I second this recommendation, Inigo Quilez is amazing!
If you're interested in learning the fundamentals of some of the math he uses, I can highly recommend the CMU computer graphics course. It's free on YouTube.
IQ is the man! He’s the dev behind ShaderToy. He’s seen as somewhat of a Gandalf figure in the amateur shader dev community; some of what he produces in GLSL is light years beyond what most devs can conceptualize in a shader.
https://youtube.com/@TheArtofCodeIsCool has been my favourite so far, and he focuses on writing shaders. This seems like the next logical step thank you for sharing!
...although I have to say that it is a little bit embarrassing that my "reputation" up to now is mainly from this thread. –
mikuszefski
Nov 25, 2014 at 18:19
You’re right, humor almost always gets flushed hereaboots. Fascinating how the fury let loose on this one. Must have been quite a bit of pressure backed up, now thankfully relieved.
What better answer than drawing butts of course, to all of those students who are wondering where they would ever use sin/cos/tan in a real world application.
What a great way to draw in students and encourage them to engage with the material. “25 extra credit points to the first student who submits an algorithm for drawing a butt.”
Millions of years of evolution has resulted in the invention of machine-learning which can be used to come up with the optimal formula to solve this conundrum.
Matlab was honestly my foray into more advanced programming, coming into it with engineering. It was refreshing and so cool to see my programs visually. I do miss it.
"Von Neumann's elephant is a problem in recreational mathematics, consisting of constructing a planar curve in the shape of an elephant from only four fixed parameters. It originated from a discussion between physicists John von Neumann and Enrico Fermi."
I wish there were some boilerplate equations like this in 3D software, it's so tedious getting something even remotely realistic looking that something like this would be a great start.
It's funny how different the atmosphere is on the various stack exchanges. On many other sites that question would have been closed with the rational "Needs more focus."
I don't think it was that different on the internet per se, but SE itself was relatively young at that point and more lax with its own rules. This early period is when you also had funny answers for bad questions, like using RegEx to parse HTML.
This is something I’ve been contemplating way too much lately.
I’m 37, but I look back at the internet I don’t really remember anything feeling like an overnight paradigm shift. But, revisiting moments like this buttocks post are like relics frozen in time — and I definitely feel like things are different and more streamlined in the internet now.
The internet became a streamlined hate-filled echo chamber so slowly that I never saw it happening.
It was a slow process, usually following money; you see it in communities like Stack Overflow and even moreso Reddit, the latter of which started out as a "bastion of free speech", but after a while they started to crack down; first on hate subreddits and speech, then de-prioritizing NSFW content from /r/all (the only way to get everything without publically subscribing to porn subreddits) (and I'm sure that will be removed entirely if they want to go public).
I'm not sure what happened to SO, I can imagine their intent was to improve quality and reduce duplication - both bad for e.g. Google ratings or returning users. But the funny posts made it a living community. Removing the fun parts of a site like that makes it sterile.
I mean there's still e.g. codegolf, worldbuilding or the D&D spaces that are kinda funny sometimes.
For starters, it's incomplete. Yes, "some" people think humor itself is offensive. I would wager that there have always been some people like that, since humor itself was invented. How does that relate to what happened to Stack Overflow?
To make your answer complete, you have to connect the remaining dots, and there are multiple ways to do that. Thing is, none of those ways are "obvious".
For example, you could posit that the majority of people find humor offensive today, as opposed to 2014, but I don't see any evidence that's even true, much less obvious.
More likely, you're implying that the majority of people who have influence over Stack Overflow's tone consider the humor itself offensive. If that's obvious to you, it sure isn't to me.
I'm not. I was just trying to find out what you're actually trying to say, instead of going against HN "most generous take" policy and assuming it's a political stance ;)
The second Eternal September, directly related to the rise of social media, which I think was ultimately fueled by the mass adoption of smartphones.
Before, the Internet was mostly inhabited by people who wanted to do something specific, and were at least minimally invested - they had to actively use a computer to access things on-line. Nowadays, the Internet is inhabited mostly by people ready to judge you while sitting on a bus, because their phone buzzed them a notification that their friend retweeted a story about some stranger being outraged that some other stranger retweeted a link to your SE question.
I think of that more of an eternal Summer of 2007 since that's when the iPhone came out, and anecdotally the shift in society was well underway by 2010. I'm not sure we could use this to explain things are necessarily that different today than in 2014.
I am tempted to think the amount I have used social media and my smartphone has actually declined since 2014, and in the case of facebook I suppose it considerably has, but I'm not sure I haven't just replaced it with other compulsive clicks. So in that sense I must agree things have probably escalated a bit, but I can't point to a single event over the past decade to create a turning point.
