Best use of ray tracing I’ve seen is to make old games look good, like Quake II or Portal or Minecraft. Newer games are “I see the reflection in the puddle just under the car when I put them side by side” and I just can’t bring myself to care.

It’s also connected to a performance feature. They can load lower resolution textures for faraway objects. You can do this without the blurring effect of DoF, but it’s less jarring if you can blur it.

Early HDR games were rough. I look back at Zelda Twilight Princess screenshots, and while I really like that game, I almost squint looking at it because it’s so bloomed out.

The source code on these models is almost too boring to care about. Training data and weights is what really matters.

These models are trained on human creations with the express intent to drive out those same human creators. There is no social safety net available so those creators can maintain a reasonable living standard without selling their art. It won’t even work–the models aren’t good enough to replace these jobs, but they’re good enough to fool the C-suite into thinking they can–but they’ll do lots of damage in the attempt.

The issues are primarily social, not technical. In a society that judges itself on how well it takes care of the needs of everyone, I would have far less of an issue with it.

Quit your house so you can afford instant coffee.

Democrats in charge despise the progressive wing. They wish they didn’t have to listen to silly little ideas like Medicare for All or building high speed rail. They’ve gotten fat off the idea that we all know what Republicans will do when they get elected and vote for them, anyway.

This was never going to be stable in the long run. Republicans only had to win a few times to entrench themselves. That’s because they don’t see their far right wing as nutjobs. They see them as opportunities for driving things further to the right. For example, it took 50 years of planning to get the right people in the Supreme Court to bury Roe v Wade, and it all happened because they won just enough at the right time and then used that power to get what their base wants. What their base wants is horrible and cruel, but they know how to implement the plan.

Where this leads us now is a situation where ditching establishment Democrats has little downside. We’re fucked if we keep hanging on to them. Drag them to the left or leave them out in the icy cold.