Rust wgpu now has a
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@mcc if my aim were to implement the most minimal hardware 2D accel I'd probably target XRender so I could shim it, from my current understanding
Haiku is maybe getting hardware 3D ... eventually(?), and has forbidden slop, if you hadn't seen@izzy If I am creating a new universe, I do not wish to bring the following things with me into it: C, X, OpenGL. We can do better. We should find a way to do better. Even webtech is better.
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@brouhaha I don't know how many years I have and I don't know how many years I'm able, constitutionally, to go without reaching a goal. If doing A does not achieve my goal without B, can I actually get all the way to the end of A knowing that I've still got to do all of B when I'm done? What if writing both A and B takes so many years together that the definition of what you need for A and B to work shifts in the meantime?
@mcc @brouhaha then hand out work to the rest of us!
right now the big problem we collectively face is that we are all very enchanted with the idea of doing everything ourselves, getting everything exactly to our personal tastes, all that
we're personally, like, guiltier than most people in that regard >< so there's that ><
if we can narrow it down to just a few major paths, we can start walking those paths together instead of alone
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This thread is probably meandering and maybe solipsistic. My point is this: My weird background means I can look at this staircase full of missing stairs, identify one step, and go, "I can fix that". But I don't know if there's enough of me to fix multiple steps. I haven't decided what to do from here. Pick a step and fix it anyway? Pick a "fun" project, like the GPU [which face it, even if I finished it chances are not high more than 3 people would ever use it]? Give up and learn electric bass?
@mcc yeah it's rough out here atm. I can say that spending more time building physical things rather than digital ones has been good for me, but that it's still feeling increasingly bleak work wise. I still make indie games, don't personally use llms at all, yet almost my entire stack seems to be trying to turn into pink slime, and the pay is still pretty bad.
So yeah idk bass sounds pretty good tbh
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@ireneista @MaddieM4 @mcc @decay @amarioguy on this note, it's an absolute shame that "pre-calculus" in the USA K-12 "traditional" math pathway is such a poorly-implemented clusterfuck
for those not familiar, as far as i can tell, this was *supposed to be* a wrap-up of elementary algebra and *the bridge* into the "real math" mode of thinking (i.e. the "correct" blend of formalisms, beauty, discovery, abstractions, etc. that mathematicians actually use)
instead, it typically turns into a poorly-motivated grab-bag of topics that aren't clearly "calculus" but that they couldn't fit anywhere else
a bunch of the "i wish i knew the math needed to do X" i've seen where X is something computer+art-ish doesn't actually require much beyond this (okay, probably some extra discrete math bits because the USA curriculum just refuses to add any of that)
@r @MaddieM4 @mcc @decay @amarioguy yeah, sigh, that matches our observations (and also explains why we didn't perceive it as having any actual content, as kids)
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@r @MaddieM4 @mcc @decay @amarioguy yeah, sigh, that matches our observations (and also explains why we didn't perceive it as having any actual content, as kids)
@r @MaddieM4 @mcc @decay @amarioguy (since we already had that way of thinking from self-study done at the expense of our grades and against the wishes of our teachers)
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@r @MaddieM4 @mcc @decay @amarioguy (since we already had that way of thinking from self-study done at the expense of our grades and against the wishes of our teachers)
@r @MaddieM4 @mcc @decay @amarioguy it makes us really angry that the only way to actually learn anything in the US is to decide that you're fucking well going to learn what you think is important even though everyone in authority will punish you for doing so and you'll have to put up with twenty years of insults about your intelligence
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@r @MaddieM4 @mcc @decay @amarioguy it makes us really angry that the only way to actually learn anything in the US is to decide that you're fucking well going to learn what you think is important even though everyone in authority will punish you for doing so and you'll have to put up with twenty years of insults about your intelligence
@r @MaddieM4 @mcc @decay @amarioguy the entire fucking country would collapse if not for people who made that choice at a young age, to learn despite being punished for it
and it's too much to put on children. it's completely unfair.
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@r @ireneista @MaddieM4 @mcc @amarioguy but yeah jumping back up here a lot of this is technical theater. You can go to school for lighting design, stage electrics, audio engineering and like such as and learn this stuff but there's no real connection back to the computer-touching or EE side
@decay @MaddieM4 @mcc @amarioguy i've noticed this pattern *in general*
computer-touching is very much in the "academia" side of the world, and especially with the sf bay area tech scene of the past ~15 years has intentionally(?) pulled away from a lot of this more-hands-on stuff
EE is *extremely* broad, but i've personally felt as if it almost needs to(?) pick sides whether it's going to be "academia" or "hands on" (my old university had a major bad reputation for being _terrible_ at "hands on" for how Elite
️ it is)otoh, i've noticed that the hands-on fields often come across as a bit.... protectionist and closed-off
i believe @ireneista has thought about this topic a lot more?
