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colinthompson

160 karma · joined May 29, 2015

Technical Director at Pixar Animation Studios.
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colinthompson··on Elizabeth Holmes Documentary Upends Telluride Film Festival
Hoo boy.
colinthompson··on Geometric Algebra
If you rotate your phone and view in landscape mode the problem goes away, on iPhone at least. Not ideal but at least it’s something.
colinthompson··on NASA spacecraft flies right through sun explosion, captures footage
Apologies if this has been posted already. Does anyone know what "well-fortified" means, specifically?
colinthompson··on Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and Nvidia form alliance for OpenUSD
From the AOUSD website: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/aousd-quotes

“Unity is committed to the continued adoption of USD standards. AOUSD is an important step forward to delivering a common foundation for content creation, collaboration and interoperability. We are excited to be involved in the alliance and to help shape the future of USD.” - Allan Poore, Senior Vice President, Unity Wētā Tools

"Epic Games recognizes the significance of USD in establishing standards for 3D content, virtual worlds, and the open metaverse. Pixar has demonstrated exceptional leadership in the open source community over the last decade, and we are excited to witness the formation of the Alliance for OpenUSD, which will propel the technology to new levels of standardization." - Marc Petit, VP Unreal Engine Ecosystem, Epic Games

colinthompson··on Retro Computer Museum
It’s so great to see the many places listed here. It compels me to mention The Museum of Arts and Digital Entertainment, based in Oakland CA, in case any Bay Area folks are interested in such places: https://www.themade.org/
colinthompson··on Researchers Develop Transistor-Free Compute-in-Memory Architecture
Are ferroelectric diodes more sensitive to external tampering than a “typical” memory circuit? As in, could a device like this be more easily “jammed” by a strong external electromagnetic source? That’s where my head went when reading about this circuit, but maybe it’s no less sensitive than “typical” circuitry?
colinthompson··on GTA VI Leak [video]
First and foremost- this content was stolen. You haven’t paid for it. If you saw a stolen car left on the side of the road, would to take it for a joyride?

Secondly, do you think watching these these videos is making anyone at rockstar fired up? Do you think they like this? I believe that almost all of them are deeply saddened by this. Should we celebrate and respect people’s work by making them feel awful?

Lastly I’m not telling anyone what to do. I’m just merely pointing out that this content is not soul-less. It’s built on the backs of people who did not willingly share this material. I think it’s awesome if people are curious, but I think to is incredible disrespectful to execute that curiosity by forcefully stealing something.

colinthompson··on GTA VI Leak [video]
I’d say this is less “pulling back the curtain” and more brazen theft. But go off.
colinthompson··on GTA VI Leak [video]
Please don’t click these links or share these videos. As a member of the film/animation industry, hearing about leaks like this absolutely hits me. Please think of the hundreds of artists and programmers who have worked countless hours on this game. They are all heartbroken right now. We can all honor their hard work by not watching this leaked content. Wait til they finish.
colinthompson··on On the Origin of the iPhone
I purchased the fingerworks gesture keyboard insert for my TiBook. It was amazing. I remember thinking it was the future of all laptop input devices. While I'm glad it resurfaced as the iOS input device, I am super bummed I still don't have that keyboard on my MacBook. That thing was incredible.
colinthompson··on A macOS-like operating system based on FreeBSD
One argument might be that X11 does not support higher than 8bit display tech AFAIK, so if you wanted to do any sort of HDR display (potentially for something like grading or some other gfx development work) you’d be out of luck.
colinthompson··on US plans to produce ‘Iberian’ ham in Texas and Georgia
Agreed! Also I am genuinely interested in finding out: what is the difference between “finishing” the pigs with peanuts and sunflower vs. acorns. That difference could be highlighted as an “American” take in the process. Variety is good!
colinthompson··on “The Far Side” Returns to a Weird World
Agreed. The edge of absurdity is still funny though, the boundaries just shift over time, and new creativity finds it. I would argue that Sean Tejaratchi is one to chart such waters:

https://liartownusa.tumblr.com/

...whom, incidentally was also (somewhat) recently profiled in the New Yoker:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/01/the-brilliant-...

colinthompson··on Everything we know about Apple's smart glasses
In general, I find Karl Guttag’s analysis far superior:

https://www.kguttag.com/2020/05/20/analyzing-front-page-tech...

