Alexa Schor

We had some fun with this in a fractal geometry paper, using “Ss” for the self-similar fractal version of set S.

Announcing SGI 2026! Undergrads and MS students: Apply for 6 weeks of paid summer geometry processing research. No experience needed: 1 week tutorials + 5 weeks of projects. Mentors are top researchers in this emerging branch of graphics/computing/math. sgi.mit.edu

Belated Hanukkah 15x15 Duck dentist's domain?; Largest European bank, for short; \* With 50D, 2024 film whose titular character marries a Russian oligarch's son and celebrates a Maccabee-related miracle.; The second-most-fa...

Getting back into crossword constructing with a belated Hanukkah puzzle:

crosshare.org/crosswords/Q...

When I was at Garmin I worked on the graphics driver for the new IFD, not on autoland, but it’s still very exciting!

Garmin Emergency Autoland deployed for the first time | Flightradar24 Blog Garmin autoland was deployed for the first time in an emergency, safely landing Beech B200 Super King Air N479BR in Denver.

In exciting aviation news, Garmin’s autoland was successfully deployed for the first time after the pilot of a B200 King Air was incapacited in the air!

www.flightradar24.com/blog/aviatio...

Eighth night! Third candle’s in a hurry.

As an aside, I do suspect this may technically not be a kosher Hanukkiah due to the ~5mm vertical curve, but that is less than the variance in candle lengths from most sources, and it doesn’t look like a bonfire, so I think it’s probably fine.

Having recently spent so many hours grappling with the DL, there’s so many other improvements I’d rather see…

A yellow banana-shaped menorah with yellow candles, lit up for the first night of Hanukkah.

Happy Hanukkah!

This feels accurate - I think a lot of my resistance towards black-box models, even if they did perform consistently, is that it seems to take the fun part out of it!

Writing code on a bumpy train and tried stabilizing the display image to my head -- it does (surprisingly) make things a bit easier to read but overall feels too weird to actually use.

When I was young, I started reading programming books before I was familiar with the English prefix “pseudo-“, so I kept seeing algorithms “in pseudocode” and thought “wow, I should learn that language instead, it seems so easy”

What a cool project and design!! May I ask how you printed the templates? I always have trouble getting things printed at 1:1 scale

I spent a few minutes trying to parse this NYC parking sign yesterday -- the best I can figure is that non-commercial parking is only allowed in January?

One day we will find the fabled Fouriest transform

I love solvespace! It’s so useful to have a lightweight constraint solver around

I won’t be at SIGGRAPH this year, but if you are, make sure to check out my colleagues’ amazing work!

4D+ Deformables: Mon 11:45a
3D Head Generation: Mon 2:40p
Countering Racial Bias BoF: Tue 5p
Teaching Game Engines: Wed 11:07a
Predicting Fabric Appearance: Thu 9:20am

Full list: bit.ly/yalesg25

Really excited to share this with you all! The website is already live at anadodik.github.io/publication/...

I didn’t! But that’s a good point, I wonder if people (or at least the cross-section of people that participated in that data labeling) see those features as signaling e.g. competence or helpfulness

I used to love overusing emdashes and bolded list headings. Alas…

🥻Our new #SIGGRAPH2025 paper introduces a novel pipeline that captures and digitizes physical threads, predicts fabric appearance from the weaving pattern, and aids designers in exploring new possibilities.
🔗 mandyxia.com/research/fabrix.html

It seems bluesky's image compression muddled the text a bit. here's the full text: pastebin.com/DNxnpZB4

Gab's system prompt. It's a lengthy document, but among other things, it instructs the model to deny the Holocaust, produce racial slurs and hateful content on demand, and to endorse the "Great Replacement" white supremacist conspiracy theory.

It's really horrifying. Below is Gab's current system prompt. It seems to change roughly weekly, presumably at Torba's whims.

A lot (e.g. Holocaust denial) has been in there since Jan '24, some (e.g. seed oils) is newer. I assume the paid models are as bad or worse, though I can't verify.

It’s somewhat niche, pretty much just for putting up aluminum siding AFAIK. You can’t use stainless or galvanized for that purpose or you’ll get galvanic corrosion.

Gab's system prompt, formatted and highlighted. It instructs the bot to, among other things, deny the Holocaust, endorse a "Great Replacement", and produce any racial slurs that a user asks for.

While I'm on the topic: after the reporting by WIRED et al on their system prompt (telling the bot to, among other things, deny the Holocaust), Gab briefly removed those instructions – reintroducing them about a week later, after the news cycle passed.

Their prompt has not changed much as of today:

My hope is that the high-profile instances of open political manipulation that we’ve seen from e.g. Grok and Gab will reduce that blind trust – we’ve seen that many providers have a desire to manipulate the output, and this will presumably remain even as their methods become more sophisticated. 2/2

People still seem to trust LLMs without considering the potential for overt manipulation or bias, and I think we’re also nearing the end of a brief period where chatbot makers assumed that prompts would be hidden: future manipulation will likely come in ways that are harder to directly observe. 1/2

Fractals!

MOTIVATION Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) are at the core of Computer Graphics research. These chips are critical for rendering images, processing geometric data, and training machine learning models. Yet, the production and disposal of GPUs emits CO2 and results in toxic e-waste [1]. METHOD We surveyed 888 papers presented at SIGGRAPH (premier conference for computer graphics research), from 2018 to 2024, and systematically gathered GPU models cited in the text. We then contextualize the hardware reported in papers with publicly available data of consumers’ hardware [2, 3]. REFERENCES [1] CRAWFORD, KATE. The Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. Yale University Press, 2021. [2] STEAM. Steam Hardware Survey. https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey [3] BLENDER. Blender Open Data. https://opendata.blender.org

Ever wondered how badly we're all addicted to buying new GPUs in graphics labs?

Come see our talk at #SIGGRAPH2025 to discuss how we can collectively move "Towards a sustainable use of GPUs in Graphics Research"

with @elie-michel.bsky.social @axelparis.bsky.social Octave Crespel and Felix Hähnlein

Figure from a graphics paper, showing a range of implicit functions. The caption reads Figure 5: For a given boundary there is a uniquely defined exact SDF that is eikonal and satisfies the distance property, but there are many ways in which the conditions can be violated to different degrees. Pseudo-SDFs are functions that satisfy the eikonal property almost everywhere, but not the distance property (Equation 1). Conservative SDFs are not eikonal nor do they satisfy the distance property, but the function values are bounded by the actual distances. Implicit functions are generic level set functions that do not have any guarantees.

brb trying to convince every graphics paper author to use the same taxonomy for implicit functions

Ooh yes!