I am so going to this talk.

More Marx. From the Wikipedia: "[workers become] alienated from the activity of production itself, which is experienced not as a fulfilling expression of creativity but as coerced, meaningless toil."

Vibe coding is the immiseration of our profession.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27...

Did you know you can subscribe to the paper edition of @theonion.com to help support their takeover of InfoWars? Hell Yes. Worth every penny.

membership.theonion.com?campaign=701...

Epistemic Prestige in Unreal’s Physically Based Rendering Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public LicenseThe open access edition of this book was made possible by generous

STS Reading, Week 12: “Epistemic Prestige in Unreal’s Physically Based Rendering” Chapter 4 of "Enacting Platforms" by @jmalazita.bsky.social

In which Jim unpacks the values encoded “Physically Based Rendering” and anyway what does that phrase even mean???

direct.mit.edu/books/oa-mon...

The Racist Legacy of Computer-Generated Humans Moviemakers have perfected the art of rendering skin and hair—but only for white people

Technical Reading, Week 12: “The Racist Legacy of Computer-Generated Humans” by me.

In which I pointed out that white skin and straight hair have been the baseline for CGI humans for the last 20+ years.

www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-...

A practical model for subsurface light transport | Proceedings of the 28th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques

Technical Reading, Week 12: “A Practical Model for Subsurface Light Transport” by Jensen et al.

The paper that cemented the idea that white skin is the algorithmic baseline for skin rendering. The analogizing phrase “milk and skin” appears not once but twice.

dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

Opinion | Beware conservatives promoting “intellectual freedom” Victor Ray: This conservative lie about schools like mine is furthering authoritarianism

Making tenure count, for MSNOW I wrote about my employer, The University of Iowa, creating a center for intellectual freedom. It's a reactionary project built on decades of conservative propaganda about higher ed.

Technical Reading, Week 11: “Distributed Ray Tracing” by Cook, Porter and Carpenter.

One of the major Monte Carlo graphics papers, which notably does *not* reference von Neumann, Metropolis, or any of the hydrogen bomb lineage.

dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

Media Heterotopias : Digital Effects and Material Labor in Global Film Production In Media Heterotopias Hye Jean Chung challenges the widespread tendency among audiences and critics to disregard the material conditions of digital film pr

STS Reading, Week 11: “Heterotopic Monstrosity: THE HOST and GODZILLA”, Chapter 4 of “Media Heterotopias” by Chung.

Godzilla’s hydrogen bomb origins, and CGI evocations of widespread student demonstrations against authoritarianism in South Korea in the 1980s.

read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/2...

Boots Riley answering student questions after film screening at Yale

And Boots Riley came and gave a Q&A afterwards! I got to shake his hand and thank him for his movie!

I LOVE BOOSTERS poster, opens nationwide on May 22nd.

Saw a preview of I LOVE BOOSTERS yesterday and it was *AMAZING*.

Wildly imaginative, bonkers sci-fi in the present-day East Bay, in that one-of-a-kind @bootsriley.bsky.social way.

It was *SO GOOD*. I don’t think I’ll see anything better this year. Opens nationwide May 22nd.

Claude Code's Source: 3,167-Line Function, Regex Sentiment Anthropic claimed 100% of Claude Code is AI-written. A source leak exposed a 3,167-line function, regex sentiment analysis, and 250K wasted API calls daily

Reflections on the Claude Code source code leak from @techtrenches.dev

“The leak isn’t the story.
The code is the story.”

I had good luck with Nations Photo Lab. I was worried the colors would get washed out, but they ended up looking decent. It took a few days though.

They did seem more aware of Pixar and Disney Animation's technical track records! The way these stories pass down sure is non-linear.

UPDATE: Most students in the class hadn't heard of ILM! They knew of Lucasfilm, but just as the place that makes Star Wars, not as a VFX studio.

Next year I'll probably instead assign Chapter 2: "Perfect Imperfection: ILM's Effects Aesthetics", about how ILM aesthetics now pervade everything.

