tamriel

It's a nice respite from regulatory bodies reassuring people with fidget spinners and memes.

Deleting insidious social media accounts (Facebook for example) half a decade ago when it became clear which way the wind was blowing.

I seriously doubt I would be as happy, or even alive, it I hadn't.

If you don't need to touch shaders, then you're doing something trivial, like drawing models with a camera.

Once you dip your toes into even something like alpha transparency, or z fighting, depth buffer precision, or texture upload hitches, you start to unpack the shader pipeline under the hood. Which THREE.js makes it super easy to do, because it's much more of a broad library than it is a thick one.

> Also not accurate. WebGL is a -very- thin wrapper over OpenGL ES

Conceptually it seems thin, but it's all a lie. WebGL's most awesome feature is that for simple cases you don't realize how much of a lie this is.

In practice, there is shader recompilation, sentinel rewrites and caching, sync fences, format decodes, a full-blown message queue protocol to a render thread, automatic frame flipping and composition, CPU rendering, and the end of the pipe isn't even necessarily OpenGL at all!

But I agree it appears very thin until you actually look at what's happening (or are forced to due to leaky abstractions).

One of the best resources I've read on this is WebGL Insights:

https://github.com/WebGLInsights/WebGLInsights.github.io/rel...

I would actually just recommend diving into THREE.js.

It's truly one of the best documented and most "obvious" codebases out there. If all you've got is a solid understanding of JS, you can just start hacking up something nontrivial on THREE.js and you'll come out of it knowing most of WebGL.

And in doing so you'll eventually realize that even WebGL itself is quite "high level" -- there is a _huge_ amount of abstraction that you take for granted in the browser.

No, he would not. As mentioned in the article he was reputedly celibate by choice for this reason.

The person checking out the book is a program, so they aren't the brightest.

They check out the book called "how to go to facebook.com". Then they check out "how to type a password". Then they check out "Typing '1234' for Dummies".

I bet you'll never figure out how to get into their facebook account.

Can you elaborate where in the wild you found it?

If the yardstick for Mozilla's mission is how fast they can make a browser, why do we need Mozilla? There are arguably better equipped entities doing that.

Their whole mission is to have better judgement and management, advocating for the user instead of a corporation (or foundation). So it sounds like you're in agreement with the GP that Mozilla's decay is not news.

The key word is "just".

That's not a misconception I share. I understand Mozilla can and should make money to further its mission.

But unlike a for-profit, making money isn't the mission of Mozilla. So needing to make money can't be used as a justification for doing naughty things against the public good.

I agree.

I merely challenge the notion that a nonprofit -- which proudly tumpets its benevolence and non-profitness -- should get a free pass for covertly installing advertising arrangements, just because they need to "make money".

Their charter and marketing is all about defending the internet from the companies doing shady things to make money, so they can't have their cake and eat it.

> Mozilla's gotta make money somehow

They're a nonprofit; they're not allowed to just "make money". And, they already take donations.