>I swear to god, people heard the story about how Socrates was against books and reurgitate this as argument against any critical view on AI usage.

It's something we all learn in freshman english class. But it comes up over and over again because the general idea is true. You have to temper the unbridled optimism that comes with any new technology by contemplation of what may be lost. Otherwise we're spinning in circles.

The skills I've lost are no longer valuable. No one with a brain will ever spend another minute writing HTML/CSS by hand anymore. But I spent a decade of my career doing that all day long every day. It's time to move on and up. The horizon for software is limitless now that we've been freed of the drudgery.

I feel the same way!

I still remember dropping the MX440 I spent all summer saving for into my eMachine AGP slot and playing BF1942 for the first time as a total revelation. Must have been how the previous generation felt when Doom came out. Simpler times.

>"They're in serious risk of losing their lead with this sort of performance."

Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded.

You'll notice I specifically said "victims of their own success". Obviously these problems are induced by the fact that they have so many users. Blowing a lead due to inability to handle the demands of success is still a path to losing the lead.

You can't accomplish this with a shader?

From my experience with game engines and people that really care about CRTs - I believe the effect (confidence: 95%) can be entirely achieved with rendering glue in any of the modern game engines - Unreal, Unity, Godot, etc. Now, whether or not it is a literal shader, or a shader + custom sauce, not sure.

However, I have not tried, so I cannot verify that claim to 100% accuracy. The author ...might have tried? They definitely surveyed the landscape. My read of the article was that they went down this rabbit hole and back-justified it instead of investing a similar amount of time in a practical solution in a modern engine.

CRT look and feel is a niche full of very passionate and opinionated people.

I've done a version of this in Godot. It's kind of a hack, but it works and it's all Nodes without needing a script. You could do it more easily in a compositor effect but you have to deal more with the guts of the engine.

The basic idea was to use a chain of Viewports and TextureRects using the previous ViewportTexture to do the effect. This is essentially just setting up a chain of framebuffers that I can draw on top of at each step. The first step just does a simple calculation to convert the incoming color to an "energy" value with a simple shader on the whole frame. Then there are two decay viewports that feed each other to decay the old frame and overlay the new one. These just have a decay parameter that I can tweak to get different effects. There's a final Viewport that supersamples everything because I'm going for more of a vector display look than a CRT. And I can layer on other effects at either the energy state (like decaying phoshpor) or at the final stage (like flicker or screen curve).

Here I've exaggerated the decay quite a bit so you can see the effect. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZrvcZIfqOI The trails there are entirely from this effect. I'm only rendering the spinning figure. You can also see where lines overlap they are brighter than the surrounding lines because I cap the maximum energy value in the first layer.

Do you have an example? I’ve done a slightly-more-than-casual search for convincing post-processing and haven’t found success. Filters still tend to retain the sharpness of pixel edges in a way that CRTs don’t, and the contrast doesn’t look right either.

I'm not saying the tech currently exists in a form you can just plop into a project and have it give you the exact CRT look and feel that you want. What I am saying is that you can do that within any modern game engine - you just have to decide what, exactly, the look and feel you want is and how to get there.

As an example, I will quote the article:

> Retro Game Engine owns the full frame lifecycle. I decide what the input signals are, what the display does with it, how time affects it, what gets presented and when.

You can replace "Retro Game Engine" in that sentence with "Unity" or "Godot" and it is just as true.

I think you are underestimating what a filter is allowed to do.

You could build a simulation of the universe, send the frame data to the CRT inside that universe and capture the output of the simulated CRT and show it on the LCD.

Balatro is a good example. Lots of different opinions on whether its a good CRT effect or not.

Still the best CRT simulation I've seen is in an X screensaver called XAnalogTV. It simulates both CRT artifacts as well as NTSC channel cross-talk and analog interference. It amazes me that still no one has produced a portable version.

>"around 2015-17 - Swift could have easily dethroned Python."

NumPy, SciPy, Pandas, and Pytorch are what drove the mass adoption of Python over the last few years. No language feature could touch those libraries. I now know how the C++/Java people felt when JS started taking over. It's a nightmare to watch a joke language (literally; Python being named for Monty Python) become the default simply because of platform limitations.

Why is it that every single one of these think pieces feel terminally 3 months behind on the times?

I've heard about "landmark" cases against these companies over and over again for the last decade. There seems to be at least one every couple of years. And yet literally nothing has ever happened or changed.

Since these are civil lawsuits, it just takes more people coming forward to sue. There are plenty of cases where a jury found a defendant liable for damages only for the defendant to continue the bad behavior and subsequent juries awarding ever-increasing and compounding punitive damages. Big Tobacco and Purdue Pharma (went bankrupt) are examples of this pattern. Monsanto was famously hit hard with massive "repeater" damages after they continued selling and marketing Roundup despite prior judgements.

The exact same can happen to Big Tech. The goal is to get them to stop the bad behavior now.

I feel the same way. They're just going to appeal the case until they find a layer of the legal system where they have leverage.

"We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying too. They of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well, but they are still lying. The lie has become not just a moral category, but the pillar industry of this country."