Do you have advice for building up this network for graphics development?
I'm a Master's student building a custom rendering stack with wgpu and it's difficult to meet people interested in specific skills like rendering.
This sucks. This page makes it clear this is the motivation for "Ads on Maps", as they talk about it prominently here - they are now directly selling the attention of their device consumers to their business customers.
I guess they were doing that before in the App Store, which is of course also awful.
It would be useful if the site listed whether these had been standardized outside of Chrome yet.
It’s hard to delineate which of these are Chrome features or actual web standards. And it’s therefore hard to blame either Safari or Firefox for not supporting them if they’re not standardized yet.
This is a huge list of "features from Chromium", which aren't really standard or even a thing outside of its ecosystem (the fact that both Firefox and Safari lack them is the obvious giveaway).
I'm happy that Firefox doesn't expose Bluetooth, NFC or similar stuff to websites: the browser is huge enough without needing to mediate even more access to local hardware.
It's unclear how some of these would even work for other Browser. E.g.: contacts. What data source would you use? I keep my contacts as vcard files in ~/contacts, but other folks might use a remove CalDAV server, a web-based GUI, or data stored in SQL which can be read by some other native client (I think KDE does this).
Here’s what Mozilla has to say about Web NFC, for example:
> We believe Web NFC poses risks to users security and privacy because of the wide range of functionality of the existing NFC devices on which it would be supported, because there is no system for ensuring that private information is not accidentally exposed other than relying on user consent, and because of the difficulty of meaningfully asking the user for permission to share or write data when the browser cannot explain to the user what is being shared or written.
And here’s what they have to say about Web Bluetooth:
> This API provides access to the Generic Attribute Profile (GATT) of Bluetooth, which is not the lowest level of access that the specifications allow, but its generic nature makes it impossible to clearly evaluate. Like WebUSB there is significant uncertainty regarding how well prepared devices are to receive requests from arbitrary sites. The generic nature of the API means that this risk is difficult to manage. The Web Bluetooth CG has opted to only rely on user consent, which we believe is not sufficient protection. This proposal also uses a blocklist, which will require constant and active maintenance so that vulnerable devices aren't exploited. This model is unsustainable and presents a significant risk to users and their devices.
The fact is that Google wrote these specifications, couldn’t convince any other rendering engine to implement them, and somehow it’s Apple’s fault the rest of the world rejected their idea.
These are not web standards, they are Blink-only APIs that Google decided to build unilaterally. The web is not defined by whatever Google wants. Web standards are supposed to be arrived at through consensus, and the consensus is that these things should not be part of the web.
>and because of the difficulty of meaningfully asking the user for permission to share or write data when the browser cannot explain to the user what is being shared or written
So fucking moronic privacy virtue signalling BS holding technology back.
They're doing the same thing with Web Bluetooth.
"hurr de durr we can't ask permission" Yes you fucking can, you give me a modal to confirm leaving the current page and being redirected to a new one (in some cases, but not all), you give me a pop up when a site asks to send shitty notifications (as they all do).
An app can sit and use nfc/bluetooth in the background all day long...a site can only do it while I actually have it open in the browser and presumably it's foregrounded etc.
It's really, really NOT hard for them to implement this stuff & I feel like it's less "this tech that has been in phones for more than a decade is unsafe!" and more "we need to cry about features that Chrome is pushing for us to support because otherwise we're letting them lead".
>The fact is that Google wrote these specifications, couldn’t convince any other rendering engine to implement them, and somehow it’s Apple’s fault the rest of the world rejected their idea.
Apple is on the W3C board that gets to decide which APIs become standards. They are preventing these APIs from becoming standards. They have an interest to forbid Web Bluetooth and NFC from becoming standards, because they profit heavily from native apps on their iOS platform, where they collect a percentage of all sales made through apps, so they want to force developers to create native apps instead of web apps.
I'll also point out that Opera, Edge, Samsung and others did implement the Web Bluetooth API, so you are wrong about your assertion that they "couldn't convince any other rendering engine to implement them".
If you don't think Apple is abusing their power here, then you are either lacking understanding of how Apple operates, or you just love Apple a little too much.
> Apple is on the W3C board that gets to decide which APIs become standards. They are preventing these APIs from becoming standards.
