Hehe, not that that hard pressed. IMDB has a whole horned-demon category keyword: https://m.imdb.com/search/title/?keywords=horned-demon&explo.... And those results don’t even include South Park, nor Hellboy. If I Google image search for “Satan” I get nothing but red horned demons for pages.
There have always been wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing stories about The Devil too, it’s just a separate category.
The trend is clear that if we keep using fossil up, then soon nobody will have a good source for it. And it’s clear that for geopolitical reasons in addition to environmental reasons, energy independence will be a core necessity everywhere on earth. It’s handy that the sun is sending us enough energy, directly (solar) and indirectly (wind, hydro), that nobody has a good reason not to be “green focused” and phase out fossil fuels for energy. Any country that leads and shows the rest of the world that it can be done deserves applause.
Who is going to pay for it? Even when it was cheap, solar uptake was low except in Texas. EV adoption is still poor outside of California. Then there’s the issue of a K Shaped economy. Outside of our bubble in Silicon Valley, a lot of people can barely afford necessities let alone go green.
You might be confusing consumer purchasing choices with the national energy policy and infrastructure we were talking about. Going green personally is only more expensive to consumers in places where our country isn’t building and offering green power by default. EVs are a bit of a different topic. But what difference does it make when fossil fuels run out? Left unchecked, sooner or later market forces will make oil much more expensive as it becomes scarce, and eventually there is no choice. Yes we might be decades or even hundreds of years away from that, but in the big picture that’s not far away, and it doesn’t matter because the eventuality is obvious. Eventually there will be no such thing as non-renewable energy. Might as well start now.
Solar panels are being built like crazy in really poor developing countries like Pakistan, simply because it's cheaper than the alternatives. If they can afford it, average American surely should too.
There are lots of reasons you don’t see a lot of SDF skeletal rigging & animation in games. It’s harder because the distance evaluations get much more expensive when you attach a hierarchy of warps and transforms, and there are typically a lot of distance evaluations when doing ray-marching. This project reduces the cost by using a voxel cache, but animated stuff thwarts the caching, so you have to limit the amount of animation. Another reason it’s more difficult to rig & animate SDFs is because you only get a limited set of shapes that have analytic distance functions, or you have primitives and blending and warping that break Lipschitz conditions in your distance field, which is a fancy way of saying it’s easy to break the SDF and there are only limited and expensive ways to fix it. SDFs are much better at representing procedural content than the kind of mesh modeling involved in character animation and rendering.
One possibility, a little backwards maybe, is to produce a discrete SDF from e.g. a mesh, by inserting it in an octree. The caching becomes the SDF itself, basically. This would let rendering be done via the SDF, but other logic could use the mesh (or other spatial data structure).
Or could the engine treat animated objects as traditional meshed objects (both rendering and interactions)? The author says all physics is done with meshes, so such objects could still interact with the game world seemingly easily. I imagine this would be limited to characters and such. I think they would look terrible using interpolation on a fixed grid anyways as a rotation would move the geometry around slightly, making these objects appear "blurry" in motion.
Sampling an implicit function on a grid shifts you to the world of voxel processing, which has its own strengths and weaknesses. Further processing is lossy (like with raster image processing), storage requirements go up, recovering sharp edges is harder...
But isn't this what the author is doing already? That's what I got from the video. SDF is sampled on a sparse grid (only cells that cross the level set 0) and then values are sampled by interpolating on the grid rather than full reevaluation.
I agree that training on copyrighted material is violating the law, but not for the reasons you stated.
That said, this comment is funny to me because I’ve done the same thing too, take some signal of disagreement, and assume the signal means I’m right and there’s a low-key conspiracy to hold me down, when it was far more likely that either I was at least a bit wrong, or said something in an off-putting way. In this case, I tend to agree with the general spirit of the sibling comment by @williamcotton in that it seems like you’re inventing some criteria that are not covered by copyright law. Copyrights cover the “fixation” of a work, meaning they protect only its exact presentation. Copyrights do not cover the Madlibs or Cliff Notes scenarios you proposed. (Do think about Cliff Notes in particular and what it implies about AI - Cliff Notes are explicitly legal.)
Personally, I’ve had a lot of personal forward progress on HN when I assume that downvotes mean I said something wrong, and work through where my own assumptions are bad, and try to update them. This is an important step especially when I think I’m right.
