beka valentine

trans dyke hacking on @[email protected] . she/her (xey/xem or ey/em if you're bored with binaries); no child zone, 18+ only 

current twitter handle: @[email protected] 

former twitter handles: @beka_valentine @illegally_beka

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[email protected]

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nprofile1qqsxukmy4ylec97k22y3zjz78xwghcpkr3gzu0rnd6q3378qpk2s6rqpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0ds7892ka

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nos.lol

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Last Notes

2026-06-01 05:30:25 GMT

pasta with margin and adobo or jamaican curry powder is way better than pasta with sauce tbh

2026-05-26 17:02:58 GMT

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@nprofile…hyh5 ?

2026-05-26 16:54:10 GMT

sure, you complain about the AI cliche of "Not X, but Y"
but do you complain about "No X, just Y"?

2026-05-22 20:39:37 GMT

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@nprofile…ytg3 i mean, gravity is definitely not a social construct

2026-05-22 18:40:31 GMT

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gravity? thats real, we see it and feel it every day here, we witness it ourselves.
we do not see and feel and witness that gravity moves the heavens, we merely guess that it does, and its a great fucking guess

2026-05-22 18:39:28 GMT

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but alas, we've never seen the little angels pushing things, and the sameness of causes is not fact or observation, it's thesis, hypothesis, guess
its a damn good guess too, it works really well, but its guess, not observation

2026-05-22 18:38:26 GMT

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if thats how the world worked, we MIGHT have been able to observe the little angels pushing all the things, and then the statement "objects fall for the same reason planets move in circles" would not be a THESIS at all, it would be OBSERVATION, it would be FACT

2026-05-22 18:37:19 GMT

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we might well have been able to squint REALLY HARD and see the little angels pushing things!
and if we had built ships to the sky and squinted really hard up there, we could see the little angels pushing planets
who knows!

2026-05-22 18:36:10 GMT

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but could it have been an observation? well sure
i mean, suppose that people were right, that the WHY was answered with "little angels push things around"
so the planets move in circles because little angels push them
objects fall because little angels push them

2026-05-01 18:03:30 GMT

new video!
Recreating the VPL DataGlove, Part 3: Tube+Fiber Flex Sensor
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U971dbM8m20

2026-04-29 17:03:00 GMT

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@nprofile…659r ah see i grew up on the 90s scifi show version

2026-04-29 17:00:50 GMT

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@nprofile…659r i havent but it looks like a revival of that style and i therefore love it
but where's the guy who talks to animals?!

2026-04-29 16:29:13 GMT

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anyway, the futurismo of these shows, and the sincerity of their aspirationalism within that futurish setting, is what makes it so very TNG to me

2026-04-29 16:07:26 GMT

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it feels almost imaginable that someone in 1992 could express pride in winning American Gladiator, as if that were a genuine accomplishment on par with winning an Olympic gold medal
i can't see anyone feeling similarly about WipeOut or its ilk

2026-04-29 16:06:37 GMT

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and so i think that's why this kind of cringey camp futurismo versions of these kinds of shows went away and were replaced by goofball comedy versions

2026-04-29 16:04:12 GMT

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caring about the future, even your own personal future, and honestly believing you can improve it is cringe, don't you know? the future can't be better, don't be so naive and childish to think you can do things, don't be a rube!

2026-04-22 16:17:48 GMT

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except, no, you can't do that, because functions aren't their own specific thing you can refer to
instead, the closest thing to a transform like that, is to pre-apply with an input transform:
circle(1, vec2(2,2), P - vec2(3,4))

2026-04-22 16:16:03 GMT

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so for instance
translate (3,4) (circle 1 (2,2))
would be equivalent to
circle 1 (5,6)
that is to say, the original circle, but translated right 3 and up 4

2026-04-22 16:14:55 GMT

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signed distance functions like this are immensely powerful and incredibly useful and thats great
now, if this were haskell, say, and we wanted to draw a circle at some point c, and then translate that somewhere, we could just do this:
translate delta (circle r c)

2026-04-22 16:13:15 GMT

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so something like
float circle(float r, vec2 c, vec2 p) {
return length(p - c) - r;
}
when circle(r,c,p) is negative, the point is inside the circle, when its positive it's outside, and the value returned is the distance to the boundary of the circle

