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pixelfarmer commented on What is a color space?   makingsoftware.com/chapte... · Posted by u/vinhnx
ryandamm · 14 hours ago
I suspect that the biggest limitation in printing vs. emissive displays is the simple fact that your contrast ratio and color reproduction is severely limited in printing, because the dye is modifying ambient illumination.

This affects brightness and contrast: For emissive displays, you can have emissive values that are several to many orders of magnitude brighter than the 'black point', and more importantly, the primaries are defined by the display, not by ambient illumination.

Part of the magic of HDR displays is manipulating local masking (a human perceptual quirk) to drive bright regions on a display much brighter than the darker regions, so you can achieve even higher contrast ratios than the base technology could achieve (LED back-illuminated LCD panels, for many consumer TVs). Basically, a bright pixel will cause other nearby pixels to be brighter, because you can't see the dark details near a bright region anyway — but other regions could be darker, where you can perceive more detail in the blacks. This is achieved by illuminating sections of the display at significantly higher or lower levels, based on what your eyes/brain can actually perceive. That leads to significantly higher contrast ratios.

(As a heuristic: photographers generally say you can only get ~5 stops of contrast out of a print. (That is, bright areas are 2^5 times brighter than the darkest regions.) Modern HDR displays can do 2^10 or better. YMMV.)

But this also affects color... much of the complexity in getting printers to match derives from the interaction between the imperfect gamut caused by differing primaries, as filtered through human perception (and/or perceptual models). But you can't control the ambient illumination, so you're at the mercy of whatever the spectrum of your illumination is, plus whatever adaptation the viewer has. This feels fundamentally impossible to do "correctly" under all circumstances.

Which is to say, the original sin of color theory is the dimensional collapse from a continuous spectrum to a 3-dimensional, discretized representation. It's a miracle we can see color at all...!

pixelfarmer · 12 hours ago
> the primaries are defined by the display, not by ambient illumination

In itself that is correct, but as you've noted, our own vision system isn't operating like that. The same display brightness and colors will be perceived very differently depending on the ambient light's brightness and color, and can also mean a severe breakdown in the dynamic range that can be made visible via a display.

And this ambient light also clearly impacts how prints are seen.

pixelfarmer commented on The new literalism plaguing today’s movies   newyorker.com/culture/cri... · Posted by u/frogulis
oDot · a month ago
There's a disconnect somewhere in the industry, because as I writer I can guarantee you one of the things readers get most annoyed with is on the nose dialogue.

My screenplays are heavily influenced by Japanese Anime (which I have researched to a great degree[0]). Some animes have _a lot_ of that kind of dialogue. Sometimes it's just bad writing, but other times it is actually extremely useful.

The times where it is useful are crucial to make a film or show, especially live-action, feel like anime. Thought processes like those presented in the article make it seem like all on-the-nose dialogue is bad and in turn, make my job much harder.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igz7TmsE1Mk

pixelfarmer · a month ago
The problem is that it permeates writing in so many places. For example, games get more and more littered with this sort of nonsense, too. And worse, it is often also used as a vehicle to convey all sorts of ideologies. Many people don't care about these ideologies, but they get annoyed fast if someone shouts them into their face like a zealot. Plus it feels just fake, completely artificial.

The other problem with it: To me, as an adult, it feels like whoever wrote this made the assumption I'm stupid. This sort of writing is ok, up to a certain degree, for kids. But for adults? A lot of anime are aimed at the younger generations. Anime written for adults are done very differently.

The Matrix is heavily influenced by manga / anime, which you see in quite a few scenes in how they are shot. But many of the explanations that are done are part of the development of Neo, so they never really feel out of place.

Cyberpunk 2077, which does have on the nose dialogue here and there as part of random NPCs spouting stuff. But by and large it tells a story not just through dialogues but also visually. And the visual aspect is so strong that some reviewers completely failed at reviewing the game, they were unable to grasp it. Which is a huge issue, because we are talking about adults here.

pixelfarmer commented on Comparing the Climate and Productivity Impacts of a Shrinking Population   nber.org/papers/w33932... · Posted by u/alphabetatango
Gustomaximus · 2 months ago
Was a long article and only skim read, but wouldn't a bigger factor be rising living standards? As more of the world moves to developed world living standards, which would be ideal, if this shift is faster than green technology + depopulation we are going to see increased climate pressure. I didn't seem them mention this but my inexpert view seems the rising tide of living standards may present the real problem.
pixelfarmer · 2 months ago
I haven't read the actual paper, but alone from the abstract many questions come up.

Personally, I doubt the any "near" to "mid" term population decline will have larger effects on the climate change we are seeing. It is just too slow. Meaning that we certainly get (much!) larger effects about climate change done with other stuff, no doubt about that.

However, using that as an inverse argument to foster population growth is a stupid idea, because more people means more resources needed for everything, starting with food and water, climate change resistant shelter, and all the other stuff that is needed for actual living. All of that isn't created out of thin air. Considering that there is increased pressure just to provide food and water already (climate change anyone?!), the lower the population in the long run is, the better. Also, food supply destroys a lot of our environment, alone the meat industry is a planet wide killer because of that.

If I add all this up, population decline is a good thing. And if I read something like "Meanwhile, a smaller population slows the non-rival innovation that powers improvements in long-run productivity and living standards" I start to question the sanity of the people writing something like that.

pixelfarmer commented on Effectiveness of trees in reducing temperature, outdoor heat exposure in Vegas   iopscience.iop.org/articl... · Posted by u/PaulHoule
Ar-Curunir · 2 months ago
Replacing inefficient street parking and wide roads with trees is a straightforward win.
pixelfarmer · 2 months ago
It is like Sim City 1 where crossroads generated traffic, so you'd replace them with parks.
pixelfarmer commented on ICE test train reaches speeds of up to 405.0 km/h   deutschebahn.com/de/press... · Posted by u/doener
simianwords · 2 months ago
I think higher speeds can help efficiency. For example it can help catch up a train that has been delayed.
pixelfarmer · 2 months ago
It can, but it requires the track to be free in front of it and being allowed to go at the required speed to catch up.

