> Rendering a million photorealistic objects is not much more compute-intensive than rendering a hundred cartoon objects
Surely ray/triangle intersection tests, brdf evaluation, acceleration structure rebuilds (when things move/animate) all would cost more in your photorealistic scenario than the cartoon scenario?
The battery life of a camera doing basically constant uploads of > 10 MB images over cellular, potentially even in bad reception areas will be awful. It seems much more sensible to just offer a good wifi experience.
Kindles offering global reception back in the days for downloading a few kb of ebooks every few weeks are a very different game.
I really enjoyed reading this. It's not often you stumble upon long form somewhat stream of conscious writing thats this personal without it also feeling overly navel gazey. This had a nice balance between travel log and personal reflections.
As someone who almost went into photography instead of software dev, I feel like the slower falloff over the years for the "photographer middle class" might've been easier to handle than the quick cutting happening now in dev work...
Though watching job after job dry up around you might wear more than an abrupt change. Not sure which I'd prefer.
I do find myself going back to my film (35mm) camera more now. When it's a moment I want to preserve, and not just a snapshot of an event.
That's the argument for general-purpose rendering engines. These offer an API comparable to three.js. The API at that level is much easier to deal with than the API at the Vulkan level. Usually, about a page of code will put a glTF model on the screen.
But fast, general purpose rendering engines are hard. Not impossible, just hard. In open source land, we have about a half dozen examples of My First Rendering Engine, and they mostly work. But they don't scale.
Do open source engines count in your custom engine list? I could see that going either way: yes, because one can modify it to your heart's content, or no because it was built by someone else and not to the exact trade-offs you have in mind
Though I found they like having control over whether the music is playing more... to my chagrin. I tried to keep my parrot from being too noisy through the day by setting up a microphone in his room, and having it turn off the radio for 30 seconds every time he was louder than a threshold amount.
Day one -> he triggered the shut down ~10 times.
Day two -> easily 50.
Day three -> you can see where this is going
Dude freaking LOVED being able to turn on and off the radio. It almost beat out being able to flap his wings and make the curtains move as one of his favourite hobbies.
you thought you were punishing him by taking away the music if he makes to much noise and you give him a tool that gives him control over his environment. seems that backfired because it looks like the parrot is less interested in the music itself but in this new ability to control the radio.
I was this way too, until I bought it again on my phone. Now its my commute game and I have clocked in a huge number of hours. But in small, 1-2 run sessions
This is about banning phones during class or school hours. Even though the war on drugs may have failed the general populace, the prohibition of drugs at schools has been largely successful in preventing drug use from taking place in classrooms and on school property. (the same with smoking bans at schools)
I'm not sure its 100% "blue collar connections." That may be part of it, but the quality of food/drinks at starbucks has gone down dramatically in the past 5-10 years.
I worked full time there for awhile and happily ate hundreds of meals there. Now I won'tbeven touch my favourite donuts (#sourcreamglazedgang)
I dont know if its a corporate level thing or a franchise level thing, but man, Tim's sucks now
[edit: i meant to say the quality of tim's food has gone down, not starbucks]
I think it’s a mixture of corporate decisions and economic forces. For one thing, commercial real estate has skyrocketed even moreso than residential. If you’re a franchisee and your lease has shot through the roof but you can’t raise food prices then you’re going to demand corporate switch to cheaper ingredients and processes.
I just had a sandwich at Tim's the other day. It was freshly made with fresh ingredients. I was pleasantly surprised. In the middle, Tim's had food quality issues, but if the last experience is any indication, they have recovered nicely from it.
I heard from a Canadian friend of mine (very reliable source) that Tim's corporate changed to the same supplier of coffee beans that Starbucks uses. It's possible their other meal options were changed similarly.
Not the best link, but this largely sums up an effort by reddit to hire "International Ambassadors" that would create a low-effort alternate language version of subreddits about 2 years ago. A dead comment below yours has somebody's personal-ish experience with the program.
Personally, it's pretty easy to find posts on reddit that pair a vague question with an image. I imagine that there are normal people that could be posting these, but it's such easy engagement bait that's both trivial to create as well as use as cover to recycle old comment threads for karma.
Now, what would be more interesting to know, but Reddit isn't going to tell us is "How many accounts banned for bot behavior use a custom username versus using the default generated username".
The reddit front page has been an absolute dumpster fire of repetitive, ai-generated (or at least content farm generated) rage bait posts since the mod revolt a while back. I wish there were a way to quantify it, but basically all the "generation" subreddits, personal finance subreddits and "am i the asshole"-type subreddits absolutely dominate the front page and /r/popular with rage bait posts.
Surely ray/triangle intersection tests, brdf evaluation, acceleration structure rebuilds (when things move/animate) all would cost more in your photorealistic scenario than the cartoon scenario?