Pipoca

That makes about as much sense as saying that a truck and excavator both draw a lot on engine power, so, same difference.

Or that both ray tracing and brute force decryption require a lot of compute so they're basically the same.

Basically, a scene in a game has a bunch of objects in it.

It's not to hard to just light them, but it doesn't look that good. Most games want to have shadows, reflections, that sort of thing.

The traditional approach is to use a bunch of extra manual work by pre-calculating a bunch of stuff.

Ray tracing works by simulating how physical photons bounce around in real life. It's existed for a long time; they've used it in animated movies for decades.

The issue with games is that we haven't had hardware capable of doing it in real time until quite recently.

Edit:

That is to say, if you want to animate water or a mirror with ray tracing, you know where the camera is in the scene, and you know where the water/mirror is, so you know the angle the reflection would have come from. So you bounce the photon back that way til you get to the light source.

Ray tracing isn't about AI, it's about the physics of photons.

The big costs, e.g. for road maintenance, are due to trucks by a wide margin

The big costs are due to weathering. The freeze-thaw cycle in particular does a huge amount of damage to roads.

The costs of fixing freeze-thaw damage to roads is proportional to the total paved lane miles you have. If you've got a total of 5 lanes on your stroad, that's 2.5x more damage to repair than if you've just got 2 lanes on your street.

And car lanes don't move many people per hour per foot of road width. Bike lanes, sidewalks, and bus lanes support much higher numbers of people per hour per foot of lane width.

Having people drive everywhere encourages suburban sprawl with a very large number of lane miles per capita. That has a very expensive fixed cost to repair from normal freeze-thaw cycles, even if the marginal cost of each mile actually driven in a car isn't so bad.

First Past The Post, which is more typically called 'plurality' in the US. Each person votes for only one candidate; the candidate with the most votes wins.

You can actually make your own American pretty easily with good cheddar, sodium citrate, and water. That's how I usually make Mac and cheese. A+ would recommend picking some sodium citrate up on Amazon.

MicroSD cards are better, here. They're 250mg; a pigeon can transport 75g. That's 300 microSD cards, ignoring the weight of the SD card enclosure.

It's a real quote, from the 80s, published in a networking textbook.

It's amusing, but it's always been a serious and occasionally practical observation.

IPoAC is a joke about printing actual IP packets, sending them by pigeon, then scanning them.

You do the whole usual TCP ACK/SYN thing, but with pigeons.

It's not the same as 'sneakernet, but strapping microsd cards to a pigeon'. It's way, way sillier.

American cheese is one specific cheese made in America. It's essentially cheese made into a cheese sauce, then chilled back into a block. There's a number of quality levels of it based on how much they skimp on the cheese. And when eaten melted, it's actually pretty decent, if mild.

Most grocery stores in the US have two cheese sections. There's the cheap shredded/sliced cheeses, and then there's a separate section with the fancier cheeses, both foreign and domestic.

Cheese in the US is weird. We make both Velveeta and Humboldt fog. An American cheese won the World Cheese Awards a few years ago, but most of the cheese eaten in America is cheap, mild, mass produced, pre-sliced/shredded semisoft cheese. Most of it isn't "american cheese", though.

Am I missing something? Ctrl-f on https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Futurama_episodes doesnt turn up an episode with that name, and googling "they don't think it be like it is but it do Futurama" turns up nothing interesting.

As an aside, what Futurama episode did they quote him in?