6 ms·

I love these stories of engineering and science from the trenches. Prefacing the story with "the early Pixar renderer was stupidly slow for silly archaic (and a

I love these stories of engineering and science from the trenches. Prefacing the story with "the early Pixar renderer was stupidly slow for silly archaic (and at the time sensible reason) X" followed by "luckily no-one is that silly anymore - except me, as an expert, did Y, which geez looks a lot like X" is a perfect start :) Not only is it an adventure you can join an expert in their field on but when told honestly it's a lovely reminder that everyone stumbles and drops the proverbial hammer on their foot occasionally. It's also a loving testament to our era of content generation that a frequent task in creating a children's film is solving complex scientific or engineering problems. They recreate so many of the strange nuances and hidden beauty of our world (anisotropic rendering, Navier–Stokes equations, subsurface scattering, caustics, flocking, dendritic growth of snowflakes, global illumination, ...) just so they can render the purest representation of it for us. I genuinely am so glad for the time I spent in art[1] and computer graphics, though neither have much relevance to my career now, simply as it changed the way I look at the world. When you want to try to recreate a real life scene from scratch you realize just how much happens in the real world without you ever appreciating it[1]. [1]: Even after the physics and science above: Do people frequently travel down this path? Might it become a holloway[2]? Does the roof guttering drain out here? There'll likely be moss or wearing paint. Old stone steps of an ancient tavern? The stone will likely be worn away at the center or on either side of the door. The background scenery in a modern computer graphics film has dozens or hundreds of hours in them and will be filled with nuance and/or in-jokes. If you need to create a background world in any appreciable detail, why not use it as a canvas to keep telling a story? [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunken_lane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunken_lane

yoodenvranx 8y ago
> I love these stories of engineering and science from the trenches. I wish there was a website collecting all these stories and articles. They could also ask the authors for permission and offer epub/pdf downloads of these stories. That would be a nice read while traveling
- theoh 8y ago
  "all these stories and articles"? There are millions of people working in software, the number of interesting war stories just within computer science is (conservatively) in the thousands. A distributed system of blogs is the only efficient way to publish that breadth of material, bearing in mind that each reader's interests are different, you can't curate a feed to suit everyone. With all due respect, one convenient website aggregating all that material is not a practical idea. It's like asking for one huge magazine to exist which contains everything worth reading about a huge field like CS. Edit: I mean, it would be convenient, but there's no royal road to finding stuff that's worth reading. https://queue.acm.org https://queue.acm.org is pretty good, for example
  - whatshisface 8y ago
    It sounds like you're arguing that Netflix is not only impossible, but that it would be more impossible if it served text.
    - lmm 8y ago
      Netflix for text would be impossible. Netflix for movies is only possible because the overwhelming majority of decent movies are produced with the involvement of a relatively small number of production companies, and that in turn is the case because making a good movie is a much bigger exercise than making a good piece of text. It's highly unusual for one person to make a high-quality movie on their own and publish it directly on the internet, whereas this is entirely normal and common for text.
      - cuckcuckspruce 8y ago
        Your public library and services like Overdrive are "NetFlix for text". NetFlix for text != zero curation, NetFlix curates their selection.
        lmm 8y ago
        > Your public library and services like Overdrive are "NetFlix for text". They're NetFlix for books and formal periodical publications, both of which are more movie-like: there are a relatively small number of publishers and publishing a full-length book is a substantial, multi-person project, as is publishing a magazine or newspaper. There's a huge wealth of text out there that has no chance of ever hitting any library or central seller/distributor of etexts.
tclancy 8y ago
Based on your comment, I'm guessing you have, but on the off-chance you've not read Robert McFarlane's Landmarks, you should. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23597544-landmarks?from_search=true https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23597544-landmarks?from_...

yoodenvranx 8y ago

> I love these stories of engineering and science from the trenches. I wish there was a website collecting all these stories and articles. They could also ask the authors for permission and offer epub/pdf downloads of these stories. That would be a nice read while traveling

theoh 8y ago
"all these stories and articles"? There are millions of people working in software, the number of interesting war stories just within computer science is (conservatively) in the thousands. A distributed system of blogs is the only efficient way to publish that breadth of material, bearing in mind that each reader's interests are different, you can't curate a feed to suit everyone. With all due respect, one convenient website aggregating all that material is not a practical idea. It's like asking for one huge magazine to exist which contains everything worth reading about a huge field like CS. Edit: I mean, it would be convenient, but there's no royal road to finding stuff that's worth reading. https://queue.acm.org https://queue.acm.org is pretty good, for example
- whatshisface 8y ago
  It sounds like you're arguing that Netflix is not only impossible, but that it would be more impossible if it served text.
  - lmm 8y ago
    Netflix for text would be impossible. Netflix for movies is only possible because the overwhelming majority of decent movies are produced with the involvement of a relatively small number of production companies, and that in turn is the case because making a good movie is a much bigger exercise than making a good piece of text. It's highly unusual for one person to make a high-quality movie on their own and publish it directly on the internet, whereas this is entirely normal and common for text.
    - cuckcuckspruce 8y ago
      Your public library and services like Overdrive are "NetFlix for text". NetFlix for text != zero curation, NetFlix curates their selection.
      - lmm 8y ago
        > Your public library and services like Overdrive are "NetFlix for text". They're NetFlix for books and formal periodical publications, both of which are more movie-like: there are a relatively small number of publishers and publishing a full-length book is a substantial, multi-person project, as is publishing a magazine or newspaper. There's a huge wealth of text out there that has no chance of ever hitting any library or central seller/distributor of etexts.

tclancy 8y ago

Based on your comment, I'm guessing you have, but on the off-chance you've not read Robert McFarlane's Landmarks, you should. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23597544-landmarks?from_search=true https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23597544-landmarks?from_...