Old School Visual Effects: The Cloud Tank (2010)
INT. WAREHOUSE – NIGHT Following my recent rants about computer generated effects (here and here), I thought it would be fun to look into one of the old school visual effect techniques that computers have now rendered obsolete. Today’s subject is… The Cloud Tank. CUT TO: WHAT IS A CLOUD TANK? A cloud tank is […]
European Tech Alternatives
Find GDPR-compliant, EU-hosted software and service alternatives that respect your data sovereignty. Browse 500+ European companies across 30+ categories. Explore Popular Categories Popular Alternatives Browse by Country About EU Tech Map EU Tech Map is the leading directory of European software companies and GDPR-compliant alternatives. We help businesses find trustworthy, privacy-respecting technology solutions hosted in […]
Step 3.5 Flash: Fast Enough to Think. Reliable Enough to Act
Architecture Optimized for Flash-Speed Decoding and Inference The architecture of Step 3.5 Flash is defined by a model-system co-design that prioritizes inference cost and speed as the core architectural constraint. We employ a Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) backbone to decouple global model capacity from per-token computation. While the total knowledge base spans 196B parameters, the system […]
Minecraft Java is switching from OpenGL to Vulkan
Work continues for the Vibrant Visuals update to come to Minecraft Java, and as part of that they’re switching the rendering from OpenGL to Vulkan. Announced today (February 18th) by Mojang developers, it’s a huge change for such a game and will take time – but it will be worth it in the end so […]
15 years of FP64 segmentation, and why the Blackwell Ultra breaks the pattern
Buy an RTX 5090, the fastest consumer GPU money can buy, and you get 104.8 TFLOPS of FP32 compute. Ask it to do double-precision math and you get 1.64 TFLOPS. That 64:1 gap is not a technology limitation. For fifteen years, the FP64:FP32 ratio has been slowly getting wider on consumer GPUs, widening the divide […]
How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe
Europe faces a critical choice in the race for artificial intelligence (AI). As the technology promises to reshape economies worldwide, policymakers are caught between two competing narratives. Optimists envision AI as the catalyst for a new productivity boom, potentially adding several percentage points to annual growth (Baily et al. 2023). Sceptics warn that adoption barriers, […]
Ladybird: Closing this as we are no longer pursuing Swift adoption
List of issues preventing moving forward on moving Swift 6.0 support out of an experimental state: https://gitlab.kitware.com/cmake/cmake/-/issues/26174 Details: Swift + Ninja doesn’t respect CMAKE_OSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET. This results in a mismatched LC_BUILD_VERSION on swift and c++ object files, spamming the console with warnings. Workaround: # FIXME: https://gitlab.kitware.com/cmake/cmake/-/issues/26174 if (APPLE) set(CMAKE_Swift_COMPILER_TARGET ”${CMAKE_SYSTEM_PROCESSOR}-apple-macosx${CMAKE_OSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET}”) endif() https://gitlab.kitware.com/cmake/cmake/-/issues/26175 Details: With CMP0157 enabled, […]
All Look Same?
Food Keep in mind that the food cultures are constantly being imported and exported. This is not a test of identifying the origin. The answers are based on where the pictures were taken. For instance, noodle was invented in China, but both Korea and Japan adapted it in different ways.
Martial arts robots at 2026 Spring Festival Gala [video]
My journey to the microwave alternate timeline
Cross-posted from Telescopic Turnip Recommended soundtrack for this post As we all know, the march of technological progress is best summarized by this meme from Linkedin: Inventors constantly come up with exciting new inventions, each of them with the potential to change everything forever. But only a fraction of these ever establish themselves as a […]