iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Omer Shapira @omershapira.com · 11/11/2025

4 layers of black stain, 4 layers of various walnut stains, 4 layers of tung oil and 4 layers of wax later: I’m really really scared to drill the final pieces into place.

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Omer Shapira @omershapira.com · 03/11/2025

Building a guitar from some CAD files and industrial parts. Shockingly simple if you already have a neck

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Omer Shapira @omershapira.com · 06/08/2025

Paper snip of me w/ the IDF high commander, printed Aug. 5 2005. I volunteered to participate in the removal of Israeli settlements in the Gaza strip. I thought I could do nothing more important for the future of coexistence. Today, exactly 20 yrs later, Netanyahu reversed this move. Heartbroken.

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Omer Shapira @omershapira.com · 14/07/2025

Saw Oasis in Manchester. The entire city (and country) was consumed with it. 15% of the audience (80k/night) wore bucket hats. Musically, it was amazing. Otherwise it felt like late FleetwoodMac. Liam and Noel did not exchange a single word. Liam spoke to the audience, Noel just wanted to go home

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Omer Shapira @omershapira.com · 13/06/2025

loss functions are getting impractically specific

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Omer Shapira @omershapira.com · 03/06/2025

Big update from The Workshop on Computer Vision For Mixed Reality @ CVPR 2025: 📝 Papers and schedule are now up! Our Speakers: Richard Newcombe (Meta) Anjul Patney (NVIDIA) Rana Hanocka (UChicago) Laura Leal-Taixe ‪(NVIDIA) Margarita Grinvald (Meta) 📅 June 11, 8AM 📍Room 109. cv4mr.github.io

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Omer Shapira @omershapira.com · 13/05/2025

Found my mom’s only online copy of her dissertation, “Computer Reconstruction of Bodies Bounded by Quadric Surfaces from a Set of Imperfect Projections”, on a .mil website, and realized the industry is still improving on solutions she pioneered. Happy Mothers’ day. apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA...

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The problem is: a guitar for pop music needs to look like a guitar for pop music. I have several. My favorite is a Johnny Marr Signature Jaguar, which I’m twinsies with Taylor Swift for playing. This guitar, however, looks like it’s going through a rough divorce and is about to lose custody.

Thing is, pickup configurations can usually nail 1-2 good tones. This guitar, nails *many*. it does that with clever wiring: the 2 pickups are actually 4 (so far normal), and they can be connected in many different ways, including a special mode where some outputs have a passive bandpass filter.

Yet another signature sound is the “full” sound based on a humbucking pickup (two pickups with opposite polarity, ‘bucking’ the ‘hum’ that many classic rock bands used for ‘warmth’. This has a sweet spot closer to the neck. I like using Franz Ferdinand’s fuzz guitar tone as an example.

Another “Signature” sound you may know is a “treble” single coil pickup at the bridge, where sound has many “tinny” overtones. Used frequently in country music and in tracks where you hear a strummed guitar cutting through the mix, this is the sound a Telecaster is known for. Here’s Graham Coxon’s.

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The other thing special about this one is the pickups: Pickups are normally designed to have a specific response curve, given some ref impedance. The wiring determines the filtering. The “Stratocaster” signature sound (think “Sultans of Swing”) is two pickups wired in parallel, cutting the mids.

The latter 2 reasons make it attractive to people who play real fast, hence they’re fitted with high SNR/high output pickups, have low “action” (distance string is suspended above fretboard), and are targeted towards metal players, so most of them are made to look like they have a cocaine problem.

Omer Shapira @omershapira.com · 19/04/2025

Fanned Fret guitars mean that instead of the frets being perpendicular to the strings, they meet them at an angle. To preserve the tuning, the strings have different lengths, like in a piano. It’s new tech. They’re hard to do because the fretboard is not flat, so the wire curving requires CNC:

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I caved and bough an Ibanez SML721 fanned fret guitar. The guitar looks like it commits tax fraud, but it is the easiest instrument I ever played, and by far the most versatile. Can do a Strat ‘quack’, a Tele treble sound or a 72’ Tele neck humbucker sound like Franz Ferdinand. Next level shit

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Omer Shapira @omershapira.com · 15/04/2025

The thing about these works that I didn’t know until seeing them in Tel Aviv some years ago is that they’re a *little* small for ordinary people to walk inside. I wondered about this for a while, and it turned out that on top of being gay in a country not ready for it, he was also *very* tall.

