polytronic

Meta is copying our work and our logo. I was the chief developer of MySoci.Net, featuring my own 3d graphics engine NthDimension (https://github.com/StylianosPolychroniadis/NthDimension) for its first version before moving on to Unity. You can check out MySoci.net at https://www.microsoft.com/el-gr/p/mysoci/9pbwts6pnb9r

Plant trees

A couple of points that I see people miss surprisingly often. I will pretend for the purposes of this post that I do not know how mRNA or DNA works and will not argue that until very recently we considered 75% of our DNA structure be junk.

What really surprises me is the fact that a lot of educated people trust 'science' blindly. So on to my first point. The original narrative regarding the current crisis is that we are dealing with an extremely trasmitable and deadly virus. As such we are facing the danger of collapsing the medicare system because intensive care units are simply not enough to handle the volume of cases. A disastrous situation, I agree. Fine! So let's have a vaccine. Let's combat 'future' (ie new) infections (cases) and completely disregard the 'present' situation at hand. Why should we bother with coming up with a treatment (medicine, antibodies or whatever) to keep people from entering intensive care? Our savior is only something that regards new cases alone. Until we come up with such a 'miracle' unfortunately people will die. This concludes the first point, the vaccine mania and the complete disregard for treatment. What sane person would see a 'conspiracy' here?

The second point. "The technology is so advanced that you noobs have no idea". Granted! Let's pretend I'm an ignorant noob. "The new mRNA and cDNA tech is effective and safe". How do you know? Let's entertain this idea for a while. Sure, we've got a tech that can produce a brand new vaccine in a matter of a couple of hours. All it takes is a gene-sequence typed on a keyboard which is then 'printed' in the bio-reactor and voila, the wonder is here! Ready to be injected into the human body, able to affect and modify sensitive cellular mechanics pretty much as you would type some code, compile it and load onto your chip, right? What a wonder! Who needs thorough testing after all? We have ruled over nature! No one will ever get sick by this 'curse' again or any of it's variations. One single recipe to rule over the 7.5Bn person diversity on this planet. Yes, because we have so advanced tech that we are standing at a point where we have a complete understanding to the very finest detail of cellular biology. Only if countries like Israel hadn't proven otherwise...

Trust the 'science', it IS safe. Not only we have a complete understanding to the very finest detail of cellular biology but we also have mastered time-travel. Yes, we have so advanced tech that allows us to time travel to the year 2030 A.D. and behold our wonder did not hurt anyone, ever! Who needs testing? We are so bright! What a time to be alive!

I guess we can now take our righteous seat right next to God! Hell, what am I saying we ARE Gods! Oh, sorry I forgot, we still gotta find that gene-sequence that beats death altogether. But worry not, our saviors are a few clicks away! But I digress... Forgive me.

What sane person would see a conspiracy in all the above? Hell, what 'educated' person with 'critical' thinking would dare to question the 'wonder'? We have so advanced tech, said the 'educated' Gods.

I'm confused, is it science we are talking about here or is it religion???

Dangerous to the society? Not really. Dangerous to the elites? Certainly yes!

Because they had no tv?

The mob would not miss such an opportunity!

My understanding is that it generates parallel to the rgb information, a depth-map and segments encoded also in specific spectrum of colors. This removes the burden of heavy image processing (edge-detection, etc) which improves performance. The segments can be trained for classification.

It is very interesting to read how Hesiod defined the extinct species (size, anatomy, behaviour, etc) almost 3000 years ago and contrast it with modern research

Five according to Hesiod. We are the sixth. See Hesiod's Theogony and Work and Days

The author at 17 years of age can understand academics and research. Has the skills and dedication to go through an exercise of reconstructing state-of-the-art.

I can't help but feel pride and hope for the future, both the author's and the world.

A vanity exercise? I think you are really missing the point here. As a 3D graphics developer myself, having published my 13-years long pet-project, a full-featured 3D graphics engine as open source (https://github.com/StylianosPolychroniadis/NthDimension), I can surely tell you that going 3D as well as GPU programming, is The most rewarding, in terms of computer science knowledge, effort one can possibly do.

Now only if UV texture-mapping was any easier, I would love to be in a position to call myself a 3D artist.

