Ah, this could be a great study in organization design! Conway's law suggests that the software architecture resembles the organization. So there might not be any designers making such decisions. Probably lots of organizations can't use each others' toolbars but are expected to add their own toolbar?
Raymarching is great, and I love the work being done by the demoscene / Inigo Quilez / etc! I don't talk about it as much because my libraries usually have slightly different goals.
Most common raymarching strategies put limitations on your function, e.g. you need Lipschitz continuity to guarantee that you don't hit the model when doing ray steps. This property are pretty easy to break by accident (e.g. just scaling the model requires a correction factor), so you have to be careful with how you bend and twist the underlying math expression. If you're doing a single demo (or have a known library of good shapes), you can get away with it, but there's less flexibility.
The goal of my infrastructure is to support basically any math expression, no matter how poorly-behaved (although I really would appreciate C0 continuity), so I like the guarantees [1] of interval arithmetic.
That being said, the boundary is fuzzy. On one side, you can do raytracing with interval math [2], instead of point samples. From the other side, my more recent GPU rendering uses Z-sorting of spatial regions, so still using 3D intervals but walking them from the camera backwards (no blog post yet, sorry).
[1] Fidget doesn't actually change FPU rounding modes, so it's not absolutely guaranteed, but ehhhhhhh
I went to Sagrada Familia and then to Mies van Der Rohe Pavilion.
The latter had a bikini fashion shoot ongoing.
Maybe something to do with it. The world and society completely transformed. Mass media, fashion, loss of religiosity, sexual liberation, globalization, social mobility...
This 1992 paper has a section that 3 C of warming leads to 1.2 % of GDP loss globally. Quite an assumption to put it lightly. I don't know how much the rest of the paper then makes any difference...
I think this is similar now in most things. Music or blog posts etc. Yet when you try to discover something, for some reason it's really hard to find good quality material.
A few years ago there was mathematics progress in recommendation algorithms. Those could better things a lot. I foolishly disparaged the progress, as yet another way to sell us more content. I'm sorry for that. I've changed my mind since.
I assume it's a natural thing to happen if somebody gets a lot of power. If not being extra careful, they will automatically get surrounded by yes men and start drifting in odd directions. Happens to dictators too.
With democracy at least there's changing some of the people in power on a schedule.
As soon as I personally attained a modicum of financial security I automatically started giving fewer fucks about things than I used to. I assume the number of fucks given (about people, ideas, values) asymptotically approaches zero as your wealth increases. Or at least it does if you don't work at it.
It's not yes-men. Power and money tend to convince people they are successful in every aspect of life. Our society emphatically endorses this viewpoint and even idolizes it. Look at our celebrity/businessman worship.
Then, since they are rich, anything they do is now acceptable. Anything they do is what a successful person would do. That becomes their viewpoint.
As this phenomenon is so common, do we have enough science about it to make it a base for laws, so future generations could avoid this state of collective psychosis it seems to lead to?
I think it is widely accepted that power corrupts. It is the basis of democracy, and why we would defend it so jealously. Democracy was fought for and won, and we should never forget the alternatives are much worse. This requires peaceful debate, free speech, and free and fair elections.
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