Links

Why we're leaving the cloud

world.hey.com

Of course it’s expensive to rent your computers from someone else. But it’s never presented in those terms. The cloud is sold as computing on demand, which sounds futuristic and cool, and very much not like something as mundane as “renting computers”, even though that’s mostly what it is.

The Game Boy Interceptor

there.oughta.be

Today, there is nothing unusual about streaming footage from a Game Boy. Emulators can easily do it and modern Game Boy variants like the Analogue Pocket offer HDMI output that could be captured. There also are some mods to add HDMI out to original Game Boy hardware, so getting a video stream from a Game Boy is a challenge that has long been solved.

The unusual detail about doing it for a Tetris tournament is that the players have to rely on their muscle memory which they trained on their personal Game Boys. Switching them for an unfamiliar modern device or an emulator will significantly impede their ability to play competitively. Also, you can imagine that a tournament that asks each contestant to first mod the hell out of their beloved Game Boys just to stream a video would not be well received.

Signed distance functions in 46 lines of Python

vgel.me

Signed distance functions are a really cool method of 3D rendering! But they unfortunately have a reputation for being difficult to understand. It makes sense why—they usually get shown off in beautiful, but complicated ShaderToy examples written in GLSL, an unfamiliar language for most programmers. But at their core, SDFs are a really simple idea. I’m going to prove that by walking you through a program that raymarches an animated SDF donut in only 46 lines of Python.