Notices by Adrian Cochrane (alcinnz@floss.social), page 32

Big question is power. If using flash storage, *something* needs to measure time and then delete the data. That *something* needs to be powered.

But maybe we can flip the script? Maybe this could be done using *volatile* memory and just enough of energy storage to keep it up for 24h?

✨ Power runs out, data goes away! ✨

Add a tiny bit of read-only storage for template partition table to be automagically copied to the volatile storage the moment it's plugged into a powered device? 🤔

#InfoSec 🧵

@kinyutaka I find that's generally the point of these articles: People do overthink alt-text & they shouldn't.

@phire I really struggle to understand how Tailwind is any different than using the `style` property...

O.K., there's some enhancements. Nothing that can't be accomplished using CSS Variables, that's a thing now!

And with CSS Cascade Layers there should be no reason to fear the Cascade, a fear which led to Tailwind being created!

A Guide To Accessible Form Validation - Sandrina Pereira @ Smashing: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2023/02/guide-accessible-form-validation/

Are you making these five mistakes when writing alt text? - Daniel Sage @ The A11y Project: https://www.a11yproject.com/posts/are-you-making-these-five-mistakes-when-writing-alt-text/

A beginner’s guide to manual accessibility testing - Whiteney Lewis @ popetech: https://blog.pope.tech/2023/03/01/a-beginners-guide-to-manual-accessibility-testing/

The overlay personalization farce - Karl Groves: https://karlgroves.com/the-overlay-personalization-farce/

#AudioEye Will Get You Sued - Adrian Roselli: https://adrianroselli.com/2023/02/audioeye-will-get-you-sued.html

The Great Gaslighting of the JavaScript Era - Jared White "The Spicy Web": https://www.spicyweb.dev/the-great-gaslighting-of-the-js-age/
Yeah, this tends to be my attitude... Becoming a browserdev is essentially my way of saying just how serious I am.

The Web Needs a Native .visually-hidden - Ben Myers: https://benmyers.dev/blog/native-visually-hidden/

App accessibility: Commonly overlooked accessibility practices for mobile apps - Ryan Tan @ Bootcamp: https://scribe.rip/app-accessibility-commonly-overlooked-accessibility-practices-for-mobile-apps-98d82907b15c (Medium via Scribe)

Keys To An Accessibility Mindset - Daniel Yuschick @ Smashing: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2023/02/keys-accessibility-mindset/

Ugh! I'm struggling to get CatTrap to build against a newer version of Haskell CSS Syntax. One which doesn't cause dependency conflicts. I've forked the repository so I could bump its version number.

Help is welcome!

But I'm setting this aside for now, getting dinner, & doing some accessibility reading.

Maybe sometime soon I'll have to relax by fantasizing about a nicer language to implement CatTrap in...

@lain_7 I'll queue that topic up!

Since subgrids can be applied per-axes, I'm ending up deferring it's handling to the actual layout formulas.

Last task I want to accomplish today: Navigate a dependency conflict & use my Harfbuzz language bindings to query some unit values from the font!

I'm certainly glad I'm separating preprocessing, lots of stuff to normalize!

Working to get CatTrap building again with my preprocessing of length units & CSS4 Grid properties. I still have to handle spans & (Haskell is warning me here) Subgrids properly.

But I got through a bunch of work to get it building again! Time for a breather...

@FediFollows I've got a @snikket_im server running, it's working really well for me!

Oh, I forgot: What would those Compute Units do?

Basically everything in 3D computer graphics boils down to a floating point multiply-sum operation. Including matrix transforms, normalizing vectors, combining lighting, interpolation, or computing texture indices & subsampling results.

There's also occasional square-roots, logarithm/exponentiations, trigonometry, etc. Thanks to the magic of calculus (Taylor Series) those can be done via a handful of multiply-adds.

4/3 Fin, I mean it!

P.S. From all my reading on the subject, the answer to the question asked in the last toot is not publicly known. So that's all educated guesswork.

P.P.S. I'll discuss older GPU designs tomorrow! From the 1990s & 20'00's.

3.1/3 Truly fin!

The interesting question is: How do we transition between the different steps of the Depth Buffering pipeline?

I'd start by parallelizing over triangles. The cache can be used to avoid duplicate compute effort as we iterate over its vertices.

Then I'd have circuitry to fork each of these threads during the interpolation step.

To output/blend results I could use atomic writes via the cache hierarchy. And use an alternate sorting control-unit to optimize this write-order.

3/3 Fin for today!

Each "compute unit" cycles between processing multiple vertices/triangles/pixels/etc. There's several compute-units per L1data cache. There's several of those per control-unit (& L2 cache). And maybe a handful of those in the same GPU.

The cache primarily serves to hold textures & shaders, though it can serve other purposes.

Caveat here is the control flow is less efficient. The Control Unit must emit a branch if it is taken by *any* of its compute units. And needs lots of data to process.

2/

To generate an entire screenful of image data live, we design special hardware that can process all vertices, triangles, & "fragment" pixels simultaneously. Or all output pixels simultaneously.

In contrast CPUs as we stuffed transistors into our microchips GPUs got conceptually simpler, so how does a modern GPU work?

In short: We stuff it full of "compute units" cycling between processing multiple such items as it fetches data via a cache hierarchy, or other causes of latency.

1/4?

I'd like to point out: Serious AI researchers can get off the hype train at any point. It might not have been your choice that your field was invaded by the Altmans of the world, but sitting by quietly while they spew nonsense is a choice.

Likewise, describing your own work in terms of unmotivated and aspirational analogies to human cognitive abilities is also a choice.

>>

Since I shared an article complaining about being required to log into websites to even read their static text, reminder: You don't even need to log in to contribute to my browser projects!

You don't need a codeforge account anywhere to contribute!

For now you do need a public email account (ask if you don't have one you're comfortable making public) or an account, but I'd love to experiment with versatile alternatives.

@stux @notjustbikes I've seen some in NZ. It's hard to scooter around them!

Seems pretty clear it's due mainly to publicservice ads overemphasizing driver-safety.