The republican speeches today are familiar to any abuse survivor.

"I hate that you made me hit you. I've never hit anyone before, so that's how awful you've been to me to make me do that. And the way you keep pushing this, it feels like you're trying to make me go there again."

A lengthy thread I wrote just to write. Feel free to ignore.

1/ The future of consumer GPUs is probably less ASICy than people think. I think we're nearing the end of growing non-general purpose compute/cache die utilization in consumer GPUs. Here's why:

2/ Real world RT core usage is far from peak theoretical perf. On Nvidia, they're cache starved. The way to improve performance for Nvidia is to add more cache to the die a la infinity cache. On AMD, it's just to improve their RT core design, which isn't great.

More importantly,

3/ real world RT core usage is very naive. It's often collect n sample per pixel with m reflections w/irradiance caching, & then run A-SVGF to denoise. This usually works well, but sucks w/moving objects, fine details like leaves on distant trees, and the combo of leaves in wind.

4/ But research already shows that you can get pretty drastic improvements w/adaptive sampling in that case.

Beyond that, adaptive sampling research usually focuses on general cases. But consumer GPUs use RT for e.g. games, Blender, etc. These aren't super general. The engines

5/ underpinning these applications have access to a lot of information. For example, developers can add hints to objects to suggest to the renderer that they be sampled more or less.

Better exploitation of temporal data and ray tracing statistics can make a lot of the rays cast

Deciding what to and when to go all in on an idea is super challenging and there’s a lot of bad advice out there

Here’s how it went for me and SwagUp

Here we go 👇

1/ the first important thing is that SwagUp wasn’t the first product/business idea I had worked on

By the time @swaguphq was started I had launched at least 15+ different ideas of varying levels of success growing up

2/ The chances your 1st, 2nd, or even 5th idea/product is going to take off are pretty low

And that’s largely because building startups are less about the product and ideas, and more about markets, timing, and execution

3/ So I think the first key lesson is that the number of swings you take early on is as important as the product you choose to work on

This is where you see many “over night successes” that were really the culmination of years of at bats, even for me at 25, I started at 6 :)

4/ Now back to the founding of SwagUp...

Leading up to it, I had known a bit about the industry, needing swag while launching and app in school, eventually selling flags and custom shirts to fraternities on campus in college

“Those schools who try to do everything they would do in a face to face context in a remote context are going to come unstuck” Darren Northcott .....

“Worst workload is in schools that are reinventing the wheel rather than using resources like @OakNational “ ....

“Teachers are still being required to do triple and double marking, hand in daily and weekly lesson plans, and some schools are hanging onto flight paths and half term data drops AND now add remote learning to it”

“There is no evidence that one form of remote learning is better than another”

“There are schools with really effective remote learning that don’t use live streaming at all”

cw // doxing, threatening, manipulating, death threat

yesterday, an elf threatened to dox my friend and me over petty fanwar.

exposing @kyufella and in doing so—@jungkyukie too.

a thread (PLEASE READ IT FULL)

Pete Buttigieg testifies today on his nomination to run the Dept. of Transportation.

I spent almost a year covering Buttigieg. He refused to speak with me, so I’m going to thread some of the things senators could ask him about today.

In 2011, Jiha’d Vasquez, 16, was found dead, hanged, on a utility tower.

In 2012, Buttigieg became mayor and Jiha’d’s mother asked him for help with the case. Common Council records show Buttigieg was at the meetings where she spoke about her son.

Jones and a local NAACP official wanted help because her son’s death had been ruled a suicide…with no autopsy and no investigation.

Items were missing from his backpack.

Jones told reporter @jharrell6468 that she asked Buttigieg to help get the case re-opened. She says he gave her his card and told her to call.

But when she did, she never got through to him, and no one ever returned her

When we looked into it in 2019, the county coroner told me it would be “prudent” to reopen the case. And also told us the file on the case was missing.

Buttigieg never responded to Jones or to our questions about the case. It remains closed

A couple of years ago I promised myself that one day I'll be strong enough to be able to talk about my mental health openly. I've made this my goal. I think this is the day, so here's how I ended up diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 37 - a thread...

In 2017 I reached my rock-bottom. I got back home from Philippines, where I failed to deliver my conference talk due to being a mental train-wreck (for which I'm terribly sorry!). I started having suicidal idealizations and I realized it's time to get help.

It's not that I wanted to end myself, but I would see myself dying in all sorts of ways every-single-day. These are called intrusive thoughts and the ones I had were probably one of the worst ones you can experience.

I started therapy in May 2017 and it was surprisingly easy for me to...just start talking. It was a relief that I could just talk to somebody because I pretty much isolated myself from everybody.

Unfortunately, my therapist didn't want to be specific about my problems and everything was just...too generalized? I don't know how to describe this. I wanted to hear concrete facts eventually, like "you're dealing with X and you should do Y to improve".

I posted this elsewhere on social media today. Sharing here because I think there are many ppl who relate, and bc having gotten pushback again today, I have found further reason for hope in some of the support I’ve gotten (thread): 1/11

In all of the pushback I’ve gotten over the past yr in statements I’ve made about politics & the white evangelical church, notably a lot has been not about the substance of my message but a continual refrain of “why do you have to say ‘white’ Christians?” 2/11

I’ll share a little to explain why this stands out to me. I’m Indian-American, loosely defined. My dad is from India and my mom is white. I have enjoyed all the privilege of living as a white American, to be clear (lots to unpack there, but have to save that for another day) 3/11

My entire life I’ve been asked to explain myself. “Where are you from?” “Ohio.” “But where are you *really* from?” Or worse, “what *are* you?” I grew up in the 80s and 90s and this is my lived experience. I now know it’s a common one for others like me. 4/11

Again, much more to unpack here, but the point is: I was always “other” because I wasn’t white.

White is just assumed as this default that we have lived with in America, and everyone else has then of course had to be named as something else: black, Hispanic, brown, etc 5/11