Besides it’s good to take things slow when face to face with people.

This is so strange. To my mind the only purpose companies hire engineers is to support business. The staff engineer should not need a project manager to tell what is interesting for business aspects - even though the goals are likely mostly technical.

I do realize this does not hold up always. But to me if you can't provide some reasoning for your work in business metrics you are participating in an academic exercise.

For processes that are scalable, well known and industrial, profit motive actually does provide results.

The question is more of are there bottlenecks of skill and maybe secret sauce (eg something like ASML).

I suck at math myself so can relate. But actually the math you need to learn to be effective at graphics is mostly about understanding _a very small subset_ of a bunch of concepts (such as how 2x2, 3x3 and 4x4 matrices work) and one is set for life,

so I think it’s good to give the formal mathemathical explanation and then Gilbert Strang what it all means.

But camera transform is so unintuitive it really helps if the student tries to work it out for themselves why it works.

For me it’s really weird anyone would write code and _not_ start from reading all of introductory computer graphics literature because it’s so awesome but I realize I’m the outlier here.

I mean _it's just work_. You don't need to invent anything. Just do the work.

What _is_ hard is when people run after silver bullets to avoid all this work.

Because people who don't understand software decide it would be cheaper to implement something only once. Or someone who does not really understand what they are doing insists that same C++ code runs automatically on all platforms.

AI has given the software engineers permit from the beancounters to do the sane thing.

Good software development orgs _have always_ done proper per platform ports.

Also - there is nothing wrong in supporting only one platform as such!

Once this is accepted the rest becomes easier as you are not wasting time trying to find a silver bullet.

I mean it’s then ”just normal work”.

This is wrong way around.

If you don’t support the platform your app runs on using the native api:s to the hilt your port is just bad.

If you actually want to support multiple platforms _you actually need to support_ them from the ground up.

This is speaking industrially and businesswise. A professional software business always has per-platform implementation resources. Or they have just one platform. Or they pretend they are multiplatform and then _everybody_ _daily_ fights with the problems this causes.

Obviously those elements that can be portable should be. It’s like Einsteins simplicity maxim - your codebase should be as portable as can be but not more.

” It’s even worse for CUDA…”

No these are just the business and market constraints. If this does not make sense for your offering then don’t use it. This feels like false FOMO - CUDA is not a silver bullet but it might be a specific solution to a specific problem.

Practical computing is not and never has been an abstract pure concept. It’s about making machines built by corporations to do usefull things at scale.

There is no ”non proprietary” computing unless you make your own stack.

SketchUp does not really have that either if you are expecting something else than triangles. Since sketchup has polygons you could argue they are brep but even then only accidentally.

Architecture works with a bit different ruleset than mechanical cad.

People design all sort of buildable things in SketchUp and it's just about dragging polygons around.

You _may_ need accurate surface if you run your model to CAM.

But to this day lot of manufacturing is still done via drawings and there the only thing that matters is that can you draw some type of lines and attach clear dimensions to them. So the shapes don't necessarily need to be accurate for all flows since they are more like topological hints to the person reading the drawing rather than accurate replica of the thing to manufacture.

I just released a new version with lots of new modeling tools: https://adashape.com/blog/alpha-0-2-0/

As a highlight the lofting tool is pretty fun complement as it allows combining multiple drawings in an intuitive way to define a certain category of complex 3D surfaces without too much effort (https://adashape.com/manual/adashape/en/shp-loft/).

I've been chipping away at manual as well - and found it was a really good idea to write my changelogs in product voice as I can more or less recycle that copy text into the manual verbatim https://adashape.com/manual/adashape/en/

(Previously featured on HN in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47638498 )

If you enjoy doing a thing in specific way, nobody is going to take that away.

Chess is a great example. More players than ever, perfectly obsolete if you compare yourself to a computer, but that does not hurt.

If the AI takes your livelihood - that hurts. But I did not read this to be a complaint on that.

Whatever AI is, it _is_ a huge democratizing influence in all fields.

How is the person supposed to know your opposing point of view if you don't tell it?