While it's true that a LAB gradient will produce a more perceptually uniform gradient, it doesn't alter the article's point that sRGB isn't a colorspace. It has an associated nonlinear gamma function that is used to help compress values to 8-bit, and the result is that interpolating between two sRGB values is not the same as interpolating between them in a proper RGB colorspace, with the result that you'll get brightness problems.
So yes, LAB will produce more perceptually uniform gradients than RGB, but browsers are exacerbating the problems of RGB gradients by not implementing them properly.
Supposedly because at the time of the acquisition, "Canyon Bridge was licensed and regulated by US law." but "Since then it has moved its headquarters to the Cayman Islands and as such is no longer a US-controlled entity." [1]. Although that sounds pretty flimsy. I suspect, given it happened in 2017, it was judged politically unwise to block a Chinese state investor when the UK was looking to increase global trade post-Brexit.
Eventually it seems the UK gov woke up and blocked a Chinese attempt to take over the board and move the company to China[2]. Now it seems there's a plan to IPO again in London or Nasdaq[3] so the Chinese owners can exit.
I am very excited for this. For those unaware, Ron Gilbert was the creative force behind The Secret of Monkey Island 1 and 2, but then left Lucasarts and the subsequent Monkey Island games were made by others. He's said for a long time that those games, while perfectly fine, didn't represent his vision for how the series would have continued (and Monkey Island 2 finished on an intriguing cliffhanger), so it's cool that we'll finally get his version of things, as the new game will continue from where MI2 left off (although apparently the other games will remain as canon somehow).
Also, a few years ago Gilbert and many of the others working on this new game made a retro-styled point-and-click adventure game called Thimbleweed Park[1]. It wasn't a smash hit in terms of sales, but I thought it was a lot of fun, and had some very sharp dialogue and design, and reassures me that the creative team haven't lost their touch and this won't be another Underworld Ascendant debacle.
I still haven't played through all of Thimbleweed Park, but I managed to get my GF into adventure games after I bought it for her on Switch and she played through the entire game.
It's a fantastic game, It's basically what I always wanted out of an adventure game when I was a kid, and what's more the touch screen is a perfect interface for adventure games.
It was disheartening when 3D FPS games took over in the late 90s and MS fortified that with advertisements targeting the 'bro' segment for their new Xbox console and Halo franchise.
I was worried that Grim Fandango (still my favourite, omg that soundtrack) was the swan song of the genre but I'm so pleased to see that gaming as a whole has exploded and game development is so much more accessible than it used to be so that the genre has found it's niche. I genuinely think that an ipad mini form factor is utterly perfect for the genre so it pleases me that kids of a new generation can explore these neat little story worlds once again.
Also it's good to see that Disney isn't smothering the video game IP that they got when they bought LucasFilm. It seems like this is them testing the waters, and I hope that it is a resounding success that encourages them to do more with that goldmine that is LucasArts.
Coco was announced about the same time Disney bought LucasFilm and that was my running joke that the real reason Disney bought LucasFilm wasn't as much to secure Star Wars, but to build a Grim Fandango Cinematic Universe.
I remember there was lots of buzz about a resurgence of the genre when Double Fine's Broken Age did the crowdfunding thing and raised $millions. A lot of excited people. And then that seemed to go away again when the critical reception to Part 2 of it was pretty contentious? I wonder what it would have sparked if it had been as much a critical and publicity success as the first part...
Yeah, cut my teeth on the Sierra adventure games. Didn't hate the FPS takeover Half-Life ushered in, but.. It's almost cliched to say "Modern RPGs don't feel as alive as Ultima VII" and yet.. There is truth to that.
Kinda got stuck in Thimbleweed but honestly hadn't felt so immersed in a game's setting since the old days.
Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I consider MI3 (The Curse of Monkey Island) to be the absolute best in the series. The puzzles feel just right, the comedy and writing are on point from beginning to end, and the graphical style holds up to this day.
Use Monkey With Wrench and that library sequence ruined my replays of MI2 and took away some of the charm. The sewer scenes made me forget it tho, and still gave me fond memories.
Same here. The art was beautiful and the puzzles just doable. MI2 I found super hard though I have to admit the show loading times and disk swapping on amiga didn't help.
I think MI2 took me 6 month to complete (also with only like 2 years of english I didnt know what a monkey wrench is...) . Mi3 was one weekend, a bit too easy.