colinthompson··on Video: A Language for Making Movies
I would love to see a running list of languages named like this. There are many, but I guess I can’t find or remember them since they’re all named so generically. Processing is the only other one I can think of at the moment.
colinthompson··on 150 Meter SpaceX Starhopper Test [video]
You can see it a little bit better in the feed from Everyday Astronaut: https://youtu.be/m0MTtqzzf-U?t=8520
colinthompson··on Rotating 3D Shapes
3Blue1Brown has a great video on quaternions:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4EgbgTm0Bg

colinthompson··on Blue Moon
Nitpick: the miss-alignment of the rendered shadow with the direction of shadows in the surface photos they comp over is maddening.
colinthompson··on This Cat Does Not Exist
Please do not change the training data for this....or at least keep this version. These are the most amazing failure cases ever.
colinthompson··on Seagate Announces 16TB HDD
My guess is that in terms of a time vs. money trade off, buying a new drive and shelving the old one is the preferred method of archiving. The maintenance required to convert all files to some compact format might be enough of a PITA (however minor), that it's simply more worth it to buy a new drive.
colinthompson··on How Snow Leopard became synonymous with reliability
Agreed. Regarding why folks might not want to upgrade: for me the main reason is legacy hardware not performing well with newer OSes. For example I recently upgraded a 2012 Mac Mini to High Sierra, and the experience was unacceptably slow. Switching back to Lion, the overall experience feels snappy again. This has happened to me on both Macs AND iphones over the years. At least on a Mac it’s a little easier to hold off.
colinthompson··on Spiders eat astronomical numbers of insects
Welcome to the east bay hills! May I suggest a fun alternative to a standard gardening crew to clear your extra growth:

http://goatsrus.com/contact.htm

From the sound of it, your yard/land is a great fit for their services :)

colinthompson··on Backblaze's Hard Drive Stats for Q2 2017
Big Backblaze fan. You guys have saved me a couple critical times!

I'm curious if your guys' view on NAS options is evolving at all?

My interest is this:

Here at Pixar we have several folks who I'd call "lazy power users" at home. Folks like us are familiar with computers, and we want a strong home network, but want to spend as little time as possible sysadmin-ing the thing. That generally means powerful, easy to manage wifi, proper firewalls, etc.....and networked storage/sharing & backup of all the family computers, from personal machines to spouse and kid setups.

For the circles I run in, this is a fairly common case, and no single service seems to fit the bill.

Backblaze seems so close (especially WRT "it just works"). If it could offer a "Home backup solution" as a service...oh man, I know of at least a hundred people who would sign up in a heartbeat.

colinthompson··on Algorithm generates practical paper-folding patterns to produce any 3D structure
Actually I think it could be quite relevant. The mere fact that origami doesn't allow cuts is what makes this so attractive from a texturing standpoint.

From what I can tell, it appears that there are many locations where the original plane overlaps. If it is possible to easily calculate adjacency for those triangles, you would be able to properly do filtering lookups.

Another question is how much overlapping there is. The more there is, the more you potentially waste texture resolution.

Still, cool idea...

colinthompson··on Gallery of programming UIs
Another relatively obscure but potentially interesting entry could be Field:

http://openendedgroup.com/field/OverviewBanners2.html

colinthompson··on Disney seeks new patent for soft robots playing characters
For their animatronic robots, their numbering system has historically referred to the number of uniquely articulated motors/servos of a particular model.
colinthompson··on The CIA Is Sharing Declassified Maps
These are incredible. I'm especially impressed with how high res the scans are. Time for some new office posters!
colinthompson··on Open-Source 3D Graphics Design: Where to Begin
I think the biggest thing missing on the list is a full featured compositing package. Fortunately there's Natron:

https://natron.fr

colinthompson··on Nintendo Switch – New Video Game System [video]
Looks really cool. Too bad it’s not out in time for christmas. The thing would sell like crazy this year.

What I find most notable in the video is their nod to competitive-gaming / esports, which Nintendo has such a long history of shunning/disrespecting/mis-understanding. Maybe they’re finally trying to atone for the debacle around the whole Smash scene? (Then again, maybe it’s just the marketing people who put this video together thought that would be fun to add and have no idea about Nintendo’s history here.)

colinthompson··on A Primer on Bézier Curves – B-Splines
Indeed. The main reason they weren't replaced sooner was because parameterizing subdiv and poly surfaces for texturing was historically a pain in the neck, whereas NURBS was essentially free. New techniques like PTex and better UV mapping tools removed that issue, essentially nulling the inherent advantage of NURBS for use as an asset authoring surface type.
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