An improved illumination model for shaded display | Communications of the ACM To accurately render a two-dimensional image of a three-dimensional scene, global illumination information that affects the intensity of each pixel of the image must be known at the time the intensity...

Technical Reading, Week 10: “An Improved Illumination Model for Shaded Display” by Turner Whitted, the paper that popularized ray tracing (whether it was the *first* ray tracing paper is more contentious).

dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

The Empire of Effects Finalist, 2024 Marshall McLuhan Outstanding Book Award, Media Ecology AssociationHow one company created the dominant aesthetic of digital realism. Just abou...

STS Reading, Week 10: “Retconning CGI Innovation,” Chapter 3 of “Empire of Effects” by @julieturnock.bsky.social, about how ILM retroactively constructed the story of how they have always been, and forever will be, at the forefront of CGI innovation.

utpress.utexas.edu/9781477328972/

White: Essays on Race and Culture White people are not literally or symbolically white; n…

STS Reading, Week 9: “The Light of the World,” Chapter 3 of “White” by Richard Dyer, about artistic norms for depicting white skin in painting and photography

www.goodreads.com/book/show/10...

Technical Reading, Week 9: “The Choices Hidden in Photography”, by @aaronhertzmann.com

jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx...

I'm sure "taste" was a positive quality frequently attributed to Jeffrey Epstein by his colleagues.

The term's deployment now seems to have grotesque purposes beyond avoiding using the term "expertise".

(Sorry if the article already said this. It's paywalled for me.)

Wow this is good.

📢 New England Symposium on Graphics 2026 returns April 12 at @mit.edu! Featuring talks by Profs Frédo Durand (MIT), @adrianaschulz.bsky.social (Brown), @theodore-kim.bsky.social (Yale), junior talks, posters, and networking. Free to attend!!
Register: forms.gle/g5fWyLVqCfm8...
Details: nesg.graphics

Hard to imagine now, but IRON MAN (2008) was about a weapons manufacturer who had a moral awakening after seeing the human toll of his products. He finally springs into action when he see news footage of refugee families being torn apart.

At the time, people thought he was modeled after Elon Musk.

The previous version also had its own charm! Albeit a "probably contains JavaScript that will add your computer to a botnet" charm.

The Life and Legacy of Bui Tuong Phong | ACM SIGGRAPH 2024 Talks You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.

STS Reading, Week 8: “The Life and Legacy of Bui Tuong Phong” by @yoehanee.bsky.social, Jacinda Tran, and me. We trace his life through 20th century conflicts, connect his early passing to the Vietnam War, and try to set the record straight on his scientific legacy.

dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

Illumination for computer generated pictures | Communications of the ACM The quality of computer generated images of three-dimensional scenes depends on the shading technique used to paint the objects on the cathode-ray tube screen. The shading algorithm itself depends in ...

Technical Reading, Week 8: "Illumination for computer generated pictures", the 1975 article by Bui-Tuong Phong, the only scientist of color at the University of Utah graphics lab during that era. He passed away at age 32 a month after its publication.

dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Thanks for confirming the tech-bro view. Total inability to construct a theory of power. Unflagging belief that you'll be the last one standing on the lifeboat. Your skills are the important ones, have intrinsic value, and will forever be impossible to dispute.

Yes, I suppose that's better from a political power perspective.

The part that bothers me is that the whole thing is premised on betraying the point of open source. No attribution, no contribution to newcomer learning, no community mindset. Cranking shit out as fast as possible is all that matters.

Ignoring the further devaluation of expertise and centralization of power here is not great.

Technical correspondence: comment on computer rendering of fractal stochastic models: Communications of the ACM: Vol 25, No 8

Technical Reading, Week 7: "Comment on Computer Rendering of Fractal Stochastic Models", Mandelbrot's angry letter to future Pixar folks about the crapola Genesis Sequence in Star Trek 2: Wrath of Khan.

(His views, not mine.)

dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...