> and little to no follow-up engagement from their authors.

A strategy I sometimes use for external contributions is to immediately ask a question about the pull request. Ignoring PRs where I don't get a reply or the reply doesn't make sense potentially eliminates a lot of low quality contributions.

I wonder if a "no AI" rule is an overly blunt instrument. I can sympathise with it but babies and bathwater etc.

I find one easier to avoid or ignore them the other.

Mudbun renders using raymarching - the video explains why he has avoided doing this.

Although a decent chunk of modern tooling is there to handle the limitations of triangles. And modelling is often using higher-level abstractions that are only turned into triangles at the end of the process.

That's true if you're using a CAD-like tool, but that's typically not used for art (more for engineering / mechanical design)

Game / VFX artists heavily use mesh-based tools such as Maya or Blender.

Both have many tools that aren't raw triangle editing

By coincidence this was released a few weeks ago: https://hothardware.com/news/max-payne-rtx-remix-mod

> Much of the science about lighting, physics, and rendering we take for granted today was mostly unknown;

I'm not so sure. I grew up playing with offline 3d rendering rather than real-time game stuff - and game dev was merely reusing the same smoke and mirrors that people used to keep rendering time under a week a decade earlier. People always knew the "correct" way to do things but it was just out of reach given the hardware constraints. GI, radiosity, path-tracing etc already existed well before this - but nobody could do it on consumer hardware

That scene in Independence Day is seeming less far-fetched every passing moment.

The Jeff Goldblum virus one?

I believe fans have provided a retroactive explanation that all our computer tech was based on reverse engineering the crashed alien ship, and thus the arch, and abis etc were compatible.

It's a movie, so whatever, but considering how easily a single project / vendor / chip / anything breaks compatibility, it's a laughable explanation.

Edit: phrasing

That isn't actually a fan theory, it was actual plot that was cut from the film for time.

Still dumb but not as dumb as what we got.

Reminds me of how in the original the matrix plot the humans were being used for compute power, but the studio execs decided audiences wouldn't understand it.

:-/

Gaussian splats

I asked it to do a task that doesn't require spreadsheets but it keeps asking for access to my google drive.

It uses Google Sheets as a "memory layer" for complex workflows to orchestrate multi tab sub agents for example where per row an independent sub agent tab is launched to execute and write back new columns.

We only request drive.file permission so create new sheets or access to ones explicitly granted access to us via Google Drive Picker

That needs to be explained at the point the permission is requested