Luckily, procedural graphics (both geometry & texturing) has filled the gap for me.

Off course, the biggest school was working along with real 3D artists that shed light and introduced me to engine and shader optimization, my greatest passion at the moment (along with GPU parallelization).

That's awesome! An example of true art in software engineering! Kudos!

I completely align with this:

"When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression no matter how holy the motives."

Robert A. Heinlein

It does rest after every beat

John Maynard Keynes published an interesting paper in 1930. "Economic possibilities for our grand children"

I have trouble registering to your website. More specifically I opted for linkedin based registration but the process stops with a message that the password is weak although I use a couple of special characters, numbers and text in both lower and capital characters

R.I.P. Tony Brooker

mov ax,0x4c00

int 0x21

How to be an Epicurean? That's easy! Start by using his Tetrapharmakon (means the quadruple remedy) to live a happy life, which is the following:

Θεός Άφοβον - God is not to be feared

Θάνατος Αναίσθητον - You don't feel (sic or meet with) death

Τ'αγαθόν μεν εύκτητον - It is easy to acquire goods

Το δε δεινόν ευκαρτέρητον - So is easy to withstand rough times

I concur! Additionally to the article I believe the overall problem with software development is that it cannot be done by everyone. Developing great software requires the mentality of a passionate artist and a lifetime dedication. Unfortunately most companies I've worked with (with very few exceptions) are only after immediate profit and thus creating toy programs mainly by means of integration of ready-made third party libraries. The example they set for new developers is catastrophic. Fewer and fewer people dwelve into the depths of knowledge. Shallow integration, adoption of over-hyped immature components and the new trend of containerization is a two-fold failure: a) Failure of educating minds to think and b) low quality end products for the users with all the consequences this brings (aka performance, security, UX, etc). It really feels as if software development has entered a dark era where instead of educating people we create mechanics that take 'experinments' to market asap and disguising them to look like they operate error-free. Of course such tactics cannot keep problems hidden forever. If only I could share with you the stories of large heap fragmentation I've heard over the years on production server code...

Here in Greece we 'competitionized' state working cleaning ladies! Trust me we know how its done and some of us know damn well the grand scheme of things. U puppies keep on dreaming about progress and evolution under the present state of things. Have a little patience and keep your eyes open. You'll know soon enough what I mean.

PS @YC I ain't politically correct so u can downgrade my score all u want. Honestly I though u would better than -3

Hahaha, I would say we should be more worried about natural stupidity

Πράγματι όλοι εδώ!

Not to mention the fact that ancient Greek seems like a foreign language to modern Greek speakers. Interestingly ancient Greek is more compact and comprehensive (ie uses fewer words compared to modern) as it uses a richer grammar (tenses, voices, etc)

The single most important factor when it comes to UI is text rendering. Immediate mode UIs are based on text rasterization, ie polygon creation for each character of the text while retained mode text is usually featuring texture atlases containing all characters in upper and lower case. This of course introduces a limitation on the number of fonts available to the developer, font sizes, etc. My 3D engine is using an immediate mode UI for the editor and tools while it allows for creation of retained mode UI for in-game UI components by automatically generating texture atlases for the selected font types

There is great a number of Alan Watts talks on YouTube. For more information https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Watts

I'd like to stand at the last paragraph of the article above stating “There is some beautiful structure that somehow coexists with a totally random environment,” Papić said. “What kind of physics allows this to happen? This is a kind of deep and profound question that runs through many areas of physics, and I think this is another incarnation.”

This comes as a blow in the face for those who believe that the universe is the result of randomness or that intelligent design is a fairy tale.

My response to Mr Papic is that this is the kind of physics our Creator has built! The kind of physics causing another familiar entity, the DNA, to refuse to submit to entropy as well. It is another proof of the existence of God and He's greatest creation, the Soul!

I could not agree more! To me the big picture is that the industry is aligned towards servitude to MBAers, marketeers/salespeople and advertisers.

Let's go sell more and grow x% per year!!! Until the next disruptive fast-food junk product puts us out of business.

In the meantime we've helped making our end-users (the rest of the world) stupider.

How proud are you code monkey?