No, that is exactly the reason I am bringing up physics. There used to be a time when a singular person could make an outsized impact. In the recent past though, this has not been the case: significant breakthroughs are usually the result of coordinated effort of many individuals. Is that really a valid reason to not do physics?
now, if you said "don't get into it because your primary employment prospects would be games or film industry, which are known to be less than stellar towards their workers" - that would be a different story.
My only additions to the article would be to study your probability/statistics (can't do efficient path tracing without it) and get comfortable with integrals, especially integrals on a sphere (physically based rendering will be a lot easier to understand).
Where is the "John Carmack" of ML? Where is the John Carmack of physics? This hero worship crap needs to be left in the past. There isn't a singular active researcher you can point to and say "this person has made the field what it is today". There are very influential papers, but they all have multiple contributors. Is that really a valid reason to not engage in a particular area of research or engineering?
And who cares anyway? No matter what you choose to do with your time, chances are that you will not have that much of an impact on your chosen discipline. You should choose how to spend your time based on whether an activity genuinely interests you, not on whether you think it would be easy to get recognition.
general rule of thumb is that you never want gamma-corrected values if you intend to be doing any sort of math with them. the only exception is when you want to match the behavior of softwares that actually do all the math with pixel values in sRGB space (I think that's what photoshop does but don't quote me on that).
there isn't much that is "arcane" about gamma correction itself (as in, the math itself is really simple).
at the fundamental level, if a surface is illuminated with one lightbulb and we add another light bulb, the difference is exteremely noticeable to the human eye. if we add one more lightbulb to a surface that is already illuminated by a hundred light bulbs, there will be no perceptible difference. the exact response can be modeled with a pretty simple power law (with a modification in the low range, as the article mentions).
that's all there really is to "gamma correction". it's a hack that exploits this quirk of the human visual system in order to more efficiently allocate bits for encoding different "lightness" values.
all of the confusion and bugs stem from one or more of the systems in the chain that forms the final image, making an incorrect assumption about what the others are doing. it's a bit like coordinate spaces in that regard.
when you re-crop a photo or use the perspective tool, you are literally distorting the image. not to mention, all of the processing that happens in modern cameras before you even see the image. in the case of a modern smartphone in particular, I think it's fair to say that you never really see the "real" image as captured by the CCD sensor, and even if you did you would not like it anyway.
they're technically not wrong. C is literally an "abstraction" of the machine. As we know, the whole point of an abstraction is to ignore the multitude of details :-)
"outgroup"? what outgroup? we're talking about inanimate objects here.
by your own logic, you treat your home appliances as an outgroup so you must be secretly a dangerous psychopath.
or do you thank your microwave after heating leftovers?
it's a neat experiment but I think it's ultimately flawed because color is usually perceived in context, and depending on context I could easily see anyone reinterpreting the hues they labeled "green" in this test as blue, and vice versa.
EDIT:
in general, blue is a pretty fascinating color. yes, many cultures have a somewhat blurry distinction between blue and green. Some others seem to differentiate shades of blue that others don't (i.e. in Russian "голубой" and "синий" refer to distinct colors but in English those would be just shades of blue). I guess there's something about photons in that energy band that messes with perception. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-photo_blue
jumps is another one. jmp can have many encodings depending on where the target offset you're jumping to is. but often times, the offset is not yet known when you first encounter the jump insn and have to assemble it.