Racing for Realism - <AUTHOR> https://renderman.pixar.com/stories/cars-3 <comment><USER3> Going to work at a competitor to Pixar in '96, it was the first time I was exposed to real life computer science problems that needed more compute power than could be imagined.

Between then and 2017, think about the staggering performance increases available, more so than in many fields because of the embarrassing (parallel nature) thing inherent to many of the problems.

And yet there is still no end in sight to the compute power that could be leveraged.

I wonder what would change if we had say, 3 orders of magnitude performance improvements across the board starting tomorrow. What might be some of the first practical advancements to be exploited and seen?

Let's assume the amount of compute power that could be leveraged effectively and practically for computer graphics is finite, however large.

How much less compute power would that be, compared to what it's going to take achieve general AI? Or even a Turing effective chat bot?

<comment><USER4> That's an interesting question, with an interesting premise.

Will realism (graphics + physics simulation) take less compute than AI for sure?

If we look at the limit case, the reality I can see out my window has more atoms than are in my brain. So, in theory perhaps, human-equivalent AI will similarly require less compute than realistic graphics & physics simulation/animation.

OTOH, evolution took billions of years and presumably depends on all the animals and all the physics that has ever happened, so maybe inference will always be cheaper than graphics, and maybe AI training and evolution will always be more expensive?

I have no idea, but it's a fun thought experiment.

FWIW, I also worked for a Pixar competitor, and the renderfarm we had was indeed more compute than I had been exposed to before. That said, we didn't make a huge amount of effort to optimize the system, we only made sure really stupid things didn't cause overnight renders to take longer than required for dailies the next day. I'm absolutely certain that at least 1 order of magnitude is available to software render farms, if the primary focus shifts from production to optimization. I'm halfway sure that using today's and tomorrow's GPUs could get you at least another order of magnitude, but that comes with a second level of expensive engineering effort. In short, I think if you _really really_ wanted it, and had the money & time to commit, you could probably have your three orders of magnitude right now.

<comment><USER5> > In short, I think if you really really wanted it, and had the money & time > to commit, you could probably have your three orders of magnitude right now.

I'd imagine something along the lines of a datacenter, filled with racks stuffed full of these:

[https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/dgx-1/](https://www.nvidia.com/en- us/data-center/dgx-1/)

...but repurposed for graphics rendering instead of deep learning.

In fact, it wouldn't surprise me to find out something like this actually exists (though whether for graphics or deep learning, I don't know).

Also - I wouldn't be surprised to learn that a datacenter full of D-Wave machines exists somewhere (perhaps next door to the datacenter filled with DGX-1 systems - I mean, something has to make sense of the data output).

Pure speculation, of course; I'd suspect we'd know about it though if it were the case, unless it was done as a government black project...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Personally, I think one of the main problems with current use of CGI (specifically in non-animated movies) is color treatment. Comparisons between the original non-altered version of Jurassic Park (JP) against Jurassic World (JW) shows my point. There is an increased tendency to change hue and saturation of color in post-production, in order to transmit ideas or set moods on the film itself, but this makes CGI look faker than what it is and the brain is able to identify it.

EDIT: I prefer the look of JP over JW, not because I think it has better CGI, but because colors look more closer to reality.

<comment><USER7> Modern color treatment in film totally drives me crazy, independent of what it does to CGI.

It seems like _every_ film coming out of Hollywood these days is processed exactly the same way:

* Crank down the low end so half the frame is solid inky black.

* Pick one or two key colors, and jack up their saturation.

* Desaturate everything else.

In other words, make the entire movie look like an over-dramatic poster for it. Throw any sense of naturalism or unique look out the door. Once you notice it, you see it everywhere. Here's the top live action movies of 2016:

 _Rogue One_

Cyan and olive: [http://www.ramascreen.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/04/Rogue-O...](http://www.ramascreen.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/04/Rogue-One-A-Star-Wars-Story15.jpg)

 _Captain America: Civil War_

Yellow and red: [http://cdn3-www.superherohype.com/assets/uploads/gallery/civ...](http://cdn3-www.superherohype.com/assets/uploads/gallery/civil- war-trailer-2-screenshots/cwttss03.jpg)

Why they felt the need to make Cap's lip rosy red is beyond me. Even better is this shot:

[http://www.theglobaldispatch.com/wp- content/uploads/2015/11/...](http://www.theglobaldispatch.com/wp- content/uploads/2015/11/Captain-America-Civil-War-cast-photo-Renner-Johansson- Evans-Sebastian-Stan.jpg)

This is a _daylight_ shot. Look at how the characters are all squinting. Look at the big white fluffly clouds that should be diffusing the light and softening shadows. And yet, magically, all of the shadows are jet black and almost all of the color is gone.

 _The Jungle Book_

Green and red (to draw attention to Mowgli):

[https://www.moviedeskback.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/02/The...](https://www.moviedeskback.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/02/The_Jungle_Book_HD_Screencaps-23.png)

 _Deadpool_

Another daylight shot with nonsensical shading:

[http://turntherightcorner.com/wp- content/uploads/2015/12/Dea...](http://turntherightcorner.com/wp- content/uploads/2015/12/Deadpool-Movie-Screenshot-Brianna-Hildebrand- Negasonic-Teenage-Warhead-Texting.jpg)

The light is clearly diffuse, if you look at the shadows on the ground, and yet there is this deep black everywhere. Deadpool took the look further by only picking one color (red, Deadpool's outfit color) for the entire film.

Lest you think this is just an issue with superhero movies, let's ignore those and look at the other top non-superhero movies of 2016:

 _Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them_

More of the same:

[http://harrypotterfanzone.com/wp- content/2016/09/fantastic-b...](http://harrypotterfanzone.com/wp- content/2016/09/fantastic-beasts-trailer-screenshot75.png)

It also suffers strongly from the "It's a period movie so we're going to sepia tone everything so hard it looks like you're watching the movie through an aquarium full of pee" effect.

 _Hidden Figures_

[https://www.themarysue.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/11/hidden...](https://www.themarysue.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/11/hiddenfigures.jpg)

More of the period movie sepia along with an improbably jacked up complementary cyan.

 _Star Trek Beyond_

If the past is warm, the future must be cool:

[http://www.ramascreen.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Star- Tr...](http://www.ramascreen.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Star-Trek- Beyond2.jpg)

Blacks, grays and neon cyan, just like Rogue One. Look how unnatural his skin tone is! They wanted to jack up yellow to complement their primary blue so much that the poor dude has jaundice:

[http://cdn.wegotthiscovered.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/05/s...](http://cdn.wegotthiscovered.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/05/star-trek-beyond-trailer-cover.jpg)

 _La La Land_

I'll give this one some credit for varying it up a bit. Also, dramatic spotlit stage lighting is a logical part of the movie's look. But it's still prey to the same cliched look in places:

[http://henrymollman.com/content/images/2017/01/Screenshot- fr...](http://henrymollman.com/content/images/2017/01/Screenshot- from-2017-01-18-22-36-49-1.png)

 _Ghostbusters_

Ectoplasm green and spooky violet were the key colors for the whole film. Secondary colors tend to come across as magical or eerie to viewers since they're different from the safe and familiary primary colors. Of course, jacking up magenta doesn't do flattering things to skin:

[http://www.ramascreen.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/03/Ghostbu...](http://www.ramascreen.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/03/Ghostbusters2.jpg)

Also, what color is Melissa McCarthy's coat? Is it actually black? Who fucking knows.

 _Central Intelligence_

The traditional comedy look is brightly-lit and saturated, so Central Intelligence didn't fare quite as poorly as the above. Whenever they had a chance to dim the lights, though, they revert to the same cliched look as well:

[https://i2.wp.com/doblu.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/09/centr...](https://i2.wp.com/doblu.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/09/centralintelligence2944.jpg)

 _The Legend of Tarzan_

[http://images3.static-bluray.com/reviews/14209_5.jpg](http://images3.static- bluray.com/reviews/14209_5.jpg)

Jesus, we get it, colorist. They're in the wet jungle. We don't need to be physically assaulted with the colors blue and green to figure that out.

...You get the idea.

