Rendering Engineer at @disneyanimation working on Disney’s Hyperion Renderer and more. Previously @pixar, @dreamworks, @cornell, @penn. Views here are my own.
Burbank, CA
Joined February 2013
- Tweets5.7K
- Following1.2K
- Followers7.7K
- Likes8.7K
Pinned Tweet
To new followers of mine: sorry to disappoint, but I mostly just post about nerdy graphics stuff. Sometimes I promote stuff from my day job at Disney Animation. Recently I posted some takes on AI, but I'm stopping that since I don't have much useful to add to the discourse.
When I was a younger, wading through obscure incantations to get my OS to talk to the hardware was fun.
Now I have a ton of stuff in life that I care way more about than that and I just want a computer that works. I don't ever want to waste time on getting my OS to work.
Have used Linux for decades. Traditional, mutable distros are powerful, but loaded with footguns.
Footguns that usually would go off when you were trying to enable very basic features (like audio).
This tide is shifting after the advent of robust, immutable distros.
I've been especially impressed by Bazzite and SteamOS, where even historically tricky A/V features, like HDR, VRR, and 7.1 audio all (more or less) "just work", out of the box.
I mean, it very literally is not an IMAX display. The Duo’s screen surface area is about 175 sq cm, and Citywalk’s IMAX screen is 430 sq m, so if we want to be literal about it, the Duo is literally 0.004% of an IMAX screen.
Still a cool aspect ratio choice though.
The city where I live is building a new central public library, and to my enormous pleasant surprise, they picked a great architecture firm to do it! They picked SOM, who have built some spectacularly beautiful modern libraries. Pretty excited about this!
In this World Series, I’m rooting for Game 7 and extra innings, and then may the best team win. Just imagine how memorable it is going to be for whichever team wins to win their very first ring in a Game 7.
Someone made a Blender plugin that makes Blender look/behave exactly like Maya, and holy cow it really does look/behave exactly like Maya.
This is awesome for people like me who have like 15+ years of Maya baked into muscle memory.
5hyuns.github.io/maya-workfl…
I realized that the original English voice cast in Bluey now sounds weird to me because my daughter watches Bluey almost entirely in Cantonese and Mandarin, so I’ve gotten used to those voices instead of the original Queensland voices.
A favorite category of broken render of mine is what I call "laser eyes": it's when one end of the eyelashes is correctly pinned to a character's face, but for some reason the other end is located at like 3.4028e+38 units away. You can imagine what it looks like.
Normally this type of thing is a bugged render for us (pipeline didn't export the skin or exported it in the wrong place, or visibility flag was broken), but for Hexed, we got to put it in the movie!
During the preseason I initially thought a 14 win season was possible, and then over the past few losses I thought that maybe they could still turn it around, but now reading that this was allowed to happen… I’m now on team fire the entire medical, training, and coaching staff.
In yet another case of Intel having the right idea at the wrong time and not having the patience to see it through or the vision to execute well and therefore losing out on a gold mine… Optane would have been a perfect fit today for giant inference servers.
Ok hear me out, upcoming Macs are rumored to have a 512GB RAM (!) option. What if we just made a machine that ditched main memory? It'd be a herculean effort, plus making RAM non-volatile would suck in many ways, but fixable through AI at writing time or runtime, maybe better suited for a new generation of OSes
The giant upsides are tremendous low-level kernel + software simplifications, no more disk roundtrip, 100x throughput without caching, etc? Imagine ditching file system in favor of pure in-mem data (still standardizable at the boundary) then spill the rest to cloud like today
I’m sure I’m not the first person to have this realization, but it just occurred to me today that the Muppets and professional wrestling fundamentally operate on the same principle.
A few years ago Autodesk audited my personal hobby Maya Indie license. I had to send a bunch of stuff, all of which was very goofy because I had it installed on one computer and had zero revenue because it was a hobby.
I've ramped up my Blender adoption a ton ever since.
This is a wild approach, @autodesk.
We’re a small business paying $380 per user, per month. We’ve been paying customers for over a decade, and we make a deliberate effort to honor the license agreements for every product we use. Your software already requires authentication and an assigned license. What, specifically, prompted this email?
Earlier today, I had two conversations on two separate podcast episodes about your direction with Fusion and why cloud-based API access makes sense for agentic MEP workflows. I was making the case for Autodesk. I think the product direction is right based on recent posts from @andrew_anagnost.
Our company has been deciding where to invest our development effort: integrate our custom cloud agent harness into Autodesk, build on an open-source platform, or adopt one of the emerging cloud alternatives. That decision will lock in years of internal development and software spending. This decision is also central to our plans to expand @PermitZIP nationwide.
An email like this becomes part of that decision. So does the time we have to spend responding to it.For more than a decade, we’ve paid for anywhere from 5 to 30 licenses each year. Autodesk is our single largest SaaS expense. This is a heck of a way to make our next platform decision easier.
Starting next week, we’ll begin transitioning away from Autodesk products. We have nothing to hide and will cooperate with the audit. We’ll also be directing our future spending toward companies that earn our confidence as partners.
I hope your audit goes well.
The new airport near where I live was completed on time, on budget, to the exact spec that we voted for, and the whole project went from groundbreaking to open in about 2 years.
By US standards this is already amazing, but I live in California, so this is straight up a miracle.
They simply were the better team in every way than the Dodgers. I hope they go on to win it all!
ALT Milwaukee Brewers National League Champs Postseason 2026, Budweiser x MLB Five cutouts (going clockwise from the middle) of Jackson Chourio, William Contreras, Brice Turang, Abner Uribe and Christian Yelich in cream-colored Brewers uniforms in front of a dark blue and silver background with the National League Championship Trophy as well.
I wonder what would happen if you used an approach like this to run more general code on TPUs / Tensor Cores.