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Blender 5.2 LTS 3 days ago

It (3d asset creation) practially hasn't changed much since ~1995.

I don't think this is strictly true, not only are there new approaches to modeling like mudbox and such, but the nature of the assets people are creating is meaningfully different in 2026 than it was in 1995. The polycounts are orders of magnitude higher, the way you texture and shade the models is different, etc.

And then the actual hardware being used to render the finished assets is very different - it's much faster, it has dedicated acceleration for rasterization and ray/path tracing, etc. Fewer compromises are necessary to deliver your 3D assets to the viewer than back in 1995 and it's cheaper to deliver them.

It's true that a lot of the fundamentals haven't changed though. I'm not sure that's a bad thing.

The people currently in power want every single byte of data they can get on people who reside in this country so they can divide them up by arbitrary criteria and do with those groups as they please. Depending on the person, that might mean imprisonment, it might mean deportation, it might mean something worse.

A problem you'd probably run into here is that it would be rather difficult to prove that no real CSAM was involved in the process of making the somehow-okay fake CSAM. Image generation models require training sets, after all. Do the companies training these models have the necessary data and evidence to prove every individual in every training image was over 18? Is generating fake CSAM okay if you trained the model on non-CSAM photos of real kids? I don't think so.

There are of course situations where being aggressive about this can hinder people's freedoms - like an adult who looks 'too young' having their freedoms curtailed because any photos or videos would Look Like CSAM - but I don't think they're common enough harms to justify holding back on regulation here.

I would hope we can agree that aggressive policing of anime and cartoons is a bad thing without denying the real existence of CSAM - the actual thing - or denying the bad things that have to occur for it to exist

It may make you uncomfortable to learn this but fascists - actual ones - are currently active in politics! My hair isn't dyed, for what it's worth.

We could argue over the definition of fascism and which politicians fit it which might be more productive than accusing posters of being depressed.

SDF techniques are widely used in real games, even if a shadertoy put together in an hour or two doesn't run well on low spec hardware.

This presumes that people will have the time and the patience to wade through the slop and find the gems. Right now people do that with the tide of low quality human-authored games to find the gems but when there's 10x or 100x as many low quality games will people still have the patience? I hope so, but I don't know. We're already seeing a huge uptick in the number of games being released every year on Steam and most of them don't get more than a handful of reviews, positive or negative.

The little pull-quotes marked by illustrations feel chosen at random and not particularly worthy of being so, i.e.

characteristic times of electronic signals are restricted by so-called parasitic capacitances, and parasitic capacitances in general are proportional to the length of the connection

modern CPUs use so-called “dynamic branch prediction”

These two mostly served to distract me and break up the reading flow of the page, and I initially thought they had been erroneously truncated.

This next one is straight-up nonsensical because it's missing context:

Overall, these effects seem to compensate each other, and main memory access latencies of an x64 desktop box, and an M4 Apple SoC happen to be in the same ballpark of about 200-300 CPU cycles.

Which effects?

If the author is reading this, I would advise you to either remove these, or try to be more careful about what sentences you decide to pull out in this way to make sure that they communicate something useful by themselves. Ideally something that reflects the overall theme of the surrounding paragraphs.

The illustrations attached also seem to have nothing to do with the text but that's probably not a big deal.

A reduced test case means you run less code to process the test case, which means your breakpoints trigger less frequently (and the remaining breakpoint triggers are more likely to be relevant to the actual bug). It also means all your debugging steps are likely to run faster and produce less data to sort through. Your log files will be shorter and easier to read/grep, etc.

Imagine being handed a sheet of 10 equations and being told "1 of these equations is wrong." Now imagine that someone came in and erased 8 of the correct equations - they just saved you a bunch of time.

An appliance repair company I used exactly once maybe 5 or 6 years ago recently started spamming me with texts and emails trying to get me to refer friends to use them or use them again. Never hit the "report spam" button faster.

I'd kinda understand it if they had sent me a polite text or email shortly after our initial engagement saying "hey, if you had a good experience please review us/recommend us" but coming in literal years late with a blast of multiple messages screams "we hired some sort of marketing firm and fed them our customer database".

Somehow I never knew that you can have multiple push URLs for a single remote. Thank you for sharing this, I've been manually pushing to two remotes with a script for years!

Think about the scenarios where people are viewing slideshows. If you're on a mobile device, that 150ms spent decoding each image is time where the CPU and/or GPU of the mobile device are running at full tilt, draining the battery. Suddenly applications that would normally be fast and efficient like a photo gallery app become laggy and drain your battery. Not great.

If DLSS 5 becomes the norm it's possible that just makes things worse. The DLSS 5 demos required an entire separate card to run the model, though IIRC NVIDIA did claim it would eventually work on a single card. Given what the model is doing (yassifying the whole scene instead of just upscaling/reconstructing) it makes sense to me that it would increase compute demand instead of reduce it like previous versions of DLSS.