Favorites October 28th 2024
I didn't realize video game graphics engines had come this far, but reading the comments, I recalled that Unity isn't even the leader in this. Unreal Engine is considered the leader, although I spent some time looking around for equivalent demos, and I was not quite as impressed. While we're on videogames, here's some gifs and a summary of a paper about generating good looking motion in human 3d models with very simple directional inputs.
If you're wondering, here's the other sides of the ball, no Antarctica, although that's not the biggest problem. Mercator is a famously bad projection for maps.
"The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet". At the moment I think the future is stuck in a traffic jam on 16th street. Ideally you'd want shared/carpool rides and higher capacity vehicles, but this is impressive nonetheless
Longer Reads
• Here's an article and a shorter summary thread about a proposal for 'density zones', a way for the federal government to encourage cities to build more homes. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– It's important to revisit your old predictions to find out if you were wrong. It's hard to learn if you think you already know everything. Maybe Musk should rethink his claim SBF would not go to prison since he's a democratic donor. (src)(cached)
– If you're in CA, here's an argument against prop 33, the article is quite long, but the upshot is that it will make the housing crisis worse by enabling actively bad rent control policies. That's why NIMBY groups love it. (src)(cached)
– A great video explaining Astro Mechanica's new kind of jet engine, which, if I understand it correctly, decouples the propulsion part from the turbine part. This means that the engine can operate efficiently all the way up to supersonic. One commenter argues that it's possible because power electronics are just so much more efficient than they were 20 years ago. Here's a video of just ignition of the engine. (src)
– Senior government officials in Singapore earn around $1 million a year, and that's good! You get less corruption that way, and you attract more talented people. (src)(cached)
– The Verge asked Intuit's CEO about their lobbying against simplifying the tax code, got a non-answer, but then Intuit tried to get The Verge to cut that part of the interview out. The Verge declined, of course. (src)
– Chinese media claims they have a cruise missile factory producing 1000 missiles per day. (src)(cached)
– Democratic party is fully pro-nuclear now, but Republicans don't realize it yet. (src)(cached)
– Examples of MAiD in Canada continue to look like they've set up some bad incentives somewhere. (src)(cached)
– Polling shows that voters are connecting Trump to abortion bans in a way they weren't back in April (src)(cached)
– Google translate now handles Canadian French as a separate language. This example sentence only has like 15% of the words in common, and it's the short words. (src)(cached)
– Check out this graph of how Sao Paulo's traffic deaths dropped by a third when they brought traffic cameras online and lowered speed limits. If you're looking for more upsides of automated enforcement, it also reduces racial differences in police stops. (src)(cached)
– Waymo still doesn't do highways, and it really hampers their travel times for medium or long trips. (src)(cached)