This reminds me of the exciting time when I first got to make my own ray-traced 3D graphics... in 1991. I had to sit there and watch as the free POV-Ray tool ge

This reminds me of the exciting time when I first got to make my own ray-traced 3D graphics... in 1991. I had to sit there and watch as the free POV-Ray tool generated the image pixel by agonising pixel, left-to-right, top-to-bottom. Toy Story was four years later, and required 800,000 machine hours on a "render farm" to produce an output resolution of just 1080p. Now? I get to play games on a single PC at 60 fps with ray tracing at 4K resolution! Conceptually, the glacial pixel-by-pixel rendering in 1991 and the RTX games today are the same thing, but qualitatively there's no comparison. We've been shown that machines can be prompted in English, think about what they've been asked, and produce useful output... at the same kind of rate I was getting from POV-ray in the 90s. Now picture the same thing five years later (equivalent of Toy Story), ten years later (Grand Theft Auto III), twenty years later (Battlefield 3, Kung Fu Panda 2), or thirty years later (Cyberpunk 2077). Some of us can extrapolate from the present and foresee that the pixels crawling one at a time across the screen is not how it's always going to be. That one day the same technology will make our dreams come alive. Others look at nascent technologies like generative AI and think "Pfft... too slow." and write Substack posts.