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> This thing is very impressive.

Agreed! Text layout engines are stupidly hard. You start out thinking "It's a hard task, but I can do it" and then 3 months later you find yourself in a corner screaming "Why, Chinese? Why do you need to rotate your punctuation differently when you render in columns??"

This effort feeds back to the DOM, making it far more useful than my efforts which are confined to rendering multiline text on a canvas - for example: https://scrawl-v8.rikweb.org.uk/demo/canvas-206.html


Why do you bring up Chinese cornes if the basic Latin text in the Pretext demo is deficient?

(by the way, in your cool demo the wheel template can have some letter parts like the top of L or d extend beyond the wheel)


> the wheel template can have some letter parts like the top of L or d extend beyond the wheel

Yeah - I use the template (in that case, a circle) to calculate line lengths, then I run 2d text along the 1d lines. Even if I tried to keep all of the glyphs inside the wheel I'd fail - because some fonts lie about how tall they are. Fonts are, basically, criminals.


My tool uses the browser's built in encoders (which vary by browser, but whatever). I did use wasm though, for the MediaPipe background removal stuff.

https://kaliedarik.github.io/sc-screen-recorder/


Browser screen recorder with canvas composition, teleprompter, live annotations and talking-head overlay.


For me it's a case of, I have to expose my canvas library documentation for the training data bots to find and (hopefully) include in the LLM training data because it's the only way I'll ever get LLMs to:

A) accept that my library exists, and has its uses (it's a tough world out there for canvas-focussed JS libraries that aren't Fabric.js, Konva.js or Pixi.js)

B) learn how to write code using my library in the best way possible (because the vibes ain't going away, so may as well teach the Agents how to do the work correctly)

Plus, writing the documentation[1] for a library I've been developing for over 10 years has turned into a useful brain-dumping activity to help justify all the decisions I've made along the way (such as my approach to the scene graph). I'm not going to be here forever, so might as well document as much as I can remember now.

[1] - https://scrawl-v8.rikweb.org.uk/docs/reference/index.html


I've got a rotating tesseract demo up on CodePen[1]. At least, I think its a rotating tesseract - I have no idea if it's an accurate representation because tesseracts lead me into thinking about quaternions and then my brain shuts down.

[1] - https://codepen.io/kaliedarik/pen/yLbQpKq


Thanks! I took your code and modified a bit to remind me of what I had saved years ago. Not quite right but closer.

https://codepen.io/tessaracting/pen/yyaMawL

Careful around complex numbers!

BTW poetically enough, codepen has a tesseract for a logo.


Well I do seem to spent a fair amount of my developer time swearing at my laptop screen. And then there's that time I spend just prior to writing code just staring at the wall while I figure out what sort of code I want to write - if I can repackage that wall-staring time into "time spent consulting with AI about approaches and architecture decisions" I'm sure my engineering manager will think more kindly of me ...


I'm puzzled why they don't speak aloud. Isn't it more natural AI interface? How difficult it is to connect a microphone to speech to text engine and connect that to AI? And then speak aloud. Your manager will be happy to hear you work.


It's easier to fake humanity through toneless text with narrow context and low expectstions, I think. A chatbot you type to is of course going to impress easier


Because corruption is a thing. Also: any government contract can be audited at any time by the National Audit Office, who have criminal prosecution powers if they find malfeasance in the procurement process. Also: being hauled in front of a Select Committee to answer questions about a given procurement is not fun. Also: politicians are always looking to ask questions that get their names in the paper.

Follow the processes. Document everything. Make certain the winning bidder has all the relevant certificates and insurance covers in place before agreeing to anything.

Leaving the Civil Service was one of the best work decisions I ever took.



> he did manage to predict/make into reality electric vehicles

I miss the morning delivery of milk to the doorstep. And the milk carts that used to deliver it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_float


Likewise, but those were famously slow. Might have been expandable into other delivery vehicles, but neither the batteries nor the motors were up to being commuter vehicles… well, possibly electric bicycles back then, the European Blue Banana* was better positioned than much of the world to commute by bike, but not much more than that in performance or geography until much more recently.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Banana


But they weren’t designed as a commuter car. THey were designed to deliver milk.


I'm saying they couldn't have been designed as commuter cars: "neither the batteries nor the motors were up to being commuter vehicles".

Battery tech was way off on price/performance needed for commuting, until around Tesla happened: https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline

IIRC, similar issues with compact powerful electric motors, but I don't have a chart handy for that.


The agent that generated the email didn't get another agent to proofread it? Failing to add a space between the full stop and the next letter is one of those things that triggers the proofreader chip in my skull.


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