2026-04-22 16:11:15 GMT

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i'll give you an example. let's consider a 2D shader for drawing a circle. the usual way to do this with a pixel/fragment shader is to define a function that, given the radius and center of a circle, computers when a random point is inside that radius

2026-04-22 16:08:55 GMT

one of the things that's especially frustrating about shader programming being stuck in the imperative mindset is that there's no ability to do higher order programming, so everything is infinitely more confusing for being contravariant to how you think

2026-04-08 18:46:54 GMT

the TACO assholes won. the ceasefire is gone. Democrats got what they wanted: continued war with Iran

2026-04-05 18:00:48 GMT

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@nprofile…jwpj but also, VPL's work was almost entirely inaccessible as well

2026-04-05 18:00:20 GMT

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@nprofile…jwpj VPL was almost entirely in the 80s, and was rather a distinct phase of VR from the 90s wave

2026-04-05 17:23:48 GMT

its kind of frustrating that the VR scene of the 1990s produced basically 0 books about their adventures in creating the future, because they kind had no soul and no vision

2026-03-25 21:17:01 GMT

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@nprofile…ted5 when did that class run?

2026-03-25 21:12:26 GMT

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that's not to say that it makes a compelling case internally, but at least there's a clear sense that you can use the tool to create interesting things you might want to look at
way better than anything in the VRML book

2026-03-25 21:10:13 GMT

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now, i do get that this book is a technical introduction to VRML, but its hard to pick it up and feel like this is something worth spending time on
whereas the VRML sourcebook for VRML 2.0 at least throws a weird alien world on the cover to entice you

2026-03-25 21:08:26 GMT

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Jaron Lanier had the good sense to pitch VPL's work on VR by making appeals to human creativity and expression, which is at least an open ended invitation to fill in the blanks with compelling ideas

2026-03-25 21:07:16 GMT

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its not just VRML, but VRML is the easiest thing to point to
these same people are still around, and were pushing the metaverse a few years back, with painfully similar schlocky pitches
no one cares about ~commerce~
you won't attract people with that as your pitch

2026-03-25 21:06:08 GMT

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and its an interesting contrast to the incredible imagination behind hypermedia that existed from the mid 80s through the mid 90s, and the web from the mid 90s on, and video games for forever

2026-03-25 21:04:59 GMT

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now look, sure, i get it. it's early days of VRML, from 1994 to 1997, but even through to the late 90s or early 2000s, you'd be hard pressed to find VRML content that was in any way compelling. the imagination for what it could be was just.. boring and bland and schlocky

2026-03-25 21:00:10 GMT

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now, given that these are static things, not dynamic, interactive environments, its hard to find any of this compelling on its own
VRML 1.0 didn't even have animations and such, so you couldn't even make little characters that did stuff. that came in VRML 2.0 / VRML97

2026-03-25 20:58:58 GMT

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the aforementioned track light is described somewhere in source but never even shown

2026-03-25 20:57:43 GMT

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a blank building exterior with a bench and lamp
a studio apartment with furniture and kitchen
a banana
a stair case with 3d text as buttons
a computer lab
an abstract architectural space
an abstract representation of SQL
a molecule
a slot machine
South Beach in SF

2026-03-25 20:52:33 GMT

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here's a list of example objects/spaces in the book, in order:
an AR15
a hexagon
some squiggle writing
the VRML logo
the planet earth
the New College vrmLab
a cube
an orrery (consistently mispelled as orrey)
a strange building interior that's described as a "stock ticker"

2026-03-25 20:47:40 GMT

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what i mean by that is like.. the things imagined are so boring and schlocky. the mythos around the motivation for VRML is all like.. William Gibson's Matrix, or Neal Stephenson's Metaverse, but the canonical examples are stupid
like, one example given is a track light
whoopie

2026-03-25 20:46:13 GMT

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reading through the VRML book that Mark Pesce wrote, i feel like there's a real sense of .. not having much to say with VRML
i think this was an eternal problem, partially due to VRML's static nature, but even then i think it's not logically impossible to say stuff

2026-03-25 20:36:06 GMT

VRML 1.0 is a truly weird language. not sure if this is carried through to later versions and its descendants but, wow what a strange language

2026-03-25 04:36:35 GMT

Sonique's It Feels So Good is such a great song
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5ZaxGR21sc

2026-03-25 03:10:13 GMT

Sadeness, by Enigma, is such a quintessentially 90s song, holy moly
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4maoo4A3x4

2026-03-22 17:54:17 GMT

@nprofile…4wfp have you heard eire og's sam song?

