foobarrio

If you're going to reason about the effects of this the collective society you must also consider the cost/benefits of continued prohibition to the society as well. We are already paying for the decisions of the state to imprison people under prohibition. Is this cost more or less than the cost incurred to national healthcare of individuals poor health decisions?

It will make different if the encoding compression is different. Not all 1080p streams are equal. A 1080p FHD blueray is around 30mbps. I've read 20mbps h264 being almost indistinguishable from 30mbps blueray. In my own personal test using some Starwards bluerays, a 10mbps looks pretty good compared to the blueray. On YouTube I've seen anywhere from 2-4mbps being used for 1080p and 7+ used for 4k.

A 4k or 8k stream is coming into your computer at 10+mbps and being downsampled to 1080p can very contain more information than a lower quality 1080p stream coming into your computer at 4mbps even after downsampling.

Surely this is a false dichotomy no? The alternative to some "CEO of some internet company" isn't "party away your youth." Perhaps you are creative and really want to be involved in creating movies, music. Some people enjoy hardcore technical work and don't wish to "elevate" to the point of CEO and want to do research.

How often is failure of the car itself the cause of a fatal automobile accident? Just looking at lack of seatbelt use and alcohol make up 50% of traffic fatalities. It seems that the "Human Choice" is the biggest thing to fix when it comes to auto accidents.

* https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

I wish they provided the RAW files. Looking at "traditional-pipeline" photos I am positive I can get a much better result just spending some time with Lightroom and coming up with some "super high ISO" preset. Perhaps it will not match their new pipeline but it will be better than what they have for the "traditional pipeline".

Doesn't that mean you were providing a service instead of creating a product?

MMA showed the BJJ is a requirement to win but it's no longer sufficient. The sport has evolved. Plenty of non-BJJ guys win. Demian Maia is one of the best BJJ guys (and has been super successful) and he's gotten KO'd by strikes and had his BJJ neutralized by guys like Woodley.

Back when tournaments like UFC started, ground fighting and grappling were not part of the standard repertoire of tournament fighters so those guys won. Now it is. Back in the heyday of Pride, champions like Mirko CroCop were definitely not BJJ guys. Of course they trained BJJ but it's not their only tool.

We could skew fonts now if we wanted to. TTF fonts are mostly quadratic Bezier curves so we can redefine what the axes to use when rendering the font glpyhs. Instead of i = (1, 0), j = (0, -1) we can use i = (1, 0) j = (0.3, -1). There's a lot more to fonts obviously like bitmap glyphs, hinting, kerning, etc but we could build in some params if we wanted to.

The aesthetic serves a purpose though. Hi-fi 3D game assets take orders of magnitude more work to create than low-fi 2D ones. I agree that nostalgia and familiarity are what allows gamers to accept NES-style graphics as a valid form of low-fi 2D art. The creator of Stardew Valley mentioned he wouldn't have been able to finish the game had he had to create 3D assets that looked as good to people as the current 2D art.

Having people accept NES-style pixel art is a boon to indie devs. Games like Super Meat Boy have higher res 2D graphics but is still a similar aesthetic. Low-fi poly is also a retro art style. However I've noticed that low-fi poly games are still rendered in high resolution and using more advanced lighting techniques so still requires more work than low-fi 2D.

The interface stuff is hard to gauge on the surface but don't write it off just yet. Many interfaces require lots of hardware acceleration to work right even though they look simple (for example Photoshop or Lightroom). Video editing software has to use all kinds of tricks to show real time updates usually involving some kind of fast approximations upfront with better and better ones blending in. This is often straight, hardcore programming to get the memory and performance of the rendering at a good place and not really applying PhD level stuff. Often times the topics you touch on will be years ahead of the game stuff. Game graphic techniques are often times things that we've been doing in other software for years and finally possible in a game(eg tone-mapping, HDR, physically based lighting, etc).

Then there are interfaces like this:

* http://www.musictech.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Caption-...

Things used by creative people often don't have existing widgets toolkits to draw from and entire new UIs have to be created.

Domain knowledge can be acquired along the way. Not just for games, but in general you never want to be "Just a programmer". You want to be "X that can program" or a "a programmer that knows X". You need enough domain knowledge to be useful to experts.

For cars, I don't didn't mean the car's UI itself but rather that industrial manufacturing uses tons of software with large graphics components. Things like SolidWorks or other kinds of things that analyze the physical shapes of things have a lot of just straight hardcore programming in them.

Edit: as for education, go get some! MIT open courseware has tons of calculus and engineering classes for free. The text books can be found online often times for a few bucks. The digital signal processing course was actually fun.

What is it about programming the visual stuff that you like? For me I realized what I enjoyed about graphic algorithm is that you are constantly dealing with high level concepts like perceptional models as well as having to make a performant implementation using various approximations and what not. It wasn't necessarily the "art" part of it. Sticking to visual work:

* Someone has to create the tools that the games and movie industry has to use. Companies like Adobe and Autodesk that create 3D rendering and modeling software need tons of programmers familiar in graphics programming at all levels. Office source software like Blender is actively developed.

