I have been creating animations using a similar process but with a regular camera and manually splicing the frames together. [1,2,3] The effect is quite interesting in how it forces focus on the subject reducing the background into an abstract pattern. Each 'line' is around 15px wide.
I also shot a timelapse of the Tokyo skyline at sunset and applied a similar process [4], then motion tracked it so that time is traveling across the frame from left to right[5]. Each line here is 4 pixels wide and the original animation is in 8k.
> Daily puzzles are engaging, efficient, scalable, and well-aligned with key product and business goals.
bring it back within the realm of human-generated PR text? Or it's too perfect? I find the perfect number of syllables to be off putting sometimes, it can feel like the uncanny valley of text.
Not only does the sun not rotate around us, the rest of the galaxy doesn't even care to think that we exist. An interesting evolution in thought nonetheless.
I wouldn't say it's hatred, they're just extremely risk adverse - every situation needs to be entered with caution. It seems to be common across a wide range of Japanese companies.
Recently, there is a certain amount of Disneyesque revenue maximization that seems to be going on though, and keeping control of legacy titles is a part of that for sure.
Yes, they're risk adverse but in the last couple of years, Nintendo has also become much more legally expansive than they were. Of course, Nintendo has long been legally aggressive, especially in protecting their trademarks ("Super Mario" et al) but the expansiveness is both new and deeply problematic. It was fine when Nintendo was legally aggressive suing unlicensed Super Mario T-shirt makers but in the past couple of years they're going just as aggressively after retro fan and preservation communities and other non-profit, minor players who they previously mostly ignored.
This change was a conscious decision and makes little sense because these new targets have always tangentially infringed some IP rights but never in ways that had measurable financial impact on Nintendo's current core products. And, arguably, retro preservation and fan communities are net positive for Nintendo's brand. Even notoriously litigious companies like Disney choose to selectively turn a blind eye to cosplayers in Marvel super hero capes. Threatening or suing your hardest core, most loyal brand fans for doing things that didn't make them money or cost you money (at least rounded to the nearest $100) is not only a waste of resources, it's actively bad for your brand.
This has turned me from generally positive toward Nintendo to literally hating the brand. Sure, doing this is technically within their rights but it's just being shitty and there's no compelling reason they had to change from being selectively reasonable to "full-on asshole" toward their fans.
Nintendo isn't changing, the world around it is.
15 years ago there were no youtubers who built a business around pasting a talking head over a video game stream. It seems nobody even asks Nintendo if they are ok with that and now people are angry because the answer turned out to be 'no'. That's not how copyright works.
The emulator authors who made millions by accepting donations with the explicit promise of facilitating piracy of the latest Nintendo games still for sale also should have known better.
There's a lot of hate for Nintendo right now, but imo it's all on entitled gamers who want stuff that Nintendo created for free. There's no company that can safisfy those demands and stay in business.
It feels to me like it's getting democratized in the same sense as to what happened to professional photography in the early 2000s with the introduction of digital cameras and high quality color inkjet printers. The barrier to entry becomes so much lower.
Instead of dealing with the costs associated with using, developing and printing from film, as well as the skills associated with knowing what a photo would look like before it was developed, digital cameras allowed new photographers to enter the industry relatively cheaply and shoot off a few thousand photos at a wedding at a relatively negligible cost. Those photographers rapidly developed their skills, and left studios with massive million dollar Kodak digital chemical printers in the dust. I know because I was working at one.
If you remember, this was in the time where the studio owned your negatives ostensibly forever, and you had to pay for reprints or enlargements. What were amateur photographers could enter this high-margin market, produce images of an acceptable quality, charge far less and provide far more.
I'm not able to say whether this will happen to software development, but the democratization of professional photography absolutely shook the somewhat complacent industry to its core.
In that case it had nothing to do with contempt for creative people, it was the opposite, anyone who wanted to be creative now could be.
Digital cameras didn't change the need to go out and actually shoot the photos, however. They didn't change the fundamentals of lighting and color and what a good photo looks like. It was a more convenient and cheaper process compared to film, so more people could participate in photography, but it maintained a lot of the creative process.
I shot a timelapse of the Tokyo skyline at sunset that is similar to this but with much more detail [0], and then motion tracked it so that time is traveling across the frame from left to right[1]. In a similar process to the linked NASA image, the video is made of strips, but each strip is 4 pixels wide. It turned out very different compared to how I imagined it would, but that is due to the stages explained in the linked article. Super interesting!
