So in the real world, light obeys all kinds of laws of physics. Photons, which are particles and waves simultaneously somehow, are emitted from a light source, travel in straight lines until they encounter some matter then they either bounce off, are absorbed and re-emitted. Our eyes fairly precisely detect the number and wavelength of photons coming from the direction we are looking, which allow us to glean information about what objects are out in the world.

Simulating that with a computer takes a lot of math, because you would have to simulate the paths of a LOT of photons. For a very long time, computers, especially ones consumers could afford, just couldn’t do that, especially not in real time for video game graphics.

So through the 90’s and 2000’s, video game developers developed shortcuts for creating reasonable approximations of lighting effects. These are a pain to figure out how to do but they look reasonable and run much faster than trying to do the lighting physics. By and by graphics cards started coming with circuitry specifically to pull off these shortcuts, and small programs designed to run on graphics cards to apply these effects to graphics are called “shaders.” You may have heard that term if you’ve been around gaming for awhile.

Ray Tracing is the technique of doing the actual optical phyiscs problem to render the graphics instead of using those shortcuts. Like I said earlier, there is a lot more math involved here, but since you’re simulating the laws of physics you can get much more realistic lighting effects this way.

Things like Pixar movies or Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within used ray tracing techniques for rendering the animation in the movie with realistic lighting, but these took minutes or even hours to render a single frame. It’s also how the graphics in Myst and Riven were made, during production they ray traced the graphics then stored the results as pictures which a home computer of the time could easily display.

More recently, starting with Nvidia’s RTX-2000 series graphics cards, publicly available hardware is capable of doing all that math in real time, allowing for video games to have very realistic lighting drawn by the game engine in real time. This promises two things:

1. Better or more realistic lighting effects than possible with shaders. Things like shadows falling on your character’s gun, or everything in the environment that glows casting pools of light and shadows. This has been realized to a point, though there is still more computations to do so it does run slower, when you turn ray tracing on it usually comes with a decrease in frame rate.

2. Easier development. I’m not sure this has actually been achieved yet, but theoretically once your game engine has ray traced lighting effects built into it, you should be able to design your scene, populate it with objects and light sources, and it should just work. Problem is there are still so many graphics cards out there in use that either outright can’t run real time ray tracing or do so very poorly that they still have to use the older shader approach, so in practice it has actually complicated not simplified game design.

Enshittification will continue until Chapter 7 bankruptcy improves.

Then you’ll find me in your corner.

There was a point in time a man could support a family working as a cashier at a grocery store.

Given my experience with it in Satisfactory it’s rather heavy.

We’re pleasantly familiar feeling and stay out of the way, so there’s no reason to.

I think I’d go farther and say you’re pretty good friends; we have plenty of projects going together, we’ve got a giant waterfall we do a pretty good job sharing, etc.

Hopefully you know that “your country only exists at my pleasure” is not a compliment.

Wasn’t really designed to be; it’s more meant to chastise other imperial superpowers throughout history. If you went back through history and took the dominant superpower of any given era and plunked their leadership down in 1950’s Washington DC, how many of them form close economic ties and a mutual defense pact, and how many of them march on Ottawa?

If I read our treaties correctly, the official attitude of the United States is more like “Canada shall cease to exist over our dead bodies.”

I’m not interested in a modern “it’s a phablet but it folds in half” design.

I want a phone with a slide-out keyboard more than that.

An action I’m in favor of is canceling policies. “Since your company is in such a habit of denying customers the service they have paid for, I’m no longer paying for your service.” Get a few million of us to do that and maybe something will get done. Money talks louder than ballots especially when the ballot box is just piped to /dev/null the way it is for so many Americans.

Or better yet, have a million people say “cancel my policy” on the same day. Or 330 million.

That’s an abstract question to try to answer; it’s not like we sit around and ponder about y’all for hours on end but someone says “This is my friend Bill from Canada” and you just think “Oh cool.”

On a societal level, we share the world’s longest international border, we’re massive trade partners, like, most of the Northwestern hemisphere’s best comedians come from Canada…we like Canada, we think they’re fun to have around.

“Affect” is a word we can deprecate because all it’s for is umm actuallying. It goes in the same box as “inflammable” and “cleanse”.

Extra foam.

I don’t think it’s possible for the stories Shakespeare told to become obsolete because he wasn’t the first or last to tell them. It is my understanding that not a single one of Shakespeare’s plays were original works, he retold folk tales, legends, historical events etc. (Hamlet is a Danish legend, Henry V was his attempt at a documentary…) and his versions were good enough and written down enough to become canonized as classics.

But, to a modern audience, Shakespeare’s language is 400 years out of date, and not only is it obsolete language, but it’s Whedonesque obsolete language. Shakespeare wrote in quippy punny poetry and the bases for a lot of his puns, a lot of the cultural references he makes, we just don’t get anymore. Because of all that, I think it’s a similar task as reading Chaucer in the original middle English, you can kind of muddle through but you have to keep stopping and figuring out what the hell you just read.

I’m not saying Shakespeare’s plays are worthless and should be discarded, but I don’t think an average teenager should be expected to read and understand it the way he might a 20th century novel. I think we owe it to students to, the way we do with Chaucer, offer the original and a more modern translation.

If it’s used as a reading comprehension exercise I would recommend the script for Ten Things I Hate About You instead of The Taming Of The Shrew, for pretty much exactly this reason.

I can tell you are confused.

The scenario I got in high school was “Here, one or more high school students, is a copy of Hamlet as Shakespeare wrote it preserved down to the punctuation and page layout. Read it just like you read To Kill A Mockingbird.” I assert that this is a poorly designed exercise in reading comprehension for modern 21st century English. This exercise will not substantially improve anyone’s ability to understand, say, the Pilot’s Operating Handbook for a Cessna 172.

I would say exactly the same thing of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, if it was presented to teenagers in its original Middle English. It isn’t though; textbooks are printed with the Canterbury Tales translated into modern-ish English. At the very least

And broghte hire hoom with hym in his contree

becomes

And brought her home with him into his country

We don’t do that with Shakespeare though; it has to be enjoyed in the original nonsense. Which I take as evidence it’s an aesthetic choice rather than a practical one.

I would assert that - if you’re trying to increase proficiency in reading normal 21st century English as a general life skill - you wouldn’t design the lesson like my English teacher did. If that was your goal you’d probably use a modern translation, maybe you’d study Ten Things I Hate About You rather than The Taming Of The Shrew.

Which is why I’ll also assert that Literature classes as taught in later high school and into college aren’t really designed to be communication proficiency classes but art appreciation classes. Which should be electives like band, orchestra, painting or photography, not required classes like math and science.

The English literature classes I took from my teenage years on all assumed you were proficient at reading.

Reducing but not eliminating the amount of time people drive would mean less practical experience which means rusty drivers. I recommend recurring training.

No, I do live in an area where drivers’ ed is pathetically short and simple though.

The Wellerman craze introduced me to them, and now I’ve got a bunch of their albums.

Yeah I couldn’t quite hit that efficiency with my Ninja but it was fully capable of traveling on the interstate and it it had a damn near 5 gallon tank. That bike was designed in 1988 and received only minor adjustments for 20 years and basically nothing has that combination of efficiency and capacity.

You want to know why Canada still exists despite having a fraction of the manpower or military of the United States?

It’s because the United States likes Canada. We think they’re fun to have around.

Hypothesis: Pornhub is effected by a lot of the bans in places like Texas. I don’t see ChromeOS or Apple users as the kind of folks who know how to find their ways around those bans, but Windows and Linux users are more likely to via VPNs and such.