Google's new "AI overview" takes up about half of the screen on a phone and cannot be disabled. This is one of the most user-hostile choices they've ever made.
Thank you! I used to use DuckDuckGo, but I had to switch to Google as DDG became overrun with LLM-generated results in the past 2 years. Google has some ability to reject them.
Not letting you disable it may be user-hostile, but it also helps Google product managers to inflate their KPIs, so it's impossible to say if it's bad or not.
The annoying thing is that 95% of the time it’s not at all what I want, but 5% of the time it’s pretty good. But if I had the option to expand it or something, I’d probably never do that and miss out on the 5% of the time that it’s good.
Start with the desire - we want to have an algebra of 2D affine transformations with composition and (usually) inversion.
We can represent this with the trick of "homogeneous coordinates", using 3D vectors with the last entry 1 and 3x3 matrices with the last row [0, 0, 1].
This is convenient because both mathematicians and programmers are familiar with linear transforms and matrices. It's in the comfort zone. There are many libraries.
However, it's wasteful to store all those extra 1's and 0's in memory. You can always replace the matrices with
class Affine2D {
Matrix2x2 linear;
Vector2 shift;
};
and overload all the algebraic operators, including multiplication with 2D vectors.
Thanks to LLMs, the death of stylish writing in non-literary fields is assured. I agree, many people seem to view writing as a burden.
I have only met a handful of people that can lay out a complex argument from scratch in speech alone. For most of us, writing is thinking. If you avoid writing, your ideas will remain murky forever.
From my experience with vispy, it is more limited than pygfx. I mean, you can always use gloo to get whatever you want but the "built ins" are much more limited than what pygfx seems to have. I really like vispy anyways, I think this seems like an evolution with some lessons learnt from vispy.
This is indeed one of the major differences. Many of the problems that are plaguing Vispy are related to OpenGL. The use of wgpu solves many of them.
Also, wgpu forces you to prepare visualizations in pipeline objects, which at drawtime require just a few calls. In OpenGL there is way more work for each object being visualized at drawtime. This overhead is particularly bad on Python. So this particular advantage of wgpu is extra advantageous for Python.
Apart from being based on wgpu, Pygfx also has a better design IMO. Korijn deserves the credit for this. It's inspired by ThreeJS, based on the idea to keep things modular.
We deliberately don't try to create an API that allows you to write visualizations with as few lines as possible. We focus on a flexible generic API instead, even if it's sometimes a bit verbose.
