I wonder how many HN readers you just insulted. Me for one.

I'm a senior engineer and have no degree. I never get offended by people making comments like this. If we're both in similar roles, making quality contributions, and are progressing in our careers, the only difference between us is, I didn't spending 50k-100k on a degree.

Sounds more like a knock on the person making the comment than it is on me.

I fit the same criteria. I think college is probably a wholesome experience, but I don't really know, as I only went for two years and didn't really get much out of it.

I had a few major issues with the experience:

One: It was force-fed to you in High School, it almost seemed like there was no other choice at the time, and it was far too easy to go into massive debt at such a young age.

Two: I was already self-taught in computer science, and the coursework didn't really expand upon my knowledge any.

Three: The bureaucracy was insane, having to deal with Student Aid, registration, and signing up for classes. It was nauseating.

Four: While there were some interesting classes in other domains of knowledge, the fact that there were so many required courses, like Writing and "English Composition." Kind of soured the experience. I didn't learn anything in the Comp Sci classes, and probably 60% of the other stuff I wasn't interested in. As an Adult who's paying tuition, you should be able to 100% pick and choose what courses you want to take, but because I was only 19 and fresh out of high school, that liberty didn't really dawn on me until after I had finally left.

I went to a community college. I assume a four-year school or something more academic by nature would be interesting, but not worthy of hiring one person over another strictly on credentials.

So not this Reticulum networking stack: https://github.com/Hubs-Foundation/reticulum

> and then "NeRF"'d which means to extrapolate any missing data about their transposed 3D model

Not sure if it's you or the original article but that's a slightly misleading summary of NeRFs.

I'm all for the better summary

> and little to no follow-up engagement from their authors.

A strategy I sometimes use for external contributions is to immediately ask a question about the pull request. Ignoring PRs where I don't get a reply or the reply doesn't make sense potentially eliminates a lot of low quality contributions.

I wonder if a "no AI" rule is an overly blunt instrument. I can sympathise with it but babies and bathwater etc.

I find one easier to avoid or ignore them the other.

Mudbun renders using raymarching - the video explains why he has avoided doing this.

Although a decent chunk of modern tooling is there to handle the limitations of triangles. And modelling is often using higher-level abstractions that are only turned into triangles at the end of the process.

That's true if you're using a CAD-like tool, but that's typically not used for art (more for engineering / mechanical design)

Game / VFX artists heavily use mesh-based tools such as Maya or Blender.

Both have many tools that aren't raw triangle editing

By coincidence this was released a few weeks ago: https://hothardware.com/news/max-payne-rtx-remix-mod

> Much of the science about lighting, physics, and rendering we take for granted today was mostly unknown;

I'm not so sure. I grew up playing with offline 3d rendering rather than real-time game stuff - and game dev was merely reusing the same smoke and mirrors that people used to keep rendering time under a week a decade earlier. People always knew the "correct" way to do things but it was just out of reach given the hardware constraints. GI, radiosity, path-tracing etc already existed well before this - but nobody could do it on consumer hardware

That scene in Independence Day is seeming less far-fetched every passing moment.

The Jeff Goldblum virus one?

I believe fans have provided a retroactive explanation that all our computer tech was based on reverse engineering the crashed alien ship, and thus the arch, and abis etc were compatible.

It's a movie, so whatever, but considering how easily a single project / vendor / chip / anything breaks compatibility, it's a laughable explanation.

Edit: phrasing

That isn't actually a fan theory, it was actual plot that was cut from the film for time.

Still dumb but not as dumb as what we got.

Reminds me of how in the original the matrix plot the humans were being used for compute power, but the studio execs decided audiences wouldn't understand it.