Go back and watch a movie from before 2000 and you'll quickly realize how much more _pleasant_ to look at most of them where, and how much more variety there was in look. Compare Alien to The Graduate. But it seems like ever since the rise of digital coloring and superhero movies, Hollywood has decided every single fucking movie needs to look like a comic book page, whether it needs it or not.

One recent movie I really liked that bucked this trend was Her. It was _heavily_ colorized, but in a way that stood out. In shots like these, even though there's a strong color cast and a lot of dark, there's still always some color and detail in the shadows:

[https://i1.wp.com/turntherightcorner.com/wp- content/uploads/...](https://i1.wp.com/turntherightcorner.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/12/Her-Movie-2013-Screenshot-Theodore-Apartment.jpg)

[https://3kpnuxym9k04c8ilz2quku1czd-wpengine.netdna- ssl.com/w...](https://3kpnuxym9k04c8ilz2quku1czd-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/02/her-screenshot-14.jpg)

<comment><USER8> I think that part of the reason this is happening is the move to digital cinematography, which makes this kind of adjustment from raw video files much easier.

Also, moving to digital allows you to basically configure your own "film look" rather than relying on the filmstock that you're feeding into your cameras.

Digital also tends to look a bit more flat and desaturated than film in general. So to make up for that, they make use of strongly direct lighting to cast shadows all over the actors (it's really noticeable on the face) to give depth to the image.

This Star Trek example is a good one of this: [http://www.ramascreen.com/wp- content/uploads/2015/12/Star-Tr...](http://www.ramascreen.com/wp- content/uploads/2015/12/Star-Trek-Beyond2.jpg)

There's a massive stage light sitting right off to the left of him.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice, I like the wear and aging element it affords the renderings.

This makes me wonder if at some point realism will extend to movement whereupon a studio begins to shoot (render) feature films involving digital "people" as costs undercut actors. Will they be able to cultivate favorite "actors"? So you see an "actor" in different and disparate roles? In other words create interest and following for a constructed "actor".

<comment><USER10> Reminds of "The Congress" by Ari Folman. "Robin Wright is an aging actress with a reputation for being fickle and unreliable, so much so that nobody is willing to offer her roles. [...] Robin agrees to sell the film rights to her digital image to Miramount Studios in exchange for a hefty sum of money and the promise to never act again. After her body is digitally scanned, the studio will be able to make films starring her, using only computer-generated characters."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congress_(2013_film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congress_\(2013_film\))

<comment><USER11> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_(2002_film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_\(2002_film\))

"When Nicola Anders, the star of out-of-favor director Viktor Taransky's new film, refuses to finish it, Taransky is forced to find a replacement. Contractual requirements totally prevent using her image in the film, so he must re-shoot. Instead, Viktor experiments with a new computer program he inherits from late acquaintance Hank Aleno which allows creation of a computer-generated woman which he can easily animate to play the film's central character. Viktor names his virtual actor "Simone", a name derived from the computer program's title, Simulation One."

<comment><USER12> Actually Happened (not a movie plot)

[http://www.criticalcommons.org/Members/kellimarshall/clips/A...](http://www.criticalcommons.org/Members/kellimarshall/clips/Astaire_DirtDevil2.mp4/view)

"The late Fred Astaire 'dances with' a Dirt Devil vacuum cleaner. This controversial ad, okayed by Astaire's daughter but protested by his widow, inspired "the Astaire Bill," which was passed in 1999 to 'eliminate the exceptions and place the burden of proof on those using celebrity images, forcing them to show that their use is protected by the First Amendment.'"

<comment><USER11> I remember that commercial, and Audrey Hepburn's chocolate commercial. And Bill Clinton's role in Contact.

More recently there was also some news about actors having to double check their contracts to make sure they didn't sign away the rights to 3D scans of them being used outside of the film they were in.

<comment><USER12> > _More recently there was also some news about actors having to double check > their contracts to make sure they didn 't sign away the rights to 3D scans > of them being used outside of the film they were in._

Yikes! An actor works once and would never work again.

<comment><USER13> If that sort of thing becomes commonplace, that won't be an issue, because they'll never work _at all_ , and actor will slowly but surely cease to exist as a profession at the high end. See the comments upthread about Hatsune Miku and such; Japan is much farther down this road than the US is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It was all super impressive until the last photo of the sunset shot over the bridge, there seems something artificial about that. Possibly the blur of the car on the far side, but it's more than that. Just not sure what.

<comment><USER15> One problem is that if you don't live at the same longitude as where this shot is simulated, the colours are literally going to look wrong, giving you an overall feeling of "there's something off about this and I don't know what". It's the same reason why you can regret buying a beautiful jacket in Norway, only to discover it looks "completely different" when you get back to your homestead in Wisconsin.

<comment><USER16> Why would longitude affect an image like this? Can you elaborate?

<comment><USER17> They meant latitude.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Since the article doesn't go into a whole lot of technical detail about the shading technique, here's the pixar whitepaper describing it: [https://graphics.pixar.com/library/BumpRoughness/paper.pdf](https://graphics.pixar.com/library/BumpRoughness/paper.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER19> Maybe there will be artificial intelligence painters for cgi movies? What I mean is AI that learns from real photos of similar objects and paints the computer generated images in a similar style. Deep learning AI can already colorize black and white images quite good.

Maybe the cgi artificial look can be seen as an art form in itself and 100% realism is not the end goal for children movies.

</comment><comment><USER20> At a glance, there appears to be almost no rendering performance difference vs standard normal mapping. Seems like it would be feasible in realtime engines. Baked normal maps are commonplace now in leading game titles. AR/VR stereoscopic views would make anisotropic surface effects, diffraction, etc even more obvious for those micro details and really help sell the illusion. Very interested in seeing Cars 3 in 3D to test this hypothesis...

<comment><USER21> It's an additional texture fetch on the gpu, it's virtualy free if you discount storage costs. It's been in games for years.

<comment><USER22> Additional texture fetch is by no means free but when the alternative is 100x SSAA you can get away with a lot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I swear for about 3 minutes I thought the title was "Racism for Realism". I said to myself, of course, Pixar. Can't have a believable fairytale without it.

</comment><comment><USER24> > So, problem solved, right? Not entirely. Though these microfacet approaches > take surface orientation into account and give us realistic results while > shading, the problem is that they don't take into account the geometric > microfacet details contributed by Bump or Displacement mapping which can end > up inside a single pixel and get filtered out

Could someone explain this in more detail?

<comment><USER25> Check the bump and bump+roughness disk platter image

Basically the scratches done via displacement mapping aren't filtered trough sourface roughness using the previous approach. The new approach appies the roughness filtering on top of the displacement map, so even displaced geometry partecipates into the roughness map. physical based rendering pipeline is basically the swap between the bump and roughness filters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> That was a good read. I'm excited to see these gains trickle down into video game rendering. A 35% gain on normal mapping performance without any user intervention would be huge.

Next step is to explore a similar method with parallax mapping so that we can see these some of these gains transfer to VR titles.

<comment><USER21> Parallax mapping will not benefit from this, since the limiting factor there is performing a raymarch on a heightfield to find an exact intersection. At every step along the ray you need to test wether you are inside or outside of the heightfield. This means offsetting the uv coordinate (xy position inside the texture) by the ray vector, and then using that coordinate to sample the texture again, to check whether or not you penetrated the heightfield. The amount of texture lookups quickly becomes the bottleneck, especially on large textures since they incur cache misses. To give you an idea: for every parallaxed pixel on the screen the heightmap texture might be looked up several dozens of times. You don't nearly get to subpixel accuracy before performance grinds to a halt. Parallax mapping is view dependent, so roughness mapping, even if somehow applicable would need to be highly anisotropic for it to work, which means a huge storage cost.

<comment><USER26> > for every parallaxed pixel on the screen the heightmap texture might be > looked up several dozens of times

I didn't realize it was on the order of dozens. Just to clarify, we're talking pixels and not texels, right? This isn't dependent on the resolution of the map?