I’m often tempted to ask for downvote explanations too, but FWIW, it never helps, and aside from HN guidelines asking people to avoid complaining about downvotes, I find it also helps to think of downvotes as symmetric to upvotes. We don’t comment on or demand an explanation for an upvote, and an upvote can be given for many reasons - it’s not only used for agreement, it can be given for style, humor, weight, engagement, pity, and many other reasons. Realizing downvotes are similar and don’t only mean disagreement helps me not feel personally attacked, and that can help me stay more open to reflecting on what I did that is earning the downvotes. They don’t always make sense, but over time I can see more places I went wrong.
Currently, downvote means "I want this to be ranked lower". There really should be 2 options "factually incorrect" and "disagree". For people who think it should matter, there should be a third option, "rude", which others can ignore.
I've actually emailed about this with a mod and it seems he conflated talking about downvotes with having to explain a reason. He also told me (essentially) people should not have the right to defend themselves against incorrect moderator decisions and I honestly didn't know what to say to that, I'll probably message him again to confirm this is what he meant but I don't have high hopes after having similar interactions with mods on several different sites.
> FWIW, it never helps
The way I see it, it helped since I got 2 replies with more stuff to read about. Did you mean it doesn't work for you?
> downvotes as symmetric to upvotes
Yes, and we should have more upvote options too. I am not sure the explanation should be symmetric though.
Imagine a group conversation in which somebody lies (the "factually incorrect" case here). Depending on your social status within the group and group politics, you might call out the lie in public, in private with a subset or not at all. But if you do, you will almost certainly be expected to provide a reasoning or evidence.
Now imagine he says something which is factually correct. If you say you agree, are you expected to provide references why? I don't think so.
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BTW, on a site which is a more technical alternative to HN, there was recently a post about strange behavior of HN votes. Other people posted their experience with downvotes here and they mirrored mine - organic looking (i.e. gradual) upvotes, then within minutes of each other several downvotes. It could be coincidence but me and others suspect voting rings evading detection.
I also posted a link to my previous comment as an experiment - if people disagree, they are more likely to also downvote that one. But I did not see any change there so I suspect it might be bots (which are unlikely to be instructed to also click through and downvote there). Note sample size is 1 here, for now.
Okay, but only if this is balanced by accounting for the cost of IC engineers’ solo time too. Sometimes it does feel like meetings waste a lot of time/money quickly, but I’ve also watched people burn money by not having meetings and going the wrong direction for weeks, watched teams over-engineer the crap out of features nobody asked for, watched people tear out huge swaths of working code they just didn’t like and waste years re-implementing it, only to have it be buggier for a few years and then end up with basic design flaws, sometimes the same ones as before, and sometimes new ones…
A blanket force to reduce meetings isn’t quite the right incentive; we need incentives to have the right amount of meetings and to make them more effective. The right amount of meetings is probably always going to be more than ICs want, and less than managers want. But if you have any reliable ways to make that happen, to keep meetings effective, that’s gold. Charge money for that knowledge and consult, or become a CEO, either way you’ll get rich!
I wouldn’t phrase it that way. Relying on willpower is a recipe for failure. Humans generally don’t have enough willpower, it goes for most things, even when you don’t have strong physiological forces involved. The key to getting a diet to work is in figuring out how to not require willpower, which means thinking about it differently, forming new habits. Stress and social environment also need attention or they will steamroll your goals.
This goes for coping with a lot of executive function problems and disorders.
Part of how I have to manage my rather severe ADHD is specifically crafting an environment that's as ADHD friendly as possible, much to my wife's dismay.
That means nothing can ever be hidden away or out of sight, otherwise I will immediately forget it exists. It means every bill must be on autopay, or it will not get paid. It also means living as minimally as possible, for me. Even something as "simple" to a neurotypical like washing dishes or doing laundry is a seemingly impossible mountain for me to climb. I solve that by owning as little as possible, and I also remove choices by, for example, just owning multiples of the same exact outfit.
The moment any sort of friction or context switching is involved in a task, I am going to fail, so I have to architect my life in a way that reduces friction as much as possible.
