Yining Karl Li

Inside how the Dodgers fixed Roki Sasaki -- and possibly saved their World Series repeat hopes After a disastrous MLB debut, L.A.'s new ninth-inning man has unleashed jaw-dropping stuff in October. Here's what fueled the sudden turnaround.

Roki Sasaki suddenly returning as an absolute lights out postseason closer and the road it took him to get here is one of the best stories in all of baseball this season. He’s been absolutely incredible in the NLDS.

www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/...

Yooo I remember Bryce 3D; this program ruled back in the day.

Earlier this year an AI guy told me with great confidence that his self-fine-tuned sports LLM had predicted that the Yankees and the Red Sox would face each other in the World Series this year. I didn’t have the heart to tell him… 🤣

Nice link- I hadn't read this before! I think the observation about how the game's biggest challenge was in the powers-of-ten idea is very astute- that's a really hard target to do well, and off the top of my head the only recent game I can think of that does it well is maybe Universal Paperclips.

Something something Spore crawled so that No Man's Sky could fly.

YouTube video by Zeusmonomon Will Wright GDC 2005 Spore (The Future of Content) Remastered

In light of EA's upcoming change of ownership... here's your annual reminder that Will Wright's original GDC 2005 demo of Spore was one of the most incredible game demos every presented, before the game was utterly and totally ruined by EA's meddling.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofA6...

It is time for what is IMO the greatest sport ever invented: October postseason baseball. Regular baseball is my second most favorite sport; October baseball is my favorite sport.

Any military can kill people if it has equipment in the right place, but few can deliver a box of any cargo you want anywhere on the planet with a moments notice. Battles are won by tactics, wars are won by logistics, etc.

I think it’s worth remembering that the greatest capability of the US military isn’t killing people; that’s relatively easy. Its greatest ability is being able to establish a fully working Burger King anywhere on Earth within 24 hours, which betrays its unmatched logistics might.

The fact that different apps can have different corner radii is wild. It feels like when I’m on Linux with a mix of Gnome 2, Gnome 3, and KDE apps. Or on Windows when some apps are using the modern UI and some are still using Vista/7 UI.

I previously wrote that I don’t really feel strongly about Liquid Glass either way on iPhone/iPad, but I finally updated my daily driver Mac to Tahoe and… woof Liquid Glass on macOS is _rough_. I feel like this is the most inconsistent macOS has felt since… gosh, Kodiak?

YouTube video by Walt Disney Animation Studios Zootopia 2 | Final Trailer

Final trailer for Zootopia 2! This is a bit of a spoilery trailer, but boy does it have pretty visuals. Part of the fun and challenge of making Zootopia movies is the sheer amount of stuff that we cram into every frame. All rendered using Hyperion, of course.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Awt...

I’ve been thinking recently re:RFK about how amazed I am that the USA is doing its own Lysenko, but it turns out we’ve been doing our own Lysenko for decades now in our public education systems.

California spent decades sabotaging its students’ ability to read, and it turns out that if a student can’t read, then education outcomes across the board are going to be bad. I know CA is into equitable education outcomes, but this wasn’t equitable, it was just stupid.

California is only now working to dismantle the whole word approach and re-adopt phonics, but in the meantime there are forces in the state that want to ban teaching Algebra before high school. Just complete insanity.

Illiteracy is a policy choice Why aren’t we gathering behind Mississippi’s banner?

Interesting read: Mississippi turned around their literacy rates by switching back to science-based phonics reading. Meanwhile for years California has used “whole word” reading, which has been thoroughly debunked and is a big driver of abysmal literacy rates.

www.theargumentmag.com/p/illiteracy...

YouTube video by Secret Base The History of the Seattle Mariners: Supercut Edition

So my favorite two MLB teams are NL teams, but every year on the AL side I hope for the Mariners. They're the weirdest, most interesting team in all of sports, and at long last it might just be their year.

Good time to repost the epic Jon Bois doc:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIgK...

I feel like over the past few years, the last weeks of the MLB season has tended to be not very exciting since the playoff positions are pretty much already locked, but this year is something else. There are so many insanely tight desperate races right now; it's fantastic.

I know more than a few current and former VR system/platform devs who worked at the couple of major VR players and who do not use or even own VR devices at home.

Criterion Collection edition of Flow is now out. This one is def on my list to pick up. 👀

Also yeah that's a film 100% made with Blender now with a Criterion Collection release. Pretty cool!

www.criterion.com/films/34685-...

YouTube video by CartoonBrew.com Official 'Forevergreen' Exclusive Clip

This isn't an official Disney Animation project, but it was in fact rendered using Hyperion btw. 😉

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1L2T...

Nvidia and Intel announce jointly developed 'Intel x86 RTX SOCs' for PCs with Nvidia graphics, also custom Nvidia data center x86 processors — Nvidia buys $5 billion in Intel stock in seismic deal Cats and Dogs, living together!

Nvidia buys a $5 billion stake in Intel, will jointly develop a x86-RTX SoC. This is a huge hell-hath-frozen-over deal.

I hope this doesn’t spell the end of Intel Arc, which is single handedly applying downward price pressure for consumers right now.

www.tomshardware.com/pc-component...

It's taken a while for everyone to get healthy, but the Dodgers starting rotation that was promised is finally in full gear, and it's proving to be one of the best starting rotations ever assembled. It's a Death Star.

The exhaust port of course being the Dodgers bullpen.

To be honest, I don’t feel strongly about Liquid Glass. Some stuff could be better, some could be worse, it’s fine I guess.

The automix feature in Apple Music on iOS 26 though, man I do not like that being on by default at all. First time it happened I 100% thought it was a bug.

Maybe the real CISC architecture was the friends we made along the way.

Oops forgot a whole word in that post lol. Should read “I love everything that the folks at Panic do”

I love everything that the folks at @panic.com; they really do never miss.

Haha, I suppose from a light transport perspective that's true. But in practice the geodesic paths can only be traced through ray marching and for accuracy this requires tiny steps closer to the event horizon and requires intersecting testing the scene on every step. All of which is very expensive.

Note that all real black holes are thought to be Kerr black holes, whereas Schwarzschild ones are purely theoretical. This is because all known celestial bodies have spin. Something something insert reference to the short story "Omphalos" by Ted Chiang here something something.

I think I got Kerr black holes mostly working. I've had to make some simplifications, but the core frame-dragging effect is now implemented. Kerr black holes have angular momentum (spin), which causes asymmetry in the gravitational lensing.