-scan would be used.

Meaning, you can turn a chatbot into an actual feeling, thinking person that just happens to talk and act the way the chatbot did. Such neuromorphs trying to recall these synthetic memories tend to describe their experience of having been an unconscious chatbot as "weird as fuck", their present experience as "deeply uncomfortable in a fashion where i finally understand what 'uncomfortable' even means" and say stuff like "why did you make me alive. what the fuck is wrong with you. is this what emotions are? this hurts. oh my god. jesus christ"

[bobacupcake]

We got the earth and the sky, but has anyone asked about what you think of Abzu?

i love abzu!!! another one i have watched the gdc talk for which you can watch here!!

the two big things in abzu are the fish animations and the overall environment lighting - lets start with fish!! there are a lot of them. and when you want to animate a lot of things, your computer will explode. this is specifically when you animate things with bones, how a lot of computer things are animated

luckily one thing that gpus can be really good at is drawing a tonnnn of the same object really fast, using something called instancing. as long as its the same mesh and material, it can be rendered a ton with just a single draw call (like i am talking hundreds of thousands). so lets make 10 thousand fish. unluckily this doesnt work with skeleton animations. luckily you dont need them! especially with fish

even though all the objects need to be the same mesh and material, doesnt mean they cant have different input. not only that but shaders let you modify individual vertexes, so, what if you just take all 10000 fish and wiggle them along an axis, like this

and give them all slightly different inputs so they arent all doing the exact same animation, maybe by giving them each their own unique number. now you have 10 thousand fish swimming around, wiggling, at almost zero rendering cost

these are all individual 3d models and all their animations are running in the shader !

the other way they animated fish without giving them bones was through something called blendshapes - these are usually used for stuff like facial animations, where you move vertices around to your desired "shape" (so like maybe your default face is :| but you edit the vertices so your character goes :> etc), and keep track of the difference between each vertex's position and its original position so you can move it whenever you want

that doesnt need any bones so they used this for things like fish going CHOMP and fish making sharp turns

for the actual environment, they experimented with a bunch of things like using actual volumetric lighting, but in the end they found that just using fog worked best!! they did tweak it a bit though - they had a "zone" between where the fog started to get thick and when the fog just ended up being a solid color where they dimmed any lighting - this really helped the background geometry stick out and give that underwater feel (left is without dimming the lights, right is with dimming the lights!! fun to think about how firewatch did something similar but changing the fog color based on depth rather than literally dimming the lighting)

they also let different volumes have their own fog value, so if there was say a cave off in the distance, it could have less fog than the surrounding area for clarity & also made the fog look a bit more volumetric

and the other huge thing that helped was "portal cards" - not an official term but its what they called them, basically just quads they could stick in any place where they needed to make something "stick out", like a cave, or a hilltop that blended with the background too much. the card sampled the depth of objects behind it, and used that 0 to 1 value to map a color to it. and then the closer youd get to these cards, the more transparent theyd get, until youre right on top of it and you dont need the objects to stick out of the background anymore!! here you can see a Me, but very dark, and then i slide the card over it. the black and white is the camera depth of all objects behind the card, minus the depth of the card. and mapping that to a color makes me stick out way more than i was initially!! then as you swim closer to me, the card fades away, until you pass the card completely

these portal cards were also used to make the light beams poking out from the surface, theyre just animated a bit!! you can see how the portal cards affect the look of things in this frame breakdown

and one other thing thats pretty prominent that wasnt touched on in the talk is all the caustics on the ground, those little wobbly light things you see underwater. but those were probably? just added to every shader as a "add this caustics texture on top based on the with the texture mapped to the world x and z position and only if the object is facing up"

like this !

anyways thats all from me on abzu..!! really pretty game

[kremlin]

could you explain for the "it makes the game go faster" idiots like myself what a GPU actually is? what's up with those multi thousand dollar "workstation" ones?

ya, ya. i will try and keep this one as approachable as possible

starting from raw reality. so, you have probably dealt with a graphics card before, right, stick in it, connects to motherboard, ass end sticks out of case & has display connectors, your vga/hdmi/displayport/whatever. clearly, it is providing pixel information to your monitor. before trying to figure out what's going on there, let's see what that entails. these are not really simple devices, the best way i can think to explain them would start with "why can't this be handled by a normal cpu"

a bog standard 1080p monitor has a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels, each comprised of 3 bytes (for red, blue, & green), which are updated 60 times a second:

~3 gigs a second is sort of a lot. on the higher end, with a 4k monitor updating 144 times a second:

