There was a nicotine + adhd thread today in c/[email protected] and I got to write a few paragraphs about my favorite subject: anything tobacco.
I don’t know particularly what is so cool about it, but I just can’t get enough information on the subject. Old fashioned snuffboxes, cigarette boxes and holders, pipes… And the rich history and culture of each brand and style and how it evolved in every part of the world is just so interesting to me.
So it made me curious about what are some of the other more unconventional special interests around this community
I love non-standard computer rendering methods.
Most games use rasterisation which takes a number of triangles (polygons) and calculates where on the screen it should be.
An alternative that’s becoming more common is ray tracing which starts with the screen coordinates and and calculates what’s in that direction.
Rasterisation is a really clever trick to do more with less powerful computers, and was the only way to do any kind of realtime graphics in the early days of computers.
Ray Tracing takes much more computing power, but allows for interesting things like non-euclidian geometry, 360 degree field of view, and picture-in-picture with no loss of performance (compared to ray tracing without these additions).