q_andrew

Hey! Congrats on the launch, the touted performance increases are mind blowing.

I think physics engines are difficult for a few reasons:

- They don't mesh with a lot of features that modelers take for granted (non-uniform scaling, concave meshes, lax model scaling)

- It's hard know intuitively what values to use for things like acceleration, density, velocity, damping, friction. Especially because they are very inter-dependent.

- Interaction with moving kinematic or non-physics objects is an undefined behavior that has to be tested pretty rigorously.

- In gamedev, rigidbody physics are basically a trojan horse for gameplay bugs like clipping through the map and sudden bursts of high speeds (Which is both magical and frustrating). It's a non-trivial task to sandbox those behaviors completely.

- Projectiles. There's no catch-all solution for small fast-moving objects, it's always a tradeoff. But that's mostly because big O dictates it to be so.

Yes, I'm a big fan of the documentation. According to the release blog, they are re-organizing the docs for 6.0 -- hopefully a further improvement:

https://babylonjs.medium.com/announcing-babylon-js-6-0-dcb5f...

Blender is definitely the weapon of choice. Substance 3D is almost required nowadays for proprietary rendering, and the occasional Autodesk+VRAY combo for older established clients.

Edit: On the coding side, python is great for pipelines (especially now that blender has its own module). Imagemagick is great for formatting textures and huge .tiff files. ffmpeg is the king of video formatting.

I think Havoc physics will be a very welcome addition. Threejs has an adjacent library based off of bullet physics -- a solid library, but one that can be a bit finicky to set up. Although, physics engines are inherently difficult to work with in the first place.

As a technical 3D artist, Babylon has been a great way to dive into web dev, and it parallels with standard game engines just enough that I can easily find my way around the documentation.

An interesting idea for a website to track this stuff, especially because so much of the AI space is filled with vaporware and theoretical scenarios.

One nitpick -- this incident is caused by traditional video game AI, not to be confused with the neural stuff that's causing waves right now:

https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/38/

During a gold rush, sell shovels. Especially if the shovels have an actively renewable license.

Sort of. It can do much more than sketchup, but the interface is not designed for quick drafting like sketchup is. Blender doesn't shield you from the more complex parts of 3D design like sketchup does, but if you learn it you will have a better grasp of the system as a whole.

I agree about what others are saying about internet access being a pandora's box of stress and depression, so I think creative apps would fit your description a bit better.

Even if you're not the artistic type, you should try Townscaper:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.OskarStalb...

It's a bit like meditating, you lay out these tiny little island villages that add all of the extra little details for you. It helps me cope with the world.

If this isn't a quote from somewhere, thanks for the funniest original comment I've seen in months

To be fair, most species of fish evolved independently, and the term 'fish' has zero scientific category or phylum.

from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish ---

In earlier times, even biologists did not make a distinction – sixteenth century natural historians classified also seals, whales, amphibians, crocodiles, even hippopotamuses, as well as a host of aquatic invertebrates, as fish.

Edit: to put things into perspective, a salmon is more closely related to a camel than it is to a hagfish.

I love their description of the first airship, a rich weirdo's toxic balloon that is destroyed immediately upon landing by a mob of confused peasants.

The Sprawl trilogy and its fashion/world is formed a lot by politics. Gibson himself says that Neuromancer is an exaggerated critique of Reaganomics and the problems it exasperated (or, at the very least, failed to address). The rampant drug abuse, sovereign corporations, the ever increasing gap of poverty and technology -- I think a lot of derivative media adopts these elements to look cool (without actually understanding their context or meaning).

I don't, but the things that I do are modular enough that I can make parts separately and plug them in when I come back.

Large home desktop, cheap replaceable linux laptop is the perfect combo. I've saved so much money over the years by swapping out desktop parts and using a beat-up thinkpad for off-location work. Every once in a while I'm missing a newer display port, but overall it's a great system.

This is a good time to mention some things that should be more common knowledge:

-Recreational use of prescription meds makes it vastly more difficult for people who actually need them. Especially when their condition causes an inability to schedule and coordinate.

-Psychiatrically, recent studies are showing that neurotypical brains don't actually benefit much from stimulant medications (but the illusion of productivity can be a good placebo)

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03768...

Given the context, it also might be a sarcastic illustration of people's misunderstanding of ADHD as a sporadic condition instead of a neurological disorder.

A solid solution. I'll check that out, it seems like a fun side project.

Yes, that is what I meant. Thanks for the links.

Seeing the galaxies peppering this image, I can't wait for James Webb's version of the 'dark sky' Hubble image. It would be even better if the same patch of sky was used, just with the increased vision of Webb's imaging.

I find the asymmetry of force in vehicle combat very interesting. If a single foot soldier can take out a tank that costs millions of dollars, is it even worth using a tank? Obviously there are tactics to avoid this but I bet it's a pain in the ass to out-maneuver.

I think there have been plenty of problem-solving innovations, but there's a sort of 'market efficiency' effect on innovations that require less complexity. Once the kitchen knife was invented, any sort of slicer-dicer tool is just a rehashing of the knife concept. However, when the problems get more complex (E.G., the automation arm that anneals metal is now utilizing neural networks to make sure the kitchen knife does not have deformities), actual solutions are harder to recognize. HVAC can make your building safer from the pandemic, but it usually comes down to whether your boss wants to pay for it. Remote work can be effective, but it needs healthy hours and employee trust to do well. Those are human issues that you can't necessarily innovate away.

Thanks!

What are some good sites with RSS feeds? I was sad to see that Reuters doesn't have it.

Strong Towns is great. My hesitancy of this kind of activism is that I can't track down and show up to every public hearing like grumpy retired homeowners can.

I need my next project to be non-horror because my fiancee can't even watch! Although we definitely aren't complaining about the extra income.

How difficult was it? I'm thinking of doing something similar in my mid-sized mid-western city. There are so many growth opportunities stunted by zoning laws. I'm a big advocate for regulation but parking mandates and housing density limits present more problems than solutions.

I'm making a PC game about that weird and ethereal (and scary) feeling you get from empty public buildings. I've already sold over 2000 copies and it hasn't even left beta yet.

https://q-andrew.itch.io/anemoiapolis

Yes. There's even some evidence that chemical warfare via bombing was done in Korea, something they really should have known was a terrible thing to do.

Malcom Gladwell did a great segment on his podcast Revisionist History about this. He talks about the schools of thought in the US military about who and what to bomb that lead to these campaigns. It is extremely tragic that these citizen-heavy areas were absolutely pulverized. There's evidence that the US military used similar techniques in the Korean war.

People have some very intense opinions of computer modern. I stumbled into a thread where many claimed it was the worst font ever made, and others saying it was the best thing to happen to digitally published academia. You may have just opened a can of worms...