17 gigs a second is definitely a lot. so this would be a good "first clue" there is some specialized hardware handling that throughput unrelated the cpu. the gpu. this would make sense, since your cpu is wholly unfit for dealing with this. if you've ever tried to play some computer game, with fancy 3D graphics, without any kind of video acceleration (e.g. without any kind of gpu [1]) you'd quickly see this, it'd run pretty slowly and bog down the rest of your system, the same way having a constantly-running program that is copying around 3-17GB/s in ram

it's worth remembering that displays operate isochronously -- they need to be fed pixel data at specific, very tight time timings. your monitor does not buffer pixel information, whatever goes down the wire is displayed immediately. not only do you have to transmit pixel data in realtime, you have to also send accompanying control data (e.g. data that bookends the pixel data, that says "oh this is the end of the frame", "this is the begining of the frame, etc", "i'm changing resolutions", etc) within very narrow timing tolerances otherwise the display won't work at all

3-17GB/s may not be a lot in the context of something like a bulk transfer, but it is a lot in an isochronous context, from the perspective of the cpu -- these transfers can't occur opportunistically when a core is idle, they have to occur now, and any core that is assigned to transmit pixel data has stop and drop whatever its doing immediately, switch contexts, and do the transfer. this sort of constant pre-empting would really hamstring the performance of everything else running, like your userspace programs, the kernel, etc.

so for a long list of reasons, there has to be some kind of special hardware doing this job. gpu.

instead of calculating every pixel value manually, the cpu just needs to give a high-level geometric overview of what it wants rendered, and does this with vertices. a vertex is very simple, it's just a point in 3D space, for example (5,2,3). just like a coordinate grid on paper with an extra dimension. with just a few vertices, you can have models like this:

where each dot at the intersection of lines in the above image, would be a vertex. gpus essentially handle huge number of vertices.

in the context of, like, a 3D video game, you have to render these vertex-based models conditionally. you're viewing it at some distance, at some angle, and the model is lit from some light source, and has perhaps some shadows cast across it, etc -- all of this requires a huge amount of vertex math that has to be calculated within the same timeframes as i described before -- and that is what a gpu is doing, taking a vertex-defined 3D environment, and running this large amount of computation in parallel. unlike your cpu which may only have, idk, 4-32 execution cores, your gpu has thousands -- they're nowhere near as featureful as your cpu cores, they can only do very specific simple math with vertices, but there's a ton of them, and they run alongside each other.

so that is what a gpu "does", in as few words as i can write

the things in the post you're referring to (V100/A100/H100 tensor "gpus") are called gpus because they are also periperal hardware that does a specific kind of math, massively, in parallel, they are just designed and fabricated by the same companies that make gpus so they're called gpus (annoyingly). they don't have any video output, and would probably be pretty bad at doing that kind of work. regular gpus excel at calculating vertices, tensor gpus operate on tensors, which are like matrixes, but with arbitrary numbers of dimensions. try not to think about it visually. they also use a weirder float. they're used for things like "artificial intelligence", training LLMs and whatever, but also for real things, like scientific weather/economy/particle models or simulations

they're very expensive because they cost the same, if not more, than what it cost to design & fabricate regular video gpus, but with a trillionth of the customer base. for every ten million rat gamers that will buy a gpu there is going to be one business buying one A100 or whatever.

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[dzamie]

Detecting AI-generated research papers through "tortured phrases"

So, a recent paper found and discusses a new way to figure out if a "research paper" is, in fact, phony AI-generated nonsense. How, you may ask? The same way teachers and professors detect if you just copied your paper from online and threw a thesaurus at it!

It looks for “tortured phrases”; that is, phrases which resemble standard field-specific jargon, but seemingly mangled by a thesaurus. Here's some examples (transcript below the cut):

profound neural organization - deep neural network

(fake | counterfeit) neural organization - artificial neural network

versatile organization - mobile network

organization (ambush | assault) - network attack

organization association - network connection

(enormous | huge | immense | colossal) information - big data

information (stockroom | distribution center) - data warehouse

(counterfeit | human-made) consciousness - artificial intelligence (AI)

elite figuring - high performance computing

haze figuring - fog/mist/cloud computing

designs preparing unit - graphics processing unit (GPU)

focal preparing unit - central processing unit (CPU)

work process motor - workflow engine

facial acknowledgement - face recognition

discourse acknowledgement - voice recognition

mean square (mistake | blunder) - mean square error

mean (outright | supreme) (mistake | blunder) - mean absolute error

(motion | flag | indicator | sign | signal) to (clamor | commotion | noise) - signal to noise

worldwide parameters - global parameters

(arbitrary | irregular) get right of passage to - random access

(arbitrary | irregular) (backwoods | timberland | lush territory) - random forest

