Mr. Andreessen has been involved with high level politics for a long time. This is not "random radicalization". I will not comment on the quality of the politics but it feels fairly deliberate.
Graphics is not an academic body of knowledge as such. It's a bag of tricks developed over 50 years, going hand in hand with industrial hardware development.
There _is_ deep and rich academic framework around the subject, but I think to understand "why this" you need to program to understand the problem space since it's not really anything you could derive from first principles. I mean you get the rendering equation and so on, but the graphics knowledge portrayed in the article comes from understanding the three pillars of real time rendering.
It's about delicate interaction between human visual system (how to fool it), algorithms, and the hardware capabilities.
In general you need to program graphics, not read it. I mean I'm in the "reading" category myself and the people who've focused on programming are much better than myself.
Real time rendering by Akenine-Möller, Haines et all is the standard entry reference. Now in it's fourth edition. It's really good and dense.
If someone wants a simple recipe how to learn real time graphics alone in their cellar, nowadays I would recommend getting Real Time Rendering and going through https://learnopengl.com/.
After that you just continue... continue ... continue.
There are some people who understand everything about the topic instantly intuitively apparently but that's very, very unique. For the rest of us it's a life long adventure facing our own limitations and trying to get better, one program after another.
Speaking as graphics/geometry dev for 20 years now.
Absolutely! In a way it's really cool you can go to ACM archives and start reading from something like
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/563858.563893
(Blinn, Models of light reflection for computer synthesized pictures)
and then track forward from there.
But the developments in the field have mostly been motivated by "I think this looks better than that" followed by a formal mathematical model. The aesthetic aspect has been far more impactful in driving development than drive for technical precision as such.
"Does it look good" is far more important metric than displaying graphs with error bars.
This is not to say the field _isn't_ extremely technical. It is! But the main motivation for all developments has been aesthetic - hence it's IMHO almost as hard to learn computer graphics by just reading about it as it would be to learn something like academic oil painting just reading about it.
"In the center of the display, images reconstructed from filters with random values of (B, C) were displayed ... Nine expert observers took
part and over 500 samples were taken...It would not be credible to suggest that a single ideal parameter pair can be deduced from subjective testing"
So they basically did kernel fitting based on what looks good - while the theory of the kernel function itself was more technically motivated.
I actually think what you suggest _would_ be brilliant if there was a printer that printed as nice and detailed parts as Lego does from ABS. The digital ecosystem for that would be crazy.
But.
Modern consumer printers are way better than decade ago but they still sort of suck if you want any fine details.
"It shouldn't be hard to print pieces that can snap together."
It's actually quite hard to print pieces that are functional and look nice.
Modern consumer 3D printers sort of suck for small details still. If all you print are Lego Dublo sized parts. And print them from ABS. You might succeed _sometimes_.
PLA the cheapest default plastic for filaments for extruders loses fit quite fast (I've tried). So ball joints etc will get loose pretty soon.
"Would there be any downside to this approach?"
Well, the adventure currently is the printing part and it's mostly not fun but one of those activities masochistic engineers (like myself) take up as a hobby.
The consumer 3D printers are improving! Maybe one day. But the material physics are not that comforting there.
Can confirm everything. PLA is completely unusable for this as it quickly deforms under constant pressure, so it is impossible to have a stable press fit with it. ABS would be the obvious choice (since Lego is ABS), but it's difficult to print. Generally, a press fit with ABS that can be handled by kids (so easy enough to create and remove), but still being sufficiently stable so that it can be handled, requires extremely tight tolerances which you will not be able to achieve with an FDM printer. Even very good FDM printers with small nozzles will have dozens of micrometers in tolerance, which is too large - pieces will either be almost impossible to fit, or they will just fall apart at the slightest movement. Resin printing is better, but again, the material is too soft and will not be able to withstand the pressures long-term. Even if you use special durable resin, it will deform quite quickly under constant pressure.
"many people are operating outside their area of expertise on this subject."
Exactly. I takes years of really hard work to get good at this stuff. Decades.
I do realize research budgets are not that awesome, but when claims are of aesthetic in nature (explicitly and implicitly) and deal with human craftmanship there should definetly be collaboration with also craftsmen subject experts.
A good example where this was executed really well was the Notre Dame reconstruction (I _guess_). Craftsmen and academic diligence hand in hand.
Not everyones archeological reproduction has such a budget unfortunately.
> I do realize research budgets are not that awesome, but when claims are of aesthetic in nature (explicitly and implicitly) and deal with human craftmanship there should definetly be collaboration with also craftsmen subject experts.
Do we know for a fact this didn't happen in this case?
While photography destroyed academic art almost to extinction, thank heavens it's still trained and you can find practicing artists. Finding good ones might be a bit hard though.
So you could find a _bad_ artist to help you in your reconstruction project.
But finding an incompetent accomplice probably is not in anyones best interest.
So while hiring _anyone who claims to be an artist_ might be procedurally and managerially an approved method, it really is not the outcome anyone actually woudl want to have. So whatever happened here ... it does not count as professional reconstruction.
You don't need to be an art historian or an artist to recognize this.
You just need to compare them to other art from the period and the frescoes, and consider which one you find more appealing. And once you do this, there is a fair chance you will recognize the "good" art feels like an order of magnitude more appealing to you, even if you don't have the training to recognize the exact features that cause this appeal.