They are not. You have this almost entirely backwards. To become a standard, you only need two independent interoperable implementations. This means Apple cannot block something from becoming a standard. The only thing Google needs to do is convince anybody else to implement their proposals. So far they have managed to convince precisely zero other rendering engines to do so.
> I'll also point out that Opera, Edge, Samsung and others did implement the Web Bluetooth API, so you are wrong about your assertion that they "couldn't convince any other rendering engine to implement them".
All of these are Chromium / Blink users, not independent implementations.
If Apple won't allow an API onto Safari because it competes with native apps, then why should Firefox bother to implement it? Just because something moves forward in standards, does not mean Apple will ever implement it in their browser. They may never, and so why should Firefox do so, if Apple just blocks Firefox on their platform anyway? Chrome already has the APIs I want on Android, so Firefox won't spend the money to implement a non-standard before it is a standard.
Apple has a lot more control over this situation than Firefox does, and Firefox has limited resources.
>It’s hard to delineate which of these are Chrome features or actual web standards. And it’s therefore hard to blame either Safari or Firefox for not supporting them if they’re not standardized yet.
Maybe you don't realize that Apple is on the W3C board that gets to decide which APIs become standards, so they can squash any API that they think could cut into their app store. Citing Firefox as some kind of evidence doesn't take into account the abusive business tactics that Apple uses to force developers to create native apps on their platform.
I don't care about Firefox does, because they aren't forbidding an entire platform from using any browser engine except their own browser engine, which Apple does with Safari on iOS.
So Apple controls iOS browser engines, and they also control which APIs get to become standards. This is plainly abusive. It's also part of the reason Apple is being sued by the DOJ
I don’t understand the spread of thoughts in your post.
The reason to create image sequences is not because you need to send it to other apps, it’s because you preserve quality and safeguard from crashes.
A crash mid video write out can corrupt a lengthy render. With image sequences you only lose the current frame.
People aren’t going to stop using image sequences even if they stayed in the same app.
And I’m not sure why this applies: “this goes beyond” what Apple has, because they do have hardware support for decoding several compressed codecs (also I’ll note that ProRes is also compressed). Other than streaming, when are you going to need that kind of encode performance? Or what other codecs are you expecting will suddenly pop up by not requiring ASICs?
Also how does this remove degradation when going between apps? Are you envisioning this enables Blender to stream to an NLE without first writing a file to disk?
> A crash mid video write out can corrupt a lengthy render. With image sequences you only lose the current frame.
You wouldn't contain FFv1 in MP4, the only format incompetent enough for such corruption.
Apple has an interest against people using codecs that they get no fees from. And Apple don't have a lossless codec. So they don't offer lossless compressed video acceleration.
The idea is that when working as a part of a team, and you get handed a CG render, you can avoid sending a huge .tar or .zip file full of TIFF which you then decompress, or ProRes which loses quality, particularly when in a linear colorspace like ACEScg.
I’m curious what kind of teams you’re working in that you’re handing compressed archives of image sequences? And using tiff vs EXR (unless you mean purely after compositing)?
Another reason to use image sequences is that it’s easier to re-render just a portion of the sequence easily. Granted this can be done with video too, but has higher overhead.
But even then why does the GPU encoding change the fact that you’d send it to another NLE? I just feel like there are a lots of jump in thought process here.
What do you base that on? Some of the best names in academia are Chinese, and in the computer graphics world, SIGGRAPH Asia has largely eclipsed SIGGRAPH for academic presentations
The AR viewer is using ARKit on iOS which is a default system “app”. I don’t believe Google provides the same kind of built in viewer experience with AR Core being surfaced as an app.
It's well established. Most public websites for museums have galleries of high res scans, and they're mostly all trying to keep you from downloading it. There are lots of tools out there to circumvent them, however.
This is a tautology and one at odds with itself. They simultaneously provide the high res scans but you think there’s a conspiracy to keep you from them. Why provide them in the first place then?
Not at all. They want people to experience what they have, but they don't want a small subset of people selling prints, T-shirts, and little statues. From their perspective, they sell excellent quality prints, etc. in the gift shop and online, and the proceeds benefit the collection. So they lock down downloads if they can.
Almost impossible to stop a determined actor from downloading media that you're serving to a browser. Most organizations don't have the budget or understanding. They outsource their websites, and ask for it to be as secure as possible.
Especially when it comes to somewhat more specific skills like graphics development.
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