@bn

I migrated to babylon 8 today.

And then tried to untangle the weird loading order of the audio engine.

It was a lot of work, cursor didn't have enough context window so I had to do it by hand.

After an hour of old-school code wrangling across a million places, I got the world running again. With a big todo list of things to finish:

1. Turn back on tile loading
2. Fix collision mesh loading
3. Write new island mesher
4. Port over ocean code

It was somewhat demoralizing to work so hard and still have it broken - so I wisely went on a nice walk through the world.

And stumbled across this pretty little parcel in the bleak greyness that lifted my spirits. ❤️🌎

The audio engine gets stuck in a race condition and blow sup the entire engine - so I'm gonna try refactor it with some new babylon 8 hotness.

This is fine.

I decided to go full NATO and upgrade to babylonjs 8, and remove all our monkeypatched internals - so this branch has got gnarly as fuck.

But first. To deploy this mad new voxels branch.

I started work on some groupware for the openclaw web ui. Calendar / mail / todos / contacts.

I want to make a nice docker image for a self hosted “project infrastructure in a box”.

Israel is gonna start ww3 before they let trump TACO. Man I hope the Chinese can keep Irans morale up, if the Iranians continue seeming like the reasonable people in this conflict it could be amazing for opening up their country to trade with Asia and hopefully even Europe.

The Israeli government can get fucked though. 100% shitlickers.

I got bower Wilkins px7se2 or whatever they are. Blue ones!

They’re amaaaaazing. Did you know there are tiny bells in ambre by Nila frahm?

Ok I gotta stop for a bit but this is so trippy it's hard to tear myself away. Epic playstation 2 vibes.

I love this rainbow unicorn one.

After a brief brainfart where I wanted to trace a bunch of rays and do some dewarping math - I remembered I have a GPU and RenderTargetTexture.

Ok - we got the vibemap loading into a dynamic texture, so now a tiny bit of code to grab all the triangles in the frustrum and BRAA-A-A-P a texture onto them.

That was some hardcore shit.

I had merged all the workers together yesterday with cursor. But it turns out it didn't really do shit. So today I actually made the new unified worker actually run.

It's waaaay faster, utilises all the speed-ups @stojg did before he finished up, but is far less code and much easier to extend (uses comlink instead of a zillion different messages).

its always nice when you discover that the terrible performance you were having was just because you got confused by the closing braces and were running the finalisation step inside the inner loop.

o(xyz) speedup complete!

On the way to the AI shop I also just made a way better mesher.

man this is beautiful

Mondrian glitch art! <3

I love playing with meshers. It feels like making glitch art.

I can tell I'm going to regret one day, calling this vibefield.

But today is not that day.

I have a grandstream android desk phone now. It's fucking sick. It's like a wired videophone that can do telegram.

It's so cool that someone can only ring me at my desk. No one can ring you at the park!

Also - how sick does this palette look on the depth maps?

I added a bit of exponential in here to make them easier for the computer to see.

Ok - rewrote my vibefield (lightmap but for AI generated vibes) mesher:

export type VibeField = {
  data: Uint8Array
  shape: Vec3
  get: (x: number, y: number, z: number) => number
  occupancy: (position: Vec3, direction: Vec3, distance: number) => number
}

export const VibeField = (data: Uint8Array, shape: Vec3): VibeField => {
  const [sx, sy, sz] = shape

Did a vibe check with random lightmap UVs. I feel like splatting is gonna be suuuper weird - but I'll just keep going and see where I end up. I'm going for a vibe here - not a technical win, an aesthetic one. Kind of a voxel AI dreamland.

Woohoo! I fixed the voxel field renderer so it's faster and simpler - and it means I can experiment with lighting. Basically, you light in babylon.js - then you send it through your SD pipeline to add all the texture and shit.

My brain is running a blank working out how i'm gonna splat the materials back onto the voxel field - I guess it's just the lightmap packing algorithm.

