Ray Tracer in SQL • Hacker News Board

Re: Ray Tracer in SQL

#11

Post by Moosdijk » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 6:52 PM UTC

sublinear wrote: post #9

agustechbro wrote: post #6

In the Age of AI coding, this lovely cool demos are no longer interesting anymore. I use to appreciate them by the craftsmanship and hacking aptitude they required, but now AI took away that joy of watch this for me.

That feeling has nothing to do with AI. That's how art has always been. Most of these were bad at being art even before AI. A good reference for exactly what I mean would be the demoscene (both back then and now). You can watch a thousand of those and be totally underwhelmed, but every now and then you get one that totally blows your mind. There's nothing wrong with seeking novelty, but there is something wrong being…

Who are you replying to?

Re: Ray Tracer in SQL

#12

Post by mghackerlady » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 6:54 PM UTC

Look, I love a good hack, but just. No. Why would you ever want to do this. The intersection of skill and masochism needed for this shouldn't exist and yet it does

Re: Ray Tracer in SQL

#13

Post by bigmadshoe » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 7:17 PM UTC

agustechbro wrote: post #6

In the Age of AI coding, this lovely cool demos are no longer interesting anymore. I use to appreciate them by the craftsmanship and hacking aptitude they required, but now AI took away that joy of watch this for me.

Absolutely. These things are inherently pointless - what makes them cool is the human ingenuity required to achieve them. Remove that and it’s totally uninteresting.

Re: Ray Tracer in SQL

#14

Post by JSR_FDED » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 7:23 PM UTC

How do I join this awesome project?

Re: Ray Tracer in SQL

#15

Post by srean » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 8:07 PM UTC

Jgoauh wrote: post #3

Nice, but why ?

To know that it can be done.

Re: Ray Tracer in SQL

#16

Post by mmmlinux » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 8:10 PM UTC

I love all the "But Why?!?" and "It's LLM so it doesn't count" comments.

Re: Ray Tracer in SQL

#17

Post by nickpeterson » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 9:26 PM UTC

cma256 wrote: post #2

Very cool project. Next they should create a database with SQL. Querying my database's database with my database's SQL's SQL would be trippy.

SQL in SQL has never occurred to me.

Re: Ray Tracer in SQL

#18

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 11:06 AM UTC

agustechbro wrote: post #6

In the Age of AI coding, this lovely cool demos are no longer interesting anymore. I use to appreciate them by the craftsmanship and hacking aptitude they required, but now AI took away that joy of watch this for me.

Indeed, I am just waiting for the last drop, when AI tooling becomes good enough for handling machine code directly.

Note that a lot of programming can already be done via orchestration flows calling into mcp tools (replacing classical microservices).

All the no code/low code tools have migrated into it as their evolution.

Re: Ray Tracer in SQL

#19

Post by zX41ZdbW » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 11:21 PM UTC

mmmlinux wrote: post #16

I love all the "But Why?!?" and "It's LLM so it doesn't count" comments.

It is needed to find bottlenecks in the engine and optimize customer queries. For example, it gives things like: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/pull/108757

You can read more about this approach in my presentation: https://presentations.clickhouse.com/2026-openhouse-sf/great... and video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmS7VopaqNg

Re: Ray Tracer in SQL

#20

Post by zX41ZdbW » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 11:21 PM UTC

Jgoauh wrote: post #3

Nice, but why ?

It is needed to find bottlenecks in the engine and optimize customer queries. For example, it gives things like: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/pull/108757

You can read more about this approach in my presentation: https://presentations.clickhouse.com/2026-openhouse-sf/great... and video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmS7VopaqNg