I agree, 2007 is closer to the epicenter. However, I also think the shift away from social media and cell phones is rather uncommon. I have had no social media for almost a decade, but we are few and far between.
People still "have" it but it's mostly a ghost town. That's maybe a function of your friend group, but I have a feeling that younger people do not use Facebook for dating and adventure like they did in, say, 2008 (when I got an account).
A main difference between {MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.} and {reddit, hn, chronological forums, etc.} is that the former heavily rely on following/friending (i.e, establishing your social network) while the latter do not. Thus, the latter are not "social media" in the sense of media existing in a social network.
Also, I find that when replying to something in the former I'm thinking about the person (I know them, in some sense) and what they said, while in the latter I'm thinking almost exclusively about what they said (I probably don't know the person). The latter lacks that social element.
No personalized feed, no "friending", no statuses, no social network.
If every forum qualifies, you're using the term so broadly that it's useless. That's what everyone else understands, which is making it seem to you like they're missing something you see. They're not.
For comments that's mostly a consequence of a tree-based commenting model, whose huge benefits over linear model more than offset any "damage" caused by it not being strictly chronological.
What was once a bunch of individual sites, forums, chatrooms, etc., is now concentrated on a few companies (facebook, google, reddit,...), which are not that interested in content, but more into advertising and pleasing advertisers, and earning money, and advertisers, and ads and money, and less on their users.
This meant that everything had to be policitally correct (unless it was deemed acceptable to target a specific group), moderators got more powers, more thought bubbles and echo chambers... and now everything is going slowly downhill.
>Nearly 90% of all purchases are made by women for women and children.
Hate to be that person, but do you have a source for that claim?
According to a quick search of BLS data, single men outspent single women on food and cars, and comparable amounts on entertainment. Women spent more than men on clothing, but men outspent women overall.
> Women drive 70-80% of all consumer purchasing, through a combination of their buying power and influence. Influence means that even when a woman isn’t paying for something herself, she is often the influence or veto vote behind someone else’s purchase.
Unfortunately, that survey doesn't seem like something that can be heavily relied on. For one, they only surveyed women. It's unclear if the men in the same household would give similar or different estimates. They also don't define what is meant by "influencing" a decision. When you try to go to the link to learn more about the survey methodology, the link redirects to https://breastfeeding-mom.com/ instead.
I think 2016 was a big turning point for US (and to some extent global) culture, where politics became a 24/7 spectacle for many that had been previously disengaged. I think all that energy then carried over to lots of pursuits that people didn’t take too seriously before.
The kids grew up. It's not really the internet that changed much, but the people being active on the Internet and responsible for content and sites simply became older, more opinionated, more educated, sometimes more damaged. Society simply matured and people stopped playing around.
I would say it changed after 2016, the Brexit vote and Trump winning the presidency seemed to signal to the big social media companies that they needed to make changes, and this spread to many other sites too, perhaps with social momentum or perhaps simply because Google or Facebook et al can limit a site's audience if it won't act in a certain way.
Interestingly, in Hebrew it actually is called "the mouth of the ring", which if I'm not mistaken is a translation of a German phrase. But I'm at work, not comfortably confirming that right now.
Among people who are actually into drawing, photography etc, human body is much less of a taboo. For example, to just shoot a basic portrait pleasant enough to hang on the wall, one needs to consider subject's gender, age, body shape and skin tone - for his or her own enjoyment of your work. In the same way, I would imagine you have to first draw buttocks to eventually proceduraly draw a passable clothed person, which has many important applications in art, gaming and even education, medicine, ergonomic design...
You don't have to read every story on HN. Maybe in future you could avoid any obviously unserious ones. The word "buttocks" in the title is a good hint of what to expect.
Other discussion sites that have a "vote to the top" system similar to Hacker News usually get _flooded_ with low effort humor posts, to the point where it's hard to find any actual interesting comments on the subject. It's not difficult to see why - it's a lot easier to make a small comment with a pun than a longer thought out comment (so output is greater), it's a lot faster as well (the fastest comments are the most likely to stick to the top), and it's a lot easier to vote for your comment. Someone reads something for five seconds, smirks, and gives an upvote, instead of deciding whether or not to spend a couple of minutes reading a comment and thinking about whether or not the agree with the point being made.
Interestingly, this never seemed to be a big deal with the old forums. The upvote system seems to really encourage a certain type of behavior (small low effort comments that lack substance).