> roughness mapping, even if somehow applicable would need to be highly > anisotropic for it to work

I didn't think about that, I guess you're right. How huge, exactly? Seems like something you could compress very well if you combine textures into a larger megatexture.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Why do we try to recreate reality instead of maintaining some amount of fantasy/imagination/unrealism?

When does it make more sense to simply photograph a car than to try and make a digital image of a car look as real as possible?

<comment><USER4> To your second question, it makes sense to photograph real cars when you want a movie of real cars doing normal & safe car things. If your car has eyes and a mouth and talks, then photography might not be an option.

For non-Pixar movies, if the cars are racing and crashing, then for safety it often makes more sense to go digital. Digital is very often much cheaper than photography as well. It's extremely expensive to take a movie crew out into a city to film real cars, and it can get more expensive depending on the venue and the crew size and the number of shots.

To your first question, why not is an equally valid question. Realism is a choice, and fantasy/unrealism is also a choice. People employ both choices all the time, so it's not one or the other, and Pixar's quest for realistic shading has no bearing on what other people choose. But in general, realism is good for believability, it makes things look tangible and can increase the viewer's emotional connection to a story. Sometimes non-photorealistic animation can break the viewer out of a story, and sometimes (depending on the story & the environment & details) non-photorealism can enhance a story. It all depends on what the story is, and how good it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Very interesting article. I remember beikg mesmerized by the old track pannings in cars and thinking how far cgi has come, reading this afterward provides an excellent background to that feeling

</comment><comment><USER28> It's crazy to think that someday soon. We will have assembled actors.

People that don't actually exist, appear to be human but are CGI, and that the audience prefer over real, living humans.

<comment><USER29> This idea has been explored at least a few times in movies:

S1m0ne (2002) [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0258153/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0258153/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Why is this page hijacking the scroll wheel? As far as I can tell there's literally no point in doing so.

<comment><USER31> Looks like it may be being done as some part of the parallax effect on the full-width images, but it certainly needn't be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Hyper realistic talking cars.

</comment><comment><USER33> Now someone has to implement this for graphics card shaders in real time.

<comment><USER34> It is coming.

<comment><USER35> Ehhh. I don't think modern computers could even render Toy Story still, maybe an approximation but that's what realtime graphics are about - using tricks to make approximations, to make things look "good enough". Non-realtime graphics feel easier in some ways because you can use e.g. raycasting to get "free" realistic reflections and lighting and whatnot. Then you can focus more on what makes a material look the way it does, like they do in this article.

<comment><USER36> I think the original Toy Story could be done in real time with modern graphics cards. The Quora answer below was talking about CPUs in 2011, and it seems that plenty of added time (relatively speaking) was due to network and disk infrastructure not having the same 1000x speedup.

A more subtle aspect to consider is that CPUs might have increased in raw computation by huge orders of magnitude, but memory latency means that the same programs from 20 years ago will run much faster, but not at the same multiple of the raw flops. This implies that to get the full effect of a cpu or gpu, the software would have to be rearchitected to an extent to get the full benefit of modern hardware.

Toy Story didn't use any ray tracing, Renderman at the time was reliant on shadow maps. Because of the lack of global access to the scene from shaders, the local illumination Reyes architecture should map extremely well to GPUs. I think it is possible that someone will do similar things with Vulkan or openGL compute buffers if they haven't already.

<comment><USER4> For raw compute cycles, I think you're right, but...

The one place where today's GPUs aren't as good as Toy Story is filtering & anti-aliasing. The texture filtering and pixel (camera) filtering in software renderers is much higher quality and more expensive than GPUs can (typically) do still. You could roll your own high quality texture sampling in CUDA or OpenCL, but the texture sampling that comes with GPUs is not great compared to what Renderman does.

BTW, textures & texture sampling are a _huge_ portion of the cost of the runtime on render farms. They comprise the majority of the data needed to render a frame. The entire architecture of a render farm is built around texture caching. Just getting textures into a GPU would also pose a significant speed problem.

<comment><USER36> > The one place where today's GPUs aren't as good as Toy Story is filtering & > anti-aliasing

This only makes sense if you are locked in to some texture filtering algorithm already, which isn't true. CPU renderers aren't doing anything with their texture filtering that can't be replicated on GPUs. Where the line should be drawn by using the GPUs native texture filtering and doing more thorough software filtering would be something to explore, but there is no reason why a single texture sample in the terms of a software renderer has to map to a single texture sample on the GPU.

> BTW, textures & texture sampling are a huge portion of the cost of the > runtime on render farms. They comprise the majority of the data needed to > render a frame.

I'm acutely aware of how much does or does not go into textures. Modern shaders can account for as much as half of rendering time, with tracing of rays accounting for the other half. This is the entire shader, not just textures and is an extreme example.

> The entire architecture of a render farm is built around texture caching.

This is not true at all. Render farm nodes are typically built with memory to CPU core ratios that match as the main priority.

> Just getting textures into a GPU would also pose a significant speed > problem.

This is also not true. In 1995 an Onyx with a maximum of 32 _Sockets_ had a maximum of 2GB of memory. The bandwidth to PCIe 3.0 16x is about 16GB/s and plenty of cards already have 16GB of memory. The textures would also stay in memory for multiple frames, since most textures are not animated.

<comment><USER37> > I'm acutely aware of how much does or does not go into textures. Modern > shaders can account for as much as half of rendering time, with tracing of > rays accounting for the other half. This is the entire shader, not just > textures and is an extreme example.

At least at VFX level (Pixar's slightly different, as they use a lot of procedural textures), Texture I/O time can be a significant amount of render time.

> This is not true at all. Render farm nodes are typically built with memory > to CPU core ratios that match as the main priority.

I don't know what you mean by this (I assume that memory scales with cores?), but most render farms at high level have extremely expensive fast I/O caches very close to the render server nodes (usually Avere solutions) mainly just for the textures.

The raw source textures are normally of the order of hundreds of gigabytes and thus have to be out-of-core. Pulling them off disk, uncompressing them and filtering them (even tiled and pre-mipped) is extremely expensive.

> This is also not true. In 1995 an Onyx with a maximum of 32 _Sockets_ had a > maximum of 2GB of memory. The bandwidth to PCIe 3.0 16x is about 16GB/s and > plenty of cards already have 16GB of memory. The textures would also stay in > memory for multiple frames, since most textures are not animated.

This _is_ true. One of the reasons why GPU renderers still aren't being used at high-level VFX in general is precisely because of both memory limits (once you go out-of-core on a GPU, you might as well have stayed on the CPU) and due to PCI transfer costs of getting the stuff onto the GPU.

On top of that, almost all final rendering is still done on a per-frame basis, so for each frame, you start the renderer, give it the source scene/geo, it then loads the textures again and again for each different frame - <USER2> _why_ fast Texture caches are needed.

<comment><USER36> > At least at VFX level (Pixar's slightly different, as they use a lot of > procedural textures), Texture I/O time can be a significant amount of render > time.

I was referring to visual effects.

> I don't know what you mean by this (I assume that memory scales with > cores?), but most render farms at high level have extremely expensive fast > I/O caches very close to the render server nodes (usually Avere solutions) > mainly just for the textures.

I wouldn't say the SSDs on netapp appliances or putting hard drives in render nodes are 'architecting for texture caching'. These are important for disk IO all around. Still it's not relevant to rendering Toy Story in real time since it is clear that GPUs have substantially more memory than a packed SGI Onyx workstation in 1995.

> The raw source textures are normally of the order of hundreds of gigabytes > and thus have to be out-of-core. Pulling them off disk, uncompressing them > and filtering them (even tiled and pre-mipped) is extremely expensive.

I don't know if I would say 'normally', but in any event I don't think that was the case for Toy Story in 1995. Even so, the same out of core texture caching that PRman and other renderers use could be done from main memory to GPU memory, instead of hard disk to main memory.

> This is true. One of the reasons why GPU renderers still aren't being used > at high-level VFX in general is precisely because of both memory limits > (once you go out-of-core on a GPU, you might as well have stayed on the CPU) > and due to PCI transfer costs of getting the stuff onto the GPU.

This was about the possibility of rendering the first Toy Story in real time on modern GPUs.

