> Turns out those functions were basically a verbatim copy of Inigo Quilez's work.
Are they? A lot of these were used by people >20 years before Inigo wrote his blog posts. I wrote RenderMan shaders for VFX in the 90's professionally; you think about the problem, you "discover" (?) the math.
So they were known because they were known (a lot of them are also trivial).
Inio's main credit is for cataloging them, especially the 3D ones, and making this knowledge available in one place, excellently presented.
And of course, Shadertoy and the community and giving this knowledge a stage to play out in that way. I would say no one deserves more credit for getting people hooked on shader writing and proceduralism in rendering than this man.
But I would not feel bad about the math being regurgiated by an LLM.
There were very few people writing shaders (mostly for VFX, in RenderMan SL) in the 90's and after.
So apart from the "Texturing and Modeling -- A Procedural Approach" book, the "The RenderMan Companion" and "Advanced RenderMan", there was no literature. The GPU Gems series closed some gaps in later years.
The RenderMan Repository website was what had shader source and all pattern stuff was implict (what we call 2D SDFs today) beause of the REYES architecture of the renderers.
But knowledge about using SDFs in shaders mostly lived in people's heads. Whoever would write about it online would thus get quoted by an LLM.
I opened the article and read the first paragraph. Then skimmed the rest.
As others pointed out: the fact you can do this in CSS tells you everything you need to know if you consider what CSS is for. Even w/o ever looking at the spec or understanding how it came to be.
i don't see what you mean? it's a rendering technology
i guess if you're someone still stuck on the "web browsers are for displaying static documents" and "css is for prettifying markup" thing, then sure, I bet what you said sounds real witty
Crazy that the future of software development now looks like we'll all be making UIs with specs that just a few years ago didn't allow you to trivially center a widget in a container.
SolveSpace is a PITA in that regard. You also need to re-learn most terms that are common in other CAD software. It's a typical OSS thing.
Why care about professional users that have years of learning invested into an ecosystem of professional CAD software (including terminology)? Because these people will get you the most valuable feedback if you can get them to even play with your OSS CAD thingy.
AI has now balanced the scores here. Someone with decent CAD experience can now instruct a model to build something useful.
Based on lots of good libs out there that solve the basics. I.e. concentrate on UI/UX to build something better.
It's like Lego, hands-free. You have all the blocks and you have someone who knows how/helps you combine them.
If you have good taste, you can get nice results without understanding how the Legos where made or how to even combine them.
I agree that it is very different from other CAD software, but that is also something I like. When I started using SolveSpace for some easy models, I was a bit lost. But then it clicked, and I really enjoyed the different approach. It is not my main CAD software (build123d is), but I really appreciate the workflow.
I don't think that every oss should try the copy what already exists. The best is when new approaches are tried. The same happened to me when I started using tilling window managers. "Professional" Operating systems don't have that, but I am sure that if more people would try them, many would realize that the workflow fits them better. So, my point is that there is no single best solution in terms of user interface or interaction with a program, and the fact that many people explore and share different approaches with their open source software is something I really appreciate.
You could ask Gemini (Deep Research) to create a jargon file with mappings.
That's the equivalent of LMGTF, in 2026. ;)
I mean all this is documented publicly online (docs/help for CAD software), market leaders are known and the LLMs have ingested this data during training.
woah, thanks! seeing the scenes in the blog-post i realize i've ran into it before, but must not have observed the lineage, committed the project to memory, or realized it was so mature
there's even a parametric split-keyboard project (what i'm doing too)! the clearances and cutouts in julianschuler/concavum-customizer/.../keyboard/mod.rs[1] are so much like my static, single-file, build123d-based version in antlers/keyboard/.../main.rs[2] >u< (though i made the walls out of more layers, photo in README[3]). thx again for pointing me that way!
I love how all these 'brand' fonts look indistinguishable to an untrained eye and still brain-frying-bordedom-inducingly close to each other to someone like me who actually studied & worked in typography.
It's just the design team running in place. And at a certain scale, it's cheaper to pay a type foundry $100k once, rather than paying Monotype continuous fees for a legacy family.
But as someone who has made multiple neutral sans families, I agree. The launch rhetoric about creating a differentiated visual identity is comical when you look at all the interchangeable corporate sans together.
Pretty sure it's just the pendulum swinging. Today its all about serious and clean and minimal. Then it will be whimsical and maximalist again. Skinny jeans, baggy jeans. Skeumorphic, flat.
The purpose of the brand font is to avoid paying licensing fees. Because the typefaces aren’t protected by copyright it’s usually enough to just have someone go and essentially clone an existing font. The whole thing is an artifact of peculiarities of IP law
> The purpose of the brand font is to avoid paying licensing fees.
There are more than enough good fonts under OFL that it surprises me people want to commission a custom font primarily for licensing reasons rather than using a standard one.
I think modern fonts include hinting software and stuff like that.
