Sebastian Krzyszkowiak @dos@librem.one

Congratulations to Gints Zilbalodis and the entire Flow film crew for the Academy Award win!

Flow is the manifestation of Blender’s mission, where a small independent team is able to create a story that moves audiences worldwide.

Thank you for the shout out! 🧡 #b3d

Discrete Fourier transform is one of the most important algorithms in computing but it's also one of the worst-explained ones. You can go through pages of search results and not find a single accessible explanation of *why* it works.

A while back, I put together an explainer. I don't think it ranks highly in search, but if you want to understand the algorithm behind a lot of multimedia compression algorithms & filters, here's your chance:

https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/blog/fourier/

Of all the things I've done in my career, this is probably the one I'm the most proud of.

When me and two others at Intel started working on the Vulkan driver, Mesa had a reputation for being behind on everything. The Intel drivers were still on OpenGL 3.3 (fp64 was a pain), OpenGL ES 3.1 or maybe even 3.0, and perf okay but kinda meh. I think there might have been a driver or two in Mesa exposing GL 4.x at that point but, as a project, we were still a ways from full OpenGL 4.5.

With Vulkan, we jumped the line and had Vulkan 1.0 conformance on Intel on launch day. It was a hell of a lot of work (I worked 80+ hours/week that last month or two) but we got there. The driver branch we dropped that day was pretty shaky and it was missing a lot of features but we were there. It took a year or two to get to where we had decent perf, working games, and feature parity with the hardware. But that was okay because there were only two titles that came out that first year and getting them working was the important bit.

Then Vulkan 1.1 came out and we were there with a day-0 driver again. This time, without missing any interesting features. Then 1.2 and 1.3 and now 1.4. With every new version, more drivers joined the train. When Vulkan 1.4 launched, there were 5 different Mesa drivers that landed MRs on to enable Vulkan 1.4 on launch day.

This has totally changed the conversation about open source graphics. When I started, everyone scoffed at Mesa. Today, the speed at which we're able to implement features and launch new API versions is the envy of the graphics industry. We're still not totally caught up everywhere—NVK and PanVK still need work and etnaviv Vulkan doesn't exist—but we're going toe to toe with the proprietary driver teams across most of the industry. The fact that Linux Vulkan drivers are being hammered by most of Valve's library via DXVK and VKD3D means the Mesa drivers are often more stable and robust than their closed source or Windows counterparts.

It's a totally different world for 3D graphics now than it was a decade ago.

People mimic what they see when there’s a perceived danger. I was just at the pharmacy picking up my wife’s meds, and every pharmacist was wearing a surgical mask (wish they were n95, but I’ll take it). There were about 10 of us in the lobby and only three folks did not have a mask. As the moments ticked by, 2 of them walked over and picked up one of the free masks and put them on. The next three people who walked in, upon seeing a room of masked people, also put masks on from the free box. You may not think you’re setting an example, but you are. Show yourself. Be the light.

on Halium/droidian/linux mobile

really need to write a blog post about this but summarising my thoughts for now:

* Droidian and other Halium based projects are not Linux mobile

* They shouldn't be carelessly compared with #postmarketOS/Mobian, they are much closer to Android in terms of tech stack/complexity/longevity

* Basically the WSL of #LinuxMobile

But, still good, still valuable for making your device more-free, and for the growing app ecosystem.

but i am slowly losing my mind every time i see someone describe a mediatek phone running a proprietary BSP as "real linux mobile" you are warping what little "brand recognition" this community has and it will reflect poorly on all of us when more light is shed on the underlying software stacks and long-term unmaintainable downstream hacks