Omer Shapira @omershapira.com · 26/03/2025

The Fujifilm GFX100RF is proper weird. “Compact”, w/a sensor so big (44x33 @ 102MP) that the last 4 optical elements are magnifiers(!), pancake lenses @ fixed 28mm(equiv) and f4 (no surprise seeing the magnifiers). *no stabilizer whysoever*. Many reasons to hate it, but I’m totally going to get one.

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Omer Shapira @omershapira.com · 26/03/2025

The funniest thing I ever did was condition my doing an interview in a student paper on them adding this to my bio:

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Omer Shapira @omershapira.com · 23/03/2025

Ken Shirriff (@righto.com) claims [1] the nickname THE MOTHER OF ALL DEMOS was only given to Engelbart's demo by Andy Grove in the 1991 Comdex keynote, referencing Saddam Hussein's expression at the time, MOTHER OF ALL WARS. Google n-grams seems to back this up. [1] www.righto.com/2025/03/moth...

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Omer Shapira @omershapira.com · 17/03/2025

most of us, at some point of every passion.

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Omer Shapira @omershapira.com · 16/03/2025

Another stab reading it this year: She describes how sorely needed twitter would’ve been in 1987, to commiserate directly with people who see your hard work and the human in you, which is exactly what we lost in the past few years. (I checked, and she’s here now, @traceythorn.bsky.social. tyvm)

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Omer Shapira @omershapira.com · 15/03/2025

Another part that really resonated with me: Having spent my entire adult life in relationships with partners who share my fields, sensibilities, and ambitions, and even breaking them off when those diverged - her way of describing a healthy collaborative lifestyle is grand.

Omer Shapira @omershapira.com · 15/03/2025

Before finding true purpose in graphics papers I used to host a show on national TV

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Omer Shapira @omershapira.com · 15/03/2025

Reading BEDSIT DISCO QUEEN, Tracey Thorn’s autobiography (thanks @theohonohan.bsky.social). Here she describes interacting with Americans:

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Omer Shapira @omershapira.com · 09/03/2025

Politely saying "This is not a dither shader" will make a dither shader appear, sort of - at least a bayer matrix. Some hand-tweaking later, I can get what I asked for; and I used the demoscene noise for perturbation.

Omer Shapira @omershapira.com · 07/03/2025

Turns out the peptide candidate generator was this regex: github.com/Svensson-Lab...

Omer Shapira @omershapira.com · 03/03/2025

1. Copilot fails at well-documented graphics pipeline issues. Unlikely that seeing images will help (suspect insufficient training data to explain what a stencil is) but may try. 2. Asked for a dither shader and got the well-known demoscene magic number modulo noise, without any dithering.

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Omer Shapira @omershapira.com · 03/03/2025

Day 1 / Setup Within 30 mins of work, got: • Project structure: quite bad, lots of tweaking needed • npm build+run confs (spot on) • Components imported - this was annoying; an open loop problem where I have to type in feedback. Ended up taking control.

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Omer Shapira @omershapira.com · 28/02/2025

Friends who know me too well got me a gift: A 300-page-long conceptual shitpost about roots of a cubic polynomial.

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Omer Shapira @omershapira.com · 23/02/2025

The Brazillian navy found a ship sunk by a U-Boat in WWII. Cool, but what's really fucking cool is this the quality of imaging possible with current multibeam & side-scanning SONAR at the ocean floor: www.cnn.com/2025/01/31/a...

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Omer Shapira @omershapira.com · 19/02/2025

Here's a typical relationship definition in a deep learning paper. Red lines indicate what connections I have to make to understand the claim.

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Omer Shapira @omershapira.com · 19/02/2025

Are you saying this based on intuition? Because I don’t know what sales figures clear the bar for “extremely mainstream” but it’s not “1 Poland per year w/a 4yr lifetime” www.statista.com/statistics/1...

Omer Shapira @omershapira.com · 17/02/2025

📯CALL FOR PAPERS: Submit work to the Workshop on Computer Vision for Mixed Reality @ CVPR 2025! 📆 Deadline: March 28 → Papers appear in the CVPR Workshop Proceedings ✨ Topics: 3D/Image/Audio Capture/Understanding/Reconstruction, Spatial AI Agents, Human-AI Interaction. cv4mr.github.io

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Omer Shapira @omershapira.com · 15/02/2025

Ordered some Mortise-Mounted hinges to turn my Piano into an extra desk (Piano hinges scratch laptops). Needed to figure out the path of motion, and looked at the hinges: It's just parabolic! But it's hard to figure out without thinking of a 2nd order polynomial as 2 nested Lerps.

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Omer Shapira @omershapira.com · 12/02/2025

Whoever made the cover image reference “Nude Descending a Staircase” has my respect