jrowen

6 ms·

61.
by jrowen 5mo ago
I implemented Rayleigh and Mie scattering for a game engine once (my own, hobbyist thing). It was pretty crazy to see a quite good sunset/sunrise cycle from those alone. IIRC even the sun itself popped out of that somehow. I was using
62.
by jrowen 5mo ago
I'm not really trying to white knight for academia. I know there is a lot of low-quality stuff (part of that is just reality, most of the work done in academia or industry won't stand the test of time). But I do kind of have to
63.
by jrowen 5mo ago
I think it just goes back to what your goals are. I don't know for sure but I imagine the research you're describing as disappointing was never meant to be directly applicable to a real world problem. It's meant to explore an
64.
by jrowen 5mo ago
Another thought is that, I might be more likely to apply the term "ocean of uselessness" to a lot of what goes on in industry than to what academics are striving for. People like having a job and a paycheck and accomplishing units
65.
by jrowen 5mo ago
But what is the teacher teaching from? Generally they are working off seminal and highly-regarded texts that the autodidact set would tell you to read anyway. I will grant you that the current form of the education system, especially in lig
66.
by jrowen 5mo ago
One thing I think a lot of people don't internalize is that academia and industry have fundamentally different goals. When I went into industry, I had the thought, like many others, that "my degree didn't prepare me at all fo
67.
by jrowen 5mo ago
Again I think this is a false dichotomy. Learning "everything ourselves" does not mean going out literally by yourself and rediscovering everything from first principles. Whether you learned it from a dreaded teacher or from a man
68.
by jrowen 5mo ago
You have your designs and then you open up a building to do repairs or start construction and some surprise presents you that you weren’t expecting. And yet, the field of architecture is still highly valuable. Without those designs, there
69.
by jrowen 5mo ago
I found the whole article to be a bit heavy on anti-academia. And I went to industry after undergrad. It's a false dichotomy between the "thinkism" bogeyman (actually reading books and papers and putting work into theoretical
70.
by jrowen 5mo ago
This is a great point. Us millenials all look at AOL through rosy colored glasses as part of the halcyon days of the free internet, but there was probably just as much depressing corporate overlord bullshit going on, we just thought it was
71.
by jrowen 5mo ago
This is pretty much true, but also, you're older now. The people the age you are now were saying things like this when you were having all that fun. You are in a different place now. Your life is not about coming home after school and
72.
by jrowen 5mo ago
I lived off Divisadero briefly, sometimes referring to the general area as "diviz". I looked up Division St and realized I've probably driven on it many times but don't have any particular recollection of it or any confu
73.
by jrowen 5mo ago
Corporate bullcrap. Do your art, do what you believe in. Don't do it for "the company to make money." The company doesn't need to exist in and of itself. When you start making decisions that way, what is the point? So yo
74.
by jrowen 6mo ago
I don't get that quote. Does that apply to teams working on SDKs, GPU design, internal tools, etc? Are those all reframed as "products"? Seems like there would be a lot of groups at Apple concerned entirely with shipping tech
75.
by jrowen 6mo ago
Maybe, or, as we saw with ridesharing already, maybe they will change the laws. When push comes to shove, I don't believe there is enough will to overturn current practices to preserve the sanctity of the bike lane at the expense of ca
76.
by jrowen 6mo ago
The US is happy creating laws for everything that are impossible to follow, but only selectively enforced. Do you consider this insane? Your assertions that "everyone always must break the law" and "there are effectively no
77.
by jrowen 6mo ago
I mean, if it comes to a lawsuit, sure, but the system is designed so that permitting and inspectors catch most of it. If you're trying to build your bathroom under the radar without a permit that's an entirely different analogy.
78.
by jrowen 6mo ago
Well, there are a lot of non-ADA-compliant bathrooms out there, for one reason or another. But that's up to inspectors to enforce. If they're letting it slide in human-built businesses then AI-built businesses will hew to that. It
79.
by jrowen 6mo ago
The argument is that "our customers expect this behavior because everyone else does it." Not that they tried to change it and failed.
80.
by jrowen 6mo ago
Google themselves also did this with Gemini, we saw how quickly OpenAI's lead was erased. It could make quite a bit of sense to use this as a crutch so they (Apple) can overhaul their own efforts free of production pressures. I'm
81.
by jrowen 6mo ago
I feel I've had the most success with treating it like another developer. One that has specific strengths (reference/checklists/scanning) and weaknesses (big picture/creativity). But definitely bouncing actual questions
82.
by jrowen 6mo ago
I think it's just a confusing use of the term "generating." It's thinking of the LLM as a thesaurus. You actually generate the real idea -- and formulate the problem -- it's good at enumerating potential solutions
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by jrowen 6mo ago
And what would you learn from that? Even if it could be said that those things attempted to implement that strategy and failed, you can't really infer much about its overall viability by looking only at losers. The dodo bird is an exam
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by jrowen 6mo ago
Yeah there's definitely a lot of things that can go wrong, especially in a live hardware chain. But with the software, what a lot of even pro DJs and sound guys don't seem to realize is that modern compression codecs are damn good
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by jrowen 6mo ago
Leaders are one thing, and sort of a product of the pressures of their position, but over longer time scales and evolutionary cycles, "isolate in fear" isn't really a dominant strategy. You're gonna get behind and get wi
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by jrowen 6mo ago
It is also asymmetric. If you announce your presence, even if 4 out of 5 civs that notice you don’t annihilate you immediately (but they probably should), the fifth might. It’s just a probability game, with permadeath. So hiding is the mos
87.
by jrowen 6mo ago
Yes that's more accurate. And it's about measurability. Even with that tiny bit sharper lens, you can probably point to an actual measurable difference in the photos. Whether that makes them "better" remains subjective.
88.
by jrowen 6mo ago
In a blind test, could you tell the difference between photos taken with that equipment and photos taken with less expensive equipment? Most audiophiles can't do measurably better than 50% on an ABX test. That test is more about audio
89.
by jrowen 7mo ago
I didn't see that one, I added it to my shortlist. Part of my point though is that, for a long time, the big-budget Hollywood stuff was actually "the good stuff." Like people can quibble about whether indie art films were bet
90.
by jrowen 7mo ago
That's not really about media though. While it does factor into the overall sentiment, a think a lot of people can enjoy America's cultural exports regardless of how they feel about the geopolitical side of things (certainly we

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