Facebook is bizarre. It’s the first entity I’ve seen that late stage enshittified. From what I remember, their strategy was: if you didn’t *constantly pay more* you got deranked in the algorithm. Even for advertising. Insane anti social behavior for both consumers and advertisers

Thin plate RBF spline, taken from https://shape.polymtl.ca/lombaert/thinplates/

After profiling the first step, the primary perf hog (~30s per frame) is something called a “Thin-Plate RBF spline.” I don’t think we have anything like this in #graphics or #gamedev …but we should. It feels a little like irradiance caching. Maybe radiance cascades could be handy here? #astronomy

That one is a wee bit of a fib because I only transfer the data once. I’m assuming I can parallelize transfers while a compute job is going for said test. If anything, it’s the upper limit of what this simple code can do.

The streams are a command queue vs requesting each kernel individually

2048x2048 convolution with a 32x32 kernel performance comparisons. Time is log scaled.

#Astronomy feels SO much like peeking into a parallel world from #gamedev. Its fascinating. Its like if we only did pixel shaders for decades with color only, no normals

Tested a 2048x2048 image convolved with a 32x32 kernel. Literally a bloom shader lol, ~500fps

Gonna blow some minds with this

Since each generation is 15 years apart, by extrapolation, 21 will be funny again in 2371

I was finally given an astronomy research task, the first of which is to install something called "Topcat"

Oh my god hello again web 1.0

I wonder how much room there is to transfer the last 20 years of graphics tech into this field. Java's a bit of an odd choice nowadays
#astronomy

Are these GA Rotors? It almost has the exact half angle rotations we see in that realm, but in this case both sides are positive? Weird, but neat!

This all ignores Elon’s dark descent since buying twitter. He’s gone fascist, abandoned his companies, and turned twitter into 4chan’s worst boards. His mission went down the drain of that sink he let in

The fucking “@grok put a one-piece bikini on it made of thin strips of fabric” shit is so god damn antisocial it feels like a Facebook feature. We all know how that went. Shocked any artist remains there. What a disgrace to any artist to ask grok to pave over labor with corporate slop

I was debating cross posting to the dead bird site for engagement. Every time I go there all I see are cool research papers!

But then I scrolled a little further and between the research there’s “yeah, we SHOULD kill the Jews” and in every art reply there’s ai generated CP and

Yeah I’m good.

Do people usually not importance sample the human luminance sensitivity spectra and treat the rest as procedural color? I’ve done that to great success for visualizing relativistic blackbodies but maybe I had the precise niche where that worked well

Man I’m having such a shitty 2026 so far.

• my nose was kinda itchy earlier

God it hasn’t been my year. Can’t wait for 2027

Whoops!! I forgot to share the results! It still has a few odd rendering bugs, this is a Kerr black hole. Runs in real time with my modified Kerr metric using a normal vector parameterization. Still couldn't squash the horizon reflections, but the frame dragging is super visible now!

I’ve always been a fan of ml papers that rip out as much of the ML as they can. No magic parameters, no stolen data, and it’s often fast enough for games. Gaussian Splats and Plenoxels are excellent examples for graphics. I feel a form of GS would make for stellar screenspace imposters

Monday rhymes with book

Imagine if all of OOT was like that, in first person, like they originally planned! It’d prob end up being like metroid prime lmao

I was crunching to finish GR assignments (I need more time 😔) and had a realization. What if you remove gravity from GR? And it worked. Like, shockingly well. Is GR just a system to embed physics into a coordinate system? …isn’t this Lagrangian fluid dynamics? What a crazy plot twist wtf

Here’s a fun litmus test for you: does your sim produce the rainshadow effect & horse latitudes?

Holy fuck I can’t fucking believe the Kerr reparameterization worked holy shit even the naked singularity works

Sure some of the rays are bouncing off the horizon but rk4 is doing its best

I wonder how well this system would work with a little bit of z axis flow too? You’ve shown that it produces trade winds, so a two-layer sim may produce full atmospheric cells. It’d make rendering easy too as it’s just two sphere textures

General relativity notes on graph paper, deriving the Schwarzschild equation of motion for the radial term. There are pens at the bottom of the screen, and some glasses.

Degenerate General relativity is such a wacky idea I’m shocked it’s working so well. Schwarzschild produced a genuine simplification when using a degenerate normal instead of true 4 parameters. Kerr’s demon is scaring the hell out of me though……….

Mascot horrors gotten real weird lately huh

After this semester I’m going to see if I can improve on the Gaia team’s MCMC method with a direct MC and try to find a better fit. I’d love for this to be actually accessible at this scale

Warning: the entire Gaia dr3 dataset is 700 *gigabytes.* the culled data (position, distance, luminosity/flux, temperature, and “fog”) is ~15gb. Filtering it took around a day on my old pc.

But!! Parts are visible in each chunk, ~250mb each. It’s worth it!!

I wonder how useful modern diffusion model papers would be at this problem. I’ve found a lot of success taking neural methods and ripping the neural network out for nearby domain problems, like this one. Fourier gradient descent is a fun one that’s similar to non-neural CNNs as an example

3d visualization of an Atomic Force Microscope image. There are prominent wave-like structures on top of the dune-like structures.

Used the tools I got from the Gaia renderer to improve my atomic force microscope renderer. God damn it’s satisfying to see in 3d. Shai-Hulud not included

If you can find a used one the entire 3000 series is wonderful. My heavily bottlenecked 3090 has been a dream despite the decade old cpu it’s bolted to

Gaia dr3 main sequence visualization, unknown orientation.

It sure produces a cool main sequence render. You can see Gaia's MCMC implementation struggle hard here. I ought to come back and make a better one using forward MC instead, those artifacts (and the 1.3 billion culled stars) bother me a lot

Top down view of the milky way, 470 million stars visible. Log luminosity scale, there are weird artifacts.

Top down view of the milky way, 470 million stars visible. Log luminosity scaled by a power of 5, there are weird artifacts. The colors are way more prominent here!

Oh my god it fuckin works!!! 470 million stars render in ~90 seconds.

The odd artifacts, streaks, and lack of milky way arms is interesting though. I wonder what went wrong? I betcha the blue streaks are galaxies.