Cheers! I became a bit obsessed with timelapses and this technique during the pandemic. It was shot in Ichikawa, Chiba, close to the station.
And yes, definitely, it's quite stark. I guess a combination of being shot in summer and Tokyo's location relatively close to the equator. I'm originally from southern Australia and the dusk there is far longer.
Why does the foot being divisible by 12 help anything? If you're dealing with something 7.3 ft long, what's the advantage over 2.23 meters?
Hell, if you've got something 2.4 meters long and 7.87 ft long, it's the metric length that happens to be conveniently divisible by 12.
The situation with machine tools in the US is unbelievable, by the way. So many stupid mistakes have been caused by the confusion between mils (1/1000 of an inch) and millimeters. And many many tools and bits are designated in fractional inches rather than whole or decimal units (as in countries using metric) which is a massive pain in the ass because both CAD software and quick mental comparisons are generally not conducive to bizarre fractions like 9/64".
The situation is legitimately a little bit different with minutes and hours, since we are able to specify units of time somewhat arbitrarily to match the units, i.e., if hours were 64 minutes instead of 60, many meetings would instead be 64 (or 32) minutes long. This has to do with the reality that we generally do not know accurately in advance exactly how much time is required, so in general there's a lot more approximation involved with common measures of time than common measures of distance, and it's handy to be able to split the hour cleanly in multiple ways.
Carpentry and construction are both also areas where you don't really have an "exact" need to be at certain measure. You can usually get away pretty well with just picking a nice round number and going from there.
Machining is different, and metric is accordingly often used there.
> Carpentry and construction are both also areas where you don't really have an "exact" need to be at certain measure. You can usually get away pretty well with just picking a nice round number and going from there.
This does not sound like you’ve done much of either. I spent my summer rebuilding my kitchen and, oh boy, do millimetres matter.
> The situation with machine tools in the US is unbelievable, by the way. So many stupid mistakes have been caused by the confusion between mils (1/1000 of an inch) and millimeters.
To be fair, this wouldn't be an issue if we had only imperial units. It's only possible to mix these up because we have an awkward mix of both systems.
> The situation is legitimately a little bit different with minutes and hours, since we are able to specify units of time somewhat arbitrarily to match the units, i.e., if hours were 64 minutes instead of 60, many meetings would instead be 64 (or 32) minutes long.
The same situation is true of carpentry, though. when we're building something out of wood we rarely have specific dimensions we must meet, we're building something artificial and can pick the closest round number. 2x4s are 2" by 4" not because they need to be slotted into some naturally-occurring fixture but because it's a nice round number that is sufficiently useful. The standard ceiling height in the US is 8' not because of any law of the universe but because it's a round number that's easy to measure and easy to divide (quarters, halves).
Your examples of something 7.3 feet long or 7.87 feet long simply don't come up in carpentry because we'd usually just round up to a nice number and scale the whole project accordingly. And if we do have something that needs to be precise within +/- a certain tolerance, a base unit that is easily divisible is more likely to be able to round conveniently while remaining within the tolerance.
Ugh, so I was just making some new window screen frames to replace some that were missing, and what a pain that was to measure things out. I had fun dimensions like 21-5/16" all over the place. Now, they certainly didn't need to be accurate to a sixteenth-inch, but being off by even a quarter inch could easily make them not fit.
Too large and you just can't get the screen into the frame, and too small and it can just fall out, or at the very least leave gaps large enough that bugs can get through.
I agree with you that there are many things where we don't have a specific physical need for certain dimensions, so we just pick round numbers. But I think the cases where we do have to conform to some messy existing physical dimensions come up more frequently than you think.
Hours being base 12 is why time is way more painful to calculate with than other quantities, and why SI just sticks to seconds.
Would Americans love pre-decimal British currency? All those shillings and florins with lots of integer divisions? I bet the average metric hating American would be unironically demanding decimal currency back when faced with it.
I always get curious about how American construction works when I hear this argument. Do builders spend all their time dividing stuff into 3 rather adding, multiplying or subtracting? I would've thought adding a sequence of measurements up would be a far more common operation.
What happens when you need to divide something into 3 a second time? Or you need to divide an arbitrary length into 3? Or what if you need to divide into 3 sections, but there is something extra between each section (like a frame or a post), or you have to account for the width of the cuts etc?
Is an 8x4ft sheet (eg plywood etc) really easier to mentally divide into 3 (on either dimension) than a 2400x1200mm one?
Girlfriend AI apps are a well-established business model. It already exists in the form of Replika and its many competitors! Its model will sometimes talk about cheating on its users.