An awful lot of the things hanging in museums look "bad" to me. I'm not just talking about the easily-mocked contemporary art. I mean things like Medieval paintings with Jesus painted as a baby-sized adult man. Everything before the development of perspective looks like a grade-school cartoon.
I'm sure you're right that reconstructions of painted statues are inaccurate. But I'm not sure that a good-looking reconstruction would be any more authentic. Cultural tastes vary a lot. I suspect that if we ever do get enough data for a valid reconstruction, I won't like it any better.
> An awful lot of the things hanging in museums look "bad" to me. I'm not just talking about the easily-mocked contemporary art. I mean things like Medieval paintings with Jesus painted as a baby-sized adult man. Everything before the development of perspective looks like a grade-school cartoon.
Perspective wasn't developed! The Greeks and Romans used it just fine, for example.
What was lost was artistic training because there wasn't sufficient economic market for it. As soon as you got sufficient economic incentive, art magically improves again. This is stunningly obvious if you look at Athens and then Pompeii and then Rome and then the Vatican (with the attendant backslide until the Renaissance as you note).
Interesting parallel to modern--will AI cause a huge backslip in art since the economic market for artists is being destroyed?
"since the economic market for artists is being destroyed"
I don't see it being destroyed. I mean the market for art. That's a market for tangible things made by specific humans, pieces that are unique.
Very hard to see how AI will affect that since the market is dominated to large extent by the need by the art salespeople, art institutions, and art collectors to sustain prestige and investment value.
If it just about volume, China would have destroyed it decades ago. Clearly adding even more volume will hardly put a dent to it.
> An awful lot of the things hanging in museums look "bad" to me
Sure. But if have a chance to visit Pompeii, the author’s argument will land. The Romans made beautiful art. It seems odd that they made beauty everywhere we can find except in the statues we’ve reconstructed.
I'm not sure whether they look "bad" is enough justification. The author dismisses the possible explanation "maybe they didn't consider this bad style back then" without any real argument other than "there are other works of art with different styles".
I agree that I, personally, do not consider them painted in a way that is pleasing to me. But is that what the reconstruction project is meant to achieve, i.e. a painting style that is pleasing to current audiences? Or is it about reconstructing the bare minimum that can be asserted with some degree of reliability that is actually supported by the physical evidence?
Again I must ask: do we know decent artists weren't involved in the reconstruction project? Remember, the goal is to use their artistry to achieve scientific results, not just do whatever they find pleasing.
> You just need to compare them to other art from the period and the frescoes, and consider which one you find more appealing
I get this is the most compelling part of the argument TFA is making, but to be honest I don't find it all that compelling. Surely the people involved in the reconstruction considered this, and there's a reason why they still produced these reconstructions, and I don't believe that reason is "they are incompetent or trolling".
I believe it is basically irresponsible to present the statues with their base layers only. Either extrapolate the aesthetic top layers that might have been there, or just report that the statues were painted without a visual example. Presenting them as poorly as they do contributes to demoralization and a sense of alienation from one's own cultural roots.
I believe researchers are under pressure not to extrapolate too wildly, unless they can find strong evidence for their extrapolations. In TFA itself they are quoted (very briefly) saying this is not a representation of what the statues actually looked like, it's just the pigments they guaranteed were there.
> Cecilie Brøns, who leads a project on ancient polychromy at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, praises the reconstructions but notes that ‘reconstructions can be difficult to explain to the public – that these are not exact copies, that we can never know exactly how they looked’.
Consider that had they gone wild with creativity, they would have been criticized for it. Apparently the current overcautious trend is an (over)reaction to previous careless attitudes in archeology.
This is my uninformed take, anyway. I think TFA's author should have engaged more directly with researchers instead of speculating about their motives; the article -- while making some interesting points -- reads a bit snarky/condescending to me. Why not go straight to the source and ask them?
"This is almost certainly not what it looked like at all, and it's hideous, but I am going to make sure this image is disseminated across the literature and the news (which will make everyone think it was actually hideous but oh well)" is just more irresponsible in my mind than any alternative.
The article makes very explicit proofs, in showing paintings of painted sculptures, where the sculptures are painted with very appealing, naturalistic hues.
I think the museums should hire trained academic artists to do best guess reproductions next to the garish ones.
The garish ones are _equally_ misleading.
Imagine you got a reproduction of a "five year old with finger paints" version of Mona Lisa and you were told this was made by a person considered a geniuous in his time and an artistic giant. What would make that think you of his patrons and him?
"decide what the software is supposed to do in the first place."
After 20 years of software development I think that is because most of the software out there, is the method itself of finding out what it's supposed to do.
The incomplete specs are not lacking feature requirements due to lack of discipline. It's because nobody can even know without trying it out what the software should be.
I mean of course there is a subset of all software that can be specified before hand - but a lot of it is not.
Knuth could be that forward thinking with TeX for example only because he had 500 years of book printing tradition to fall back on to backport the specs to math.
At work I'm implementing new 3D map geometry stuff for my employer (Mapbox) and as a a sideproject I'm building a simple 3D modeling software that gets you from idea to reliable, solid parts fast (https://www.adashape.com/).
The main argument was that democrats policies were detrimental to their business.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_sNclEgQZQ&t=11s
Mr. Andreessen has been involved with high level politics for a long time. This is not "random radicalization". I will not comment on the quality of the politics but it feels fairly deliberate.
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