> Likewise, the fact that people differ in their intellectual capabilities from birth is inconvenient for liberal egalitarians.
It is? Egalitarianism is usually considered to be the position that all humans have equal moral worth, not the position that all humans have equivalent physical and mental capacities. Not even actually existing Communists believed the latter, as far as I’m aware.
But just to double check:
> Egalitarian doctrines are generally characterized by the idea that all humans are equal in fundamental worth or moral status. As such, all people should be accorded equal rights and treatment under the law.
Nor does the existence of special laws or practices concerning low (or high, for that matter) IQ people pose any great obstacle to egalitarianism, assuming the laws or practices in question do not infringe upon moral personhood.
Rawls is a typical egalitarian philosopher and he takes care to account for these natural variations in the human condition during both the classic _A Theory of Justice_ and the modern “restatement” in _Justice as Fairness_.
> If you are interested, I implore you to read this blog from the statistician, Cosma Shalizi, of CMU. His explanation is far better than anything I could attempt to make.
Ah, this essay is very, very good. I’m not surprised, Shalizi is a genius, but I hadn’t read this particular one before. Thanks for the link.
> Would any of these reveals actually be "stunning", frankly I've assumed the worst for so long that the response will be more like "wow, that all they're doing?"
You’re far more cynical than the typical citizen, who Ryder is addressing.
> If you can't move things via water in wartime, you don't have an empire.
Exactly, the feeble American shipbuilding industry has been an existential risk waiting to explode for a generation. But corruption and profits speak louder than national security here.
I don’t know much about raytracing but it’s probably tricky to orchestrate all those asin calls so that the input and output memory is aligned and contiguous. My uneducated intuition is that there’s little regularity as to which pixels will take which branches and will end up requiring which asin calls, but I might be wrong.
Instead of an `_objects`, I might try for a `_spheres`, `_boxes`, etc. (Or just `_lists` still using the virtual dispatch but for each list, rather than each object.) The `asin` seems to be used just for spheres. Within my `Spheres::closest_hit` (note plural), I'd work to SIMDify it. (I'd try to SIMDify the others too of course but apparently not with `asin`.) I think it's doable: https://github.com/define-private-public/PSRayTracing/blob/8...
I don't know much about ray tracers either (having only written a super-naive one back in college) but this is the general technique used to speed up games, I believe. Besides enabling SIMD, it's more cache-efficient and minimizes dispatch overhead.
edit: there's also stuff that you can hoist in this impl. Restructuring as SoA isn't strictly necessary to do that, but it might make it more obvious and natural. As an example, this `ray_dir.length_squared()` is the same for the whole list. You'd notice that when iterating over the spheres. https://github.com/define-private-public/PSRayTracing/blob/8...
It comes down to how "coherent" the rays are, and how much effort (compute) you want to put into sorting them into batches of rays.
With "primary" ray-tracing (i.e. camera rays, rays from surfaces to area lights), it's quite easy to batch them up and run SIMD operations on them.
But once you start doing global illumination, with rays bouncing off surfaces in all directions (and with complex materials, with multiple BSDF lobes, where lobes can be chosen stochastically), you start having to put a LOT of effort into sorting and batching rays such that they all (within a batch) hit the same objects or are going in roughly the same direction.
When I was working on this project, I was trying to restrict myself to the architecture of the original Ray Tracing in One Weekend book series. I am aware that things are not as SIMD friendly and that becomes a major bottle neck. While I am confident that an architectural change could yield a massive performance boost, it's something I don't want to spend my time on.
I think it's also more fun sometimes to take existing systems and to try to optimize them given whatever constraints exist. I've had to do that a lot in my day job already.
I can relate to setting an arbitrary challenge for myself. fwiw, don't know where you draw the line of an architectural change, but I think that switching AoS -> SoA may actually be an approachably-sized mechanical refactor, and then taking advantage of it to SIMDify object lists can be done incrementally.
The value of course is contingent on there being a decent number of objects of a given type in the list rather than just a huge number of rays being sent to a small number of objects; I didn't evaluate that. If it's the other way around, the structure would be better flipped, and I don't know how reasonable that is with bounces (that maybe then aren't all being evaluated against the same objects?).
Historically, the Protestant and Catholic churches invested very heavily in liberal arts education in America; initially, more than the state did. The university (and even the liberal arts college) as an institution isn’t fundamentally incompatible with Christianity.
To play devil’s advocate since I’ve been a little energetic in this thread already, I’ll go ahead and agree that they’re probably correct about single-income, two-parent homes having better outcomes for children.
I disagree that it should always be the woman staying home (or always the same parent through the children’s adolescence, or that both parents should have different genders, or) but I think the premise is sound.
