This word, "simple"...I do not believe you know what it means.

You might also want to look into PBR (physically-based rendering).

This acknowledges that rather than simply a "color", it's better to consider a "material" which has additional properties. For instance, how shiny it is, which determines the matte-vs-specular balance. Matte is essentially a direction-independent color, while specular is a directional reflection and thus dependent on the angle of the surface from the viewer, and the angle of the light sources from that surface. Other relevant properties are emission (light generated by the object, not reflected--how else will you understand the color of a lit light bulb?), how transparent the object is, the index of refraction, and so on.

One thing to note is that PBR is used to consistently assign these properties in computer graphics, so under similar lighting conditions you should get a similar appearance. But it is very rare for PBR to take spectral effects into account, and normally it just does calculations assuming we just want a red, green, and blue channel in the end. So this is all orthogonal to what other people are saying about integrating spectral values and such. They are two different aspects about how to talk about color.

In principle we really want all of it combined: we want to talk about how the material reacts to light at each wavelength, and what the intensity of the output would be for every wavelength. This is enormously computationally intensive and tends not to be done. But if you really wanted a reliable description of what "color" an object is, this is how you'd have to do it. And rather than a color, you'd really be describing a material, with very many properties and all of those properties having not a single number as a value, but instead a complex function depending on wavelength.

Or you can skip all that and go straight to calculating quantum mechanics. That will be the most accurate, but of course it's the "real" process without any simplification. It's...incredibly hard.

What's surprising about Your Name is that the plot did actually go somewhere. Otherwise, his movies are pretty much entirely character studies. You hear a lot about what the characters are thinking. Mostly their doubts.

So again, extremely consistent. Like what actually happens in Voices? Some people essentially talk to themselves. What happens in Beyond the Clouds? Same thing. What happens in 5cm? Same thing. What happens in Your Name? Same thing except this time they also save a town. See, that's the aberration. But it was just in addition to the things that are always there. And it nearly ended like the other Shinkai films, where the two characters drift apart, but swerved at the last second.

I'm fine with movies that aren't plot-driven, so I still love what Shinkai makes. But back to the point, even if you don't like that sort of thing, I can't see how you could call him anything but consistent.

I'm just gonna restrain myself here.

There's a lot of mention of some other recent related films, but only one person mentioned Shinkai's first movie, Voices of a Distant Star. It has many of the same themes (because all his movies do).

What's amazing about it is that he did pretty much the whole thing himself. The writing, the art--even the acting originally, but he did get professionals to redo it for the public release. Despite being pretty much a one-man project, it was still one of the most beautiful films when it came out (and still holds up). It's just incredible to think of how much he personally did for that movie. It's only like 30 minutes long, but still. After seeing that, I was certain Shinkai would be untouchable as an anime director, and I think that holds up. He's delivered the same quality consistently.

You've seen ten, and you don't think Your Name even cracks the top ten of those ten? You must really hate it!

> its director Satoshi Kon has a much more consistent and interesting catalogue as opposed to Makoto Shinkai.

Okay, I'll take the more interesting comment as a debatable opinion, but more consistent?

If I have a criticism about Shinkai, it's that he always makes the same movie. A boy and a girl have something that makes communication between them difficult. They struggle with this but mostly they are sad. They accept that struggle is part of growing up.

That's...every movie he's done. And the visuals are always beautiful, top-notch, and probably feature clouds. There's a very good chance something from space is involved.

He's like the most consistent director I could imagine.

There's so much about the positive and negative effects of caffeine. It clearly has meaningful effects, but whether it's a net positive or negative or whether there are certain amounts that are ideal seems up in the air.

I do think it's crazy that people treat caffeine addiction like it's normal or even something to be proud of though. "Hey, you know I can't do anything until my third cup of coffee!" Like...that's not okay...

Except they were saying the beam came from above (lunar or GEO).

Can you explain the propulsion involved in the virtual elevator?

Getting energy is all well and good, but that doesn't let you apply force. The only non-propulsive method we have for space travel is the light sail, but the force involved is way too small for getting to orbit, so it can't be that.

There are two unconventional ways we have to apply non-chemical energy sources to propulsion: nuclear engines and ion thrusters. Nuclear engines are right out because they don't involve an external energy source. So that leaves us with ion thrusters, which still need propellant (often something like xenon). They can use external power for the energy to accelerate the propellant, but their thrust levels are also extremely low (too low for getting to orbit) and they still need propellant.

So...what alternative mechanism are you proposing? Since no existing method will work for this.

Yeah, it sucks that the rest of the industry took so long to come around. It's not a wonderfully stable situation. At least now there are signs that it won't remain this way.

Yes, but the problem is the looming threat that Musk can make some crazy declaration and derail a successful or upcoming program at any moment. He has fast become a liability to their success.

Ah, yes, the clear evidence:

> Just a heads up- ShittyMorph has posted a correction, and FucksWithDucks is still alive. ShittyMorph got incorrect information:

> https://www.reddit.com/user/shittymorph/comments/s7wnpz/shittymorph_here_i_am_a_big_dumb_idiot_for/

Oh wait that's the exact opposite and shows it did not happen

Citation? A lot of times reddit just makes stuff up.