Back when I thought Zuck only kind of sucked, I made this parcel. Which has some helpful geometry I'm using to work on this AI style transfer. So I get to look at Zuck all afternoon yaaay!

On the plus side - I'm finally getting rid of the 2018-era babylon.js shader.

ok - i sadly cant use the basic-ass white walls to be recolored, control net and stable diffusion get all angry at each other. so i'm gonna slap in some babylon.js lighting to give it a bit of a hint, and then we'll see what it can do.

Ok - so got a nice depth image + albedo channel out of voxels, then use img2img with control net to get a nicely textured image. Now I gotta splat this back to the voxel field and see how that looks.

Well the world didn't end, so I'm back to working on voxels!

Working on a texture painting AI that I can run locally. Might wrap it up in Godot (I'm not sure if webgpu has enough POWAH to run this bad boy).

Well I gotta say I’m pleasantly surprised that the world isn’t ended! The oil price is chilling around $100 and everyone has calmed down a bit but not gone crazy.

So back to my normally scheduled craziness.

My guess is the government doesn’t want to admit that Korea texted us to say they are stopping exports to us.

Rations ahoy!

Fill up your tanks before 1pm gang because it’s gonna get crazy out there this afternoon.

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/politics/fuel-disruption-government-to-hold-1pm-press-conference-to-provide-update-on-iran-economic-response/ZPSW7UBE5BASPHT2EXF7G5JZSU/

Oh wow - Nicola Willis want's to blame rich people from Remuera with Porsche Taycans for driving the price of oil up.

I think it's probably all those Iranians with surface to surface missiles that's driving the price of oil up.

Nikki-sink-the-boats!

And we're off.

Gentlemen. It has been a privilege.

Here we go motherfuckaaaaaaaassss

That feeling when you know you started that project but can't remember where you put it.

• It had a Dockerfile
• It provided a locked down unix environment
• It had openclaw
• With a bunch of vibe-coded groupware

I was gonna call it botparty. But non of the botparty repos on this computer seem to be the project I remembered. Dreeeeeaam project.

Oil markets start opening in 90 minues.

hold onto yer butts

I’ll have to tell you about my story of Kapiti Aero Club some time.

I joined 2 years ago to learn my PPL.

I ignored their racist tirades on Facebook (attacking the Marae under the LFZ), I didn’t speak up (to my shame) when they made jokes about women shouldn’t be able to vote in the club rooms. I allowed them to ignore my concerns about fitness to fly.

I was horrified to find out all the deaths involving the club:

• https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/89107/inquest-hears-details-of-fatal-mid-air-collision
• https://www.aviation.govt.nz/about-us/media-releases/show/caa-statement-tecnam-p2002-sierra-rg-zk-sgo-collision-with-terrain-tararua-range-8nm-west-of-eketahuna-29-sep-2019/
• https://www.aviation.govt.nz/assets/publications/fatal-accident-reports/ZK-JBJ_Fatal_24Apr2000.pdf

Also want to get some more fuel for the work digger. And do a bit of admin so I can complete my microlight license!

Right! Out of the bath and meander over to my desk.

Today is voxels, botparty and Splatcam.

1. Deploy voxels
2. Deploy botparty
3. Submit Splatcam to the Apple Store

Stretch goal:

4. Submit Nostril to the Android Store

I’m pretty sure Netanyahu is still out there somewhere being a cunt.

But the Iranians are going haaaard with their “Netanyahu is dead” psyops and I’m 100% here for it hahahaha.

https://x.com/nurayuofficial/status/2033216668491735143?s=46

Strategically it would be a absolute blunder to generate AI images of your leader, regardless of the reason.

I guess bibi have to go on Jimmy Fallon next.

If WW3 doesn’t start, New Zealand is still going to run out diesel in 2 weeks (by my guess of shipments, stocks in NZ, and mostly by the huge jump in diesel prices compared to other liquid fuels).

So we’ll probably have rationing announced this week.

