taw55

On the topic of the apriorisms in economics:

Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...

A Lost Century In Economics: Three Theories Of Banking https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105752191... (Results re-affirmed by several central banks after publishing)

Sonnenschein–Mantel–Debreu theorem (microeconomic rationality assumptions have no equivalent macroeconomic implications) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnenschein–Mantel–Debreu_t...

Obligatory reminder that money != coinage != barter != banking

> It's interesting to note, that when Obama used the platform to get elected, no one minded. But, when the opposing party does it, everyone judges it negatively.

When history sandwiches you between two world leaders with an apparently combined IQ of 2, people might let some questionable things slip.

When one wants a “real” person or theory, one strays as far as possible from the unreality-generator that is “academic” economics.

If one would mount an axle on Smith’s grave, we could live off free energy for millenia.

Techniques as in workflow? Algorithms? At which point does something become “unreasonable” vs simply effective.

Try to spend as much time with friends and family as I can manage.

Yes. This is why it’s good to seek out alternative opinions. Having a network of advisers can be very helpful.

Are you an economist?

Parallax mapping will not benefit from this, since the limiting factor there is performing a raymarch on a heightfield to find an exact intersection. At every step along the ray you need to test wether you are inside or outside of the heightfield. This means offsetting the uv coordinate (xy position inside the texture) by the ray vector, and then using that coordinate to sample the texture again, to check whether or not you penetrated the heightfield. The amount of texture lookups quickly becomes the bottleneck, especially on large textures since they incur cache misses. To give you an idea: for every parallaxed pixel on the screen the heightmap texture might be looked up several dozens of times. You don’t nearly get to subpixel accuracy before performance grinds to a halt. Parallax mapping is view dependent, so roughness mapping, even if somehow applicable would need to be highly anisotropic for it to work, which means a huge storage cost.

It’s an additional texture fetch on the gpu, it’s virtualy free if you discount storage costs. It’s been in games for years.

PBR has seen commonplace adoption in games since 2012. Roughness mapping has been used for years in real time engines.

But they clearly are distinct forms of capital.

A case against the concept of comparative advantage:

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/08/ricardos-vice-vir...

> “If generating money out of thin air by using a computer program seems absurd, that’s because it is,”

Erh, this is literally how every bank does it when they extend a loan.

You’re mixing up debts in foreign currencies and ones in national currency. The former is the issue. As long as the national currency is accepted and traded by the population (which they can effectively enforce upon them through taxation) then the state can simply sign a contract, flip some bits in the national accounting table and proceed that way. The problem here is that Venezuela has a very disfunctional market economy (it is bad enough under the champagne socialists, and the US being involved in geo-economic/imperialist opportunism there isnt helping them) and a large black market which is mostly denominated in US currency and to which the population is increasingly dependent upon. If the economy worsens, that could further undermine the national currency and weaken the central government. The US of course wants that to happen so they can install a puppet government and secure natural resources in the south american hemisphere. It’s really a mixture of corrupt centralized government making all the wrong policy decisions and nefarious outside influences.

My main problem with it isn’t that it’s unrealistic per se, just that it looks bad on static geometry. But SSAO is typically sold as a “realism” feature.

A problem that often gets overlooked are the (geo) political ramifications of differences in economic output. I’m not sure if this is an existing hypothesis, but it seems evident to me.

If one actor grabs the bigger share of economic growth that puts it in a position of power over others. Nation states that can grow their population, resource extraction and have export surplus can use those things to exert political power over others. This means that states have a strong incentive for growth.

Likewise, if a population is dependent on money for their necessities, and there exists a limited stock of it, those who command a large fraction of it have defacto leverage over those with little.

> Of course, this is not our main source of growth at the moment. But surely it could be?

Yeah, but for how long?

Exponential economist meets finite physicist: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...

Sharks with frikkin’ lazers beams!

While on the subject of graphics in games...

Another pet peeve of mine: ambient occlusion (crude GI approximation) and especially SSAO (crude approximation of a crude approximation).

Corners don’t look like that: http://nothings.org/gamedev/ssao/

(Ambient occlusion proper and in moderation I think looks fine, but most games really overdo it.)

This is false, HDR and deferred shading are two completely unrelated concepts.

A few months ago I hacked tonemapping straight into the ubershader of some foss Quake client, you don’t even need a seperate buffer to do these things.

Epic added chromatic aberation to the new Unreal Tournament at some point and the mob started sharpening their pitchforks. The reason given afterwards was that they think it’s important to break the “sterile” cg look by roughening the image slightly. I can see their point, games are at the point where they look “photoreal”, but not like a photo. I find the almost-but-not-quite realism jarring, personally, I even prefer playing older games usually because of it. so I can understand why devs try all kinds of tricks to alleviate it.

Oh wow. That might explain a lot of my lag I’ve had when multiplaying on large maps (on LAN).

I actually did that once.

It was a wordpress site for a company written by some 16 year old intern. Terribly fun. No version management. The main folder had multiple older copies of itself in seemingly random subfolders. It went deep. The CSS was stored partially in CSS files, of which there were 20 (!) loaded from the theme folder, partially in one of the 40+ plugins used (not an exageration). But there was also plenty of CSS in the templates, the database and seemingly random third party servers. The favicon was 20MB large. It used like 4 plugins for “custom fields” all of which had infected large swathes of the database, and all of which did... something. Much like the root folder had nested copies of itself there was something similar going on in there... I simply didn’t bother by the time I understood what the hell was going on. The templates were basically this premium theme of “customized” php, the fun part was that in some page templates it basically rendered a bunch of different pages inside the template (the guy apparently didn’t understand the concept of closing tags, yet somehow made it work. It was incomprehensible.) and then used custom css to hide the pages that shouldn’t be visible. Basically the entire thing was some satanic equillibrium of bugs cancelling eachother out.

It was a work of art.

It IS a great idea!

Bloody Hell, that code “snippet” just keeps on giving. Makes me feel a bit better about that tightly coupled ball of mud I barfed out last week. Lol.

Point taken, but in the meantime there’s a lot of effort being wasted in awkward pairings.

I haven’t played either, but I know for a fact that they use different pathfinding methods (grid vs navmesh, II has swarm behavior).