But all of that evolution is just "mistakes"--from the perspective of older speakers.

Do you call an apron a napron? If not, why not? That's what it used to be until people misanalyzed the article.

Psh I bet thou use "you" when it should be "thou"!

Language evolves. The variant you think of as being pure and correct would sound ridiculous to someone who spoke an older version. This is forever the case. Language has never been better or worse. It just changes.

I'd like to note that you can also see 13.6 billion light years away with your eyes. There's no limit to distance other than whether or not there's anything to see. Telescopes collect light; they don't somehow probe out to a certain point and stop there.

The functional limit is determined by two things: resolution and wavelength. For complicated reasons involving the expansion of space-time, anything really far away is going to show up as longer wavelengths than if you were close by it. The longer the wavelength, the bigger a detector you need to gain good resolution. JWST looks at part of the infra-red range, so it's calibrated generally for further objects than (for instance) Hubble was, and consequently the collection area (the mirrors) had to be a lot bigger. That imposes a limit of how detailed an image we can resolve.

Resolution itself is a bit more straightforward: sure, you can see far away, but how much detail can you see? Not much! Telescopes like this can see with many times the resolution of a human eye, but they're also looking at things that would be unimaginably tiny in the sky. Remember, if something is twice as far away, it will appear half as wide. And now we're talking about things many of orders of magnitude further away than anything you can make out in detail with your eye. That's the limit that's important here, not strictly how far away it is.

If you look at the moon with your eyes, you can see a decent amount of detail. You can see some different kinds of terrain. You probably can't see the small craters that cover its surface. They just don't take up enough angular size in your vision.

The sun, coincidently, is about the same width in our sky. Yet it is 400 times wider than the moon. It's also about 400 times further away.

Alpha Centauri, the sun's nearby star system, is about 100 million times further away from us than the moon is. To see one of the stars there in the same detail we can see from the nearby moon, we'd need a telescope with 100 million times the resolving power of our eyes. And we just don't have one. Not even Webb comes close. Webb has an angular resolution of about 0.1 arc seconds. The human eye can do about 60 arc seconds, so Webb's acuity is about 600 times greater than the human eye. That's great, but a very far shot from 100 million. And we're talking about something the size of a star, and one of the very nearest ones. Looking at a planet much further away...it's simply way out of our capability.

The cool thing though is that there are tricks we can use to add different observations together into higher quality ones, so we aren't as far away from the goal as it looks. But it's still very complicated and takes a lot of combined observing time, and you still need to target to be bright enough to detect well, which distant planets aren't.

Well, the one in the teardown thread specifically can't.

That thread was super cool. Is there a subreddit for "how they work" kinds of things like this? I mean obviously this person does stuff like that on Twitter, but I have always hated Twitter's format and never know how to navigate things properly. (Plus now it's a total shitshow with the recent corporate drama.)

Yeah, it was rather famously censored in Germany. But I don't think there was any restriction in the US, certainly not something about publishing rights and public domain. The 70 year copyright thing is also country-specific and thus couldn't explain it being somehow unattainable anywhere. Which it wasn't.

What? Back around 2000, my mom got me a copy, I assume from B&N. It certainly wasn't banned.

I feel obligated to add a disclaimer: my mom is Jewish and it was for educational reasons to understand history. That said, I couldn't make it more than a couple of pages in. I was expecting some intelligent but misguided philosophy that I could eruditely analyze and go, "aha, here was where he went wrong" and pat myself on the back. Instead it's a bunch of immediately blathering nonsense. Which is educational in a different way, relevant to note recent events this very article is tangentially related to, that such nonsense can actually get people politically pumped. But I don't think more than a couple of pages would have been necessary to learn that anyway.

Uh, why not? What about that is handled at the protocol layers the internet covers?

But here's the thing, this seamless interoperability thing...that's not something any protocol is going to solve. That's going to take an immense effort for any engine to support some standardized content. And that's...probably just not going to happen. If you spend any time in gamedev, and you understand what engines and shaders do, it's an absolute pipe dream to imagine all software working the same way. Not only would that annihilate performance, but it completely hamstrings the ability for people to make unique, creative products.

We should absolutely not want this.

> Well for one, the metaverse isn't a game or an application or anything downloadable. It's a hypothesized interoperable global network that apps/games would be a part of.

That's called the internet and it already exists.

> whereas Kyle Rittenhouse was aggressively vilified by everyone to include the sitting President of the United States and there was wild, false speculations and attribution to his motives.

You answered your own question.

> When I lived in London in the 1990s, there was a very cheap European coin, which was very similar to a one pound coin. It was used a lot in the ticket machines on the London Underground. And that did cost LU a lot of money.

Sure, if it's very cheap, I can believe it's worth doing. Especially since people may often make ten Underground trips a week.

Right now, the CAD is 0.73 USD which is unusually low--it may be worth it now (although who uses cash anymore?). But ten years ago they were on par. For a bit CAD was actually worth 1.01 USD! So, the particular year matters quite a bit. A lot of the time, it wouldn't have been worth doing.