81–90 of 125 posts
So, there is huge motivation to put in “just a bit more effort”.
And, thus you get Crunch Time in gamedev!
Judging by the comments here, I'm the only one, but I have no idea what he's talking about. Even the abstract: > The act of creation is fractal exploration–exploitation under optimal feedback control. When resolution increases the portion of parameter space that doesn't make the artifact worse (acceptance volume) collapses. Verification latency and rate–distortion combine into a precision tax that scales superlinearl…
Changing the words is going to lose some of the low-amplitude frequencies but I'll try.
It's a model for why (call the following X) things get harder when you try to make them more perfect. Let's take X for granted.
You can ask yourself "why is X true?". One model you could have for this is the "finishing touches" model: as a thing gets closer to perfection, identifying imperfections and rectifying them is harder simply out of search constraints (the less of something the harder they are to find).
Another model you could have is the "dimensional model". A thing is great when it's great along many axes. The more dimensions you add, the harder it is to search in them for perfection. Related: the curse of dimensionality.
And here he posits a new model, the "resolution model": the finer the look at what is good, the more 'options' you have at each stage to choose from; it's not just that you make the broad and then refine within, but that you are actually building the refined thing from the beginning.
He then tries to show how some kinds of creation tolerate movement in the parameter space better.
No model is perfect, so each of these ideas captures some attribute of the difficulty and maps it to a mental structure that is more easily manipulable by the modeler.
The typical owl drawing is a few circles and then the more owly bits, and then the feathers on the owly bits, and then the shadows on the feathers on the owly bits. And this is a method to reduce the kind of problem he's talking about. But if you want to make the perfect owl, perhaps there is an element of making your circle just so, already accounting for the shadows on the feathers on the owly bits before any of the precursors are made.
Anyway, this is imperfect because I am necessarily shaving off the hair on the ball to show you it's spherical. And his entire model is that the hair determines the ball.
After this you get to the commercial market for creative works. In a market that with a lot of options for consumers that are equally accessible, similarly priced, and infinitely replicable, power-law-curve nonlinear returns on quality is the norm. So, there is huge motivation to put in “just a bit more effort”. And, thus you get Crunch Time in gamedev!
Bands and artists do sometimes record a banger very quickly, and no, the effort is not in muscle memory or practice. If it was in muscle memory it would be repeatable feat, and it really isn't. Some work is technically polished and you can see/hear the effort that went into it. But there's a point where extra effort makes the work less good. Music starts to sound stale and overproduced, art loses some of its directne…
As my old art teacher used to say, "You work on something and it gets better and better and then it turns to shit."
Judging by the comments here, I'm the only one, but I have no idea what he's talking about. Even the abstract: > The act of creation is fractal exploration–exploitation under optimal feedback control. When resolution increases the portion of parameter space that doesn't make the artifact worse (acceptance volume) collapses. Verification latency and rate–distortion combine into a precision tax that scales superlinearl…
I think you're just not the audience. Changing the words is going to lose some of the low-amplitude frequencies but I'll try. It's a model for why (call the following X) things get harder when you try to make them more perfect. Let's take X for granted. You can ask yourself "why is X true?". One model you could have for this is the "finishing touches" model: as a thing gets closer to perfection, identifying imperfect…
So we must live in the world where those of us who discover a point in ideaspace draw imperfect maps until the one who can draw a good map arrives at the same point. And perhaps some points aren't even well-mappable by the discoverers. And perhaps the communicator never realizes he has arrived at the point he was told about and so never speaks of it.
We fumble in the dark desert for an oasis. Unlucky universe to be in.
Isn't there simply a human tendency to try and find a magic formula in what is simply survivor bias? As creative projects (software, painting...) we finish or satisfactorily achieve relatively few items. And except for the most repetitive of us, these achievements are pretty different. Wide space, chaos, few satisfactory products by comparison. That doesn't bode well for "magic recipe". All the way to "rules of thumb…
I follow a few landscape photographers on YouTube and really enjoy watching them go out into the field (whether it's an actual field or mountain or beach). They've got their art (at least their own style) so dialed in, that the technical details, the subject, the composition, those are almost a forgone conclusion. What matters at that point is light. And light is luck. The difference between an average image and an o…
Yeah, that doesn't mean we can't get lucky and run into the perfect circumstance. It means that when that circumstance happens, we'll be there ready to harvest it. Similarly, "the best camera is the one you carry".
And yes, these anti- magic formulas that dispell the idea of magic formula, are magic formulas.
> And when fortune smiles on them, they get positively giddy.
Yes! This is a great pleasure. Satisfaction. There is one series in particular I work on that operates like this. I'm just ready for it - don't even look for it, not anymore - but when I run into the "circumstance", that's a great feeling. And I'm ready for it.
In engineering or software there is still that idea of the back-burner stuff that does need to be done. This idea of staging or starting what needs to be done at the end of the previous day. So that you have something relatively mindless to get you launched the next morning. I also know that anti- "magic rule", even though it's one I have a hard time keeping to.
Bands and artists do sometimes record a banger very quickly, and no, the effort is not in muscle memory or practice. If it was in muscle memory it would be repeatable feat, and it really isn't. Some work is technically polished and you can see/hear the effort that went into it. But there's a point where extra effort makes the work less good. Music starts to sound stale and overproduced, art loses some of its directne…
As my old art teacher used to say, "You work on something and it gets better and better and then it turns to shit."
90% of the project takes 90% of the time and the other 10% of the project takes another 90% of the time.