Jacek @jacek@mastodon.technology

Context is:

- there is a child sexual abuse problem in Poland in context of Catholic Church;
- we don't know the scale cause nobody cares to count abuse instances (well some people do care but government does not*)
- getting damages money is super hard; cause priests have no property and church does not acknowledge responsibility;
1/
---
* arguably current party is just hostile to church child abuse survivors. But previous didn't care either.
#Poland #CatholicChurch

Nationalists (or facists) would say that #Poland was attacked in World War 2 by (choose from the list below):

* Atheists
* Communists (of course S in NSDAP stands for Socialism)
* German nation & Russian Nation

What they omit is that we were rather attacked by two nationalistic regimes (N stands for National). Soviet Russia was somwhat cosmopolitan, but in practice being a Russian in Poland was somewhat a priveledged position too.

Right now we have very big "Black Protest" marches, as ruling party decided to enforce (already very strict) abortion restrictions in Poland.

Basically woman would be forced to birth with severe defects (even ones that will die in first day of life).

They also started using terms like: "unborn human", "unborn patient".

This is all to appease to Catholic Church (after bishops publicly urged the government to hasten this legislation)

#poland #politics

3) How easily one can grow into a lackey of facist regime;
4) That CEO of a corporation that is exploiting workers will be destroyed not for exploitation, but by threatening Governmental monopolies;
5) Moral ambiguity of being a solider of said regime; what if being a solider is an only way out of poverty?

When I was a teen I read the whole "Sten" series as a S-F space-opera fantasy novel about a macho male.

I'm now listening to an audiobook, and now it is a book about:

1) Awful workplace conditions in a big corporation;
2) Workplace stratification in a corporation where "Techies" get decent pay and decent conditions, and workers get the boot (this was written before Amazon);

#SFF #Book #BookReview

Worked on performance, so I can add more grass (or in future more objects).

Here is the writeup of changes: https://blog.askesis.pl/post/2020/09/povraygen-diary-for-2020-09-04-and-03.html .

I'll work on something else than grass next :)

I have also somewhat widened (and randomized) the base of the blade of grass. I might revert that change though.

#povray #python

Correction: I won't add a dependency for 80 line file. It's not JavaScript.

Me: Dear #Python I'd like a dict that is immutable, as immutable objects are nice and safe to use;
Python: Why don't you use types.MappingProxyType?
Me: It's not Pickleable[1];
Python: Wait some time and use ``frozenmap``;
Me: It does not support O(1) operations[2];
Python: Why don't you roll your own?
Me: 🤦‍♀️

I'll download some implementation from PIP, don't worry. But I'm mildly irritated that I need.

[1]: https://bugs.python.org/issue31209
[2]: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0603/

I bought bone conducting head-phones. This kind of headphones transfers sound through bones, so nothing is on my ears.

This is sooooo good. They are light. I can listen to music for whole day, and or listen to podcasts.

Also they have decent microphone, so I can talk through them. Also they can function as car audio system (for me that is).

I almost feel like augmented person (DeusEx infolink vibes).

I'm listening to a podcast about the space race.

Funny trivia. USA had a problem with liquid waste disposal. For penis owners this system is a condom with a pipe. And these condoms fell off.

Originally the condom came in three sizes: small, medium and large. Everybody choose large.

Solution was simple. They rebranded condoms to large, extra large, and humongous...

In IT in Poland working on company provided equipment is not a obvious thing.

So there was a time when due to gross management mismatch it turned out I need to work on Windows. Due to my foresight (didn't uninstall Windows - mostly to keep the ability to install firmware patches) I had it.

But it was like year and a half out of date. Upgrade took whole day, with multiple restarts. However it was billed time, so it was only mildly irritating.

[1] Here is the reference to the property: http://www.povray.org/documentation/3.7.0/r3_4.html#r3_4_6_3_1

Good thing: it looks **better**, also I have improved performance (by doing the dumbest thing: using multiprocessing).

Bad thing is: povray files exploded from ~10mb to ~80mb.

Key was to use "ambient"[1] property for "grass". Previously grass was darker that it should be as it was illuminated from the random direction. Now ambient lightning means that they are magically always illuminated.

#povray #python

Another entry about landscape generator.

Reworked some code, to allow me to easily randomize colors, without ugly hacks I used last time.

Choose another (still randomly/computer generated palette).

Results are better but still suck :/

Will need to read into color theory (maybe just globally allow much less dark colors?).

Or maybe the "grass" is just bad. Need to think.

Also python is starting to be the bottleneck :/ (generating 100k of objects and printing them to a file).

#python #povray

My favourite playthrough is when I was a detective, that was simultaneously running a cult and catching competing cultists.

I was too good at the latter, and couldn't recruit enough members for my own cult...

I'm playing "Cultist Simulator" which is a computer card game, where you play a leader of a esoteric cult (even kinda sorta role-play).

I suck at this game big time:

* I played a worker, getting white collar at a company (minor victory);
* Succesful detective that went promoted for cult-hunting activites (minor victory);
* Couple of book-worms that bought-out occult bookstore;

Overall recommend.

#game #gameReview #sff

Added colors.

Spent part of day tearing out color map code from color brewer and seaborn code, and then integrated it with the lanscape generators.

Below landscapes are done using divergent colormaps from color brewer. Will need to do something better next time.

#python #povray

Finally managed to add some grass!

Colors are not yet randomized, will work on this next.

Another weird debug geometry, it's somewhat soothing (the yellow balls not the spikes) so I'll leave yellow balls somewhere.

#python #povray

Still trying to figure out how to add foliage.

In the meantime I have added sun.

Problem is that if sun is visible currently is rather boring as it lacks shadows.

Also I could probably add some texture to the "height field" (i.e. ground).

#python #povray

4) Having million objects (spheres) in povray eats 30% of my ram, so probably is an upper limit of what I can do without paying for cloud machine.

Anyhow here are some weird geometries with marker spheres that show distances.

Conclusions are that:

1) I need to put a lot of objects to fill the scene;
2) Objects need to be as simple as possible;
3) Ram will be a problem;
4) If I manage to do something iteresting I'll need to rewrite Python part to C++. . .

Some more debugging.

I want to add some plants, and there are some blockers:

1) I'm a fuckin undirected perfectionst and got blocked by "modelling a curve of a blade of grass";
2) I need to see how much of the geometry I need to fill with grass objects, and I have no idea how much is that;
3) Python is **sloow** geometry with a million of objects took more time preparing pov file tan rendering.

I spent most of the day debugging coordinate issues (now I know that they were coordinate issues).

I managed to solve it only when I created a debug geometry attached below.

Basically highest spike is where camera **should** be, and red cylinder is where camera is placed.

When they mismatched I knew what was wrong.