The design says: "Look at this nice Ferrari-branded toy car! You should have one in your garage, it would look cute next to your real car (_Real_ Ferrari, gas engine, looks like a sleek lion about to eat its prey)". In that sense, it might be perfect - for a brand that's not yet certain that it can stay true to itself in a EV-only world?
sometimes we do this thing where we pretend rail is super efficient, whereas in reality it's often more expensive than basically any other option, even in countries that do it well (e.g. Switzerland,Japan)
I love rail but it is a convenience / luxury mode in many cases, and should be complimentary to car travel, not replace it.
I'd definitely prefer a human made one. If you know any artists willing to make a proper version of the cover art, I'd be happy to commission one (paid, of course).
Loved this book! Part of this project started from wanting to make 4D creatures and train them to walk with RL. One interesting fact I learned is that ants would probably have 8 legs in 4D.
Why? Well, apparently ants have 6 legs because this allows tripod-gait, a simple leg movement that always keeps 3 stable points on the ground[1]
In 4D, you'd need 4 points on the ground, hence tetra-pod gait (4+4 legs).
You could of course do with less, I'd guess even as low as 1-2 if you have lots of muscles and good balance.
I tried pretty hard to increase the rendering efficiency on consumer GPUs. The biggest issue is that the main view is actually a 96x96x96 grid of "pixels" (or voxels). This makes scaling brutal: going up to 128x128x128 we'd double the total amount of pixels, to around as much as 1920x1080 resolution. Doubling the grid res to 256 would get us 16M voxels, which is about the same as two 4K displays. On top of that simple 4D object meshes scale much worse in terms of tetras than 3D objects do.
A quick solution could be to give the user a few resolution options, so they can bravely test the limits of their hardware.
So I've just modified the engine to allow you to specify a custom resolution in the URL:
(Higher resolutions might break rendering entirely if the accel structure doesn't fit in allowed memory anymore. I was able to push it to 160x160x160 on my machines)
I'll also try to think of other ways to make the rendering more efficient, maybe a BVH instead of my simpler grid-based acceleration structure? My background is not in computer graphics, so others here might have better ideas.
I had been working on a 4-th Dimension renderer project, when yesterday I saw the hackernews post where Gemini predicts the front page 10 years from now[1], and one title was "Visualizing the 5th dimension with WebGPU 2.0".
So I figured, what the heck, might as well make the implied previous article real, and fulfill our collective destinies.
Moreso genuine curiosity than as a gotcha: A lot of comments are saying this was the wrong choice. I'd find it really interesting to hear who the nomination should have gone to instead, in your opinions.
Very well put. And you could argue that it is not as much a stretch as it seems.
Self driving cars would realistically have to keep functioning in situations where arbitrary communication with humans is required (which happens daily), which tends to turn into an AI-hard problem quite quickly.