You are really tempting me to write a long thought-out comment about how to draw a pair of buttocks, with lots of citations and quotes and code samples and a good dose of gratuitous partial differential equations needed to meet the paper quota for impressive formulas. [1]
Butfirst [2] I will refer you to my previous long thought-out comment about Sun Microsystem's dress code, the practice of "Skinnyhacking" [3] pioneered down the road at SGI [4], and the full names of the nude hackers involved [5], as well as a citation to the 1992 SIGGRAPH proceedings, and a link to a pdf of the paper [6] including a photograph of the Skinnyhackers in all their glory:
"Fast Shadows and Lighting Effects Using Texture Mapping", by Mark Segal, Carl Korobkin, Rolf van Widenfelt, Jim Foran, Paul Haeberli, Silicon Graphics Computer Systems. Computer Graphics, 26, 2, July 1992, Page 252, Figure 3: Simulating a Slide Projector.
I am admittedly old, but when the hell did tech folk get so goddamned serious that ass/fart jokes and lame puns became such objects of derision and not badges of honor among us? This post epitomizes creative problem solving and creative butt jokes
Once upon a time we ruled this world…now we have become that disapproving aunt who thinks the world is going to hell because Johnny Carson let George Carlin talk about bad words on his show.
Certainly wit, sarcasm, and satire are all welcome contextually. The criticism is obviously on facile low-effort puns and juvenile butt-joke humor which are welcome on 100% of every social media platform I'm aware of.
I never realized that female nipples point at a 45 degree angle from each other (i.e., they do not point straight ahead) until I took a human anatomy drawing class. It was interesting that something right in front of me was not obvious until pointed out.
A woman with very small breasts won't have the tissue volume to have nipples pointing at certain angles, but in average to large sized breasts, they point in many different angles. It's more dependent on tissue density + how self supportive the breasts are.
Not a native speaker but when working in an international environment, everybody has an accent, and it's rude to comment/complain about it, in the same way it would be rude to complain about somebody's physical traits. Also English has such a variety of accents (native / non-native) that everybody is quite used to it.
Also, most of the time, I understand better non-native speakers than native speakers. The hardest people to understand for me are native speaker with any accent that is not North American.
When I was younger, I was very self-conscious about my foreign accent. and I noticed that people who mentioned my accent in a negative way were systematically people from my own country whose accent was just as thick as mine (and probably were as insecure about it as I was). But mostly, I found native speakers to be very patient and polite with foreign accents, I'm grateful to them.
But it's hard and exhausting to listen to! It's making my ears bleed, without any prejudice! It's like being around someone with open sores. How is that racism for christsake. That's why I'm asking, do people with native English have better time listening to this, by virtue of more skill/better brain automation?
People with all kinds of accents, and with and without native English, have a hell of a hard time listening to what you're saying, because of your intent and the actual meaning of your words, not just how you pronounce them, which makes our ears bleed.
You sound like you have open sores and deep psychic wounds, so stop picking on them and people who speak differently than you do.
And cut it out with the intentionally cruel and spectacularly unoriginal body shaming too, buddy:
Non native speakers usually "tolerate" and understand a more wide range of accents, if they learned english in a multicultural environment where everyone had a different accent.
Also in general between both native and non native speakers, commenting negatively about someone's accent is considered rude, or colloquially, an "asshole move"
If you are a non-native speaker without encountering such accents you must be Indian, right ?
This does not match my personal experience; having lived in countries on both sides of the equation, with those in the more non-native country (South Korea) having a much less tolerant for non-American/British accents (e.g. Chinese, Indian, Filipino) than those from native or very high-fluency countries. I.e. Ive found tolerance for non-native accents to be inversely correlated with personal fluency.
I had in mind environments like Europe, where social interactions are like the beginning of a joke: A Czech, a Dutch, a Greek and a French walk into a bar..
I'm European ESL but don't come to much contact with European English speakers, because it's, like, objectively hard to understand and dissonant for me. I am fine with American, British, Irish, etc accents but I've had to interact with a French woman speaking (bad) English on an exchange thing and it was one of the more excruciating things I've experienced. Similarly many youtubers who have, presumably, interesting content but strong, unbearable accents (Anton Petrov comes to mind). This is why I'm asking. I just physically can't listen to the Inigo guy, it's like nails on a chalkboard. Am I supposed to, just, NOT feel that, to not be somehow rude? I think Inigo, as an aspiring public person should work on his accent instead.
People usually can't change their accent. Complaining publicly about this is just rude, and on the verge of racism (speaking with someone with a French accent being "the more excruciating things I've experienced.").
The baseline for comparison tends to be the cultural hegemony. e.g. Hollywood, Standard American Accent. “No accent” is a euphemism for the ubiquitous or most expected accent.
It seems a fairly normal Spanish-speaker-speaking-English accent. I have no problem with it.
Expect people to take offence if you complain about their accent — potentially very serious offence, as English accents and race or national identity are strongly linked in many places.
In my experience, nonnative speakers seem to be more tolerant— probably due to empathy gained from shared experience. Anyway, I love the Spanish accent.
https://youtube.com/@InigoQuilez