They’re also objectively correct that women should, on average, be having children earlier (but wrong when they want it to be before the age of majority, or when they want to lower that age, or permit child marriage, or want to deny that couple sound sex education and medical care.)
Just to also play the devils advocate, why SHOULD women be having children earlier. Its very much a very personal choice in their own freedom. I don't think this should be a political take at all. In this decision there is nothing any Government should have a say in.
> Just to also play the devils advocate, why SHOULD women be having children earlier.
Lower prevalence of complications, lower risk of death, lower risk of birth defects.
> Its very much a very personal choice in their own freedom.
We don’t disagree.
> I don't think this should be a political take at all. In this decision there is nothing any Government should have a say in.
Unfortunately, Americans don’t live in that world. The government makes decisions that impact the health of pregnant mothers and children all the time.
> It's not something government should regulate but it is something that government policy should incentivize.
Every time this comes up, there are numerous instances reported of welfare states in Europe, Asia, etc. trying this and it not working.
The west, and especially the US is falling out of love with republicans and liberal democracy as they learn that some problems need to solved with an iron fist.
The "iron fist" is merely creating new problems at an alarming rate. Sure, in theory a wise benevolent monarch could institute reforms that are hard in a democracy. In practice, the current crop is nothing but performative grifters and their cheerleaders are unwilling to draw the distinction.
Having a single-income parent in a two-parent home was the norm for most of US history. It's also still the norm outside of the US. Where is the evidence that children are worse off because both parents work? Kids (5+) barely spend any time at home during a typical work day, so I'm not sure what "they" are correct about.
How is it objectively correct that women should, on average, have children earlier? Sorry, but this is purely a subjective statement and women are free to agree or disagree with that statement.
Having been raised by my grandparents, I personally believe the only secret for success is to show up for children, and love them and provide them a stable environment to thrive in. Everything else is just window dressing.
> Having a single-income parent in a two-parent home was the norm for most of US history.
You dont really have income and non income on a household farm. You have patriarch making decisions and everybody else working. This included slave owning farms where she had managing/organizing responsibilities.
Also, women in lower classes needed income and did worked for it. They did not had professional occupations and they were responsible for children, so it was things that fit into those boundaries - low income non professional work. But it was not really done for funsies. Then again, kids as small as 5 were left to handle by themselves and older kids were supposed to contribute.
It is really incomparable to being stay at home parent now, isolated and literally having nothing useful to do except existing and playing.
Sorry, I thought it was clear from the context that these are widely-held, American right-wing opinions that I happen to agree with.
> How is it objectively correct that women should, on average, have children earlier?
There are a few specific birth defects that are more common in younger mothers but most become much more common as the mother ages, and the overall risk of complication & death increases with maternal age.
> Having been raised by my grandparents, I personally believe the only secret for success is to show up for children, and love them and provide them a stable environment to thrive in. Everything else is just window dressing.
That’s a great sentiment but of little practical use in deciding policy.
Ah, sorry, I guess I'm not sure what it is you're actually debating needs to be fixed. Are children being born today with more birth defects and we (society) now want to concern ourselves with the issue that if parents want to have children, they need to plan for it and start earlier? Is that what a supposed objective policy would try to address?
Men also have a clock and birth defects are known to go up the older they are. So this can't be limited to women regardless of policy decisions.
I'm also not sure there could be any actual conversative government policy that could fix what is ultimately a financial incentives problem. Lots of parents would start earlier if they were able to have things like home ownership and space to raise kids in, and education systems that don't skew towards needing upper middle class levels of access to. Any potential new idea with any realistic long term fix would end up looking quite progressive and in our current hostile environment become a no-go for any conservative political appointee.
Should've added to my comment, aside from the explicitly conservative colleges/unis, and seminaries. Filter those out, and how many do you have left? Still probably more than I was expecting, but still not many in the grand scheme of things.
It is? Egalitarianism is usually considered to be the position that all humans have equal moral worth, not the position that all humans have equivalent physical and mental capacities. Not even actually existing Communists believed the latter, as far as I’m aware.
But just to double check:
> Egalitarian doctrines are generally characterized by the idea that all humans are equal in fundamental worth or moral status. As such, all people should be accorded equal rights and treatment under the law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egalitarianism
Nor does the existence of special laws or practices concerning low (or high, for that matter) IQ people pose any great obstacle to egalitarianism, assuming the laws or practices in question do not infringe upon moral personhood.
Rawls is a typical egalitarian philosopher and he takes care to account for these natural variations in the human condition during both the classic _A Theory of Justice_ and the modern “restatement” in _Justice as Fairness_.
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