* Vehicle manufacturing companies like Honda, Ford, Boeing, Airbus, BMW all use tons of visualization and engineering software when designing their vehicles.

* Architectural firms use all kinds of rendering packages to visualize their buildings. VR is becoming a part of this and perhaps a place to get in early and become an expert in.

* Companies like Sony and Samsung that create panels deal with so applying human perceptual models to get colors and contrast correctly.

* Nikon, Canon, Fuji all offer hardware and software to the medial field and have to process X-ray, MRI info etc. Even in their consumer-level cameras lots of graphics know how is needed to process imaging data in their video streams.

* All of the tools mentioned above will have a user interface that has to be carefully and creatively designed to be used by creative people, analytical people etc. This is interesting in and of itself to me.

Things like video codecs and digital signal processing tickle the parts of my brain as game programming did.

I agree with the sentiment but this guy quit his job to be an indie developer. This changes things a bit since he needs to now feed himself with this work.

Why not both? Back in 2006 I helped someone complete a Flash puzzle game. The whole thing was a an interesting programming experience. His lead developer had family issues to tend to and I stepped in. He would come up with game-play ideas and I would prototype them while also working completing the whole game. It was a blast. The ideas that he would bring to me were greatly influenced by what he thought I could pull off in the alotted time. After I was done, he later hired some other devs and told me he found himself limiting his ideas because those guys weren't as good at implementing them. In that respect he definitely hit technical limitations even though he was working on non-technically challenging games on a well known platform.

Similarly, there was no state-of-the-art coding in this game:

* http://www.thewayoftheninja.org/n.html

They had plenty of technical challenges pushing the performance of ActionScript in browsers at the time in order to keep the game moving smoothly.

Market forces are neither righteous or wicked. They also don't care at all about short-term vs long-term consequences. We don't always have to succumb to these forces and just say "oh well market said so."

Gravity is also a constant and unrelenting force yet we still fly airplanes.

Are there things like airplanes that defy market forces in a controlled manner that can help small businesses?

I should have searched. This is actually quite useful to be aware of. Thanks.

Wait there's a UTF-8 with BOM? Why do you need a byte order mark for utf-8? The stream "unit" is a byte. I thought only utf-16 and above had an optional BOM?

I like this list. What I have found about point #4 is that even teams that try to actually measure performance in a meaningful way will miss things.

If the quality of the software is slowing down feature releases, causing fires but is not being measured, you can make some headway with presenting ways to measure code quality so that your work shows up on their radar. This is difficult with such a subjective word as "quality" but tracking number of fires of time would be a good way to show that the way you develop is better than other people.

The other thing that companies miss are employees that help other employees in a mentoring sort of way. These people essentially cast a buff on everyone they work with. These buffs can be in the form of better tools, improved workflows, recommending reading material, new technologies etc. Unfortunately it seems this is up to that person's superior to recognize their value and fend for that person to upper management. I feel like it's easy for me to identify peers that cast buffs but not sure how easy it would be for a manager to identify such characters.

Make your problem their problem.

Make a list and organize all the things you'd want to change. Untangling balls of mud often take on the order of months to start seeing any kind of progress. You have to make sure you keep things organized over a long time otherwise you can't tell whether or not you are making progress.

If a module breaks often when seemingly unrelated things change or breaks every time someone touches it it's easy to say the module is badly written. It's often hard to say why it's bad and harder to say how to fix it. However at least you will have data and be able to defend your position that messy code in a particular module actually slowed down the addition of a new business features.

If you are using a bug tracking tool (Jira, Bugzilla etc) make a bunch of private ones for yourself. If management doesn't like all your private tasks showing up on reports then try to get a section for yourself or see if you can deploy your own "private" bug tracking instance.

Any time you encounter a problem make a bug for it even if you have no solution. If upgrading a library version a minor version causes a break make a bug for it etc. You'll start to see patterns and then you can make small but really important surgery on the code. You can have a plan for how to fix a particular module when the time arises.

For example we had a core module with some 190 downstream internal clients across some 5 different dev teams. A recent Oracle version upgrade caused problems because we would have to to coordinate everyone to update at the same time. I already had a long time standing issue that the module is poorly organized and already had a list of all the things that were wrong with it. When this issue came up I immediately stepped in and how to completely remove Oracle from the core module so that the downstream clients can each upgrade on their own time. Because I had thought about this for time I was ready to defend the proposal by showing it would take less time to do this. I was able to do a refactoring I've been wanting to do. Over time people will start to listen to you more if you are actually delivering shit on time. Otherwise, even if your complaints are correct, you will be labelled as just a whiner.