> On top of that, almost all final rendering is still done on a per-frame > basis, so for each frame, you start the renderer, give it the source > scene/geo, it then loads the textures again and again for each different > frame - precisely why fast Texture caches are needed.

This is a matter of workflow, which makes perfect sense when renders take multiple hours per frame, but if trying to render in real time, the same pipeline wouldn't be reasonable or necessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> One thing about 3-D animated movies is that can be rerendered later on with improved rendering tech without being reshot.

Disney should go ahead and rerelease Toy Story with its latest rendering tech (at maybe 8k), to show these kinds of rendering improvements.

<comment><USER39> My guess is that it's significantly more difficult than that—those movies are pure legacy code by now, and we all know how difficult it is to modernize legacy applications :).

<comment><USER40> You are correct. Toy Story 1 and 2 were resurrected around 2010 for 3D re- rendering. It took a team of 4 or 5 working for the better part of a year, IIRC.

A 3D movie like Toy Story isn't like a Maya file; it's hundreds of thousands of files in a gigantic filesystem, and many pieces of complicated software working together just to compose them and generate a mere _description_ of the scene, let alone make an image out of it. Getting the software to a place where it could reproduce an image at all was a feat.

And the end result, if everything goes well, is just the same image rendered again from two angles instead of one. The images would not magically look like modern graphics, because for that, an artist would have to re-model the characters to be higher resolution (and then re-animate them to be up to snuff), re-surface them, re-light them... basically re-make the whole movie. Not a button push. :)</comment></comment></comment>


The War on Cash - <AUTHOR> https://www.corbettreport.com/the-war-on-cash-a-country-by-country-guide/ <comment><USER2> I would not mind the problem as much if Banks worked like banks of old rather than opinionated service provides. Banks today limit how much cash is withdrawn and for what purpose, and any transaction is added to a permanent record. This record is then turned into precious customer data which can be used for any internal purposes, shared with partners (like insurance providers), and given to several government departments like tax collection, social security, the local police, secret police, national spy agency, foreign police and spy agencies, and so on. The customer has zero control and is barely recognized to be a stake holder at all.

It is possible to create the cashless society without the above problems, but no governments or banks are interested.

<comment><USER3> Could you elaborate on how the "banks of old" were better?

<comment><USER2> They used to be custodian of money deposited in their care. Ownership was clear, as was the role of the bank. At no point could they refuse a withdraw, as doing so would ruin the precious trust they needed in order to be a bank.

The few times that trust was lost, we have a historical records of a bank crisis where people rushed to the bank to get back _their_ deposited money. A bank today can just declare a maximum withdraw limit and act as if it is normal operation (most banks in Sweden have today a continuously maximum of $1500 limit per week on cash withdraws).

<comment><USER4> > most banks in Sweden have today a continuously maximum of $1500 limit per > week on cash withdraws

Wait, what? Are you seriously saying that if you want to pay cash for a $3,000 notebook computer, you have to make 2 different withdrawals a week apart to do that? How is that workable? What happens when you have an emergency and need more cash than that all at once? I mean, it doesn't come up frequently, but it comes up from time to time. Does writing a large check count? Or only physically withdrawing the money at a teller?

<comment><USER5> No, it means you go into the bank itself and explain your situation. The limits are to stop someone who steals your bank card from going to an ATM and draining your account.

<comment><USER2> Its not that easy. You have to physical go to a office that deal with cash. Its not permitted to be done through the phone, and only a small subset of bank offices deal with cash.

You also don't get the cash immediately, but have to wait a minimum of several bank days. Also, as regulation against money laundry require, you must tell the bank as to the purpose of the withdraw and they are permitted to deny it.

Its much more than just "stop someone who steals your bank card".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Cyprus had bank account seizures and some eastern European nations seized private pension accounts. You can't seize what you don't control.

No cash means no anonymity No cash allows banks to charge negative interest rates

<comment><USER7> Here in Brazil, we had the "Confisco da Poupança" in the 90s. According to Wikipedia ([https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plano_Collor](https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plano_Collor)), 80% of every bank account above some value was frozen for 18 months.

Even nowadays, rumors of a new "confisco" are enough for some people to take all their money out of their bank accounts (even though constitutional amendment 32, written a decade later, contains a clause specifically designed to prevent another "confisco").

<comment><USER8> At the current rate of inflation (12%?) the government taxes you even if you don't have your money in the bank.

<comment><USER5> That claim makes absolutely no sense. Taxes are revenue the government brings in. It can then use that money to do stuff. Inflation does not bring in revenue, and does not make it possible for the government to do stuff.

<comment><USER9> Unless the inflation is caused by the government printing money.

If 10 citizens each have $10, then there are $100 in the money supply. Now the government prints $10. If no actual value was created with that $10, then the value of the dollar has to drop. Now all the citizens have $9.1 (real value) and the government has $9.1 (real value). This is the same as a 10% tax on wealth.

<comment><USER10> From the given numbers, it sounds like a 9% tax.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I heard just this morning over the radio that some bureaucrat was floating the idea of a moratorium on the printing of new US$100 and US$50 Fed notes.

The bit explicitly mentioned that US$1M fits neatly inside one briefcase when using US$100 bills, but it would take three briefcases with US$20 bills.

This may be true, but I'm a little wary of the argument now, as the drug trade, counterfeiting, and money laundering line was used when the US$1000 and CAN$1000 notes were retired, and they are worth less now than they were then. Loss of high denomination banknotes has not impeded the business of the underworld, but loss of cash transactions means that everyone in legit business now has to pay a tax to Visa and Mastercard for acting as an intermediary in payments processing.

A pile of $100 bills is $100/g, or $45400/lb. $50 bills are $50/g, or $22700/lb. A $20 bill is about $20/g, or $9080/lb. Gold is $38.82/g, or $17607.88/lb. Clearly, if you eliminate the US$100, cash movers switch to the US$50. If you eliminate that, they switch to gold, not the US$20.

US$1M in $100 bills is 22 pounds (10 kg) of cash. In US$50 bills, it is 44 pounds (20 kg). In gold, it is 57 pounds (26 kg). In US$20 bills, it is 110 pounds (50 kg).

 _Someone_ in the monetary bureaucracy _might_ want to reconsider the _unintended consequences_ of the black market drug trade switching to gold as its preferred currency rather than paper money.

<comment><USER12> Gold is going to be somewhat harder to spend.

"The Serious Organised Crime Agency claimed that "90% of all €500 notes sold in the UK are in the hands of organised crime", revealed during an eight-month analysis." [1]

€500 weighs 1.12g, but is worth $1.11, so US$1M in €500s is 2kg. A very decent saving.

Of course, the UK doesn't use the Euro, so it would be interesting to see the same analysis done in several different Eurozone countries.

[1] [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8678886.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8678886.stm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The actors who the government has the most legitimate interest in surveilling (drug cartels, racketeers, corrupt officials, etc.) are the best-equipped to switch from paper currency to alternate currencies (precious metals, gems, etc).

<comment><USER14> They are also the best equipped to launder money _through the banking system_ regardless of its origin: that is what they already do!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Its 6 hours in and all but one of the subthreads have ignored (or simply don't care?) that this guy and his various sites/media is either straight up crazy or disinfo. This guy literally has an hour long youtube video on "Agenda 21". A sibling comment notes that they "hope these sorts of blogs don't become mainstream on hn". Its kind of important insofar as any sense of community is involved to reiterate that. This is serious garbage, one can find any number of discussions of money, utility and politics ranging from any ana-cap to anti-cap. This is mindless tripe.

</comment><comment><USER16> As long as there are politicians, there will be cash.

You can't (or don't want to) accept bribes, buy votes or hire hookers/strippers with traceable payment methods.

<comment><USER17> I presume you've never been to Europe. I don't remember the last time I saw real physical cash. It's very uncommon.

<comment><USER18> In my most recent trips to Germany, 2013/14, the opposite was the case. Cash seemed to be the most common way of paying for things. At food stores almost everyone was paying with cash though there was some sort of card reader (debit I assume ...?) that I saw people using occasionally. As someone from the US where in my experience electronic transfers are the norm, I was pretty astonished to find that the home of the EU central bank was still running on cash.