If you produced a bunch of screenshots of the output at various sizes, and then asked an LLM to convert to ttf or whatever, I’m guessing that’d be OK. I’m not an expert in this stuff though.
Brand fonts are typically a specific license by the original creator of the font, often together with some adjustments (e.g. big companies often need additions for global markets that were not in the smaller original font)
Corporate branding is nothing but an exercise in playing psychological tricks on people. None of it is actually distinct or important. But the silver tongued guys say it is, so people believe it even though it isn't true.
I haven't hit the "dumb zone" any more since two months. I think this talk is outdated.
I'm using CC (Opus) thinking and Codex with xhigh on always.
And the models have gotten really good when you let them do stuff where goals are verifiable by the model. I had Codex fix a Rust B-rep CSG classification pipeline successfully over the course of a week, unsupervised. It had a custom STEP viewer that would take screenshots and feed them back into the model so it could verify the progress resp. the triangle soup (non progress) itself.
Codex did all the planning and verification, CC wrote the code.
This would have not been possible six months ago at all from my experience.
Maybe with a lot of handholding; but I doubt it (I tried).
I mean both the problem for starters (requires a lot of spatial reasoning and connected math) and the autonomous implementation. Context compression was never an issue in the entire session, for either model.
The translations make no sense to a German native speaker. The list even swap meanings, i.e. between confusion and clutter.
Accurate translations are:
Verwirrung = Confusion
Zwietracht = Discord
You swapped i and e; somehow English speakders do this to German words all of the time. The 'ie' in here is a long 'i'.
Zweitracht on the other hand would mean a "double traditional costume", if that word existed (it does exist in theory, it is just then number two [Zwei] and the noun for a traditional costume [Tracht] strung together; would be a great name for a German shop that sells used/pre-owned traditional costumes btw.)
Unordnung = Clutter
Beamtenherrschaft = Rule of the public servant class
Illuminatus! is one of those works where there's a decent chance this is just a mistake or oversight, but also a decent chance this is exactly what the authors intended. You never can quite tell, and they definitely liked that.
I think the reason that English speakers swap ie/ei is that the pronunciations of these is not really consistent in English (at least in the American accent I speak), and I can't think of any words where both orderings exist but have different meanings. So the general impression I have about this is that I know there are supposed to be rules about it, but it seems pretty arbitrary and unimportant semantically.
Right, we truly don't have a strong rule about differentiating these in the standard American dialect! Most people say STINE for this one, but if you say STEEN, nobody is gonna be confused or tell you that it's wrong.
Its worth noting that in retrospect PageMaker won the DTP wars of the 1990s.
Quark XPress was the industry leader in that period (most users had a love-hate relationship with it). There was also Ventura Publisher but that had the least market share.
Adobe acquired Aldus and PageMaker became an Adobe product.
Quark were thought of (and reportedly thought of themselves) to be invincible in their DTP software market penetration/moat. Sounds familiar?
Their pockets were deep enough then that they even offered to buy PagerMaker from Adobe ... to bury it.
Instead, Adobe released InDesign and while a rewrite, it is clear to anyone who used PageMaker that the whole UX and ways of working was/were taken 1:1 from PageMaker, not XPress.
This was quite a daring move.
Adobe didn't have the standing yet in DTP to know if people would switch.
Especially since there were many software companies who had built an ecosystem of XPress plugins (very similar to the ecosystem if plugins that cemented Photoshop and later AfterEffect's positions as industry standards in image editing and motion graphics).
And for which Adobe wouldn't have a competing offer when InDesign shipped initially; and likely for years to come.
On the other hand, XPress was known for being unstable to the degree of being a PITA to work with. Even people who much preferred its UX over PageMaker were aware.
Still, I recall XPress users mocking InDesign and saying it would go nowhere.
Within a few years though, PageMaker's spiritual successor proved them wrong.
Sadly InDesign is now a joke.
Six years ago I had to use it for something simple like exporting 500 letter template instances to a single PDF for printing (where each letter gets the address/addressee replaced).
It couldn't do it. It would crash every time. I found bug reports and forum threads from years ago where people complained about this.
I managed to eventually export it as 'PDF for Web' as I found a reddit thread were someone noted this was hitting an entirely different PDF export code path.
In short, today, without serious competition for years, InDesign is just a cash cow for Adobe. Getting as much love as Quark XPress did, before its eventual demise.
"We sell car tires, selling fruit is just a side business."
"The fact that our fruit is rotten and customers complain about that does not faze us as, again: we're primarily a car tire business and that's where our revenue comes from."
The 'reasoning' of the sociopath-level[1] of the corporate hierarchy never fails to entertain.
It's all I need for my work.
RAM on this machine can't be upgraded. No issue when running a few Codex instances.
Claude: forget it.
That's why something like Rust makes a lot of sense.
Even more now, as RAM prices are becoming a concern.
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