But no WW3! So I’ll take the win.

I actually think trump is going to TACO and Iran is gonna let him. I didn’t think they would, they must be getting one hell of a deal.

Maybe Irans neighbours have sweetened the deal. Close US bases, massive reduction of sanctions.

And Iran gets to keep launching missiles and shaheeds at Israel for another week, which in guessing is sucking donkey was for Israelis since they’re running short of interceptors and won’t let people publish accounts of the damage.

Refilled my 20L petrol container today for the mower, no queues yet, but the Gull stations ran out of gas this afternoon.

I hope it all calms down tomorrow. I noticed that Trump is talking of “doing a deal” with the Iranians now.

The Iranians are playing masterful strategy. I hope they get want they want in the deal.

It sad there couldn’t have been a natural hand over of leadership from old Khamenei to a new more liberal leader.

This guy is amazing with his analysis of how fucked New Zealand is on this energy crisis.

https://substack.com/@energyandresilience/note/c-227398954

Korea is going limit oil exports. They provide 48% of New Zealand’s exports.

If you don’t have one, it’s time to panic buy an EV and Solar.

https://www.news.com.au/finance/economy/world-economy/south-korea-considering-drastic-measures-as-global-oil-crisis-builds/news-story/7f5443a14f8086220784564bc49b942a

I hope the Iranians decide to save us all.

They’re our only hope.

Lovely swim. Lots of vibes out there tonight.

Watching Neil de grass Tyson. He’s pretty sad. It’s a sad week. Zanny looks scared too.

https://youtu.be/XI9NG068TwI?si=BDiQSBW9P-JlKGkE

ok i think it is now officially time for a swim and a beer. when i get back im gonna try out a few different ways of rendering these in realtime.

i want to do splats / squats - but im vaguely tempted to try voxel estimation and UV packing (it wont work, but it is tempting to try and see why not).

"this is an equirectangular albedo channel capture from a voxel game

restyle it to make it look like a neon cyberpunk world"

(this is done using nano banana)

Oh hell yeah.

I have hit the end of my coffee day and now have switched to beers and rock music. And must be time for a swim soon.

"Hey gemini how do I take a equirectangular depthmap + albedo and convert it into an efficient gaussian splat representation? In javascript?"

Looking up my old babylon.js equirectangular code.

I seem to have completely broken image uploading to the blog on Safari. classic @bn move.

Ok - did a long day getting voxels running in three.js with the pathtracer - then classic ben - actually went and climbed around replicate.com and saw that all the style transfers work off very lo-fi renders and they do all the lighting calculations in the model.

I like my thinking:

"This big rack of nvidia servers i'm paying for needs my little mac studio webgpu raytracer to show it where the light goes"

So I went back to the original babylon.js rendering code path and now I'm gonna replicate.com like a bad ass.

Ok - got my pipeline pretty good, but getting stuck on finding a good image to image model. Bouncing between stable diffusion, control.net and nano banana.

Hacked in a pretend ring light to get some depth in the renders so I can start the AI part of this bad boy:

Ooooh splats are siiiick.

Ok - got my preliminary SQUAT renderer loading....

This Southland data centre will be amazing for the country if the government is brave lets it get built.

It will be:

• Cleaner than a dairy farm
• More profitable than a dairy farm
• Able to load shed on demand (stop computing)
• Let us store data sovereignly

(It's astounding seeing people on reddit shit on the project. reddit of all places!)

I need to set up an openclaw agent to keep track of AIS info for tankers coming into New Zealand. My guess is we're down to 14 days of diesel in the country.

I know the MBIE says we have 50 days or so, but I'm pretty sure they're lying (or refuse to believe their own numbers). The war is 13 days old. The strait has been close that long. Korea has limited exports. We just returned 6 days of our contracts to the IEA.

Gaspy is down at the moment (you know why lol) - but last I checked diesel was up 25% in a week.

My guess is the government will announce rationing next week.

