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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
Stretch goal:
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.
“They say you’re dead!”
“I’m not!” Cue laughter
“Why not?” (Dead silence)
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.
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.
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.
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:
(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:

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.
(This won't work, here comes $110 a barrel!)
The image upload pipeline here is
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.
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:
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:
hello world!