Your link says ſ (the long s) didn't disappear (from English) until several hundred years after the movable type printing press and makes no mention of physical problems when using that letter, suggesting instead removal gave a type a more modern feel:

> Pioneer of type design John Bell (1746–1831), who started the British Letter Foundry in 1788, is often "credited with the demise of the long s".[12] Paul W. Nash concluded that the change mostly happened very fast in 1800, and believes that this was triggered by the Seditious Societies Act. To discourage subversive publications, this required printing to name the identity of the printer, and so in Nash's view gave printers an incentive to make their work look more modern.

Only þ (thorn) died with the printing of Caxton's Bible using y-, for cost reasons.

The other letters -- ƿ (wynn), æ (ash), and ð (eth) -- went out of use long before movable type printing. https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/the-lost-letters-of-th...

We already have plenty of techniques that are fast enough for classic UI rendering. There is no conceivable bottleneck for the kind of stuff that is on your screen right now. It's not a matter of "doing something quickly" imo, that's an issue specific to the games industry, and largely caused by the need to make entirely custom, animated, textured UIs as a feature for a single product.

What projects like Slug and Vello rather show is that GPU coding remains so obtuse that you cannot tackle an isolated subproblem like 2D vector rendering, and instead have to make apple pie from scratch by first creating the universe. And then the resulting solution is itself a whole beast that cannot just be hooked up to other API(s) and languages than it was created for, unless that is specifically something you also architect for. As the first slide shows, v1 required modern GPUs, and the CPU side uses hand-optimized SIMD routines.

2D vector graphics is also just an awkward niche to optimize for today. GPUs are optimized for 3D, where z-buffers are used to draw things in an order-independent way. 2D graphics instead must be layered and clipped in the right order, which is much more difficult to 'embarrassingly' parallelize. Formats like SVG can have an endless number of points per path, e.g. a detailed polygon of the United States has to be processed as one shape, you can't blindly subdivide it. You also can't rely on vanilla anti-aliasing because complementary edges wouldn't be fully opaque.

Even if you do go all the way, you'll still have just a 2D rasterizer. Perhaps it can work under projective transform, that's usually pretty easy, but will it be significantly more powerful or extensible than something like Cairo is today? Or will it just do that exact same feature set in a technologically sexier way? e.g. Can it be adapted to rendering of 3D globes and maps, or would that break everything? And note that rasterizing fonts as just unhinted glyphs (i.e. paths) is rarely what people what.

I get the feeling that you aren’t asking for the short version, because most people wouldn’t latch onto that point and create an account for it.

Hmmm.

An example - the inefficacy of Fact checking efforts. Fact checking is quintessentially counter speech, and we know that it has failed to stop the uptake and popularity of falsehoods. And I say this after speaking to people who work at fact checking orgs.

However, this is in itself too simple an example.

The mechanics of online forums are more interesting to illustrate the point - Truth is too expensive to compete with cheaper content.

Complex articles can be shared on a community, which debunk certain points, but the community doesn’t read it. They do engage heavily on emotional content, which ends up supporting their priors.

I struggle to make this point nicely, but The accuracy of your content is secondary to its value as an emotional and narrative utility for the audience.

People are not coming online to be scientists. They are coming online to be engaged. Counter speech solves the issue of inaccuracy, and is only valuable if inaccuracy is a negative force.

It is too expensive a good to produce, vs alternatives. People will coalesce around wounds and lacunae in their lives, and actively reject information that counters their beliefs. Cognitive dissonance results in mental strife and will result in people simply rejecting information rather than altering their priors.

Do note - this is a point about the efficacy of this intervention in upholding the effectiveness of the market where we exchange ideas. There will be many individual exchanges where counter speech does change minds.

But at a market level, it is ineffective as a guardian and tonic against the competitive advantage of falsehoods against facts.

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Do forgive the disjointed quality in the response. It’s late here, and I wish I could have just linked you to a bunch of papers, but I dont think that would have been the response you are looking for.