I went down the knife-sharpening rabbit hole a bit, too, but I only managed to make my knives duller with whetstones, even though I have good dexterity.
Eventually, I just took my knives to a professional sharpener and got the paper-thin, tomato-slicing sharpness I wanted.
Funnily enough, I had both an expensive "forged" knife and a cheap IKEA one, and the IKEA knife was sharper and held its edge much better.
Excellent idea, hunting for the best headphones only cost me like two hundred hours of my life, couple hundreds of dollars, and rewarded me with a mild tinnitus as well.
As someone who uses a Wacom tablet daily, it is not convenient for traveling because you don't always find the right table to use it. I can imagine OP wants to use his tablet while sitting on his bed in his hotel room.
The claim I was responding to you was that some people use our friends the magic robots not because they think they are useful now, but because they think they might be useful in the future.
Because our ability to simulate/render a realistic world in real time using direct equations is still very limited. We’re accustomed to these limitations and often feel “graphics are good enough”. But, we’ll always be decades behind “ILM in real time”.
The AI route has a good chance of moving us from decades behind ILM to merely “years behind ILM”.
>The AI route has a good chance of moving us from decades behind ILM to merely “years behind ILM”.
Firstly: we have very accurate models. But not at real time speeds. Games only have some 30,16, or even 11 ms to render a frame. The techniques we have are faking the real physical interactions that render farms can take minutes or hours to pump out per frame.
Secondly: Not at this performance rate. taking 100ms to render a frame is unaccatable in the concept of a game. Games are already so pressed for time budget; unless some hyper JIT happens we can't take all that budget querying an LLM.
Not OP, but I have long thought of this type of approach (underlying "hard coded" object tracking + fuzzy AI rendering) to be the next step, so I'll respond.
The problem with using equations is that they seem to have plateaued. Hardware requirements for games today keep growing, and yet every character still has that awful "plastic skin", among all the other issues, and for a lot of people (me included) this creates heavy uncanny-valley effects that makes modern games unplayable.
On the other hand, images created by image models today look fully realistic. If we assume (and I fully agree that this is a strong and optimistic assumption) that it will soon be possible to run such models in real time, and that techniques for object permanence will improve (as they keep improving at an incredible phase right now), then this might finally bring us to the next level of realism.
Even if realism is not what you're aiming for, I think it's easy to imagine how this might change the game.
You're comparing apples to oranges, holding up today's practical real-time rendering techniques against a hypothetical future neural method that runs many orders of magnitude faster than anything available today, and solves the issues of temporal stability, directability and overall robustness. If we grant "equation based" methods the same liberty then we should be looking ahead to real-time pathtracing research, which is much closer to anything practical than these pure ML experiments.
That's not to say ML doesn't have a place in the pipeline - pathtracers can pair very well with ML-driven heuristics for things like denoising, but in that case the underlying signal is still grounded in physics and the ML part is just papering over the gaps.
The question was "why does it feel more real", and I answered that - because the best AI generated images today feel more real than the best 3D renders, even when they take all the compute in the world to finish. So I can imagine that trend going forward into real-time rendering as well.
I did not claim that AI-based rendering will overcome traditional methods, and have even explicitly said that this is a heavy assumption, but explained why I see it as exciting.
I think we'll have to agree to disagree about well done 3D renders not feeling real. Movie studios still regularly underplay how much CGI they use for marketing purposes, and get away with it, because the CGI looks so utterly real that nobody even notices it until much later when the VFX vendors are allowed to give a peek behind the curtain.
e.g. Top Gun Mavericks much lauded "practical" jet shots, which were filmed on real planes, but then the pilots were isolated and composited into 100% CGI planes with the backdrops also being CGI in many cases, and huge swathes of viewers and press bought the marketing line that what they saw was all practical.
I find it odd that you're that bothered by uncanny valley effects from game rendering but apparently not by the same in image model outputs. They get little things wrong all the time and it puts me off the image almost instantly.
>Hardware requirements for games today keep growing, and yet every character still has that awful "plastic skin", among all the other issues
That's because the number of pixels to render onto keep growing. Instead of focusing on physically based animations and reactions, we chose to leap from 480p to 720p overnight, and then to 1080p in a few more years. Now we quadrupled that and want things with more fidelity with 4x the resolution of last generation.
> images created by image models today look fully realistic.
Because they aren't made in real time (I'll give the BOTD for now and say theya are "fully realistic". Even this sample here claims 100ms. Rendering at 6-7 seconds per frame isn't going to work for any consumer product at any point in gaming history.
>Even if realism is not what you're aiming for, I think it's easy to imagine how this might change the game.
not in real time rendering. I am interested to see if this can help with offline stuff, but we're already so strapped for performance withoout needing to query an "oracle" between frames.
as of now, I'm not even that convinced by the Nvidia 5X series of frame interpolation (which would only be doable by hardware manufactureres).
Malleability / flexibility can introduce unreliability.
We need to get over a hump, where software becomes more humanlike, but just like with good engineers over time we can probably arrive at a place where we can trust our new malleable solutions just like a new colleague turning out to be great.
