mezentius

Yes, agreed… and beyond that, the question of what is “original” is thorny enough that it should not be left up to a machine’s judgement. As Paul Valéry put it: ‘There are works in the likeness of others, and works that are the reverse of others, but there are also works whose affiliation with earlier productions is so intricate that we become confused and attribute them to the intervention of the gods.’

I appreciate the summary of the legal and cultural issues; however, by “permitted” I meant specifically, where does Claude currently draw the line? i.e. how much can one get away with?

To what extent are ports of old/abandoned games to modern systems permitted? For me, one of the major value propositions of AI-based coding tools is the ability to rapidly update legacy software that still has some use, including games.

1) People who don’t derive pleasure from reading do generally see it as an affection, because they can’t understand the appeal outside of apparent status-signaling. Reading, and discovering new material to read, is in fact an intensely selfish pleasure, but it is not a natural pleasure; if you didn’t get hooked in childhood, it’s probably not possible to convince you, and so you will forever see someone offering you a free book as some kind of hostile, elitist signal.

2) There are a lot of reasons why LFLs may not always thrive in low-income neighborhoods (although there are quite a few in mine, and it’s no Beverly Hills), but I would suggest that it is not because the residents exist in some higher state of authenticity.

The excellent book, “Rites Of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age”—which uses this infamous incident as a jumping-off point from which to explore Modernity as an incipient artistic and social phenomenon that accelerates during the interwar period—concludes that this account of the crowd’s reaction was, at the very least, highly embellished, and not dissimilar to tall tales about crowds fleeing from the Lumière brothers’ image of a train bearing down upon them. But since these stories are contemporary to the events, they do nevertheless tell us something important about the spirit of the age.

I’m guessing you haven’t worked in the film business, as ‘more efficient’ is not the same as ‘brighter’ in real-world conditions on a film set. LED lighting brings efficiencies in power use, weight, and heat, but nowhere near the quoted figure in terms of raw output due to optical loss, color control, diffusion, among other things.

Unless you are James Cameron shooting Avatar III on a soundstage with (close to) a blank-cheque from the studio, you are still limited in terms of space (the constraints of the location given the size of the light and its supporting stand), time (the time to set up and adjust each light properly, including last-minute adjustments), labor (someone’s got to plug all that in, run the cables, etc.), and cost/availability (you don’t always get the lights you want for a given budget).

Beyond that, you’re also considering aperture and ISO from a creative standpoint; maybe you don’t want to shoot wide open for reasons of image control, and so you may spend your lumen budget on ensuring that a particular scene can be exposed at, say, f/5.6 at ISO 100. Or you may want to spend your lumens on lens filtration, which produces a specific effect but further cuts down the incident light.

In short, no, you do not have 10x light available to spend on frame rate, and for any marginal gains in raw output, most cinematographers are thinking about what creative choices it opens up for the film; I would never burn additional lumens to shoot at 120fps just for the sake of A/V fanboys on the internet, unless the scene requires slow-motion or high-speed capture for postproduction reasons. Technical choices in this industry should always be motivated by the need to solve creative problems effectively, quickly, and within budget.

The exact number “24” may be a standard for historical reasons, but a frame rate AROUND 24 is not an arbitrary standard. Higher frame rates require more light so that the image is properly exposed for the 1/(2x frame rate) of a second (assuming a 180-degree shutter angle) that the shutter is open. Doubling the frame rate requires doubling the amount of incident light, so going to 120 fps from 24 requires ~5x more light for a given ISO rating and aperture.

If you think about how light falls off in proportion to the square of its distance from the source—and that generally actors don’t stand in one place, but move through large spaces where they must appear to be lit evenly—you start to see that this is not just a question of “efficient LED lighting.” Shooting at high frame rates requires an enormous amount of light that cannot easily (read: cheaply, quickly, without higher expenses) be brought to bear in a normal production outside of controlled studio conditions.

You’re describing something real; I’m a screenwriter and have worked on studio films where this kind of character arc was encouraged. (I wouldn’t call it a distinct structure because it can be mapped onto a very similar, traditional three-part framework.) It is, however, very much not an artistic decision. The reason for the prevalence of this arc in expensive, family-oriented movies is because studio executives (or worse, the CEs at production companies) are uncomfortable with characters who make bad choices, and think audiences will reject them. Maybe they’re not wrong— but this is a relatively recent development and one of the thousand reasons why movies have become so boring.

More satisfying (in my opinion) arcs tend to follow a psychoanalytic path: a character with some unaddressed pathological issue ends up in a serious crisis. The crisis forces them to acknowledge the issue and change slightly. The difference between a comedy and a tragedy is that in a tragedy, the change happens too late. (An interesting variant in tragedy is that the change happens in time, but unexpectedly turns out for the worse—think of the end of The Godfather.)

Sure—in order of mention, that would be “A Scanner Darkly” and “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”

The slyly comic tone of the latter may surprise those who’ve only seen its rather dour film adaptation (“Blade Runner”), which the original novel resembles only slightly.

This sentiment is often repeated by people who should know better (Adam Gopnik, no less) but it’s always seemed to me patently false. PKD was a highly skillful prose writer, but it’s often not entirely appreciated that he wrote to produce a deliberately comic and ironic effect. (Read Lem on PKD’s “transmutation of kitsch into art.”) This is what nearly all of the overly-serious film adaptations of his work miss: he was quite funny, and intended to be.

You can argue that some of his books were written too quickly, or deploy his usual tricks less successfully, but that doesn’t qualify as mediocrity. For that, look to most “hard” sci-fi, Reddit fan-fiction, and LLM-generated slop.

A simple technique not listed here for drawing contour edges:

1) Create an array storing all unique edges of the faces (each edge being composed of a vertex pair V0, V1), as well as the two normals of the faces joined by that edge (N0 and N1).

2) For each edge, after transformation into view space: draw the edge if sign(dot(V0, N0)) != sign(dot(V0, N1)).