The cool thing about graphics programming is that often times you aren't even doing "linear algebra" strictly.
A lot of the math for 3D graphics programming uses the concepts of affine spaces/transformations since standard 3x3 matrices don't have enough information to support translation/projection. I had no clue about this branch of math at all until I started learning graphics programming--in fact I think graphics programming requires you to learn the most math of just about any discipline of computer science outside theoretical computer science. The amount of math you need to truly "understand" path tracing is immense.
Homogeneous coordinates is still linear algebra in a 4D space instead of the obvious 3 you would naively pick. Kinda like quaternions where adding an extra degree of freedom suddenly works around some expressivity problem you didn't really know you had but clearly it solves (e.g. gimble lock on euler angles). But the term linear algebra covers high dimensional uses like training neural networks, its the thing that gives us the matrix formulation of stuff.
Quaternions are an extension of complex numbers and are used ubiquitously in graphics programming for both 2D and 3D applications. Most math libraries support them.
If your gripe is over programming languages not having support for 3D math, then I think that should be expected. Most languages try to keep their standard libraries small, and their built-in types smaller. A language that has built-in support for such things would be incredible niche. Maybe JAI is what you're looking for? I'm not sure if that even contains built in support however.
Highly recommend Physically Based Rendering. As a book, Pbrt is to the study of path tracers, as Gravity is to the field of general relativity. Wholly encompassing and rigorous.
How much of this is due to richer kids having more access to mental health resources? While I wasn't poor growing up, my parents didn't have the means to let me see mental health professionals and as a result I went undiagnosed for 21 years.
There's also different reactions to various illnesses across groups. In some subcultures, you might get a special, nicer treatment for having an illness, whereas in others you may viewed as broken and less worthy of respect.
The former would probably have some people seeking out a diagnoses for the illness, whereas the latter would have some people intentionally avoiding a diagnosis for the illness.
"How we *CAN* be" is doing a lot of lifting there. Boomers, GenX, and older Millennials all had ample opportunities to do something before we arrived here.
Invented and made the solar panel economically viable.
Electric cars aren't exactly designed by the youngest generation either.
We / they have taken big steps to stop trade in tropic hardwoods.
The generation before us built the systems and societies that we today take for granted. To the best of their abilities, very many of them worked very hard to give something better to us than they got themselves.
Go further back and they actually stopped the most well oiled war machine that has ever existed, the nazis. Later they stopped the Soviet by outcompeting them.
Hindsight is 20/20.
But a little humility should be mandatory I think.
And ironically, we have the environmentalists of the past to thank for the fact that we don't have several times as much nuclear power for base load (and also several times less
This blaming the environmentalists for nuclear's failures is quite a tired argument. In addition to being false (environmentalists didn't have the political capital for it in the critical decades) the enormous public subsidies towards nuclear power in the past 80 years were an opportunity cost away from renewables. If we had spent even a small part of that on renewables r&d investment starting in the same timeframe (40s/50s) we could have transitioned from fossil fuels decades earlier.
> we have the environmentalists of the past to thank for the fact that we don't have several times as much nuclear power for base load
Ask yourself why environmentalists succeeded in shutting down nuclear power, the one viable alternative to fossil fuels, when they failed at literally everything else. That might lead you to who was actually responsible.
For a rather large win, as I mentioned, the Ozone layer was saved. Another big one was banning of DDT and introduction of regulations on everything from new pesticides / herbicides to emissions (or fuel saving as we used to refer to it until recently).
The "don't look up" mindset practiced by generations both current and previous reaches a new height of cognitive dissonance. The interesting question is that why such a thing didn't cause more widespread mental health problems before (though it did for many).
All the sociopolitical difficulties that hinder solutions today were just as, if not more, insurmountable for all those generations.
And the technological landscape is much more promising today than at any point since this problem was identified. And people from all the generations you listed are strongly represented among the people who created and began scaling those technologies.
No generation has been better positioned to contribute to solving this problem than the one entering adulthood today. It will be a damn shame if most of them but into doomerism and let it keep them from taking their shot.
Didn't downvote you, but that's not a hopeful attitude. If the damage is done, figuring out who to blame doesn't repair it. Sometimes we gotta clean up somebody else's mess or nobody will. As programmers, quite routinely I suppose :P
But it sure is useful to figure out what policies and who did that... considering those are basically still the people in power. For any world-wide change you need to either change them or wait for them to die.
He comes off as very arrogant. Also, on more than one occasion he's tried to pass off others work as his own. The best of example of this is when he said he invented the field of cellular automata.
(He does come across as arrogant, because he probably is, but his arrogance doesn't extend so far as to include this a claim that he invented something that he’s acknowledged were discussed before his birth.)
The natural way of being a human for thousands of years was to hunt and gather, and then die before 40. But that didn't stop us from progressing past that point.
Why we as a society put up with this yoyo-ing economic model will never make sense to me. Nobody likes recessions, or layoffs, yet we're all complicit with them.
Economic shocks are simply unavoidable. Supposedly the goal is to avoid the yo-yo effect of them, e.g. try to control the rate of inflation and unemployment so it doesn't feel so chaotic. The COVID shutdown and money print to deal with it kind of worked on that front if you consider just how disruptive it all was and how people are still going about their lives, contributing to GDP.
The covid money injection caused this bubble though, these companies hired like crazy during that time and now did layoffs to a more normal level. It might have been a necessary stimulus for other sectors, but the tech sector really didn't need it so there it just caused a bubble.
I'm aware, but the money injection didn't come from a desire to inflate the bubble, more a desire to avoid the calamity from shutting down the world economy for 3 months.
I do think there's an issue where the Fed is absolutely terrified of asset prices dropping and contagion spreading on all fronts, now that they have found this intervention works, but that's kind of tangential to my point, that the goal actually is to avoid the yo-yo, with the chief metrics of unemployment and inflation to guide them.
A lot of the math for 3D graphics programming uses the concepts of affine spaces/transformations since standard 3x3 matrices don't have enough information to support translation/projection. I had no clue about this branch of math at all until I started learning graphics programming--in fact I think graphics programming requires you to learn the most math of just about any discipline of computer science outside theoretical computer science. The amount of math you need to truly "understand" path tracing is immense.
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