I’ve been doing some game dev stuff lately and I needed to intersect a ray with an octree of triangles, for collision detection. I first implemented a naive algorithm that simply checked if the AABB of each octant intersected the ray, then found the closest point. This was devastatingly slow, as you might expect. I then implemented the algorithm described by Revelles et al which is a nice algorithm, but limited (all octants must be half the size of their parents, for instance; this means it can work only on true octrees and not “loose octrees” or k-d trees) and fairly complicated.

Today I had a random thought while doing day-job work: what if I treat the octree divisions as splitting planes and essentially do a binary search? By knowing which plane my ray is closest to at a given step, I know which nodes I need to search. To my surprise – and slight horror, because it’s never a...

This blog post will exist as a living document of ideas – some very fleshed out, some barely more than a concept – which I would love to implement if I had 15 of me. Unfortunately, there’s just the one (for now) and I don’t have time to work on any of this. As such, please take these ideas and run with them; if you make them and charge for them, I will throw money at you.

I completely rescind any rights to these ideas. You are free to implement them in any form you wish. I just want to see these happen.

Mario Maker clone

Mario Maker is an awesome game, but by its nature it’s limited to Wii U (and kind of, almost 3ds. But not really) and thus the audience is even more limited. Additionally, I think there’s some really fun stuff that could be done regarding visual scripting to make this powerful and awesome.

I actually started work on something like this a while back but...

I always have a large number of projects, which shuffle between active, inactive, and effectively abandoned. In the interest of self-accountability and maybe letting others take over or get involved in projects, I’ve decided to make an incomplete list (last ~6 months), which I’ll attempt to keep up to date:

• HypervisorSharp (H) [Active]: This project seeks to allow trivial development of hypervisors and emulators for .NET Core. Currently targets only Hypervisor.framework on MacOS. https://github.com/daeken/PaleFlag/tree/master/HypervisorSharp
• PaleFlag [Active]: Xbox emulator built on H. https://github.com/daeken/PaleFlag/tree/master/PaleFlag
• GdbStub [needs real name - Active]: .NET [Core] library to embed a GDB stub trivially in any emulator, hypervisor, or other project. https://github.com/daeken/PaleFlag/tree/master/GdbStub
• SharpStation [Inactive/Abandoned?]: Playstation...

Today is a bittersweet day. This is my last day in the ReSwitched Discord, and the console hacking community at large. But before I dive into why, some background.

ReSwitched began with just me and the goal of hacking the Switch to run homebrew code. I started a Discord in case anyone was interested in watching/helping out and I registered reswitched.tech to throw information I/we gathered. I tweeted about it and posted it on Hacker News and it grew slowly but steadily. By the release of the Switch, we had something like 50 users.

At first, the work we did was primarily in public channels, then in “private” channels. To get into the latter, you simply had to message me and tell me that you didn’t work for Nintendo. No skill test, no participation threshold – just a simple assertion, which could be a lie if you cared enough. This was enough until we started making real progress...

Like most Americans, I’ve spent the last 72 hours following the events of Charlottesville, VA very closely. I’ve laughed at the memes, I’ve been angered by the Nazis alt-right protesters, and I’ve spent my fair share of that time arguing with people on the internet. But you know what? I understand why these protests (and the subsequent counter-protests) are going on, why they’ve become violent, and why people are justifying them.

Two Facebook comments popped up on a friend’s post wherein she shared a video showing the torch-bearing mob intimidating counter-protesting students. These strike at the heart of the issue in a way unlike anything else I’ve seen:

Lol did you not see this coming? News and media has been making white people out to be the bad guy for so long and doubly so recently it was only a matter of time before big things like tnis happened. Not says its right or okay...

For the past 13 years, I’ve known about a pair of thieves that live inside me, rummaging through my things and stealing what I most care about. It’s been so long that it feels almost normal; that it feels impossible to rid myself of these unseen, unwanted, altogether intrusive guests.

Those thieves are named Anxiety and Depression. It’s something I’ve written about for as long as I’ve known the name to pin on them, working – in my own way – to fight against the stigma that pervades discussions about mental illness and causes a great deal of harm to so many people. What I haven’t written much about, however, is the way they affect me on a day-to-day basis.

Nearly every morning, Anxiety is the one to wake me. He tells me that I’ve slept through an important call for work, that I forgot to respond to that email, that today is the day I’m going to be fired because I’m a fraud...

TL;DR: Every time someone brings up homeless veterans in the conversation around refugees, God kills a kitten. Please, stop the senseless killing.

In 1968, the United States – along with 145 other nations – signed a UN treaty called the “Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees”. This was an extension of 1951’s “Convention relating to the Status of Refugees”, another UN treaty which laid the groundwork for dealing with refugees in Europe following the fallout of WWII.

While the details of these treaties are too numerous and intricate to describe here, the summary is this: all signatories agreed that they would accept refugees from many areas of the world. It defined a refugee as such: “A person who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his...

In light of the executive order signed by Trump, enabling the Dakota Access Pipeline to continue construction (though I personally find it unlikely to proceed without a lengthy legal battle first), I figured it’s worth looking at some statistics around the pipelines we already have in the US and what these can tell us about the future. I won’t be making any value judgments here, nor will I be comparing and contrasting pipelines with other means of transport. Just pure statistics.

All statistics are from PHMSA unless otherwise noted. Pipelines here refers to any liquid/gas energy pipeline – natural gas, crude oil, byproducts, and others. Statistics, whenever possible, are based on numbers from 2015 due to their availability.

• There are about 2.4 million miles of pipeline in the US
• Over half of these pipelines are 50 or more years old, though it’s unclear how many linear miles of...

… Unless you’re willing to fight for it

Everyone has myriad opinions, to which we assign various weights by importance and conviction. For instance, my opinion that birth control is a good investment is something I weigh heavily; my opinion that peaches are gross is weighed significantly less.

But your opinion has absolutely no worth to others unless you can actually back it up. While that importance and conviction is key to you, no one else will see that. No one else will care. No one else will assign similar values unless you can and will give evidence to support your side.

Every time someone says “it’s just my opinion; you can have your own”, I wonder why they cared enough to express their opinion in the first place. [Side-note: Does it generally just boil down to vanity? It seems so to me, but I’d welcome other thoughts here.] In America the prevailing belief that all...

The Transhumanist Party is, by far, the political party in the US that best represents my own views for the future. They advocate for science, rights for all persons (human and non-human), ending the war on drugs, universal basic income, and other issues that will keep getting more and more important as time goes on. You can read more about their platform here.

However, there is a half-missing component of the platform that will hamstring it: first-past-the-post voting blocks out third parties, especially where they do have such extreme views for the future. I think Zoltan Istvan (the 2016 Transhumanist presidential candidate) is a fantastic candidate and agree with 99% of his views, but even I have a hard time agreeing to vote for him as it stands. A vote for a third-party candidate in lieu of a vote for a Democrat or Republican is essentially guaranteeing a win for the party you...