Man, I am getting incredibly tired of reading LLM-generated writing
I think it's a mix of human and LLM writing.
> Drawing it on a GPU, crisply, at any size, under any 3D transform, while the text changes every frame, is not.
> One small texture, resolution independent within reason, one cheap shader.
English is not my native language, so I may be wrong here.
> There is no atlas, so a hundred thousand CJK glyphs cost a font's worth of outline data, not an atlas the size of a video. Text can change every frame at no baking cost, which is exactly what you want for live data, user input, and localized content. And it all happens in a single draw with an ordinary fragment shader, no vendor extension required.
Specifically, these sentence structures:
1. ... so <blah> costs <blah>, not <blah>.
2. And <blah>, no <blah>.
3. ... fixed resolution ahead of time, which quietly ...
Maybe what we are seeing is us internet dwellers being exposed to wiring styles of humanity we had not been exposed to ?
I learned a few things from it and have some interest in the topic. So this sort of a weird valley where I'm very annoyed by the writing but also getting something out of it. And it's more than I would have gotten out of promoting an LLM myself.
Which I know, because I have written a blog post about SDFs before, and I tried to author it with an LLM helping and the text just came out awful. I think I rewrote my entire post eventually - I am fairly confident at least that none of the LLM's words remained. I mention it because I've already read the SDF section of this blog largely, when an LLM generated mostly the same text 5 months ago.
There are tells in almost every sentence but some flagrant ones: “where every technique below makes its trade”, “every size you want crisp is another atlas”, “a bitmap has no idea it is being viewed in perspective”, “the fix that carried the industry for a decade”, “it lies about corners”, “built for artwork that moves”, “what separates them is technique, not resolution”, “text is where Slug earned its name”.
These are Claudisms, cloying mannered prose cliches that often anthropomorphize concepts, with an uncanny and annoying smugness.
> A letter is not a picture, it is a set of outlines: closed loops of straight lines and Bezier curves, filled according to a winding rule.
Also the way the comma is used to add an inscrutable end to the sentence: "filled according to a winding rule."
> reduces antialiased vector paths into unique triangle patches and rasterizes them through a massively parallel pipeline with pixel local storage
this is typical type of LLM sentence that kinda runs under the radar, sounds clever, but if you actually look at it, none of it makes sense
- what are "antialiased vector paths"?
- why mention "unique" triangle patches? (surely it wouldn't render duplicate ones)
- a "massively parallel pipeline"? like a GPU you mean?
- "pixel local storage" sounds like an obnoxious marketing term if it's not defined in the article (which it isn't)
anyway I quickly skimmed the article after that but it was little substance
It does bias me negatively towards the author, and makes me a little sad that people are choosing to not put more thought and effort into their writing, but this is a trend that is here to stay.
Making a big fuss about this hasn't gone anywhere from what I can tell, and it's unlikely that the outcome will be any different going forward.
Yes, LLMs were used to help write this article and there are tells. I can smell them too.
However, as several have picked out, it's not a one-shot LLM Leeeeroy-Jenkins writing process. I am a domain expert in these sorts of things, and the source of much of the information, concept and organization of the article.
I wrote a bunch of notes and material. I then used an LLM trained on my own styleguide from my writing to organize, expand and fill in places where it was mostly gathering info from other sources. Then I went through THAT and rewrote a bunch because it doesn't always follow directions and color within the lines. It took several days of iteration to put this together even with an LLM assisting.
So, there are parts that are entirely human. There are parts that I felt were less important for me to write personally that I let the LLM writing stand, with some edits.
It is a HUGE piece of work, and writing it all by hand would have taken more time than I could dedicate to it because I have to make a living too.
I should go back and de-LLM it some more, but legit our time is spent working on Slughorn to make it better. I welcome all suggestions for edits and errata on the article (or on Slughorn itself). Our goal isn't to trash other rendering methods. It's not a competition. The post is intending just to fairly compare all of them so people can decide what technique is best for their use, because Slug/Slughorn ISN'T the right choice always, and there's so many techniques with different tradeoffs that it can be hard to grasp where your own use-case falls and how to decide.
Also, Cubicool, the primary developer of the Slughorn code will probably chime in below to address some of the more code- and feature-centric responses.
(Finally, cheers to Eric L. for releasing the Slughorn patent that made this all possible.)