lofty

If you're not aware of the concept of car dependency, it's the idea that in many parts of the world (notably, but not limited to the US and Canada), there is no reasonably viable way for someone to travel that does not involve that person owning and driving a car, and that municipal and national infrastructure has been built around making this the only choice - billions get put into highway and road infrastructure and expansion, with barely anything for smaller forms of mobility, cycling or public transportation.

Car dependency is bad because cars are a fundamentally inefficient mode of transportation with a great toll on the environment, their roads take a lot of money and resources out of local and national governments to maintain them. But also really importantly - they rob people of having the freedom to choose alternate means of transportation that might suit their lifestyle better, or might be cheaper and more convenient for them to participate in.

I'm starting to think of the status of Android¹ phones and iPhones in society as emerging in a similar situation. For instance, in my city, you can't use street parking or rent a bike if you don't have either of these phones. I was thinking about this when curiously looking at the recently-announced Light Phone III, which has a fully-custom OS for privacy reasons. My brother pointed out that it's cool, but he would have to give up on the city's bike rental scheme that he uses a lot if he wanted to use one of these.

The EU DMA touches on this a bit - the people who make these platforms shouldn't get to dictate what people do on them and crush competition, but doesn't get to the fundamental problem of the actual devices in the first place. At least any company with the right skills, tools, capital and compliance can make a car that is street legal. It's not easy, but it's possible and there are recent new examples. Nobody can legally make a phone that can run Android software that is not dependent on the people who make and run the services that are key to making it work (usually Google), and nobody other than Apple is making an iPhone, and there's no chance of any viable competition at any point in the near future. We don't just have a smartphone dependency, but an iPhone and Android dependency.

Certain utilities are necessary in society and they should be easily or freely available, I would consider Phone, Internet and World Wide Web as public utilities - they are technological but are ostensibly open standards that have significant societal benefit that can (at least hypothetically) be taken on by a wide range of stakeholders and organisations, iPhone and Android intrinsically are not; they are dense layers of technologies, hardware and software patents, kernels and APIs, often protected by international copyright law.

You know how they say "Even if you think you're straight it's worth interrogating your sexuality, and even if you think you're cis it's worth interrogating your gender, because even if you choose to stay cis/straight you will feel so much more affirmed in who you are"?
Well, can't say I ever experienced that, because I'm very gay and very non-binary, but that's always sounded like pretty good advice to me.

But lately I've been doing a lot of thinking about where I fall on the singlet/plural spectrum, and every single time that happens, I decide I woulf rather see myself as one single person.
And I gotta say: it rules. It rules to be one person because I chose to instead of because it's the default. I do feel so much more affirmed in who I am now that I've given the subject a ton of thought and chose to be me the way I am me over and over again. I feel so much more grounded and confident and I feel like I know myself so much better now.

Thinking about your identity and who you want to be rules actually.

If you've used a ray/path tracer you know that the output always starts out noisy - rays are very discrete things so you need to trace a lot of them if you want things like soft shadows, global illumination, depth of field and motion blur. The noise comes from the fact that scattered rays are sent towards different directions for each pixel.

But there's nothing stopping you from just, not doing that

With the piece above (Danmarksfärjan), it was extremely important to me that the smooth plastic surfaces should appear smooth in the final render, rather than having visible noise. To that end, I used the exact same unscrambling technique above (albeit implemented by hand in my rendering framework rather than in Blender), trading off high-frequency noise for lower-frequency artifacts that are visible in the shadows/reflections if you zoom in close.