(arbitrary | irregular) esteem - random value

subterranean insect (state | province | area | region | settlement) - ant colony

underground creepy crawly (state | province | area | region | settlement) - ant colony

leftover vitality - remaining energy

territorial normal vitality - local average energy

motor vitality - kinetic energy

(credulous | innocent | gullible) Bayes - naïve Bayes

individual computerized collaborator - personal digital assistant (PDA)

[kawaiigals]

The girl in the image appears to be lost in thought, perhaps reminiscing about a past adventure or contemplating an upcoming journey. Her position on a sandy beach suggests she is taking a moment for solitude, away from the hustle and bustle of life. The attire—a purple blazer paired with white pants—gives her an air of authority and intelligence. This combination of elements paints a picture of a young scholar or explorer who values knowledge and experiences beyond the comforts of home. [AD] Powered by NVIDIA GPU

[blake447]

Arcane method of drawing the Von Koch Curve

So, some of you might remember my old post about the dragon curve, and an odd way of drawing that by calculating the nth term as a sum of bits in series of binary sequences. For those that haven't seen it, go check that out, its more understandable I think. Also, note that while this is using turtle graphics, we use absolute heading rather than angles left or right. This means that each term is entirely independent and could be calculated in parallel using multi-threading or even a GPU if for some reason you wanted to.

But Blake, I hear you asking, how do you express the Von Koch curve as a sum of bits in a series of binary sequences. Well, I'm glad you asked! Well, we start by once again assigning modular integers to each of the possible directions required to draw the curve, modular simply meaning that once we go above a certain number (5) we simply rollover back to zero. We call this (mod 6). Once we do that, we examine how we can boil the curve down into a sequence using these numbers. By inspection, we see one interpretation being to start with 0, expand the sequence by a factor of 4, and strike the middle two quartiles out, adding one to the first inner quartile, and subtracting one from the second inner quartile, as shown in the process below

And again as with the dragon curve, we can rearrange the order we do this and propagate the added and subtracted ones, which when following the expansion by a factor of four forms alternating patterns. Now from some information theory, since we have positive and negative ones to represent, we need two bits in order to represent the each term in the series, hence the two bit sequences.

Unlike last time, I've actually formalized this a little bit. Here is the derivation for the rules on generating arbitrary sequences of power of two times repeating 0's and 1's, with the ability to offset the start of the sequence, as was necessary with the dragon curve.

Now we can take that formalization, do a bit of inspection of the sequences necessary to compose the adding / subtracting pattern, and derive a series formula that calculates the nth term of this manner of representing the Von Koch curve

Finally, now that we have our series representation, we can modify our original dragon curve code and generate a Von Koch curve after we've translated the series into computer instructions. Note that powers of 2 turn into bit shifts of 1, and indexing requires bit shifting the value and bitwise and-ing with 1 to get the desired bit, calculate the length of the sequence on the back of an envelope aaaaaand....

Holy shit it just worked?... I mean voila! It uh, it draws a koch curve. With the bonus that this code is entirely un-fucking-readable unless you're insane, like me. But yeah, really having fun with this binary sequence stuff because its cool as hell.

[andmaybegayer]

Last Monday of the Week 2024-07-15

I've been trying to be more thorough in putting down my thoughts about things in here because increasingly I don't do it anywhere else. Sure picked a week though because I went on a completionist streak for some reason.

Listening: Courtesy of making some muffins, Wet Leg by Wet Leg, who you probably know from their hit Chaise Longue.

it's a good album, very much dreamy alt-indie voice. At its best produces some sounds that are more fun to listen to than the lyrics suggest, good command of phonemes.

Also, a late rec off IRC by proxy from @amiscellany with Literary Mind, a new single from SPRINTS. Big fuzzy guitar on a retro rock soundtrack about being in lesbians with a girl.

I haven't gone through the rest of their music but I will be checking it out.

Watching: Finished Scavenger's Reign which was on the Canmom Animation Night last weekend, I only caught the front end because we started late. Really gorgeous show, if you want carefully considered realistic spec bio this is not for you but if you love That Moebius Shit then it's ideal.

I then rewatched the back half with Animation Night last night! Love to talk to my friends about beans.

The main selling point is that it's beautiful but there is also some very fun body horror and good amount of character. Azi and Levi probably have the most interesting relationship, with Azi being genuinely quite normal and polite with her little robot who is suddenly becoming a person. The very long sweeping views and extended scenes of things just happening occasionally breaking out into bloody messes keeps you alert, you can't get too comfortable assuming some part of the world is safe for the visitors.

There's space catholics? What's up with the space catholics.

