yeoyeo42

technology is just a red herring. GTA-level whacky NPCs will have NPC behaviour regardless of what situation you throw them in.

The same "person" that shows absurd behaviour like that, assuming it's not just rage/clickbait, has absurd behaviour in a completely technology disconnected world as well.

The only thing that might differ is that it's not as outwardly obvious. Those behaviours are a result of who they are at a person (whether this be because of genetics and environment, poor soul RNG, or something else).

To that extent all technology does is make it more obvious. Basically the average NPC has more opportunities to reveal themselves as such. It's not indicative of a fundamental problem.

this is true, but in practice the EU and its local governments have a giant issue with incompetence when it comes to the specifics of regulation. it's overregulated and sometimes even in such ways that it doesn't even achieve the protection it seeks to generate, so a net loss in both directions.

Not ragebait, actual question. Isn't this kind of scenario exactly the kind of thing where capitalism is supposed to generate a lot of competition that makes everything higher quality and cheaper for the end consumer?

There is giga hyper demand for various computing products and this will likely continue for many years to come - is it likely that we will have some serious competitors to the big manufacturers (for evertyhing from silicon to the end products) a couple of years from now? Or is that unlikely based on the sheer expertise, capital, and time needed to get something out the door?

I think the steps would be like this:

- get understanding of ordinary vector linear algebra.

- understand what vector dot product does and why

- understand why an orthogonal set of basis vectors for the space you're working in is useful / what properties it has / how its used. like basic euclidean 3d space (1,0,0) (0,1,0) (0, 0, 1) basis vectors.

- get a refresher on basic calculus, in particular integrals

- understand this inner product, it's a generalization of dot product, except you can think of your vectors having infinite number of dimensions now.

- the properties of the dot product you know (like that two vectors are perpendicular if their dot product is 0) work for the inner product too. or perhaps its better to say that the general inner product is defined to have similar properties

- there are functions that are orthogonal to each other in the same way vectors can be orthogonal to each other, and you can use the inner product to tell which ones.

- spherical harmonics are constructed / by design orthogonal to each other. how to show this and where the intuition for finding them could come from is a whole topic...

- but once you have it, just like you can project vectors onto basis vectors (to essentially transform them into the coordinate system described by those basis vectors), you can project functions into the coordinate system represented by those orthogonal functions.

- then you have to figure out why you would even want to do this. in short is has a lot of useful properties/applications. in the graphics case you can compress some quite complex functions into just a few coefficients using this (not perfectly, there is some 'information loss', but still). integrating over two functions becomes cheaper when they are projected to SH basis. it lets you do some unintuitive stuff like combine light that goes into different directions into one common set of coefficients.

5 microseconds is a whole lot of time for just a branch misprediction, which is on the order of a few nanoseconds. probably a lot more important stuff going on and focusing on the wrong thing.

for example, predicting a different branch can lead to different memory access patterns. maybe you can get rid of most of the real world cost of the misprediction by just forcefully prefetching the memory the send() path is going to use.

the answer is a big depends. but I can give you some ballpark intuition.

perhaps it's easiest to think about regular image processing because it uses the same hardware. you can think about each pixel as a particle.

a typical 4k (3840 x 2160 at 16:9) image contains about 8 million pixels. a trivial compute shader that just writes 4 bytes per pixel of some trivial value (e.g. the compute shader thread ids) will take you anywhere from roughly speaking 0.05ms - 0.5ms on modern-ish GPUs. this is a wide spread to represent a wide hardware spread. on current high end GPUs you will be very close to the 0.05ms, or maybe even a bit faster.

but real world programs like video games do a whole lot more than just write a trivial value. they read and write a lot more data (usually there are many passes - so it's not done just once - in the end maybe a few hundred bytes per pixel), and usually run many thousands of instructions per pixel. I work on a video game everyone's probably heard about and the one of the main material shaders is too large to fit into my work GPUs instruction cache (of 32kb) to give you an idea how many instructions are in there (not all executed of course - some branching involved).

and you can still easily do this all at 100+ frames per second on high end GPUs.

so you can in principle simulate a lot of particles. of course, the algorithm scaling matters. most of rendering is somewhere in O(n). anything involving physics will probably involve some kind of interaction between objects which immediately implies O(n log n) at the very least but usually more.

it's not meaningless, it has several direct implications about the nature of reality.

consider that subjective experience - to put it in the weakest and most general statement - clearly has a physical component. I'm being careful to not say that it is a physical phenomenon, is caused by physical phenomena, and so on, because while I think that's a reasonable assumption, we technically have no evidence for it.

but we do have plenty of evidence that, even if it is some supernaturally created magical process, subjective experience interacts with the physical world. for one, it clearly exchanges information with basic physical systems in your body - if it did not have some way to exchange information about what your eyes are seeing, you wouldn't be able to experience sight.

subjective experience is also easily altered with simple physical phenomena like chemical substances in your brain. so either these physics directly modify your subjective experience, or the subjective experience you have is mostly a physical product of your brain and the subjective experience part is only the end point of the process that receives all the information.

it's interesting because in physics, any exchange of information implies the existence of some directly measurable physical process. anything that is the product of such a process, you can generally speaking measure. all the things you can measure in an experiment are the things we eventually call the fundamental components of nature - like the charge, spin and so on of particles, as well as their place in time and space.

so subjective experience is either already some part we haven't observed of those fundamental components - which would in some way imply that everything is subjectively experiencing all the time - or it's an extra element we have not yet observed, but may be able to directly observe in experiment in the future.

no, the first principles could be reduced to the domain that you're working in, which in this case would be non-relativistic physical optics. that is, the description of electromagnetic waves using maxwells equations. these could be considered true first principles for this problem domain.

you don't need to go to quantum physics or general relativity for everything, that would mean that a description from first principles is impossible for any field that doesn't (yet) directly connect there like biology, psychology, you name it. which may be technically correct but clearly not in the spirit of the idea.

in general this article has a quite surface level focus and narrow scope. there isn't even a description how the most common physical rendering primitive ever, a ray of light, is related to electromagnetic waves in mathematical terms. the article is not very mathematical in general which is disappointing.

with one eye you have temporal parallax, depth cues (ordering of objects in your vision), lighting cues, relative size of objects (things further away are smaller) together with your learned comparison size etc.