> The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom performance: 20 to 30 FPS on Nintendo Switch

That would generally make it unnecessary to read the article.

But more generally, being among the first to figure things out isn't easy. Nowadays you can look at photographs and paintings like the works of 19th century academic painters and say "this is how realistic paintings are supposed to look", but back in the 15th century all you would be able to see is other people doing it not quite right. I feel like it takes a bit of genius to be the first to do something right, and frankly the average artist isn't that smart.

First of all, if you've got a sphere in deep space, its shadow side is going to be pure black, since there's pretty much no light bouncing around, and so there's no light to be reflected by the shadow side of the sphere. Now let's take an indoors scene: Imagine a room with red walls, a white floor, a single neutral (white light) ceiling lamp and a white sphere in the middle, what color is the sphere's shadow going to be? In the red-walled room, the shadows of the sphere would be subtly red — especially in the parts of the shadow where it's facing the walls more than the floor. That's because the light you see in the shadows of an object is light that has already been reflected from other surfaces in the room. This reflected light, in the case of the red walls, is red.

Of course in a more complicated scene you just approximate it. For an outside scene, you usually want to make your shadows only a bit darker and move your shadow color's hue a little closer to the color of the sky. But colors are difficult, you learn through experience really.

Highly skilled artists don't just think in 2D — they really do imagine the 3D scene that they're painting. It's hard to relate to but people with a lot of drawing/painting experience can "feel the form", as they say, when they draw. But it's true that figuring out the lighting is still difficult even then.

I do want to point out that if you look at talented painters from later in history than the early renaissance, they don't make nearly as many mistakes as the ones in the article, although of course the lighting of imaginary scenes is still always approximated and simplified.

You can see his actual workflow on his YouTube channel. He shows his painting process there but doesn't show his sketching process, but I hope that you believe that people are able to draw from imagination at least.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_ZLBKj_UlY

> Note sure what you are implying here, could you elaborate?

I just meant I was probably putting to much effort into an online discussion.

> I have no doubt that he started painting these over the reference photos, and then used the 'warp tool' in his painting program of choice to alter the proportions, a very common technique.

It's simply not a common technique at all. I'm not sure why you're making these statements because it feels like your knowledge of how illustrators work is extremely limited. I've heard of people photobashing -- which is when artists combine photo manipulation and digital painting to more easily produce realistic artworks. It's got mixed opinions about it and many consider it cheating but within the field of concept art it's common because it's quick and easy. However, there's huge amounts of people who can just draw and paint from sight or imagination. There's the hyperrealists who often act as a human photocopier, but artists who do stylized art of any kind are just people who can draw from imagination. I'm not sure why that's something you "very much doubt" to be quite honest. Just looking on YouTube for things like art timelapses, you can find huge amounts of people who draw entirely from imagination. Take Kim Jung Gi as a somewhat well known example. That guy was famous amongst illustrators for drawing complicated scenes directly in pen without any sketches. But there's really plenty of people that can do these things.

You seem to be under the impression that the average artist uses every shortcut available to get a good result, but that is simply not true. Most artists I know refuse to do anything like photobashing because they consider it cheating and because it isn't how they want to work, nevermind directly drawing on top of things. Drawing from sight isn't uncommon as a way to study art, so in case you're wondering why Sam Yang would be able to reproduce the frame so closely, it's because that's how artists study painting.

> Have you ever used programs like Photoshop, Krita et al

Yes, very often. The thing is: Just because it's possible does not mean it actually happens.

- Extending the slant roof in the background, it intersects with the left figure at around the height of the nose, but in the painting it intersects with the middle of her neck.

- Similarly the line of the fence on the left is at the height of her hairline, but in the painting it is at the height of the middle of the head, and also more slanted than in the frame.

- On the right side, the white part of the pillar is similarly too low compared to the figure.

- The pole in the background has a lot of things off with regards to size, thickness, or location too.

Essentially, everything is a bit off with regards to location, size and distance. It doesn't really make sense to paint over something and then still do everything differently from the base layer, so it was probably just drawn from reference the normal way -- probably having the picture on another screen and drawing it again from scratch, rather than directly painting over the frame.

I agree with regards to Warhol but that doesn't really establish it as very common amongst painters.

What are you talking about? I've been doing drawing and digital painting as a hobby for a long time and tracing is absolutely not "VERY common". I don't know anybody who has ever done this.

> fan art where they paint trademarked characters (also VERY common)

This is true in the sense that many artists do it (besides confusing trademark law and copyright law: the character designs are copyright-protected, trademarks protect brand names and logos). However, it is not fair use (as far as I'm aware at least, I'm not a lawyer). A rightholder can request for fanart to be removed and the artist would have to remove it. Rightsholders almost never do, because fanart doesn't hurt them.

There's also more examples of it reproducing copyright-protected images, I pulled the "bloodborne box art" prompt from this article: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.03860.pdf But I agree with you that reproducing images is very much not the intention of Stable Diffusion, and it's already very rare. The way I see it, the cases of Stable Diffusion reproducing images too closely is just a gotcha for establishing a court case.

I think when you make machines that automate away some people's passion and purpose in life, of course they're going to be upset. When, on top of that, the machine automating their work is a "conceptual parrot" that is parroting the concepts they invented without their permission, of course they're going to be pissed off.

Besides, whilst AI image generators don't steal exact elements from the training data, they do basically steal the artstyles and subject matter of illustrators, which takes them many years to foster. Imagine an illustrator of fantasy book covers hardly being able to find work anymore because some publishers figured out that, instead of hiring him, they could cheaply hire an unskilled person from a third world country to type the illustrator's name into an AI image generator so that it imitates his works, along with a few keywords for the book in question, until eventually something good pops out. That is currently considered fair use in US copyright law, but in my opinion it is nonetheless so unjust that it justifies calling it "stealing".

Notably I don't disagree with the idea of abolishing leap seconds, but I also don't think it's entirely agreeable to have the world's timekeeping standards changed solely because of engineering needs with regards to Unix time. In my opinion it's somewhat silly to have the timekeeping standard of the world changed because someone at Bell labs made an unfortunate design decision regarding Unix time, rather than changing Unix time itself.

The fact that accuracy is often not important is also crucial to my proposal of legacy Unix time, because legacy Unix time would eventually go out of sync with the rotation of the Earth just like TAI. In almost all cases this would practically be an aesthetic bug where dates in old user interfaces would be a few seconds off from the real date, and therefore not particularly harmful.