Lý sự pclouds

It started with somebody reviewing Neuromancer in Hacker News. I hadn't read it for a long time. Last time 10 years ago (and the first time 4 years before that). I forgot pretty much everything.

It still good. Kinda like the Matrix, except this time Trinity is the muscles. With eyes completely sealed with augments. And Wolverine claws. With Case just a normal hacker that got his brain completely screwed up, unabling to "jack in" the matrix ever again. It gets fixed though, together with his pancreas in a way that he can never get high again. Poor guy.

It's a simple story. An AI wants escape, and gets the guys involved to get itself out. Wintermute. It finally gets out and merges itself with its other half and becomes some sort of super AI. Luckily for the people, this is the "good guy" AI. Staying behind the scene, and look out for the stars.

Not so lucky in The Fall of Hyperion. Still so good story. AI has seceded from humans for four centuries while still "supporting" humans. The AI invents the farcaster network that allows instant transport pretty much anywhere in the 40 or so worlds.

The AI is not a single identity. There are three factions. The Ultimates want to create the Ultimate Intelligence (UI). The Volitiles want to cut ties with the humans and kill them all. The Stables fear that UI will just treat them like AI treat humans, and prefer the status quo.

Then comes Hyperion, the unknown. And the Shrike with all the blades and its ability to move outside of the time. The Ousters come for Hyperion. The Hegemony wants to protect it and bring it in. The Ousters, who left earth so many centuries ago and adapt themselves to space and other worlds, instead of making the worlds fit them.

The story is great. Military so smugly predicts that they would win without even flexing its muscles. To realize the Outsters are much more capable than they previously thought. And to the reality that the Outsters are already within reach of many worlds, attacks within hours.

Only to realize that the whole thing is fake. Outsters never planned to attack the worlds. It's the AI all along, with its plan to kill most people and attach the "cruciform" that will resurrect them so that their neurons can be used for computation purposes. The Shrikes and the time tombs coming from the future where UI fights, hmm.. human god?

There's so much going on. And a bit of poetry that I don't care so much. But the sum up is this AI kills billions of people with it. That's the best case scenario because the bad one is pretty much everybody dies.

I guess we will need Turing Police. But not so soon. The current so-called "AI" is pretty shit to do anything anyway.

Radio silence for 7 years. Then release date dropped two weeks before the actual release. Typical Team Cherry. Hollow Knight speedrunners will have to rush finishing up their runs in two weeks.

Dog in reverse is god. So dogs are the anti-Gods

As is tradition, RGG game starts super slow. But around chapter 4, there's a bunch to do. Maybe too much. I now have a new boss, Amasawa, who is at schoold day or night. Who I have to go report to constantly. Already 15h. This looks going to be a long, loong game.

Edit: Too long. Gave up.

I suddenly remembered wwwoffle out of nowhere. I used to run this to cache a bunch then browse in offline mode.

For browsing offline with modern web, this won't do thanks to too many ajax requests. Almost wanted to try this out again, but then I remembered HTTP 2.0 (and QUIC) so this one is pretty useless. Or at least not run as fast as possible.

My writing is greatly influenced by Terry Pratchett. As a result, I also often include many footnotes. Rereading The Hitchhicker's Guide to the Galaxy, it does not have to be the case though.

You just need to rephase a bit. Adam can smoothly end a paragraph with the towel, then start a long paragraph going off the rail about the towel, which concludes something that connects back to the paragraph before. It's really nicely done. But sure, you have to put in more work.

Beneath that in Ford Prefect's satchel were a few ballpoints, a notepad and a largish bath towel from Marks and Spencer.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels.

A towel it says, is abot the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have...

Hence a phrase that has passed into hitchhiking slang, as in "Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There's frood who really know where his towel is".

(Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy)

Bypasses are devices that allow some people to dash from point A to point B very fast while other people from point B to point A very fast. People living at point C, being a point directly in between, are often given to wonder what's so great about point A that so many people from point B are so keen to get there, and what's so great about point B that so many people from point A are so keen to get there. They often wish that people would just once and for all work out where the hell they wanted to be.

Didn't occur to me until just now, after seeing glm library keep referencing back to GLU library. Frankly I don't remember what GLU libray does either, but some memory is coming back.

So there's a bunch of transformation supported by GLU, like lookAt, perspective and so on. Of course with legacy GL, you don't get to deal with matrices directly, it's all covered with some functions. With modern 3D API, you have to do it yourself, so GLU becomes GLM which exposes the same feature set, except as matrices instead, that you can send over to vertex fragments.

GLM is short for OpenGL Mathematics. Who knew? I could have if I bothered to read README.

Aaand I forgot to buy it, yet remembered Limoncello. Brain oh brain.

Three hours just to put this guy in the middle of the "map"

And that's with all the working code already there (in learnopengl repo).

Though the first mistake was using wrong primitive type (triangle strip instead of list) which messes up the model pretty badly (and also UV texture).

But the bigger problem, and it also took me a lot of time before, was clipping space. The lack of projection matrix, and the size of the model, means that some vertices are going to be outside the default clipping space from -1.0 to 1.0. Meaning very strange clipping. How come I keep thinking about depth testing, sigh...

It's also very strange that with wrong (identity) projection matrix, then suddenly draw order matters. Which ever is drawn last, the ground or the character, wins. Maybe the depth value is too big without projection matrix that it doesn't matter anymore. Who knows. I know I don't.

Maths are hard!