I have mixed feelings about Thimbleweed; it was very good until it wasn't; the ending felt like what you'd get when a company ran out of funding and just rushed everything together.
It may just be me, I enjoy breaking the fourth wall but not really tearing it completely down and burning the remains.
I couldn't agree more. I loved the first two thirds, but was so disappointed by the ending that I haven't recommended it to anyone since. I was very invested in a number of character development threads that never lead anywhere.
From 2013: "If I end up being able to make this game at some point, we all might find that it fits nicely in between Monkey Island 2 and Curse of Monkey Island." https://grumpygamer.com/just_to_clarify_point_12
The game announcement states that it "picks up where Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge left off". These two facts do not have to be mutually exclusive.
I thought the implication from this trailer was that Ron Gilbert agreed to do this game if he could ignore the story and characters from the other games (which is why Murray is getting pushed off the deck)
It's amazing how many interpretations of this joke people appear to have :)
To me it's very clearly about Gilbert's past remarks that he'll never do another Monkey Island unless he fully owns the IP. Tossing Murray into the water means "yes, I don't own the IP and yet I'm making another Monkey Island, you can stop pointing it out".
Yeah, I can't think of a single real app or website I've seen that uses this style. It seems instead like a single designer doing some self-promotion by inventing these new "trends". And this one seems to be inspired by cheap DVD menu screens from the 2000s.
Reading it now, the language I used was inappropriate. You're correct, the stated problem is common with registering and triggering self-repeating and timed loops.
Having used Copilot for a while, I am quite certain it will replace me as a programmer.
It appears to me that when it comes to language models, intelligence = experience * context. Where experience is the amount what's encoded in the model, and context is the prompt. And the biggest limitation on Copilot currently is context. It behaves as an "advanced autocomplete" because it all is has to go on is what regular autocomplete sees, e.g. the last few characters and lines of code.
So, you can write a function name called createUserInDB() and it will attempt to complete it for you. But how does it know what DB technology you're using? Or what your user record looks like? It doesn't, and so you typically end up with a "generic" looking function using the most common DB tech and naming conventions for your language of choice.
But now imagine a future version of Copilot that is automatically provided with a lot more context. It also gets fed a list of your dependencies, from which it can derive which DB library you're using. It gets any locatable SQL schema file, so it can determine the columns in the user table. It gets the text of the Jira ticket, so it can determine the requirements.
As a programmer a great deal of time is spent checking these different sources and synthesising them in your head into an approach, which you then code. But they are all just text, of one form or another, and language models can work with them just as easily, and much faster, than you can.
And one the ML train coding gets running, it'll only get faster. Sooner or later Github will have a "Copilot bot" that can automatically make a stab at fixing issues, which you then approve, reject, or fix. And as thousands of these issues pile up, the training set will get bigger, and the model will get better. Sooner or later it'll be possible to create a repo, start filing issues, and rely on the bot to implement everything.
I didn't find reading largely correct but still often wrong code is a good experience for me, or it adds up any efficiency.
It does do a very good job in intelligently synthesize boilerplate for you, but be Copilot or this AlphaCode, they still don't understand the coding fundamentals, in the sense causatively, what would one instruction impact the space of states.
Still, those are exciting technology, but again, there is a big if whether such machine learning model would happen at all.
I'm skeptical it'll replace programmers, as in no more human programmers, but agree in the sense 100% human programmers -> 50%, 25%, 10% human programmers + computers doing most of the writing of actual code.
I see it continuing to evolve and becoming a far superior auto-complete with full context, but, short of actual general AI, there will always be a step that takes a high-level description of a problem and turns it into something a computer can implement.
So while it will make the remaining programmers MUCH more productive, thereby reducing the needed number of programmers, I can't see it driving that number to zero.
It will probably change the types of things a programmer does, and what it looks like to be a programmer. The nitty gritty of code writing will probably get more and more automated. But the architecture of the code, and establishing and selecting it's purpose in the larger scheme of a business, will probably be more what programmers do. Essentially, they might just become managers for automated code writers, similar to the military's idea of future fighter pilots relating to autonomous fighters/drones as described in this article:
Yup, I think that's it exactly. I just described this in another comment as a reverse of the evolution that graphic design has undergone in bringing them into programming front-ends.
I can't wait to see how far we're able to go down that path.