<comment><USER19> >At food stores almost everyone was paying with cash though there was some sort of card reader (debit I assume ...?) that I saw people using occasionally.

There is a popular domestic EFTPOS scheme used in Germany. A lot of small shops (especially restaurants) don't use it though because it leaves a papertrail (ie. you have to pay taxes on it). Often Maestro/VPay will be accepted though.

In terms of card payments in general: A lot of people associate (credit) cards with being poor, in debt and having no control on how you are spending your money. Cash on the other hand is associated with having control on how much you are spending. I've even seen people apologizing at the register, because they are paying a "small amount" ($5+) with card.

Almost all big stores accept credit cards now though after the European union cut the fees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private"

Once services have been rendered, it's illegal for someone to not accept cash as payment.

<comment><USER21> Unless, of course, physical cash no longer exists, and all you have is some sort of ephemeral digital cash in a financial institution that can be easily subject to a negative interest rate policy. A bank balance can lose nominal value with NIRP, but cash in-hand can't. Hence, the War on Cash.

<comment><USER22> Physical cash CAN lose value. Very fast too.

My parents lived through the hyperinflation in Yugoslavia in the 90's. The stories they tell are ... fun. Ideally you exchanged everything into deutsche marks as soon as you got it.

New denominations were being printed every few weeks because the currency was losing value etc.

Hell, even when we became Slovenia I remember that at first, the highest bill was 1,000. Just ten years later, the highest had to be 10,000 because the thousand one just wasn't cutting it anymore. It was too impractical for the prices.

For a more drastic example: in pre-war Germany it was more common to get mugged for bread than for cash. Wads of cash just weren't worth enough to bother.

<comment><USER23> Nominal value was the important term in the parent, i.e. a 100 dollar bill can't become a 99 dollar bill.

<comment><USER22> Sure, but nominal value is not what you use to buy things. The nominal value in my bank account won't just go down on its own either. But what I can do with it will.

Or is there a mechanism I don't know about that can lower nominal numbers in untouched bank accounts?

<comment><USER24> > The nominal value in my bank account won't just go down on its own either.

It would with negative interest rates.

<comment><USER25> presumably to reduce the inflation of prices. 6 of one, right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> As someone who had to carry large amounts of cash regularly, I feel like the author is neglecting many of the costs of cash. Personal security is one of them, and certainly one that local government care a lot more about than controlling drug traffic.

As someone who lived in Northern Sweden, freezing your fingers off is another — albeit negligible.

More seriously, I doubt that rampant inflation was the tool Argentinian government used to force a technologically unimaginable solution on its citizen.

<comment><USER26> Fake money is probably the bigger issue overall though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I found the bit of this article on the Canadian penny a bit irrelevant, and perhaps misleading. Or, I'm under the impression that it was discontinued due to the fact that one or two cents were a fraction of the average purchase, rather than some sort of initiative to discourage cash usage.

I'm not very interested in using Bitcoin at the moment, but I like how its design could enable me to have some representation of electronic currency that could give some of the decentralized flexibility of cash. Perhaps a cashless society could employ structures such as those.

<comment><USER28> Yeah, the Canadian penny was discontinued because it actually cost more than a penny to make. Also pennies are useless.

<comment><USER29> I don't think this is true. Coins are multi-use. Obviously the government wants to pay as little as possible in production costs, but there isn't any reason that the production cost has to be strictly less than the unit-cost of the money.

<comment><USER30> A relevant quote from the Royal Canadian Mint:

 _In Economic Action Plan 2012, the Government announced it would phase out the penny from Canada 's coinage system. The decision to phase out the penny was due to its excessive and rising cost of production relative to face value, the increased accumulation of pennies by Canadians in their households, environmental considerations, and the significant handling costs the penny imposes on retailers, financial institutions and the economy in general._

(Source - [http://www.mint.ca/store/mint/about-the-mint/phasing-out- the...](http://www.mint.ca/store/mint/about-the-mint/phasing-out-the- penny-6900002#.VsTJNkXOfv4))

<comment><USER29> Huh, they do say 'relative to face value'. I still think that reasoning is flawed, but I'm not going to argue with the RCM.

Thanks for the link!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Larry Summers, former Treasury Secretary, recommends that the US eliminate any denomination over $20 to reduce illicit activities.

[http://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-larry-summers-wants- to-...](http://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-larry-summers-wants-to-take-away- the-100-bill-2016-02-16)

</comment><comment><USER32> My stepdad operates a network of privately owned ATMs. You wouldn't believe the hoops he's had to jump through with banks to keep them stocked up with his own money.

<comment><USER33> +1 and seriously interested. Can you elaborate??

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I use cash (or check) to avoid the "Visa/MasterCard" tax -a few percent on each transaction. If there was a zero cost way for ordinary US citizens to move smallish sums ($1-500) electronically I'd use that instead.

<comment><USER35> Wouldn't it be cool if there was some sort of "electronic money", so to speak, that could be send between people at low cost over the internet?

<comment><USER36> I'm not sure if you're being facetious, or if you've never heard of Bitcoin.

<comment><USER37> Having no personal experience with Bitcoin, do the exchanges not take a cut (either directly, or by adjusting exchange rates such that $X -> Y BTC -> $Z where Z < X)?

<comment><USER35> There are fees for conversion between BTC <-> USD. So long as you stay in BTC, the cost is ~$0.03 (at the moment) per transaction, regardless of size. Eventually, the goal is for a "closed loop" to form between suppliers, manufacturers, and retailers, to avoid the currency conversion costs. When you aren't paying a middleman a cut to convert between currencies, Bitcoin is extremely cost efficient.

Also, on volatility: As market cap rises, the volatility will necessarily decrease. The "wild 10% swings in a day" phase is just a phase, I wouldn't expect BTC to be more volatile in the future than, say, gold, or any national currency like the Yen (which itself has swung 10% in value in the past 2 weeks). This is because as the market cap rises, it takes more and more capital to influence the price significantly. Right now, any random person with $10,000,000 can cause a swing, whereas if the market cap was 10x higher, it would require ~$100,000,000 to have the same effect in terms of percentage.

<comment><USER37> Right, I understand that if you stay in BTC, things are better, and that long- term, the idea is that everyone accepts it and pays out with it so you don't have to keep converting and your point on volatility is a good one.

But as of today, I don't get paid in BTC, I can't pay for any of my 'standard' expenses (mortgage, utilities, etc.) in BTC, so if I owe my friend $50 and want to cover that electronically, if I use BTC, it's likely he'll end up with something more like $48 (or whatever) if he wants to actually buy something with it, which seems to be approximately the same situation as a "Visa tax", but with less predictability. Your Yen example is a good analog, actually. I also don't pay him in Yen for the same reasons. I don't get paid in it, he can't buy most things with it, and doing so would effectively reduce the amount of money due to conversions.

Frankly, when I'm owed money in the $0-100 range, I generally just ask for an electronic Amazon gift card. It's basically instant, there's no fee or conversion penalty, and we buy enough there that in those sorts of amounts, it's about as liquid an asset as there is. I understand this doesn't further any sort of advance, and perhaps even reverses it, but it's certainly pretty painless. That being said, it's not something I'd want to accept large amounts of with any frequency.

<comment><USER35> Adoption is a process, not an event. These things take time. Sure, its inconvenient at the moment to do things on the bleeding edge, but things are rapidly improving.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> How are people going to buy drugs in the cashless future? I can't see it working.

<comment><USER24> > How are people going to buy drugs in the cashless future?

Barter (including exchange of services as well as goods).

<comment><USER39> Tide detergent: [http://nymag.com/news/features/tide-detergent- drugs-2013-1/](http://nymag.com/news/features/tide-detergent-drugs-2013-1/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> This is about NIRP, which is fundamentally about the bankruptcy of the current monetary/banking system.

The crime talk is just a distraction.

</comment><comment><USER41> I'm not seeing an article about a war on cash. Rather, I'm seeing an article about the elimination of instruments that are not Global Reserve Currencies.

The idea that the US would do away with FRNs has so many outcomes/levels associated with it, I can't get my head around it.