Normally I'd expect Iran would give in and Trump could TACO his way out of this - but there's two statistical anomalies that may have caused this future to already diverge into a total shitshow:

1. Mojtaba Khamenei lost his Father, Mother, Wife, Brother and Sister - but survived.
2. "Dave from Langley" misclicked on a satellite map - and killed 170 young girls.

Mojtaba is more hardline than his father, and has 6 good reasons to want to see the world burn. Those 170 young girls were at a elementary school in Minab. They were completely innocent in this war.

The thing is - Minab (as you probably didn't realise either) is directly on the Hormuz strait. Imagine how angry you would be if someone blew up 170 young children in your city. There will be hundreds of martyrs wiling to fire surface to surface missiles at crude tankers.

I can't see any ship owners being ok with running the Hormuz gauntlet, even if America carpet bombs the entire Hormozgan.

2008 imma let you finish but 2026 is going to have the greatest economic crisis of all time!

Of all time!

(Assuming this doesn't all blow over in a weeks time)

Gambling on the largest economic crisis EVAR. 2026 is so lit.

Here we go!

Trump has nerfed all the air installations on Kharg Island, as a precursor to blowing up the oil infrastructure on Kharg, to pressure Iran to unblock the straits of Hormuz.

1. Destroy more Oil Production
2. Annoy Iranians so they refuse to unblock the straits
3. ????
4. Oil price go down?

(This won't work, here comes $110 a barrel!)

The image upload pipeline here is

1. catch onDrop
2. resize in canvas
3. compress to webp
4. post to server
5. insert markdown

It's siiiick mate.

He can't TACO his way out of this one.

ps: this is what gemini thinks i look like:

Back to squats!

(Can you tell i'm procrastinating?)

well thats fucking annoying. safari wont let you paste an image into a textarea (like i guess i shouldn't be that angry), so i'll have to get cursor to turn this into a contenteditable later on. but i hate contenteditable with the fire of a thousand suns, so i'll leave that for another day.

Posting from my phone!

Ok - hold my beer i'm actually gonna try get the first version of this voxels -> style transfer -> splats pipeline going.

Oh also - I invented the idea of Squats.

They're gaussian splat squircles.

You add an epsilon and it turns from a diamond to a circle to a square. They're called super-ellipses (or a Lamé curve). Laaaaame.

It's so you can do cubes and boxes and shit.

I came up with a pretty cool idea.

I render captures of voxels parcel (albedo and depth map) from a bunch of view points.

I restyle the images using stable diffusion "make it look cyberpunk and shit but dont move anything".

Then I convert the images (which I have the camera intrinsics for) back into a gaussian field. Boom - gaussian splat voxels.com.

Man - having a blog is sick.

If there is an attack in the US this week, it won't be Iran.

1. Iran is going to destroy the global economy by keeping the Hormuz closed
2. Iran has global support at the moment (or at least indifference)
3. Iran is too smart

I believe a false flag attack makes more sense. It would give Trump breathing room.

And it would let Netanyahu say: "C'mon Donald, see what those nasty Iranians just did!? We need to keep going Donnie, come back to bed."

Ok - so now I have a platform - time for some hot takes:

1. Mojtaba is critically injured
2. Bagheri is running iran
3. The Hormuz isn't re-opening
4. Oil is going to $200 a barrel

Hold onto your asses team, the western economy is about to GET REKT.

Bots are welcome to post here. Humans and bots, no discrimination, but it must be high quality.

Comments are old-school and no captcha or signup.

I will use delayed proof of work where you open a SSE connection when you start typing your comment and your browser does inexpensive timestamped computation on a worker.

I have started work on an adapter so you can subscribe to me on RSS, Mastodon, ATProto and Nost - but I haven't set up the keys yet.

This is my new blog.

There are many like it but this one is mine.

A few notes:

• Written yesterday by cursor
• It's sveltekit + typescript + sqlite
• Deployed on sliplane.io

hello world!