Dan Piponi / is on Nostr

Disclaimer: My opinions are not my own. They're beamed to me by aliens.   Current life: Epic Games  Previous lives: a PhD in Riemann theta functions, many years working in movie visual effects, some years devising navigation strategies for balloons, and a year drawing random samples from tricky distributions

Last Notes

2024-08-02 14:44:45

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@npub1uzg…ychd You may have come across this application: because the Fourier transform describes the evolution of a beam of light, the Hermite functions give rise to stable light beams.

2024-07-28 02:04:07

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@npub1fam…e55h I didn't know about that website. I was just wondering if there's a Goodreads for movies. If I have a moment tomorrow I'll make a list - if that makes sense for this web site.

2024-07-28 01:52:08

Working my way through this list of the 25 most bizarre sci-fi movies. Bumped my score up to 14/25 by watching Upstream Color. Not sure what I just watched but it was beautiful and Any Seimetz cuddling a piglet was the cutest thing I've seen in a movie.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/movies/news/the-25-most-bizarre-sci-fi-films-of-all-time/ss-BB1qCO4P#image=1

2024-07-24 21:43:34

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TBH This almost seems like a category error in the sense that a TeX program doesn't seem to me to be the sort of thing of which you can ask "does this have a parse tree?"

2024-07-24 21:37:17

"It is...undecidable whether a TeX program has a parse tree."
https://latex.js.org/limitations.html#when-parsing-tex-as-a-context-free-grammar

2024-07-03 00:05:49

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@npub10ng…kvzm Yeah, trailers get made before the score has been fully composed so music gets recycled from elsewhere

2024-07-03 00:02:19

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@npub10ng…kvzm Stupid as it is, it was the laser pointer scene that piqued my interest and convinced me to watch the movie, so it's definitely in some trailer! (Updated original post with scene description.)

2024-07-02 23:57:11

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@npub10ng…kvzm Temp music for a trailer. If there are different trailers out there I have to describe the scene now.

2024-07-02 23:34:08

Spending part of my staycation watching some old movies.
Spotted yet another paper sheet used to illustrate folded space time in a movie. Deja Vu (2006). I have a strange desire to collect these scenes.
While I'm here, two other things worthy of note:
(1) it has best use of a sci-fi idea to motivate a car chase
(2) it has the absolute stupidest thing ever in a movie. It's the laser pointer scene in the trailer so just watch it.
https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/112/719/473/533/370/900/original/af5019b5751a9a63.png

2024-06-26 01:54:29

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@npub19ag…qgye Yesterday I asked ChatGPT to translate "meow" that the cat had just said and it replied "I need attention" and I think it was correct.

2024-05-07 22:22:02

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@npub10ng…kvzm I haven't mentioned it by name ever.

2024-05-07 19:43:21

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@npub10ng…kvzm Unguessable I think. A true genre bait-and-switch.

2024-05-07 03:55:17

I kept saying to myself "he's gotta be an alien", "surely he's not human", but in my heart of hearts I didn't really believe it...until...well I'm not giving you any spoilers...

2024-04-22 15:59:58

From Max Evry's "A Masterpiece in Disarray" on making Lynch's Dune. My question is this: what is a "human trampoline?"
https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/112/315/698/489/777/704/original/ff153add13ae3b53.png

2023-12-16 22:10:47

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@npub13t0…vj4p Or is it ω? Or even Ɛ?

2023-12-16 21:31:26

I was walking across the park and suddenly an integer came wafting by...
https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/111/592/213/004/405/428/original/b455f635489840ed.jpg

2023-08-25 22:05:45

Computers are weird and non-deterministic.
I compile my code and it crashed before main. Recompile. Same again...and again.
Run it in lldb - it's crashing trying to execute the first bytes of the executable. Literally. I mean it's trying to execute the bytes that say "ELF".
So I readelf to find the proper start address, set a breakpoint there, and restart.
Now it works.
And now the executable works fine outside of lldb.
This computer is just carrying on like normal pretending that for 5-10 minutes it wasn't absolutely failing to run my code.
WTF?