</comment><comment><USER42> I really hope that these types of blogs don't become mainstream on HN.

<comment><USER43> It's not just the alarmist tone or the jittery pacing that makes this listicle unworthy of broad attention, it's the rhetorical errors as well. The author attributes this change to a war on cash rather than a global trend in response to common pressures and doesn't provide any strong evidence that governments themselves are driving these forces.

The selected links contain plenty of anecdotes but few balanced studies or statistics about why these changes are happening.

There's an interesting element of truth here: the world is moving to new systems of payment and cash use is declining, but the author is trying to frame this as dangerous without deriving a strong argument and is not clearly framing the status of cash. 1 stars for an interesting premise and a weak execution.

<comment><USER44> I think the upvotes are coming from an interest in this particular subject more than the source. I would like better material collected on the subject. Anyone have an alternative choice for research or discussion on this subject?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Data on the article is quite outdated by a couple of years, at least for Argentina. Most noticeably, tax for purchases outside the country are 35%, not 15%. "Blue dollars" are no longer a thing, since the government has not allowed people to buy dollars legally again.

</comment><comment><USER46> At the risk of getting a few downvotes, I'm going to state that I'm all for outlawing cash payments for amounts larger than a few thousand dollar/euro.

Corruption and tax evasion are a big problem in Austria (as presumably in most parts of the world), and cash payments make them so much easier.

I just don't see a legal reason why I'd want to pay for a large purchase in cash. Almost all large purchases require some kind of paper trail anyway, so it's not like giving up cash means giving up your anonymity.

Am I missing something obvious?

<comment><USER22> In Slovenia it is illegal to use cash for [business] transactions bigger than 100 or so euro. I moved out soon after that happened for unrelated reasons, but I haven't heard anyone non-shady complain.

I haven't heard of any definitive results in driving down corruption and the grey market either though.

<comment><USER47> The fact that people don't understand the risks they're exposed to doesn't make those risks go away. And once the data is exploited it'll be too late.</comment></comment></comment>


Your Chances of Dying - <AUTHOR> http://www.besthealthdegrees.com/health-risks/

<comment><AUTHOR> I posted this because of this:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9569934](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9569934)

I wondered if it was in fact worth the effort to "get your shit together" vs. the probability of an event as described even happening. Unfortunately not everything that one should ideally, one can do. Time doesn't permit mitigating all evils or "maybes" and after the fact (or when you are freshly impacted by someone else's tragedy) doing things like this always seems more important that it statistically.</comment>


I am a Harvard MBA and could help you - lobo-tuerto http://mrmaloney.com/mr_maloney/SHSdocs/fish_tale.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, judging from the appearance of that website in FF, this guys is definitely an MBA!</comment>


The fifty shades of Latin - <AUTHOR> http://riowang.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-fifty-shades-of-latin.html <comment><USER2> As a native Portuguese speaker, it's fun to look at the dialectic continuum you can construct as you go across the Iberian peninsula.

It's imperfect, but you can travel with a very soft "language gradient": Extremaduran -> Portuguese -> Galician -> Asturian -> Castillian (Spanish) -> Valencian -> Catalan -> Aragones -> Occitan -> French ...

Each individual step is pretty easy, but it adds up to a huge difference.

Unfortunately, there isn't a great analogue for English. You can kinda construct a small jump by looking at Scots, but it ends quickly and is (at least to my ears) a jump on par with Portuguese to Galician.

<comment><USER3> English is member of a language continuum, albeit a disjointed one by virtue of the English Channel and the Norman conquest. The Ingvaeonic languages is a "gradient" including Scots, English, Frisian, and Low German/Plattdüütsch. Frisian is certainly legible to an Anglophone with a wide exposure to English dialects and historical periods.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingvaeonic_languages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingvaeonic_languages)

<comment><USER4> Don't forget [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Norse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Norse) and its influence on English. (I say) some of the contemporary Norwegian is very close to some contemporary Scots.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This variation was quite common in France until the commencement of an active program of linguistic assimilation (beginning with Luis XIII but really accelerating in the 1930s). Outside the Romance Domain, Britain held out well into the 50s (I still remember being shocked by the Yorkshire "thou" as a kid) but TV wiped it out -- the accents remain but the grammar and, mostly, the vocabulary, have all converged.

Ironically I hear much more variation in Germany where there is an "offical" German that everybody learns at school but almost nobody speaks at home.

America and Australia are, to my ear, in the same boat as the UK: accents abound but if you were to transcribe people's speech they would all appear to be Californian. That's _definitely_ due to TV and the fact that US/UK TV doesn't need translation. After decades in the US I go back to Australia and people tell me, "wow, you've really kept your accent." Actually, it's just that they're very much used to hearing US speech on TV.

<comment><USER6> > America and Australia are, to my ear, in the same boat as the UK: accents > abound but if you were to transcribe people's speech they would all appear > to be Californian.

While regional variations in mainstream, WASPy, middle-class-and-above speech may be more accents (in the vocal sense rather than the linguistic sense) than dialects, American English has a number of clearly distinct dialects (notably Chicano English and African American Vernacular English) and accents (in the linguistic sense that includes patterns that would be distinct in transcription; including a couple different American Jewish English accents, among others).

<comment><USER7> Also Ozark English! Which is a super interesting dialect, it turns out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> From my dad, linguist: "This is the classic example of an L-complex. A chain of mutual intelligibility can be established from Normandy to Sicily and over to Portugal, and in fact across all of Latin America, though Brazil is linked through Portugal and the rest of Latin America through Spain. An L-simplex is a grouping of dialects that are all mutually intelligible. In an L-complex there may be dialects that are not mutually intelligible. But on occasion you find a maximal L-complex that is also an L-simplex. Israel is one. The Basque country is another. But it's rare."

<comment><USER9> Interesting terms. I've never came across them in my linguistic study, but I see they were heavily employed by C.F. Hockett, so that might be less exposure to American Structuralism.

I want to make a small correction here. Israel is a special case not because all regional dialects are mutually intelligible, but because it has no regional dialects at all (unless you're talking about Arabic, but then it's a far cry from an L-Simplex).

This is due to the history of Modern Hebrew in Israel being relatively recent. It only reached a stable grammar with a sizable generation of native speakers in the 1920s and 30s, and until the 60s at least non-native speakers probably outnumbered the native speakers. By then Television was unleashed, and killed whatever budding dialects that existed.

Practically speaking, there used to few minor dialectal variations in Jerusalem. It pretty much amounted to about 20-30 words, a default feminine form for the noun 'cat' and a different pronunciation for the number 200. But even these features are barely left in Jerusalem, which had seen large population exchanges.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The traditional languages of France are basically an infinite fractal to the extent that many of the forms are basically unheard of outside of the areas in which they're spoken.

I lived in a (largely rural) department of France called Mayenne for a year. Old people there universally believe that they grew up speaking something called "patois mayennais" (let's translate this as "Mayennese dialect") before they had to learn French to get jobs in the city.

However, I can find very little reliable information about this Mayennese dialect on the internet, in French or English. There are a few "local color" type newspaper articles that reference it, but that's about it. French dialect maps I've seen don't mention Mayennese dialect at all, and claim that Mayenne spoke either Gallo or Angevin.

<comment><USER11> French Wikipedia seems to have an article about it

[https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayennais](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayennais)

including some purported vocabulary, plus a few books that discuss it! Some of them discuss it as "bas-mainiot" or "patois du Bas-Maine", of which Wikipedia says "Il [Département de la Mayenne] correspond essentiellement au Bas-Maine, qui formait la moitié occidentale de la province du Maine"... I guess you're probably very familiar with these geographical designations, but I'm definitely not!

Google has a scan of a 1975 reprint of an 1899 book about "les parlers du Bas- Maine" which includes tons of references to speakers and lexical items observed in Mayenne.

[https://books.google.fr/books?id=mcykCmekgioC](https://books.google.fr/books?id=mcykCmekgioC)

(It's sad that some pages are missing from the preview... maybe Google algorithmically concluded that the book might still be in copyright because it was "published" in 1975.)

But it's true that a Wikipedia article isn't the same thing as finding a thriving language community online.