2026-03-21 07:07:51 GMT

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@nprofile…55vq the early web was fairly empty and dead too. finding information and shopping were some pretty major drivers of use, and then forums, art, publishing, etc.
but the web is a different kind of medium, and purposes there are different sorts

2026-03-21 07:06:11 GMT

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so why when you put a headset on do many people get sick? have we actually sat down and determined the fine cuts that have to be made to induce that? i've never found anything explaining the distinction, nor anyone even grappling with that weird disconnect

2026-03-21 07:05:07 GMT

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people spend hours and hours and hours playing video games on monitors, with all sorts of in-game movement that doesn't correspond to their body movement, and they don't get sick. they move their heads around a whole bunch and nothing, no sickness

2026-03-21 07:02:03 GMT

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also, no one has really addressed the nausea problem in a satisfactory way
and i dont mean that they haven't fixed it, i mean they haven't actually grappled with the giant mystery of why it even happens at all, because it obviously SHOULDNT

2026-03-21 06:59:59 GMT

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a 200 dollar headset that was JUST a display, and you used it by sitting at your computer and used your mouse and keyboard, would be the most popular VR system, i bet. make it a small delta over normal games and start from there

2026-03-21 06:58:42 GMT

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even the VR that tries to be useful for games tries to be unnecessarily divergent from them. instead of just goggles in place of monitors, you have to have a whole huge room scale hand held yadda yadda bullshit, which means everything is now suddenly a whole ordeal

2026-03-21 06:57:34 GMT

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this is why games and game-like social spaces persist as the dominant form of virtual environments
VR that tries to be vastly different fails and fails

2026-03-21 06:56:16 GMT

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people turn to these things for escape, but being dumped into a world where you have to be the entire reason is not escape, it's a burden. giving people an option for purpose is valuable

2026-03-21 06:55:14 GMT

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video games have always understood that purpose is key. even the smallest purpose like gold farming is a draw. but a blank canvas of a world is .. daunting? overwhelming? people don't know what to do with themselves

2026-03-21 06:53:36 GMT

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the fundamental issue is purpose. most VR stuff is completely purposeless. a void where you must supply your own reason to be there. sometimes the novelty of 3D immersion is the purpose, but that wears out quickly

2026-03-21 06:35:35 GMT

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even Star Trek: The Next Generation understood how to make these places compelling! just copy that stuff! but no, the best they ever found was terrible chat rooms, and Second Life

2026-03-21 06:33:54 GMT

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its actually immensely frustrating to me that precisely zero lessons were learned about what makes a virtual space appealing
in the context of video games, they understood this completely. but for some reason the "VR" versions of things have just remained soulless dead zones

2026-03-21 06:30:35 GMT

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that the lessons weren't learned, and that many of the exact same people were involved this time around, is really sad. i mean, nostalgia is fun, but you should use your nostalgia for inspiration and for learning lessons, NOT for copying your own failures!

2026-03-21 06:29:23 GMT

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and it suffers from all the same problems. i mean literally, there were VR real estate speculators in the 90s, there was no content, no reason to use a VR space, people not getting that commercial spaces are pointless in VR, etc etc etc

2026-03-21 06:28:25 GMT

the modern metaverse/web3/whatever bullshits, is so funny because the best examples of it look no better than stuff from the 90s, except unlike the stuff from the 90s, there's now no reason for it to be so ass

2026-03-20 17:25:48 GMT

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he does this using the immense power of foresight, and sets it up so that the terrible ability to control the future that this creates is eventually so awful that rebellion against the new conquerors is inevitable and births a new and enduring age of human freedom and flourishing

2026-03-20 17:23:52 GMT

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a rebellious man with personal grievance against the empire creates a political project which uses religion to manipulate the people of a remote, barren world into going on an expansionist conquest to take over the galaxy from the empire

2026-03-20 17:22:20 GMT

guess the scifi book series:
humanity becomes ensnared by robots and the men who control them, and has to rebel against their rule and banish them to history
a great and terrible empire controls the galaxy, their power seems inescapable...