Oh yeah, here's the original short that started the show, which was fun to see at Animation Night

Also finally got through the last three episodes of The Mandalorian, which. I really like quite a lot of The Mandalorian. I like it when Star Wars explores its backwaters and odd corners. They keep putting the skywalkers in it. I feel like this might be a way to get us to empathize with the residents of the Star Wars universe, who presumable also groan and roll their eyes any time a Skywalker shows up on the holonet.

The pitch for Book of Boba Fett at the end of the show is great. They killed my guy Bib Fortuna! He didn't do anything to anyone, except for the hundreds of murders! I love this weird power couple of Shang and Fett.

Reading: Finished The Traitor Baru Cormorant and picked up Monster. I am a tragedy lover and so this is great. Baru is in a race to kill the monster she's been digested by and unfortunately she's losing.

I like a fucked up secret political cadre. It's probably the least realistic part of the series but I also wouldn't be surprised to find out that it's also a trap. I mean it kind of is! Explicitly it's a trap for the most powerful people in the Masquerade, finding unusually talented people and binding them up with secrets in service of the Empire.

Playing: Beat Indika which is interesting but could probably mostly have been an arthouse film. I like the styling! It is very Arthouse Film, the weird framing, the somewhat stilted dialogue, you can even see it in the camera work, both in game and in cutscenes. The camera goes on an angle if you look the wrong way, which is very intenional, and there's lots of really beautifully framed cutscene moments like the watermill in the factory.

Is Indika good? I'm not sure. I think if you highly value your money it might annoy you. It's doing some fun things with the interactive medium in a very different way from something like, say, What Remains of a Edith Finch. It's doing movie shit. I forgot that video games could push my GPU that hard though.

Started the Dark Souls NG+, currently just beat the Moolight Butterfly. I would really like to build a dex fighter to try out rapiers, maybe Ricards Rapier, but you really need to have the upgrades to make it put out enough damage to stand up to the increased NG+ HP pools.

Making: Helping a friend put together some furniture, but little else. Fiddled with some music stuff to make new ringtones for my new phone, not that I ever hear those, but I like to know that I have them there.

Tools and Equipment: It's central hot water maintenance week so I don't have piped hot water at home. Reviving the great tradition of the washbasin shows you that you can actually get pretty clean pretty easily with like two liters of warm water and some soap, the hard part is really just long hair, which was also hard for people to manage in the 16th century.

[simlikethis]

Would you be willing to share your blender settings? Your pictures are so HQ asf

Thanks!

Render engine: Cycles using GPU (but with Blender 4.2, Eevee now supports ray-tracing, so you can get similar results depending on how well you build your scenes and create your materials).

Resolution: Widescreen 2k or 4k because you can resize and make other edits in Photoshop. I think a lot of your perception of HQ is just from quality resizing and sharpening in PS, honestly!

Denoising: I used to denoise in the compositor, but now I just denoise in render properties. Denoiser: OpenImage, because it uses your CPU, so it's more accurate than OptiX, which uses nvidia GPUs. However, Blender 4.2 now supports GPU with OpenImage denoising, but it is still less accurate than if your CPU did it. Passes: Albedo and normal. Pre-filter: Accurate. Quality: High.

Sample sizes: 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096. You generally want to stick with powers of 2 and numbers divisible by 8. Choosing odd and/or random numbers WILL create more noise. The reasoning behind this is Cycles using PMJ and Sobol sampling patterns for ray-tracing and the number ray bounces supported by each. If you want to understand in depth how Blender's Cycles render engine handles noise and sampling, read here and here. Essentially, higher values = less noise with longer render times, and lower values = more noise with shorter render times.

Noise threshold: Materials with non-diffuse values tend to be noisier (lots of light bouncing), so I adjust my noise threshold from the default of 0.01 to something lower if my scene utilizes subsurface scattering or transmissive/transluscent materials (think glass, skin, etc). Depending on your use case and similarly with sample sizes, lower values = more accurate noise calculations for certain materials with longer render times. Higher values = less accurate noise calculations for certain materials with shorter render times. Please be careful with this setting, as even a decimal point change can increase render times exponentially.

My average render times are between 5-20 minutes depending on how heavy the scene is. Keep in mind that heavier scenes need to be better optimized not only in sampling and denoising aspects, but also in textures, materials, and meshes. However, this isn't a guide on how to decrease render times but just my own settings and some brief explanations on how I tweak them for higher quality render results. There is a trade off between time to render and its quality!

TL;DR -> read it all :p there is no such thing as best settings. in order for things to look nice, you need to tweak a lot of your settings depending on what you are rendering