
Potemkin Village - conorliv1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potemkin_village
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flafla2
Funny coincidence, I mentioned Potemkin Villages in a lecture discussing the
Rasterization pipeline for a Computer Graphics class at CMU [1]. It is very
interesting to look back at Potemkin Villages, as they can be seen to be a
very primitive form of "rendering." Abstractly, the designers of the villages
worked with the limited materials that they had to produce the closest
reproduction of a real city that they could. In this way, the final aesthetic
of the Potemkin Villages is a function of the limitations of the creators.

You can draw a direct analogy to Real-time rendering today. The "limited
material" that we have is the GPU. Because the GPU is great at crunching
matrices and other embarrassingly parallel problems, we have converged on
Rasterization as the predominant method of rendering in real time.
Rasterization was chosen because it is fundamentally based on two concepts:
linear coordinate transformations (model->world->view->screen space) and
triangle fill algorithms. The GPU can do both of these exceptionally well.

I think it's important and instructive to keep all of this in mind, because
tomorrow we may be stuck with something other than the GPU, and the paradigm
could shift completely. There's nothing fundamental about Rasterization that
gives it better physical footing than other methods -- it is simply the best
known good that we have with current hardware.

[1]
[http://15462.courses.cs.cmu.edu/fall2019/lecture/opengl/slid...](http://15462.courses.cs.cmu.edu/fall2019/lecture/opengl/slide_003)

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jason_slack
Posted 3 other times! (5 years oil, 4 years ago, 3 years ago)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8149110](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8149110)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10581266](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10581266)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13123913](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13123913)

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grepthisab
Well this one already had more comments than the other three combined.

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bitwize
Whoa, Baader-Meinhof effect. I was talking to my gf about the ghost cities in
China, and how they're like modern Potemkin villages, except the Chinese
government wants to make the villages real. Fake-it-till-you-make-it villages.

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goatinaboat
Potemkin Company: see _Unicorn_

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Gibbon1
The one I've been using is Potemkin Markets.

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paulhodge
Funny I just looked up this phrase too, someone said it on Succession.

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ladon86
That might be why it was posted. Someone mentioned the Baader-Meinhof
phenomenon. But is there a word (other than meme) for the concept of a mass
media reference obliquely triggering a resurgence in interest in a non-current
topic? You see this often on reddit, especially in TIL posts.

