I'm not sure it's fair to describe those as hacks. Those techniques are also used for animated movies, which take many CPU-years to render. Those "hacks" are used even when artist have huge amounts of hardware, no real-time constraints, and need extremely high quality.
Techniques other than raytracing have an artistic place, not merely a pragmatic one.
The edit window has passed so I'll reply to my own comment with a nifty tidbit. The early days of animated films were particularly fun to watch as someone with a background in computer science, as it was a one upmanship competition between the major animation studios (Pixar and Dreamworks) on technology. Monster's Inc had hair. Shrek had a scene with physically-realistic caustic effects of poured milk (really, go watch it--there's an entirely gratuitous scene where a glass of milk is poured to show that they can. milk as a semi-translucent non-homogenous liquid is VERY hard to render as it turns out.) Finding Nemo had lots of water effects, etc.
The challenge of all of this was doing it using rasterization techniques, or integrating more realistic techniques using path tracing into a standard rasterization pipeline in a way that didn't kill performance. But now render farms a big enough and technology has advanced far enough that they can just path-trace everything.
Imagine that you run a charity. Your job is to save lives. Should you spend every penny you get on medicine and spend nothing on IT? Of course not. It's impossible to run a charity like that. You must have computers, and you would prefer it if they are fast and reliable. You choose to divert some money from your programs to have efficient administration.
Now imagine the cost of flash doubles. You're forced to choose between "less storage, slow storage, or less money for other things." All of those options mean more death.
Flash storage can be more important than medicine for the sick or food for the hungry.
Given that your goal is to make toys, the tradeoffs of cryptocurrencies are unacceptable. The whole architecture of cryptocurrencies is based around extreme security and trust. Who needs that level of security for a toy? Why would I tolerate high fees, slow transactions, and a clunky user experience if the token isn't worth anything? Why would I use a globally-distributed power-guzzling network of thousands of GPUs to make something as silly as TallCoin? This has all the downside of cryptocurrencies with none of the upside.
Databases aren't trendy, but they'd solve the same problem better with less waste.
The company they need to beat is AMD. AMD's integrated GPU's are thoroughly trouncing Intel's and are good enough for light gaming. Their weak integrated graphics hurt their core business of CPU sales.
They certainly want to compete in the discrete GPU space, but I think they should be much more scared of losing CPU market share.
That's a pity. I was thinking that maybe Mozilla was getting back on track and making a no-nonsense web browser. Instead they're diverting resources to yet another gimmicky fad.
But there's very little middle ground between "there were bad people on both sides" (i.e. What Trump said after Charlottesville, clearly implying that Nazis deserve some kind of consideration amidst a protest in which people's blood was on their hands) and the outage people rightfully feel in response to comments like that. Sorry but there is no debate to be had with people like that. None. Zero.
Most people aren't psychopaths. The man was crazy, but he was still a person and didn't deserve to die.
You should celebrate the fact that even people who he antagonized were upset by his death. Even if they reacted irrationally, at least they reacted at all.
There’s a big difference between empathy and guilt. That people feel guilty and responsible for what happened to the man is a legacy of his manipulation, and not something to be celebrated.
The woman in your video is just plain wrong. She's as wrong as if she claimed the sky is green or 1 + 1 = 14.
The Common Core doesn't specify curriculum. Period. Anyone who cites a specific problem or worksheet as evidence the Common Core is bad doesn't know what they're talking about. It's just evidence of an incompetent teacher.
Whether or not it's ambiguous doesn't matter much to me. It's confusing. That sentence is bad writing, Oxford comment or no. The goal of language is to understand others and be understood yourself. This kind of formal analysis doesn't help with that goal.
I think we would benefit from a simplified, formalized version of English for things like documentation and legalese. Does something like that already exist?
I don't think the blockchain is a good technology. Traditional databases or something like Git solve the same problems better. I have an ideological desire to see more trustless and peer-to-peer systems and I think they'll take hold eventually, but at the moment blockchains are worthless.
It's a good technology if you agree with the goals of libertarians today which is that we should be able to do everything without trust. Having trust is such a huge shortcut of energy and enables you not to have to completely do everything yourself. It pretty much enabled civilization to begin with, but many people now have given up on trusting anything and don't think they have the agency to improve any sort of trusted authority.
There’s a lot more I could know about the practicality of blockchain but the value of the technology is still more real than the currencies that live on it.
It seems to me, in my perhaps naive opinion, that in the long run blockchain might just be a way to make digital certificates of authenticity for digital goods that need a guaranteed uniqueness feature.
Techniques other than raytracing have an artistic place, not merely a pragmatic one.