The first season was excellent, and then in the 2nd season they did ruin lots of the story lines with just lame choices, and then the ending went completely downhill for me. It pissed me off, just like GoT.
There was this other series called Murderbot which had some similarities in the setting of the story. It was not that great compared to the 1st season of Raised by Wolves, but it was consistent throughout the whole series (so far) in quality, and it is much more satisfying.
Anyways if you like scifi and haven't checked out The Expanse yet, that is a masterpiece.
The murder bot books are a bit silly from the get go, so the show leaned into the campy vibe to sell the comedic aspect.
As someone who loves the book, I think the show is a 10/10 for capturing the feeling. Though if you where expecting as more serious scifi I can see why you think it's of inferior quality.
TBH, The Expanse also suffers from a major drop in quality after season 3. It is so hard for series to maintain quality over time I now prefer miniseries as the quality is more uniform from the start to the end in my experience.
The expanse drop was entirely due to budget cuts from amazon, who were going to cancel it but didn't because Jeff Bezos liked the show. They did get a budget cut and had to make some decisions about how to execute the story with more limited resources. They still did a pretty good job imho, but would love to have seen what they could have done with full budget.
The books really shift tone between books 3 and 4 and 6 and 7. I felt the show did really well with the tone shift, however, I do understand how people might not enjoy the results as much as I do.
The first book/season is such a banger because it's pretty great horror sci-fi at that point.
Eventually the whole protomolecule thing settles down, and afterwards you have essentially politics and genocide in space, which can be good but almost feels like a different genre.
Right - the first season's gradual zooming out (expanse) from a very focused murder mystery into a solar system-spanning event was amazing. It did feel like that event then got sidelined, as you say, in favour of politics.
The first season of The Expanse was great. Then it got progressively more meh with each season.
(obviously my personal opinion eh?)
For a really nerdy-oriented SF series try Three Body i.e. the 2023 Tencent version of The Three Body Problem. Again in my opinion the 2024 Netflix version, was one of the boringest things I've ever watched. I'm pretty sure if that had been my introduction to the Rememberance of Earth Past series I would have been left distinctly unimpressed.
For an example of what I mean by "nerdy-oriented", avoiding spoilers there's a scene where some of the characters are observing a certain celestial phenomenon. In the Netflix series they are sitting outside looking at something that should not be visible by naked eye. In the Tencent series they're sitting in a proper scientific station, i.e. a big room lined with PC workstations and side-rooms with bigger machines and printers, and they're starting endlessly at a single red line on a monitor while munching on junk food.
Another thing: a certain Chinese army base in the 1960's is decorated with picture-perfect, period hardware, big mainframes that a character is shown physically disassembling to service. In the Netflix series... honestly, I don't even remember. The attention to detail that only a proper nerd would notice is, to me, something genuinely new, like I've never see anyone go to all that trouble before to make sure a certain demographic won't scrunch up their face and go "that's not how computers looked in the '60s".
I should also say that there is certainly quite a bit of overacting (or over-directing) in the early episodes but they get over it later.
I watched the Tencent version after reading the books, and it's the first time I've been able to get properly engaged while reading subtitles.
My goto for showing the difference between the Netflix and Tencent shows is the Shi speech about bugs. It's an important moment, but the Tencent version does a much better job of conveying that.
I watched and read the entire series. Much of it is boring and poorly written both from a style perspective as well as character development. It’s famous but doesn’t live up to many scifi masterpieces imo.
The fascinating thing to me about _The Expanse_ is the disparity between the Novels and the TV Show. It's the same content, but in a different medium and environment.
I would call the novels well executed, enjoyable and very readable action adventures, using well-worn tropes. There is nothing ground-breaking in them. It's not what's currently at the edges of the genre in the written form - It's not Greg Egan, it aint Ted Chiang or Adrian Tchaikovsky. M. John Harrison does not make an appearance. It's not even Stephen Baxter, Alastair Reynolds or Iain M. Banks.
The TV show however, is quite something, it is one of the flagship sci-fi TV series. And it does indicate that written and visual sci-fi might be different stages of development , with the TV version lagging by decades.
Strong disagree. There are very few space operas which get both world building and character building so right. They usually are either great epic stories or amazing character introspectives but rarely both.
I love that there is the headline, an intro, a heading for a section about the iPhone 18, and then another heading titled "TSMC says employees tried to steal trade secrets", which is literally a word-for-word substring of the headline.
There is literally no indication in the article that this has anything to do with apple other than them being a potential user of the TSMC 2nm process. Strange they tried to connect this story to apple.
Yep. It doesn’t detail what was stolen, how they were found, if they’re arrested right now, or who it is suspected they are working for. Useless article beyond the headline.
Eventually, I just took my knives to a professional sharpener and got the paper-thin, tomato-slicing sharpness I wanted.
Funnily enough, I had both an expensive "forged" knife and a cheap IKEA one, and the IKEA knife was sharper and held its edge much better.