<comment><USER10> Not sure how I missed that Wikipedia article... thanks for digging up those references!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Growing up in the French side of the Pyrenees, I concur with the article. Traveling on the other side of the border was barely special. The road signs would have a dialect very similar to our own _Gascon_ , and there was no need to switch to Spanish.

One thing not mentioned in this article is how much these dialects have been losing ground over the past 50 years. My grand-mother spoke almost exclusively in her local dialect ( _Bearnais_ ), my mom spoke it with my dad when they didn't want me to understand, and I barely know a few words. There are schools and local initiatives to revive the old languages. The reality is that less and less people speak the dialects. Most people stick to Spanish, French, and are now expected to know English well.

</comment><comment><USER11> If you'd like to see a few of the lesser-known Romance languages in action (especially from Italy, because that's apparently a strength of this company -- I think they're based there, judging by their motto _Non solo parole_ 'not just words'), take a look around Logos Quotes, where they used to translate a different quotation every day into as many languages as they could manage. There are a _LOT_ of Romance languages out there!

[http://www.logosquotes.org/](http://www.logosquotes.org/)

<comment><USER13> Italian itself has an interesting spectrum of shades seeing as how it was "standardized" a relatively short time ago (mid 19th century), at the same time there was massive emigration from the country, with the result that the Italian spoken by the expats is quite different from the standard Italian.

[0] [http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-capicola-became- gab...](http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-capicola-became-gabagool-the- italian-new-jersey-accent-explained)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10523661](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10523661)

<comment><USER14> And because of its geographical position and history, indigenous languages show influences coming from worlds as geographically distant as Arabia and China.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The term of art is "language shift", but it's nearly always a case of internal colonialism. Nearly any time you see a linguistic minority abandon its language for the majority language, you can bet that the government was taking kids away from their parents and beating and shaming them if they dared utter the language their parents spoke to them as babies.

Occitan in 1860 was spoken by 39% of the population of France, and now has about 100k speakers. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergonha](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergonha)

<comment><USER10> This is true sometimes but not "nearly any time". For example rate of Spanish fluency in Arizona among second-generation residents is much lower than among their parents, without any kidnapping and beating going on.

<comment><USER15> The situation can be a bit different with 2nd generation immigrants, especially based on the parents' attitudes towards English. I do see occasional reports in the US of punishing and shaming students for speaking non-English languages, though, and many Americans are very hostile to any accommodation of languages other than English (Spanish signage, "press 1 for English"). And there is a clear, unstated language policy in the US of making immigrant children into English speakers (with no regard to preserving/increasing their mother-tongue proficiency), as well as a general policy of making everyone English-language monolinguals (if we wanted bilingual kids we would have bilingual elementary schools).

Minority-language communities really refers to communities where there is a long, stable history of intergenerational language transmission, and where functional bilingualism is possible or likely. Such as any Native American language, or something like Louisiana French.

A sane educational policy in this case would be something like "most instruction is conducted in the majority language, but kids aren't punished or shamed for speaking their mother tongue at recess, and there's maybe even an occasional minorty-language literature class".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder how different / similar these romance languages are, compared to the reference frame I have: German dialects. German dialects can be mutually unintelligible, young germans typically know standard german and thus have a "common ground" for communication, also they usually speak a form of the dialect that is already considerably closer to the standard "high" language of newspapers and televisions, than what their grandparents or their great grandparents speak / spoke. Sometimes (typically in documentaries), they even subtitle dialect speakers.

So yeah, I wonder if depending on the context, the classification of languages and dialects differs.

<comment><USER17> Italian dialects can be mutually unintelligible too. TV and internal migrations consolidated standard Italian to the point that local dialects are basically dead in some areas (for example Milan) but there are people in smaller cities that are actively bilingual, their dialect and Italian.

My father remembers that they could tell the town of origin of somebody by little variations of accent and vocabulary, over distances of less than 10 km in a well populated and well connected area centered around Milan.

<comment><USER14> _> local dialects are basically dead in some areas (for example Milan)_

 _Uela_ , you have to consider that Milanese dialects basically overlapped modern Italian already - as standardized on the works of Alessandro Manzoni, a writer from Milan. The accents still survive though, and even a few words.

It's incredibly funny to observe language in motion. At one point in the '90s, a few rappers living in the city I come from (Bologna) popularized a bunch of local slang in their songs. Nowadays, youngsters from Milan use that slang as native and strongly believe it originated there.

<comment><USER17> Do they use it correctly? Example: the roman "sti c...i" is very often used with the opposite meaning of the original here, that is: as a surprise, probably by guessing.

And by the way, "bagaglio" always surprises people here.

For the non Italians, among the other things the Milan accent basically swaps the open and closed e sounds. I have to change the way I say spaghetti when I'm outside region :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> All of these various languages that sprang fort from Latin after the dissolution of the Roman Empire illustrate just how much the former Roman world shrank into small kingdoms.

</comment><comment><USER19> It would be interesting to construct a many-dimensional language map of vectors. You could add two spherical (or three cartesian!) dimensions to your word vectors, and interpolate languages based on the known data.

Computational interpolation between english dialects, or chinese languages, or indian languages, sounds like a heck of a lot of fun.

<comment><USER11> Or extrapolation!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brithenig](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brithenig)

(although that was manual, not computational)

<comment><USER19> And actually, with good enough data, you could probably shove in some text and figure out where it was written (or at least where the writer learned to write) within pretty good margins.</comment></comment></comment>


Yahoo Hires McKinsey to Mull Reorg, as Mayer Demands Exec Pledge to Stay - <AUTHOR> http://recode.net/2015/11/09/yahoo-hires-mckinsey-to-mull-reorg-as-mayer-demands-exec-pledge-to-stay/ <comment><USER2> What a pitty having to spend millions to ask a consultant how to run your own business.

<comment><USER3> Especially when they're going to show up with a bus full of new grad MBAs and bill like crazy for each of them. A few whale charts and a huge billable later, they'll tell MM what she wants to hear and they're off to their next engagement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I recall there being quite a few Yahoo employees and execs with McKinsey backgrounds. I think many of them were on previous projects that Yahoo hired them for.

If this is the case, I hope they get better results this time.</comment>


Apple buys into the chip business, acquires P.A. Semi for $278 million - <AUTHOR> http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/4/apple_buys_chipmaker_p_a_semi_for_278_million

<comment><USER2> Back to the PowerPC? PA Semi's only announced product so far is a dual-core PowerPC: <http://www.pasemi.com/processors/index.html>

I was working on PowerPC processors with IBM and Motorola in the late 90's. Back then, Apple's investment in Exponential was big news: <http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EKF/is_/ai_17921250>

It seemed then that Apple was using Exponential to put pressure on its partners ([http://www.allbusiness.com/electronics/computer-equipment- co...](http://www.allbusiness.com/electronics/computer-equipment- computer/7280557-1.html)), but Apple dropped the project abruptly ([http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EKF/is_n2168_v43/ai_...](http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EKF/is_n2168_v43/ai_19471588)), leaving their project so broke that it couldn't even offer severance to its laid-off employees.

</comment><comment><USER3> Chips are expensive to develop. It doesn't make sense to me that Apple is willing to spend the R&D for new generations. It would make more sense that that R&D cost is amortized over multiple chips from multiple vendors. That was their thinking in switching over to x86 (I should know: I was working on Freescale's last PowerPC project for them when it was canceled! :( )

</comment><comment><USER4> Many of the PA Semi team also worked on StrongARM; maybe Apple thinks they can outdo the Cortex.</comment>


Easily filter Geekbench charts (8 lines JS) - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/nchaves/8309101

<comment><AUTHOR> It also just occurred to me that this is a near-perfect real life use case for Regex Golf...

