When I tackled the question of rendering webpages visually... It struck me that for the uses I had in mind (document & GUI rendering) existing & historical GPUs were either significantly underpowered or overpowered. So it interested me to design something which was just right!

For one I designed a "Compositing Coprocessor" which iterates over "sprites" sorted by top-left corner & per-pixel performs 10 vectorized multiply-sums or texture-fetches as it outputs a DVI videosignal.

1/3?

This design allows our (second) GPU to render an arbitrary number of sprites (say, 1 for every letter) whilst being flexible enough to handle all of CSS's visual properties! Usually in a single rendering pass.

The caveat is that for this to be realistic we'd need those sprites to be sorted, where we could take advantage of layout constraints to take shortcuts.

But given how remarkably weak our CPU would be at math, I had to design another GPU to calculate onscreen layout.

2/3!

@fetchezlavache Then again, if I am to take my students as a reference, for us it's stating the obvious, for them, it's useful information they hadn't thought about.

Remember, people are not made to think about solutions themselves. They wait for an instruction to tell them what to do or not to do.

A "Layout Coprocessor" would perform simple arithmetic over concurrent tree traversals. Internally these would be binary trees, but a layer of abstraction would allow more flexibility.

A mix of physical connections between compute units (which would double to facilitate running sums & multiply) & shift registers would facilitate traversing the tree. There'd be a measly 256 of these Compute Units controlled by their choice of 4 Control Units.

Loosely esembles modern GPUs but lower-spec.

3/3Fin

Iran's stockpile of enriched uranium must be "taken out" before the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran can be considered over, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has told an American broadcaster. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2026/05/11/world/iran-war-uranium-netanyahu/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=mastodon #worldnews #uranium #nuclearweapons #nuclearenergy #iran #israel #benjaminnetanyahu

This morning (see above) I summarized some GPUs I designed to augment my hypothetical "string-centric" CPU. So what value do they add?

Basically 2 things:
1. Greater output bandwidth.
2. Vectorized 32bit arithmetic.

I had great fun exploring how little computers really need to calculate, but... Computer graphics does need it! At least once you get beyond 8bit era graphics.

clownflare captchas are great for surveillance alone. that's why i assumed they would just fingerprint me asynchronously, linking my frontend browser id to the backend id of my request as it propagates through cloudflare IXPs.

that's a great gig! a new spin on the old classic!

📣 New Podcast! "11 May 1894: Pullman strike" on @Spreaker #anniversaries_history #chicago #day #facts_weekly #history #history_historical #history_otd_on #history_weekly #illinois #in #lives #news_everyday #railway #stories_daily #this #workers
https://www.spreaker.com/episode/11-may-1894-pullman-strike--71869081

@adrianc I got it by clicking my avatar and then "on the sidewalk", and then it was the second one (below "prioritize walking"). I expected it to be in "settings and accessibility", which it isn't, but I made sure to check "use metric system" in there.

Where I am, we have longer-distance buses and trains called Go Transit, so the app saying "ride with GO" was confusing at first.

Awesome. A Redditor emailed Ken Thompson about the UNICS to UNIX namechange. Actually got a reply https://www.reddit.com/r/unix/comments/1t826y8/emailed_ken_thompson_about_the_unics_to_unix/

#unix #history #computing

Hi @SocialCoop, thanks for accepting my application. #introduction: I'm really happy to be joining and taking my first step into the cooperative movement. I'm interested in #noncapitalist ways of living, working and relating to others, including coops, #UBI, the #solarpunk philosphy, #abundance and public #commons, including #opensource projects and #openscience. I'm also intersted in #neurocosmopolitanism and #nonviolence.

I work with data and love to code. At the moment I'm often riding the #trams around Manchester, #swimming in my local pool or climbing at my local #bouldering center.

"Against all authority... Except my mama".
Happy Mother's Day!

RT: @ThatTimWalker Good for the Obsever for leading on this.

@ozoned

I have a sense that ATproto would make that much easier than ActivityPub would, though. AT inherently makes the user the atomic unit, AP holds that a user is a sub-division of an instance. Messy mix.

Hey Boston fediverse!

I'm looking for places to eat outdoors in Boston, with coverage if there is rain. Any suggestions?

Searching is proving difficult, especially for finding info on if there is coverage outdoors.

Update: I asked before, and got great recommendations, but I'm finding the covered outdoors part difficult to confirm.

#food #foody #Boston #OutdoorDining #Outdoors

The fascinating way soap bubbles freeze.

📽️: Lorie Shaull | CC BY 2.0