When talking about endurance running, my mind immediately jumps to Courtney Dauwalter. In Oct of 2017 she run the Moab 240 mile race by 10+ hours. She's had other "super hero" stories such as pushing through temporary blindless to finish another race. I don't know of any particular feature that allows her to achieve these feats of endurance but the "brain/body" connection seems to be huge part of it since her training volume/intensity doesn't seem to be that much different than her peers.

How do you feel other manipulations other than compositing? What about Ansel Adam's photographs? His photographs have extensive manipulations in the dark room. He dedicated an entire book to such techniques equally important as the camera part.

The "no retouching ever" seems to come from people who shoot color positive film. For this style of photography whether it 35mm fashion photography in the 80's or large format landscapes, the color positive slide is the final output. There are not many manipulations that can be done. The image is meant to be viewed projected directly from said slide. However the choice of film greatly changes the look of the image (eg Velvia vs Kodachrome). However extensive manipulation of B&W photos has been around for decades.

This is actually my preferred config. The reason being emacs shell buffers. I can interact with any shell tool using the full text editing features of emacs. I've had to interact with many Oracle databases via sqlplus. "sqlplus" is not a fun tool to use on the shell. However in emacs it is perfectly fine and works as well as the command line interfaces from PostGRE or MySQL. The inline shell also allows automatic history, block selecting and line truncate/wrapping controls across all tools. However for pure text editing, it's always vim for me. I've even found myself launching emacs+shell within tmux in one pane and vim in another.

IMHO The weird 16:9 aspect ratio really screwed us for usability. A 19" 4:3 monitor has the same height as a 23" 16:9 monitor. However I remember 1280x1024 being commonly available on games and on Windows by the time Windows 98 came out and earlier in games.

My brother had a 486 that I think I could run the game Mechwarrior 2 by Sierra at 1280x1024. The refresh rate went down to 60hz but it was doable and we didn't have a top of the line system even at the time (mid-late 90's). Here's a 1024x768 screenshot:

https://r.mprd.se/media/images/94067-Mech_Warrior_2_Mercenar...

There seems to be at least some differing cultural values. I've had experiences with tea houses in TW/CN where the tea that is served is not really what I ordered and instead of being embarrassed or apologetic about it, they are impressed that I can even tell the difference! My friend had someone brew the same tea in different ways and try to sell it to him at different prices. When called out the guy seemed delighted at the challenge!

I've never noticed an uneven chapter ring! You're going to make me obsessed with staring at my watches. I'm honestly staring at mine and it looks fine. I think I can now see some lines look closer to the minute slashes than others but I don't know if that's because I am looking so hard for unevenness or what. I'll pull out the jeweler's loupe and compare it to my other watches when I get home. I think the watch would work a bit better without a chapter ring at all or at least without the sub-minute hashes. The chapter ring adds sportiness to a watch that otherwise looks a bit dressy.

That's why I put mine on a snazzy leather strap ;-)

I wonder how low in the price range you have to get before you have visibly uneven chapter ring marks. I think I can print a perfect one on paper on the laser printer here at work. Although the ring on my sarb is not perfectly aligned.

That sucks to hear. I guess this is also similar to high-end cars where they are more problematic than a trusty Toyota Corolla. I've love to own a Rolex Explorer or an Omega Seamaster one day but I am not sure I would ever buy one. I've been happy with Seikos and Casios. I daily wear a Seiko sarb033 on a black leather strap and it honestly as classy as I'd ever want out of watch. I really want to believe that branding isn't the only difference when comparing high-end watches but perhaps this is not the case.

+1 for G-Shocks. Even though Casio rates the accuracy of it's $8 FW91 quartz watch at "only" around 1 second per day[1], many people observe 1 second per month with others observing 0 seconds after 2-3 months. This makes it more accurate than almost all mechanical watches in any price range.

[1] http://support.casio.com/storage/en/manual/pdf/EN/009/qw593....

I love my mechanical watches but I bought them because they look cool not for their time keeping ability.

A lot of the advantages of the "better" construction aren't seen until the watch is older. An acrylic glass vs saphire glass crystal on a watch both look the same when new. Over 10 years, they will look much different. Heat-treated blued steel watch hands supposedly rust much less compared to the chemically treated blued hands. I am not sure if this justifies the price difference of a $50 fake vs $5,000 Rolex.

I've never owned a watch for more than 5 years so none of this is personal experience! However the recent wave of smart watches made me look into watches now and I have a couple of nice dress watches I researched a bit before I purchased.

The blue-green distinction is interesting because it's different in East Asia:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...

The color of a traffic light can be referred to as blue or green. This sometimes leads to interesting translations where the color 青 can be translated as green or blue (eg 青茶 being translated as "blue tea" in Taiwan instead of "greener oolong tea" or something).

At the very least you will need another little robot or human that goes by and verifies that the prices have actually been updated. I can't imagine the LCD price displayers will be super high reliable and built to last decades.