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@decay @MaddieM4 @mcc @amarioguy i've noticed this pattern *in general*
computer-touching is very much in the "academia" side of the world, and especially with the sf bay area tech scene of the past ~15 years has intentionally(?) pulled away from a lot of this more-hands-on stuff
EE is *extremely* broad, but i've personally felt as if it almost needs to(?) pick sides whether it's going to be "academia" or "hands on" (my old university had a major bad reputation for being _terrible_ at "hands on" for how Elite
️ it is)otoh, i've noticed that the hands-on fields often come across as a bit.... protectionist and closed-off
i believe @ireneista has thought about this topic a lot more?
@r @decay @MaddieM4 @mcc @amarioguy we have, but you're doing a good job of explaining it, we don't actually have anything to add

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@r @MaddieM4 @mcc @decay @amarioguy the entire fucking country would collapse if not for people who made that choice at a young age, to learn despite being punished for it
and it's too much to put on children. it's completely unfair.
@ireneista @MaddieM4 @mcc @decay @amarioguy it's Fun
️ how certain topics that schools are particularly bad at (not only the US, although the US is extra bad), such as "abstraction", are *absolutely critical* for the current "computer age"although it's Fun
️-squared that this has been identified, with *basically this exact rhetoric too*, and yet the US didn't actually deal with it -
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it is not possible within the confines of the activitypub protocol to represent how much I love this post
this is a good post and I like this post a lot
CC: @mcc@mastodon.social -
@ireneista @MaddieM4 @mcc @decay @amarioguy it's Fun
️ how certain topics that schools are particularly bad at (not only the US, although the US is extra bad), such as "abstraction", are *absolutely critical* for the current "computer age"although it's Fun
️-squared that this has been identified, with *basically this exact rhetoric too*, and yet the US didn't actually deal with it@r @MaddieM4 @mcc @decay @amarioguy wouldn't want to create an educated proletariat, after all
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@ireneista @MaddieM4 @mcc @decay @amarioguy it's Fun
️ how certain topics that schools are particularly bad at (not only the US, although the US is extra bad), such as "abstraction", are *absolutely critical* for the current "computer age"although it's Fun
️-squared that this has been identified, with *basically this exact rhetoric too*, and yet the US didn't actually deal with it@ireneista @MaddieM4 @mcc @decay @amarioguy this is something that i seriously want to do something about, although i haven't had much chance to discuss it with people and don't know _how_
how can we teach people abstraction (as a first-class idea, the way computer-touchers would think about it)?
the problem is that this isn't something that can be taught via direct instruction, it basically has to be experienced/ discovered and reinforced
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@r @MaddieM4 @mcc @decay @amarioguy wouldn't want to create an educated proletariat, after all
@ireneista @MaddieM4 @mcc @decay @amarioguy the frustrating thing is, (as we were briefly privately discussing), at some point they did!
and then they (possibly a different group of "they"?) decided to change their minds
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RE: https://mastodon.social/@mcc/117338324202161763
@eniko thanks.
and yeah, we need a kernel. one person can't write a kernel. it's not a matter of scope. it's a matter of you have to test more hardware configurations than one person can get in a private residence. we need that kernel handled by an *institution*.
the problem with freedos is if we want to make *games* then probably at some point we want access to sound and video. and if you want your game to render by any method other than CPU-on-framebuffer sound and video become Very Hard.
@mcc @eniko I sometimes wonder if we need so many hardware configurations, especially for personal devices. We could do well with some stability within a paired down feature set, even if it's not the most "powerful". A lot of the product differentiation out there is just capitalists trying to eat each other's lunch.
What's the most minimal GPU you'd find acceptable?
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Servo rests atop wgpu. Therefore, if my OS's entire GUI layer is servo, and I believe that implementing webgpu is easier than implementing vulkan, I can increase my chances of writing a working video-acceleration driver if I simplify it so *the driver supplies wgpu*, instead of trying to support the full scope of DRI/DRM or OpenGL/Vulkan or whatever this entails.
Two things I want, in both cases wgpu provides a critical, project-saving step.
And oh, I think wgpu might be slop now. Never mind!
@mcc I didn't quite follow the whole thread, but I think it's worth clarifying that wgpu is only used in Servo to implement webgpu, which is an optional feature. Servo rests atop webrender instead.