I have a feeling this is the correct read in terms of progression. But I'm skeptical if it'll ever be able to synthesize a program entirely. I imagine that in the future we'll have some sort of computer language more like written language that will be used by some sort of AI to generate software to meet certain demands, but might need some manual connections when requirements are hazy or needs a more human touch in the UI/UX
> But I'm skeptical if it'll ever be able to synthesize a program entirely.
Emotional skepticism carries a lot more weight in worlds where AI isn't constantly doing things that are meant to be infeasible, like coming 54th percentile in a competitive programming competition.
People need to remember that AlexNet is 10 years old. At no point in this span have neural networks stopped solving things they weren't meant to be able to solve.
I feel like you're taking that sentence a bit too literally. I read it as "I'm skeptical that AI will ever be able to take a vague human description from a product manager/etc. and solve it without an engineer-type person in the loop." The issue is humans don't know what they want and realistically programs require a lot of iteration to get right, no amount of AI can solve that.
I agree with you; it seems obvious to me that once you get to a well-specified solution a computer will be able to create entire programs that solve user requirements. And that they'll start small, but expand to larger and more complex solutions over time in the same way that no-code tools have done.
Elon Musk trying to save humanity from going extinct as a "one planet species" and in the process causing us to miss a near-Earth asteroid whose impact wipes us out would be rather ironic.
The ironic thing would be if we detected a large asteroid and had no way of deflecting it in time because we had shutdown SpaceX in an attempt to better find smaller asteroids.
The lower the orbit, the more quickly objects de-orbit. This is especially true of the lowest LEO orbits that Starlink sits in, where atmospheric drag also enters the picture. Worst case scenario, a totally dead satellite will deorbit on its own in a couple of years and they can very easily suicide if required to avoid catastrophe.
I'm not a rocket scientist, but this seems unlikely; sure two large satellites colliding could create smaller debris with a much higher apogee, but it seems to me that the perigee would not increase, so it would still spend a significant fraction of its orbit in atmospheric drag.
Kessler syndrome will never prevent us from launching things, it could theoretically stop us from parking things in certain orbits, but the risk to launch through those orbits will be minimal.
We've already detected all asteroids with that mass in our solar system [1]. There are smaller ones that won't end life on Earth that are still concerning, but the quandary is we have almost nothing to do even if we detected a threat from an asteroid.
Only in the near planetary region of the solar system. There's lots of comets with very long periods we didn't detect yet, because their last visit to the inner solar system was centuries or even millennia ago.
Given that this simulator supposedly maps closely to the actual interface on the spacecraft, it's funny to imagine SpaceX hooking it up to the real thing and seeing how it fares. Succeed or fail, it would be a pretty wild ride.
While I do think many media sources have an obvious self-interested bias against Facebook, I think Luckey is biased himself in how he portrays this affair in his tweets. He talks about how the press covered the filing of the lawsuit, but neglects to mention that it was originally filed in 2015, and has been through numerous twists and turns since, being dismissed, reinstated upon appeal, etc. before finally reaching a jury trial.[1]
Coverage in general has declined as the years have gone by, and this latest trial garnered little attention when it started. It wasn't as if there was minute-by-minute reporting that went dark as soon as the verdict came in. Yes, a loss for Oculus would have been an interesting story, and would have been reported on, but the reality is that Oculus and VR are simply not the zeigeisty topics they were in 2015, or even 2017, and so a "Goliath beats David after six year legal slog" story was never likely to be make headlines.
As someone who spent years fighting against a meritless suit, Luckey is entitled to feel aggrieved, and to wish that its end would be as big news as its beginning. But objectively its easy to see why it wasn't, without necessarily ascribing it to an industry-wide conspiracy of silence.
> It wasn't as if there was minute-by-minute reporting that went dark as soon as the verdict came in.
Luckey alleges that reporters were there and ready to cover it in case he lost. So there was still interest, just not interest in anything that was good for him.
> a "Goliath beats David after six year legal slog" story was never likely to be make headlines.
This is pretty much a statement of the problem right here. If your goal in reading the news is to be entertained, then it's not a problem. But if your goal is to become informed, then this bias against a certain kind of story is presenting a warped version of reality to you while pretending that it is the truth.
It's not a vast conspiracy. It's just incentives at work, but the outcome is lamentable.
So yes, LAB will produce more perceptually uniform gradients than RGB, but browsers are exacerbating the problems of RGB gradients by not implementing them properly.