4 ms·

> But today... aren't they, at least as a first-order approximation? (With some further adjustments to avoid antialiasing artifacts, desired sharpness, and so f

> But today... aren't they, at least as a first-order approximation? (With some further adjustments to avoid antialiasing artifacts, desired sharpness, and so forth.) It still depends on what you’re using them for. Image that will be rendered straight to a webpage? Yeah, it’s probably a fine first order approximation. But that’s not the only context that gets rendered on a modern screen. Say you’re using it for 3-d scenes. Yeah you absolutely should pay attention to what the paper says about footprint and sampling and filtering because, when you render it onto the screen, all of the processing steps between pixels on a texture to pixels on a screen require awareness of pixel footprint.

jayd16 5y ago
>Image that will be rendered straight to a webpage? Yeah, it’s probably a fine I don't know, I still think the concept would appear in the context of image scaling and aliasing.
- munchbunny 5y ago
  I agree in the sense that image scaling definitely requires you to think of pixels as more than just squares, but IMO browsers and OSes have gotten good enough at it that as a web developer you mostly don’t have to think too hard about it other than to remember to use high enough resolutions.
  - jayd16 5y ago
    Oh sure. At that point though, are you even thinking as far as "little squares"?
    - munchbunny 5y ago
      Fair point. I'm not really thinking of it as little squares, I'm more just thinking in terms of integer coordinates in a 2-d Cartesian space. But I do think I'm inherently abstracting the "screen" as a grid of square pixels because it's a serviceable abstraction that is substantially simpler than "here is the whole signal processing pipeline that sits between my <image> tag and some phone user's eyes." I suppose you're right that what I'm describing is just the lack of conscious mental model for what the pixel represents, versus when I'm writing a shader, where I'm actively thinking through the mental model of a pixel.

jayd16 5y ago

>Image that will be rendered straight to a webpage? Yeah, it’s probably a fine I don't know, I still think the concept would appear in the context of image scaling and aliasing.

munchbunny 5y ago
I agree in the sense that image scaling definitely requires you to think of pixels as more than just squares, but IMO browsers and OSes have gotten good enough at it that as a web developer you mostly don’t have to think too hard about it other than to remember to use high enough resolutions.
- jayd16 5y ago
  Oh sure. At that point though, are you even thinking as far as "little squares"?
  - munchbunny 5y ago
    Fair point. I'm not really thinking of it as little squares, I'm more just thinking in terms of integer coordinates in a 2-d Cartesian space. But I do think I'm inherently abstracting the "screen" as a grid of square pixels because it's a serviceable abstraction that is substantially simpler than "here is the whole signal processing pipeline that sits between my <image> tag and some phone user's eyes." I suppose you're right that what I'm describing is just the lack of conscious mental model for what the pixel represents, versus when I'm writing a shader, where I'm actively thinking through the mental model of a pixel.