iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 20/08/2026

std::time is a notable footgun. The difference between two Instants is a Duration, and Duration is an unsigned magnitude, so subtracting Instants silently saturates to zero. At least one of these assertions will always fail:

$fn youre_gonna_have_a_bad_time( a: std::time::Instant, b: std::time::Instant) { assert_ne!(a, b); assert_eq!(a + (b - a), b); assert_eq!(b + (a - b), a); }$

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 28/07/2026

Slowly accepting that my final form is going to look a lot like “But we have Cyber Rick Rubin at home...” so I figure I might as well read his damn book.

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 23/07/2026

A lighting environment like, on the walk between the main #SIGGRAPH Hall and the @khronos.org breakouts, is really just one giant nerd-snipe.

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 29/06/2026

My dudes, you're doing it entirely wrong.

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 27/06/2026

Shameless plug for all the places my wife's talking at #SIGGRAPH. (I'll also be talking, but only at the hotel bar and only about things better left unsaid.)

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 20/06/2026

The trouble with sanding green paint in a room with white trim is that during cleanup it's really hard to tell what's dusty and what's Cornell Box. #TheGraphicsAreGreatIRL

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 03/01/2026

Oh. Oh no. I picked a distro that buries the lede until you commit to an install, then boom. Unironic anime catgirl as the mascot. Welp. In for a penny, guess this is who the Linux Desktop is by and for in 2026, etc. Might as well just embrace it.

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 03/01/2026

2026 is (yet again) probably not the year of the Linux desktop. But it IS the year of me getting so sick of my OS constantly trying to upsell me that I'm finally willing to try.

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 26/11/2025

“Dark role-playing masterpiece/dropped bag of spanners” is kind of my whole IRL personality, so that would totally track. @pcgamer.com www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/22...

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 12/09/2025

Expectations are everything. If they'd just called it something like "VtM: Blood & Phyre", everybody would have been super enthusiastic to see how Chinese Room did their own modern take on WoD. Hope folks give this a shot for what it is, instead of raging at what it isn't — so there'll be more WoD.

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 25/07/2025

Aw shit. Here we go again.

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 31/05/2025

This is a disturbingly-substantial keyboard.

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 30/05/2025

Friendship ended with Gaussian Splats. Now Triangle Splats are my best friend.

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 31/03/2025

Reasonably confident that absolutely nothing good will come from this. #Apple2 #CRT

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 29/03/2025

Dammit. Anyone want to buy one lightly-used perfectly-working but-not-chroma-teal PS5 controller?

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 08/03/2025

A very retro font renderer was absolutely the most useful thing I could write this afternoon.

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 26/01/2025

Hi my wife @shannonin3d.bsky.social and I couldn't help but notice you from across the bar, and we were wondering about your dress's bidirectional reflectance distribution function...

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 21/01/2025

@phobon.io Here you go. Fewer pixels. Party like it's 1979. #Apple2 #CRT

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 20/01/2025

Sniped by my own physics, I added rotational energy transfer. What's the point of Pong if you can't "Put English" on the balls and have them bounce accordingly? I did a WASM build of this checkpoint. Run it in your browser: meggsomatic.tv/balls_with_r...

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 20/01/2025

This little 230-page book from 1989 was such an important thing for me. Unashamedly technical, it documented the API by explaining how BSD implemented it. The specifics are obsolete but the conceptual framework has been a lasting foundation. 1/🧵

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 20/01/2025

Now I've got an Apple II analog CRT simulator and a modern physics engine. (Ho ho ho?)

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 20/01/2025

2025 is gonna be the Year Of The <ᴀᴅᴏʀᴀʙʟʏ ᴛɪɴʏ> Linux Desktop. I can feel it.

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 16/01/2025

Got my analog CRT simulator built into something I can install on my Steam Deck with controller support. The change in form factor sparks joy — it just feels good in a visceral way. So about doing something more than color bars...

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 03/01/2025

Didn't have THUNDERSNOW in the forecast for today's dogwalk, but here we are.

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 29/12/2024

OK, here's the good stuff. CRT scanlines are blooming nicely. 🌸

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 29/12/2024

As promised, I did it myself. Moved my analog #CRT simulator into a #Slang shader, and now I can emulate an #AppleII display with Biblically-Accurate Color Fringes in Rust/Wasm/WebGPU. Thanks to @pineight.com for the original test pixels.

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 29/12/2024

Thanks for the test case! My scanlines are still completely distinct from one another, but within each scanline there's some nice subtlety to the color fringes that you can only get when modulating with a color carrier wave.