Deleted Comment

pixelfarmer commented on What is HDR, anyway?   lux.camera/what-is-hdr/... · Posted by u/_kush
dahart · 3 months ago
It seems like a mistake to lump HDR capture, HDR formats and HDR display together, these are very different things. The claim that Ansel Adams used HDR is super likely to cause confusion, and isn’t particularly accurate.

We’ve had HDR formats and HDR capture and edit workflows since long before HDR displays. The big benefit of HDR capture & formats is that your “negative” doesn’t clip super bright colors and doesn’t lose color resolution in super dark color. As a photographer, with HDR you can re-expose the image when you display/print it, where previously that wasn’t possible. Previously when you took a photo, if you over-exposed it or under-exposed it, you were stuck with what you got. Capturing HDR gives the photographer one degree of extra freedom, allowing them to adjust exposure after the fact. Ansel Adams wasn’t using HDR in the same sense we’re talking about, he was just really good at capturing the right exposure for his medium without needing to adjust it later. There is a very valid argument to be made for doing the work up-front to capture what you’re after, but ignoring that for a moment, it is simply not possible to re-expose Adams’ negatives to reveal color detail he didn’t capture. That’s why he’s not using HDR, and why saying he is will only further muddy the water.

pixelfarmer · 3 months ago
If I look at one of the photography books in my shelf, they are even talking about 18 stops and such for some film material, and how this doesn't translate to paper and all the things that can be done to render it visible in print and how things behave at both extreme ends (towards black and white). Read: Tone-mapping (i.e. trimming down a high DR image to a lower DR output media) is really old.

The good thing about digital is that it can deal with color at decent tonal resolutions (if we assume 16 bits, not the limited 14 bit or even less) and in environments where film has technical limitations.

pixelfarmer commented on The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority   twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack... · Posted by u/turrini
TFYS · 3 months ago
We haven't really been trying to find such a system. The technological progress that we've had since the last attempts at a different kind of a system has been huge, so what was once impossible might now be possible if we put some effort into it.
pixelfarmer · 3 months ago
There is no system that fulfills your requirements.

It is even easy to explain why: Humans are part of all the moving pieces in such a system and they will always subvert it to their own agenda, no matter what rules you put into place. The more complex your rule set, the easier it is to break.

Look at games, can be a card game, a board game, some computer game. There is a fixed set of rules, and still humans try to cheat. We are not even talking adults here, you see this with kids already. Now with games there is either other players calling that out or you have a computer not allowing to cheat (maybe). Now imagine everyone could call someone else a cheater and stop them from doing something. This in itself is going to be misused. Humans will subvert systems.

So the only working system will be one with a non-human incorruptible game master, so to speak. Not going to happen.

With that out of the way, we certainly can ask the question: What is the next best thing to that? I have no answer to that, though.

pixelfarmer commented on Inheritance was invented as a performance hack (2021)   catern.com/inheritance.ht... · Posted by u/aquastorm
josephg · 4 months ago
> I don't think Inheritance is always bad - sometimes it's a useful tool.

I can only think of one or two instances where I've really been convinced that inheritance is the right tool. The only one that springs to mind is a View hierarchy in UI libraries. But even then, I notice React (& friends) have all moved away from this approach. Modern web development usually makes components be functions. (And yes, javascript supports many kinds of inheritance. Early versions of react even used them for components. But it proved to be a worse approach.)

I've been writing a lot of rust lately. Rust doesn't support inheritance, but it wouldn't be needed in your example. In rust, you'd implement that by having a trait with functions (+default behaviour). Then have each robot type implement the trait. Eg:

    trait Robot {
        fn stop(&mut self) { /* default behaviour */ }
    }

    struct BenderRobot;
    
    impl Robot for BenderRobot {
        // If this is missing, we default to Robot::stop above.
        fn stop(&mut self) { /* custom behaviour */ }
    }

pixelfarmer · 4 months ago
I will tell you one example with inheritance: The Linux kernel.
pixelfarmer commented on Ref Butts and Slam Dunks: What It's Like Photographing an NBA Game   petapixel.com/2025/04/09/... · Posted by u/PaulHoule
mysteria · 4 months ago
But for what it is worth, when I was shooting a lot of high school soccer, better action shots came from “skating to where the puck is going.” And turning off spray and pray because there’s only one best moment to click the shutter and mechanical sympathy is the best way to get close.

I unfortunately don't have a source but I remember hearing about some action photographers trying out 4K60 cameras set to a high shutter speed and basically shooting video clips instead of stills. They would emphasize proper framing, exposure, and focus instead of worrying about timing the shutter.

Later the photographer would review the video clips and choose the best frames for publication. For web and newswire distribution 4K resolution was good enough for them, and they indicated that it was very unlikely that the perfect shot would fall outside of each 1/60 second frame.

pixelfarmer · 4 months ago
Doesn't need video anymore, high end cameras can run wild on taking picture after picture and start doing so before you even fully pressed the shutter, to account for human delays and the ones of the tech itself.

I mean we are talking about a part of photography where even back in the days of film a camera would run through a roll of film in seconds for exactly this sort of thing.

u/pixelfarmer

KarmaCake day196July 9, 2022View Original