2026-03-18 21:21:13 GMT

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"but what about the heat from the intensive computations in the CPUs and GPUs? that's a lot of heat!"
doesn't matter. it literally cannot be more heat than is coming in, because the energy all comes from the solar panels anyway

2026-03-18 21:19:51 GMT

can you cool data centers in space? yes. just build it out of many satellites instead of a single giant box and you're fine. the satellite can already cool itself, so multiplying the number by thousands doesn't change that

2026-03-10 16:31:20 GMT

its really hard for me to express how enraging the lat few years of software have been
i've been saying for a while that there's been significant, voluntary regression of software quality for a while now, but this kind of obvious regression makes it undeniable
this was a choice
https://x.com/peer_rich/status/2031287133982392412

2026-03-08 02:45:35 GMT

one thing i find immensely frustrating about Mastodon is that it's a strange isolated little island
like, Twitter is full of current events, non-stop news, etc. but Mastodon is just the same detached stuff it always was

2026-03-03 09:22:03 GMT

there isn't a single thing that the tech world is doing right now that is interesting and compelling, tbh
everyone is doing stupid boring shit that doesn't matter and has no vision

2026-03-02 17:11:55 GMT

i'm a little surprised there's been no real effect on the markets tbh

2026-03-01 09:47:59 GMT

SF has mosquitos in february 🥰

2026-03-01 08:45:45 GMT

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the oldest known built wooden structure is almost half a MILLION years old, and the fact that we have any trace of it at all is incredible because wood generally doesn't last or leave much of a trace
who knows what else was out there, lost to time

2026-03-01 08:18:38 GMT

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human history is incomprehensibly long, and we know practically nothing about what happened, who these people were, what their lives were like
oceans of time stretch behind us, unfathomably deep, full of people and stories we'll never know

2026-03-01 08:15:22 GMT

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when the city at Çatalhöyük was being founded, Jericho in the West Bank had been inhabited for 2000 years

2026-03-01 08:13:15 GMT

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when the first pyramids were being built in Ancient Egypt, the city at Çatalhöyük was 5000 years old and had been abandoned for over 3000 years

2026-03-01 07:40:01 GMT

when Athens was at its peak in 500 BC, the Egyptian pyramids were already an ancient mystery people would go visit on vacation
the Trojan War happened a thousand years earlier and the pyramids were still ancient by comparison

2026-02-27 21:00:33 GMT

over the last month, poutine has become a core part of my diet lmao x.x

2026-02-25 18:53:23 GMT

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it could also be some distinctive compound produced by plants in conjunction with bodily fluids of some sort? and the sheep eat lots of it in grass, while the bandages supply it in the bandage itself? who knows

2026-02-25 18:52:03 GMT

wet sheep's wool smells both like medical bandages and also sheep poop, and i assume that this is a result of some compound that both human and sheep cells produce. i wonder what that is

2026-02-25 00:25:20 GMT

liberal governor Gavin Newsom is retweeting known neo nazi Richard Hanania
great

2026-02-23 20:32:57 GMT

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@nprofile…pnrj have you seen any of the variable width Agda programs people publish?

2026-02-21 18:45:29 GMT

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@nprofile…q0wy i shall watch this at some point :)

2026-02-21 08:12:28 GMT

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in my grand TV show, Athens, i would have aGreek chorus, where the episodes begin and end not with traditional "last time on" or whatever
but rather with actors playing the chorus members in the scene, be when they're done with the chorus, they simply go right into character

2026-02-20 18:45:45 GMT

someone should give me 500k per episode to make a show called Athens, spanning 800 years of ancient greek history

2026-02-17 08:43:09 GMT

poutine is so fuxking good man

2026-02-14 00:56:34 GMT

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its also important to know that some of the new Chemists were themselves still doing alchemy in private and in underground publications, leading double lives, dabbling merely as a hobby, etc.