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 28/12/2024

I've been coding up an analog CRT sim, and it's been fun to see how different low-pass filters affect that. Here's "green" with a ringing Lanczos-1 filter on everything, contrasted with a tent filter for Y and a box filter for I+Q. (Bottom two rows of each image are the filter kernels.)

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 27/12/2024

Accidental mug of eye-hurting juice. I swear I'm going somewhere with this.

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 26/12/2024

3/🧵The Slang WASM backend emits "human-unfriendly" code for simple matrix uniforms. It works (modulo me making an *even* number of sign errors and accidental transpositions), but it's way less readable than it could be. But otherwise good stuff. Now to make something "real". 💀/🧵

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 26/12/2024

Got textures and uniforms into my Rust/Slang/WASM/WGPU project, with a bonus appearance from @shannonin3d.bsky.social on guitar. See meggsomatic.tv/first_textur... (may not play nice with Safari). Problems so far: 🧵

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 25/12/2024

Just unwrapped a ModRetro Chromatic, and I have to admit that regardless of any feelings on Palmer Luckey, the actual thing is an insanely nice physical object. 10/10 this was clearly built by someone who builds things for actual wars.

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 25/12/2024

And that's a wrap, *just* before the other creatures were stirring. Finished #AdventOfCode entirely in #RustLang. Thanks to @was.tl for making it. Thoughts on using Rust below...

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 23/12/2024

Switched my #WebGPU project to @shader-slang.bsky.social so I don't have to learn WGSL. Much nicer syntax, though I did file a bug on the output. Don't know WGSL well enough to be sure it's not my error, but my wife tells me I'm right. github.com/shader-slang... Anyway here's Slang in a browser:

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 18/12/2024

When #AdventOfCode makes it impossible to brute-force a solution, but the problem space is “only” a few hundred trillion and you work at a FAANG...

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 15/12/2024

📺 Better YIQ->RGB on my analog CRT sim. Got "correct" Apple II colors by driving input beyond spec from -1/16...+17/16, especially noticeable in the now-proper eye-hurtiness of the green. 🙃 Un-reversed in-phase and quadrature modulations. 🕸️ Now to merge w/ my WebGPU and we'll 2025 like it's 1977.

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 14/12/2024

"Christmas Tree" is under-specified.

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 14/12/2024

Compiling Rust to WASM to programmatically set the inline style on a <canvas> element seems wrong, yet still somehow less-wrong than actual CSS. Anyway, here's my #FirstTriangle in #WebGPU.

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 04/12/2024

Here we go! Just set peacock.surpriseMeOnStartup = true, and BOOM rainbow is the new black. Now I need an extension to do the same to Chrome based on a hash of the URL. marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemNa...

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 30/11/2024

The blueskyroast.com analysis of my wife is entirely accurate about the dating "red flags", but also those are why there was a second date.

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 30/11/2024

The trouble with EVERYTHING finally supporting dark mode is that we've lost the instant differentiation we had when only half the world supported dark mode. Now we need green mode and blue mode and orange mode so it's easy to tell thumbnails apart at a glance. #orangemodeisthenewdark

You see a twisty maze of thumbnails containing light text on dark backgrounds, all alike.

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 28/11/2024

After a bit of playing, I'm sold on a Lanczos-2 for the luma, and a box filter with quarter-phase smoothstep edges for the chroma. Just the right balance of 🌈 and 😶‍🌫️. And along the way my Rust code got way way less horrible, with proper structs, slices, zips, maps, and match expressions.

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 27/11/2024

No matter how many times I re-generate, "Craft Beer Nerds" consistently gives me a badger for the Knight, and I really want to know what hidden truth about badgers and beer nerds is lurking in the training data. labs.google/genchess

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 24/11/2024

It's super dependent on exactly how you low-pass filter the signals, too. I used a box filter as a first cut, which isn't physically plausible. Compare what different colors you get with a tent filter, for example. I need to experiment simulating some actual analog RC filter circuits, I think. 🛑/🧵

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 24/11/2024

Is the OTHER colors that get generated at the boundaries. Note the way the orange goes through green on its way to black, and the green goes through red. That only happens if you work with the actual carrier waves, but it's an subtly important part of the "look" of the screens of the time. 3/🧵

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Andrew Meggs @meggsomatic.tv · 24/11/2024

Fun little learn-Rust project: Simulating analog CRT circuits to generate the colors of an Apple II. From top-to-bottom: 1. the "bits" in memory, which becomes... 2. a monochrome Luma signal at a higher frequency than the CRT wants, which gets... 3 & 4. multiplied by the Cr and Cb carrier waves... 🧵

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