dahart

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by dahart 1y ago
My former boss (Steve Parker, RIP) shared a story of Turner Whitted making predictions about how much compute would be needed to achieve real-time ray tracing, some time around when his seminal paper was published (~1980). As the story goes
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by dahart 1y ago
I tried it, including Pluto, and it works fine. Shading is quantized at Pluto but the spheres are all round.
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by dahart 1y ago
Would you have to use double precision to ray trace the planets in their proper orbits at scale using either perspective or orthographic projection? With the ratio of Neptune’s distance from the sun to its radius being almost 2M, I’m guessi
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by dahart 1y ago
> Wait, because it's a trademark, it must be easy and obvious to understand? That’s not what I said, where did you read that? The sentence you quoted doesn’t say that. I did suggest that the fact that it’s easy to understand makes i
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by dahart 1y ago
The term is ‘retina display’ not ‘retina’ > That’s most non-CRT (aquarium) displays. What’s different about high DPI (why we need display scaling now) is that they’re imperceptible even if you put your nose onto them Neither of those cla
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by dahart 1y ago
The trademark ‘retina display’ was defined to mean the display resolution approximately matches the human retina, which is why ‘retina display’ seems obvious and easy to understand. That it’s good is implied, but “good” is not the definiti
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by dahart 1y ago
It’s a good question, what exactly is this decay and why is it called undeniable? Is that even true? If I think back on what programming was like thirty years ago up through today, everything about computing has steadily improved, gotten ea
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by dahart 1y ago
You’re right that it’s branding, but it also has meaning: a display resolution that (approximately) matches the resolution of the human retina, under typical viewing conditions. The fact that the term is easily understood by the lay public
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by dahart 1y ago
I absolutely would be too, if there wasn’t a long demonstrated history on the part of both of these people to use public drama as smoke to distract from other things they’re doing.
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by dahart 1y ago
Are you sure? You know that Trump constantly talks about his TV ratings? I forget who it was, but I remember there being a story last year or the year before, of someone who was publicly criticizing Trump met with him and was expecting to b
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by dahart 1y ago
This is extremely good advice! In particular, I agree completely the key is to figure out mentally how not to frame the problem as a willpower issue or as overcoming hunger. That is a setup for failure and feelings of shame. Making it about
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by dahart 1y ago
> Some of my friends are obese despite exercising heavily every day. I’ve been chubby despite heavy exercise most of my life. It took me at least 30 years to come to what now seems like the dumbest most obvious realization: Exercise make
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by dahart 1y ago
Yes, testosterone and other parts of male physiology are what lead to men having more muscle mass on average. Men and women have different average sizes, so we don’t need to debate whether men are larger or women are smaller, both are true.
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by dahart 1y ago
> If you are going to have any benchmark This is actually why IMO saying women are 65% as strong as the average man is the better framing. It gives you an immediate, practical, and tangible goal. If the force required to do a given opera
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by dahart 1y ago
You’re not quoting the overlap, you’re quoting the (IMO) misleading framing that compares extremes. If you look at the picture, roughly one third of the distribution has overlap. It’s not a majority, but it’s certainly not negligible either
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by dahart 1y ago
That’s a subjective statement. Here’s a picture, and I’d say there’s a decent amount of overlap. https://briefedbydata.substack.com/p/female-vs-male-grip-str...
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by dahart 1y ago
Those numbers might be true, but talking about standard deviations seems difficult to visualize or reason about, because knowing the width of the distribution is required, and because the width of the distribution of one sex doesn’t reflect
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by dahart 1y ago
Why do you call it computer created, when you wrote the software? You’re giving away credit that is entirely yours, to a tool that doesn’t make any art without you. Your computer didn’t decide to make pictures of procedural gas giants, righ
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by dahart 1y ago
I assumed it might have been a statement made a long time ago, which is why I asked if that’s what was really said. Not sure I understand what you mean about being hung up on “artist”. That’s the word you used. Do you want to suggest an alt
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by dahart 1y ago
There certainly are some physical and process differences between computer art and traditional painting, but I’m not yet convinced you understood what I said. What you have not demonstrated in any way is why the computer should be credited
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by dahart 1y ago
I don’t see quote marks, it wasn’t clear if you are interpreting in your own way or remembering exactly what was said. My point is that calling a computer the artist is hyperbole and inaccurate, even more so from the 90s than today.
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by dahart 1y ago
> She is often unsure if she or the computer is the artist. Did she really say that? As a moonlighting digital artist, I feel like this is the same thing as a painter saying they’re not sure if the paintbrush is the artist. Maybe if I wa
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by dahart 1y ago
Even though the example is contrived, and hopefully not too many people are doing massive reductions using a linked list of random pointers, it would still be nice to offer some suggestion on what alternatives there are. Maybe it’s faster t
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by dahart 1y ago
The bigger problem there is the language not offering a way to signal the author’s intent. If an author doesn’t care about the order of operations in a sum, they will still write the exact same code as the author who does care. This is a fa
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by dahart 1y ago
The spec doesn’t prevent auto-vectorization, it only says the language should avoid it when it wants to opt in to producing “reproducible floating-point results” (section 11 of IEEE 754-2019). Vectorizing can be implemented in different way
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by dahart 1y ago
I do like nerding out on language, yes, and I feel I’m in good company now. ;) Right, so independent as a term of grammatical art (or ‘improper noun’ as suggested by an article posted to HN once https://news.ycombinator.com/
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by dahart 1y ago
The sentence in question fits Chicago’s rules. While M-W and Chicago may agree with you about when semicolons are allowed, they also agree with me about when semicolons are allowed. Specifically, 6.56 (and the AP rule 2) fits the sentence p
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by dahart 1y ago
You said college was a “waste of time” and “useless”. If you’re not talking about the choice to go or not, and you’re not talking about the pay benefits, then what is your point?
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by dahart 1y ago
Naw, the “it” in the 2nd clause is referring to the first clause, and they are directly related. They are not independent unrelated clauses, and that’s the criteria for a comma splice. Your assertion that a colon should be used contradicts
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by dahart 1y ago
Googling “semicolon”: “a punctuation mark (;) indicating a pause, typically between two main clauses, that is more pronounced than that indicated by a comma.” Merriam Webster: “A semicolon can also join two statements when the second clause

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