I also have ADHD and i also find living as minimally as possible very helpful. Could you elaborate on more of those tactics that work for you? I am also curious how you apply this to your work life
Basically things that eliminate friction. I wear only slip on shoes because having to tie & untie is friction. I replaced our kitchen cupboards with those glass window ones so I can see whats inside every cabinet without opening it. I have multiple laundry bins, so I actually don't put clothes away in a dresser when done. I just leave them in the bin, pull out what I'm going to wear, and then have separate bin(s) for dirty. Eliminates a huge friction point (folding & hanging) when it comes to doing laundry.
For work, that's mostly just luck. I'm a solo sysadmin for a non-tech company, and I work from home so I have a great deal of freedom. Outside of interruptions for help desk level tickets/emails (which suck and do throw off my flow), no one really oversees what I do and I set my own deadlines for the most part so I can work when and however it suits me to take advantage of days where I have good flow state.
Thanks. I'll also add a couple of my tactics for other ADHDrs out there: I only have black same socks, underwear and T-shirts so I never have to bothered by them. I replaced my coffee machine with a simple French press, so the cleaning and maintenance is quick and easy. I add every fixed-date event to my calendar so that I get a notification when something is due and don't have to remember it. I write everything down and make lists so I keep track of stuff. I try to reduce all the fluff from my life to simplify it, and I am extremely weary of getting new things, because each thing comes with responsibilities such as maintenance, cleaning, storing and of course using it. I basically want daily stuff to leave me the fuck alone and I feel like this frees up a lot of mental resources for me
Fwiw, that’s not the best way to draw a circle in general, the test shows it’s the fastest way to tessellate a circle, among the methods the author tried, and using a specific GPU. You don’t have to use triangles to draw a circle, and the author didn’t try all possible tessellations, and the author there didn’t compare perf against any other method (a shader, for example), and the also didn’t investigate accuracy. Their fast method might have numerical accuracy issues with thin sliver triangles at some point.
> What type of filter do you mean? […] the approach described doesn’t go into the details of how coverage is computed
This article does clip against a square pixel’s edges, and sums the area of what’s inside without weighting, which is equivalent to a box filter. (A box filter is also what you get if you super-sample the pixel with an infinite number of samples and then use the average value of all the samples.) The problem is that there are cases where this approach can result in visible aliasing, even though it’s an analytic method.
When you want high quality anti-aliasing, you need to model pixels as soft leaky overlapping blobs, not little squares. Instead of clipping at the pixel edges, you need to clip further away, and weight the middle of the region more than the outer edges. There’s no analytic method and no perfect filter, there are just tradeoffs that you have to balance. Often people use filters like Triangle, Lanczos, Mitchell, Gaussian, etc.. These all provide better anti-aliasing properties than clipping against a square.
I’ve been ordering Americanos for 20 years. Espresso drinks became a very common thing around the time when Starbucks took off in the 90s. But it does depend on where you go. Diners and gas stations and some kinds of cafes and restaurants (especially in small towns) often only had drip coffee until recently, but these days you can get an Americano in many gas stations too. Cafes with baristas making espresso drinks is the norm in big cities and has been for some time.
I wonder if Ray Kurzweil was inspired by this story, or if there was some other futurist who inspired them both. I had a sort of déjà vu reading this, having been at Kurzweil’s Siggraph keynote in 2000. He was predicting this very scenario - the singularity would bring nanobots that make humans immortal. His talk made an impression on my young mind. It wasn’t until later that I realized Kurzweil was just peddling the fountain of youth, and was somewhat unscrupulous about it…
Looks plausible for a minute, but when you start to think about it, you realize he has conflated longevity with average lifespan, and that it cannot possibly be a mistake, he’s not that ignorant or careless. The plot is missing data points that were easily available when it was made, data points that would completely contradict the trend line he put in the graph. Turns out human longevity hasn’t really budged for ten thousand years, but average lifespan has changed a lot, due to infant mortality and sanitation and vaccines and lower infant mortality and less war and more science.
I think a lot of the graphics in that article are equally sketchy when you look a little closer, and a lot of his predictions from 2000 are already orders of magnitude off, so I have no trust in anything Kurzweil writes or predicts. But given the state of the earth today, maybe it’s a good thing that significant longevity or immortality isn’t just around the corner? It’s a fun thought experiment and a nice story though.
There have always been wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing stories about The Devil too, it’s just a separate category.
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