2026-02-14 00:54:50 GMT

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and the only practical way for Alchemists to continue doing good work was if they dropped the transmutation stuff so the feds didn't crack down on them

2026-02-14 00:48:36 GMT

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this is why, for instance, the practical and successful alchemy for pharmaceuticals became widely associated with the term Chemist, and why in Europe you still use that term to mean what Americans call a Pharmacist

2026-02-14 00:47:37 GMT

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as that shift in goals happened, the new generation of non-transmutational Alchemists got caught in the same anti-Alchemy nonsense during the Modern period, and they resented it
and many of them started to try to vocally distance themselves from Alchemy, rebranding as Chemists

2026-02-14 00:46:18 GMT

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and you know, why not? if you want a pile of gold, you can get that many ways. you could try to transmute lead, but you could also just make something very valuable that everyone will pay through the nose for
this is what gave rise to the modern industrial chemical giants!

2026-02-14 00:45:17 GMT

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Chemistry split off from Alchemy primarily when some Alchemists decided that they weren't actually all that interested in transmutation, and instead wanted to focus more on the aspects of Alchemy that had been very successful over the prior centuries and millennia

2026-02-14 00:44:04 GMT

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but their GOALS were explicitly transmutation of base metals like lead into precious metals like gold, and other related things, which is why they discovered many many chemical reactions that look like that, and why there was eventually a concern about debasement of currency

2026-02-14 00:42:35 GMT

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Alchemists did all of that, for sure. you gotta pay bills, and vast amounts of Alchemical work is about the practical equipment making techniques, theory, medicines, etc. b/c thats how you made money to support alchemical research

2026-02-14 00:41:08 GMT

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the biggest shift that happened, which distinguished Alchemy from Chemistry historically, was not publication, and so forth, but rather was a difference of goals
the Alchemists goal was not merely to do chemistry for chemical engineering or pharmaceutical purposes

2026-02-14 00:39:13 GMT

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in fact, if you think about it a little, it's obviously impossible to say that they BOTH never published, AND ALSO published lots of cryptic nonsense no one understood
they turned to cryptic nonsense because they wanted to publish MORE and were ducking the censors

2026-02-14 00:38:11 GMT

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specifically choosing language that was both readily understood by fellow alchemists who knew the lingo and the chemical reactions, and also religious enough to look like whacky religious nutballs to government officials

2026-02-14 00:37:06 GMT

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and 2) the ever present christian tensions in europe that meant anything that looked like adulation of christ, even if it came across as a little nutty, was good cover
and so during the MODERN period, during the 15th through 17th centuries, alchemists started to be more florid

2026-02-14 00:35:22 GMT

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in particular, this period of modern obscurantist was driven by two things
1) a desire to fly under the radar of governments who began to crack down on alchemists for fear that they would debase the currency, because alchemists were increasingly successful at chemistry

2026-02-14 00:33:34 GMT

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it's simply not true that alchemists didn't EVER publish and that they spoke in cryptic forms so that no one else understood them
there was one particular period -- the MODERN period from 15th to 17th century -- where they DID start to do this, however

2026-02-14 00:31:55 GMT

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for Medieval Latin Alchemy in the 12th to 15th centuries in Europe:
Summa Perfectionis by Pseudo-Geber
Aurora Consurgens by an unknown author, possible Thomas Aquinas
Rosarium Philosophorum
Theatrum Chemicum (which was a anthology of earlier texts!)

2026-02-14 00:29:21 GMT

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in the 8th to 13th centuries in the Islamic world we had
the Corpus of Jabir Ibn Hayyan
Sirr al-Khaliiqa/Secret of Creation by Balinas
multiple works by Al Razi
the Rutbat al Hakin by Maslama al Majriti

2026-02-12 21:16:45 GMT

ranked choice voting is so terrible, man. we gotta stop promoting it as some magical solution

2026-02-12 18:45:52 GMT

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@nprofile…qe7h @nprofile…j0eh i'd like to request tho that you make the list textually searchable. using just images right now means you can't ctrl-f for a game to see if its in the list