[0]: [http://xkcd.com/1313/](http://xkcd.com/1313/)

[1]: [http://nbviewer.ipython.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/xkcd1313....](http://nbviewer.ipython.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/xkcd1313.ipynb)</comment>


Ask HN: When your non developer friend wants to work in your startup.. - <AUTHOR>

You are a struggling startup.
You are busy. you may lose bucks each wasted hours.
Your friend don't knows coding.
Your friend wants paying job. Even if you can't pay him, he is ready to work for free for learning.
He asks you same code often than search google, he doesn't know what he wants to do with coding. he just _needs_ a job.
He wants you to give him work because he thinks you are smart.
i wonder whether you hackers have faced such situation. i want to know how you would handled such scenario ? <comment><USER2> My $0.02, YMWV

Sometimes when you say things, you need to word them in a way that conveys the correct information to them, even if the same phrase when spoken to you would mean something different. I believe this might be one of those cases.

Your friend needs a job, and sees you as having a company. He needs to be told, perhaps quite bluntly, that you don't have a company. You have something which may eventually pay off, but at the moment, it's a stuggle to make ends meet even just for you alone.

Putting someone on won't increase your revenue, so you can't pay him. Taking time away from what you're doing will decrease your revenue, so you can't mentor him.

In short, he needs to be told that you don't have a company, and in some senses you don't have a job. You have an activity that you spend all your time on, with none to spare, and you don't make enough money yet for yourself.

All the above may not quite be true, but you need to get that message across in terms he will understand. You may want to say something like "As a friend I'm sure you'll try to see things from my point of view" but that message might not be heard.

<comment><AUTHOR> he yet has not been told that we are not interested in hiring him. actually he is getting some wrong idea that we are "wow" since we are trying to work something out on our own. we want to work more and without any non interested learning/teaching sessions. telling him what you said here would work, i guess. thanks for the tips.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Bad idea. Never, ever, give a job out of compassion when the only reason is sympathy.

You will end up frustrated with a worker that doesn't bring much and your friend will also end up discomfited with a job that doesn't fulfill him.

Be a great friend and help him find a job, you are the smart one.

</comment><comment><USER4> I like to put here the Rework from Jason Fired quote "When you don't need someone, you don't need someone". Don't give a job just to give a job to someone, wait for a position that fits him properly an then, if you wish, put him on your company.

</comment><comment><USER5> While I have never faced such a situation, from what you have described I would have to say "no".

I just don't see where this turns into an employment opportunity. Some people wake up in the morning and say "today I want to be a chef", but they are not a chef until they learn how to cook - no company would employ a chef that couldn't cook. The same analogy can be applied to coding.

While he's willing to work for free anyway, I'd say there needs to be some independent learning and thinking before moving forward. To me, it sounds like he is very desperate for a job and making decisions without fully thinking them through. For example, what if he turns out to hate coding? He may be willing to work for free, but time most certainly isn't free and he could end up wasting a lot of your and your companies time.

My final advice to you would be to say if he's serious about becoming a coder then start coding as a hobby, then get serious if he finds he enjoys it and is good at it. He can look for other jobs in the mean time, he can even get another job in the mean time and practice coding on evenings/weekends, but there has to be knowledge and understanding before there can be employment.

<comment><AUTHOR> >> Some people wake up in the morning and say "today I want to be a chef", but they are not a chef until they learn how to cook - no company would employ a chef that couldn't cook.

what the analogy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> You did mention already that you are a 'struggling startup' and it would be unwise to take your friend, who may add burden to the finances of your entrepreneurship.

You can't hire someone in the first place who does not know what he wants to do except get paid. What I would suggest is for you to simply help your friend realize where s/he is good at help him/her find work which would unlock that potential.

If hiring him does not make things better for both of you, then it would be best not to do it. Sometimes, doing the right thing may be a bit painful on the 'friendship' side of things.

<comment><AUTHOR> yes. hiring him is sure a burden, financially + time killer too. we won't be able to do both, neither teach him nor could do our work. it is distractive when someones interrupts your work asking something so stupid, you never thought that silly even when you were just - printf hello world. i will rather be referring him to other suitable works.

i am getting more confidence that i would handle the situation with ease, thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> You might tell him to stop coding and think long and hard about how he could be help with a goal. Tell him the goals of your work. Let him come up with a plan for himself, and if it doesn't work, then he will be OK with it.

It is easy to be harsh and curt, but taking a little patience to deal with this is worth while. You may learn something yourself.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you think Mobile Web Apps is the way to go than Native Apps? - <AUTHOR>

Some of the reasons I came up with are. 1. One app works on all devices (except some layout and css issues). Write once, run everywhere. 2. Easier to maintain. 3. Don't have to deal with App Approval process. <comment><USER2> If you're looking for a boolean answer, there isn't one.

Web apps are superior for the reasons you mentioned. As a developer, it's just _easier_ to deploy a web app. That being said, I think you ought to be thinking about the users experience, not the developers.

App store approval processes mean that users have to wait longer for fixes. Using a particular device API means that your app just isn't available to a lot of users.

On the other hand, native apps tend to respond faster, be more in line with the users expectations, and offer the developer a slick way to accept the users money without asking them to put in all their credit card info.

You also have to look at how users expect to install apps. At least on iOS, every web app I've seen has to include install instructions because users don't think about installing them.

I think I can give users a better experience with a native app, and that's what makes the choice for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> makes sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I agree with you. I have been playing around with some mobile frameworks (phonegap, titanium and rhomobile) and I must say that coding a native app for different mobile platforms isnt too attractive to me. using any of the aforementioned frameworks, you can develop mobile apps that will run across most major mobile OS's like iOS, blackberry and Android, although you might not get a 100% native app, the pain of learning all the SDK's of each mobile platform is skipped. Its just like Java's once stated goal of "write once, run anywhere"

<comment><AUTHOR> Agree with you but why even use Phonegap, Titanium or other frameworks since they are meant to covert a web app to native app.

Developing an app is only 50%. Rest is going thru app approval process. If app isn't approved, value of that app is ZERO.

Is it not a good idea to develop a web app and make money adopt subscription model to make money. We can straight away bring down the cost by 30% which goes to Apple otherwise.

What say?

<comment><USER3> I also agree, but my point is this, using a framework like Phonegap or Rhomobile etc, will give my mobile application access to some features of the host platform like notification, file access, events, sound, video, audio etc, if required. this is something a web app cannot do on a mobile device.

<comment><AUTHOR> yea. true. Thanks :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


"Everything you see was paid for by Dear Reader." (1990) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/1990/08/05/magazine/junk-mail-s-top-dogs.html?sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

<comment><USER2> _Marketers can determine if the false signature on a letter lifts response, for example, or whether straightening the tilt of the stamp on the envelope depresses it._

Did split testing exist in practice before junk mail, or did junk mailers invent it? (Wikipedia gives them credit for the invention, but it's unsourced.)

<comment><USER3> I recall reading many years ago that a major auto company, I think it was Ford, who ponied up for a split in Reader's Digest to see which sold better. Apparently it was more than a little expensive. So it is possible that split test might have had a different origin, but then again, this is also unsourced.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There are times when I wish my mailbox had a built in shredder.

<comment><USER3> I am waiting for an invention that brings you your direct mail prediscarded.

<comment><USER5> Rather, I'm waiting for an invention that shocks people every time they buy shit from junk mail. It's those people that keep encouraging them to keep sending the rest of us crap.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Name few websites to learn new technologies by building small projects - <AUTHOR> One website I can this of is CodeProject but it is very specific to C# <comment><USER2> [http://hackaday.com/](http://hackaday.com/)</comment>


Open source CMS Umbraco discards two years of work on rewrite - <AUTHOR> http://umbraco.com/follow-us/blog-archive/2012/6/13/v5-rip.aspx

<comment><AUTHOR> Original arguments for rewriting: [http://umbraco.com/follow-us/blog- archive/2010/11/26/umbraco...](http://umbraco.com/follow-us/blog- archive/2010/11/26/umbraco-5-may-the-blogging-commence)</comment>


This is stupid. Can't they handle a simple search a little bit better?  - <AUTHOR> http://search.oracle.com/search/search?q=join&group=MySQL

<comment><AUTHOR> For comparison:

[http://www.postgresql.org/search/?q=join&a=1&submit=...](http://www.postgresql.org/search/?q=join&a=1&submit=Search)

<http://www.sqlite.org/search?q=join>

</comment><comment><USER2> I guess .. not?</comment>