Notices by Bart Wronski 🇺🇦🇵🇸 (bartwronski@mastodon.gamedev.place)

The modern low-cost microcontroller ecosystem is just mindblowing. Arduino Nano and all the ESP32 devices are so cheap, so easy to program, have such a huge community, and so many low-cost peripherals. It's super fun, addictive, easy, and practical. :)
Or even cheap FPGAs and DSPs.
I love it, I wish it was so accessible 15-20y ago.

I am excited to finally share our recent paper "Filtering After Shading With Stochastic Texture Filtering" (with @mattpharr @marcosalvi and Marcos Fajardo), published at ACM I3D'24 / PACM CGIT, where we won the best paper award! 1/N

@aras yes, we had a tech report with our initial findings and a ton of folks reported some great precedents in old games. We knew of all the academic literature, but game developers just use them and often not even report. :)
The coolest example was this old Star Trek game and the first Unreal, we had no idea! This helped us a lot to contextualize our research. :)

Game developers, please report your findings and even "hacks"! :)

@aras Even if writing a full paper might seem intimidating and a ton of work (plus sometimes dealing with gatekeeping reviewers), GDC or Siggraph "Advances" presentations, blog posts, JCGT articles or arXiv tech reports are good enough to find and reference and much easier to write. :)

@aras I had this observation in an older blog post of mine that artists manually sharpening mipmaps (which seemed like a gross hack) is actually an intuitive compensation for ugly bilinear filter and correct, best-fit optimization-based solution gives similar results :) https://bartwronski.com/2021/07/20/processing-aware-image-filtering-compensating-for-the-upsampling/

@demofox @aras switching fields for almost 5y helped me a lot :) I would kind of recommend it to everyone (assuming they are ok with re-starting almost from scratch...). The terminology difference was funny ("what the hell is optical flow? oh, you mean motion vectors?"), but I contributed knowhow from games and graphics to some CV/ML research and camera products. :)
"What do you mean games already do robust temporal multi-frame super-resolution???"

@notjustbikes that's overall a healthy heuristic for detecting narcissists. It's not just about grandiose personality and big claims etc but also taking things personally and thinking it's about them or that people should think about them.

"we have the right to defend ourselves 🤡"

Some really cool work of my teammates on differentiable shading language, compatible with HLSL, and interoperable with CUDA/Python/PyTorch, and even C++.
https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/differentiable-slang-a-shading-language-for-renderers-that-learn/

This makes ML + graphics *significantly* easier. I'm excited to see what researchers and engineers do with it :)

In case you didn't notice, that a16z manifest written by a NIMBY-Karen directly cites the author of "fascist manifesto" (the OG Italian one) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filippo_Tommaso_Marinetti
as well as neo-reactionary accelerationism father Nick Land https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment

You cannot make this stuff up. All masks are off. This is not "alarmism" but ideologies SV billionaires (including Thiel, Musk, Altman, Graham etc) believe in and publicly brag about.

@Migueldeicaza Yeah, it's kind of unbelievable. If this is the stuff, he proudly and publically cites on the company's public-facing blog... What things does he read, get inspired by, and says in private?

“I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism. And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too. Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us. And technology and capitalism have been so closely intertwined that it’s hard to distinguish the two.”
Ted Chiang