Ed Catmull and Pat Hanrahan Win Turing Award(nytimes.com) |
Ed Catmull and Pat Hanrahan Win Turing Award(nytimes.com) |
Amusing side note: Brian Paul, who wrote the mesa open source implementation of OpenGL, was a Wisconsin grad student at the same time! He was in the meteorology department, in the building across the street from computer science.
Off topic - I had an opportunity to meet and spend time with Ivan Sutherland, also a Turing award winner [0]. Ivan was one of the most "fun" scientists I have met and spoken with. His conversations were full with humor and humility.
I was walking past the street where Ivan (he insisted to call me that) was having a coffee. He asked me if I'd like to join him for one - pleasantly surprised, I said yes. The next 45m was Ivan telling me about a research problem he was working on and asking "tips" on how I would solve it. Initially, I was hesitant but he insisted and took me along a journey inside his wonderful mind.
edit: and then a couple posts later I read, of course, things are never as they seem. Depressing.
Though they did mention Marc Levoy, his Stanford colleague and coauthor on the light field paper.
I don't have the same opinion about Ed Catmull. His wage fixing really saddened me. To remove agency from peoples lives for profit of Pixar is an unconscionable act. He curtailed lives for his own gain.
And really, Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces aren't that amazing. Z-buffering is obvious. Those were the days of low hanging fruit in graphics.
And the fact that Catmull-Clark is based on recursive refinement makes it really bad for GPU evaluation (or parallel evaluation in general). It's completely incompatible with hardware tessellation, for example.
If I had to pick an especially non-obvious, elegant, and useful 1980s graphics technique, Pineda rasterization would come to mind.
For Catmull-Clark, the regular parts of the mesh (quads with valence 4 vertices) are just b-splines and thus can be evaluated using the hardware tessellator.
He's a great teacher and the class was a lot of fun. Seemed like a genuinely nice guy as well. Congratulations!
Paywalls suck, of course, but HN's rule is that it's ok as long as there's a workaround. Users usually post workarounds in the threads, including in this thread.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Sometimes you don't sleep enough, write stupid comments, and wonder why HN does not always show a 'delete' button.
> The plaintiffs in the lawsuit presented substantial evidence that implicated Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios president Ed Catmull as a ringleader of the illegal wage-fixing scheme. The Walt Disney Company has done nothing to reprimand or punish Catmull for his questionable actions, and he continues to serve as the leader for both Disney and Pixar animation studios.
https://www.cartoonbrew.com/artist-rights/animation-workers-...
Pretty damning if true. Anyone got a better/additional source?
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-requires-s...
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-requires-l...
"“Like somehow we’re hurting some employees? We’re not,” Catmull said. “While I have responsibility for the payroll, I have responsibility for the long term also,” Catmull said. “I don’t apologize for this."
My gut would have been different. I would have considered that losing some of those employees could have killed the company and then all the other employees would be out of a job. I don't know that's the decision I would have made but the thought would have crossed my mind and it's possible I'd have made the wrong decision not knowing it was illegal.
The point I'm trying to make is it's possible Mr. Cathmull had no malicious intent and thought he was doing the right thing at the time to protect a 400 person company. If true that doesn't excuse the actual crime but it does mean he might not be the monster he's being painted to be here.
Half of HN seems to worship Steve Jobs who was also caught wage fixing. No excuse for him either.
With that said, he's done a lot of cool things, and deserves recognition and credit for a lot of important pieces of technology. This award is deserved.
For reference, I was involved in the class-action lawsuit as an employee of one of the other studios involved in the price fixing ring.
After all, in your case, it took just two people, presumably neither lawyers, to know what not to do.
Pixar was paying software people significantly less than other companies. And they would try low-balling you, which sadly many of my colleagues fell for, all starry eyed about making movies, for whatever reason. That's just par for the course I suppose, but the wage fixing on top of that was a bit gross.
So the creepyness was apparent even to this lowly software engineer. Of course it was the tip of the iceberg with Lasseter.
There was this other guy who was an art director or something like that, and we used to call him a walking HR violation. Once he cornered me in the locker room and told me how all his friends are out of shape and have lousy sex. I shrugged it off as just one of the eccentric characters you encounter at the cartoon factory. He was extremely macho, and a fan of Putin, which actually made him somewhat interesting to me politically, though I disagreed with him about practically everything. Then came the 2016 election and his sexism got way out of hand and I couldn't stand him any more. I found it strange that someone with two daughters would be such a misogynist.
Turns out he had been saying creepy things to one of the same women that HR was trying to keep away from Lasseter, limiting her career. She wrote an article about her whole experience: https://byrslf.co/pixars-sexist-boys-club-9d621567fdc9
"Hey, your employer is extracting far more value from you than they're paying you for. You should be paid more."
"Yes, but I don't really need to be."
Is that "exploitation?"
It's the same issue airline pilots have. If they had the choice to move to a different airline paying higher, they would, but they accept the conditions they're given because the whole industry pays similar rates, and their skills aren't transferable to any other industry. Essentially they're trapped, lest they choose an entirely new career.
There were not many Google engineers who felt actually slighted by Google when the company was fined for price-fixing along with Apple, Pixar, eBay, &c. At least, if they did feel slighted, they sure didn't demonstrate their frustration by unionizing, leaving, or actually taking more action than accepting their one-time payoff from the class-action settlement. And why would they? They're already paid far above average wages for employees countries Google operates in (and significantly above most of the tech sector in the US).
That is, the value you get from your job may be more than just your paycheck. This won't necessarily apply to everybody, but I'm pretty sure some people receive value simply from the work itself and the sense of accomplishment they get from doing what they do.
I agree, but it "smells" weird that we've included "feel" in that set in this specific context. If neither party feels they're exploiting or being exploited in an employment agreement paying well above minimum wage, then by what standard is a third party judging their transaction that we can conclude they "feel" wrongly?
We start to go down a pretty dark path when we take "mutual consent" off the table as the gold standard for two-party interactions. There are absolutely criteria of things in society for which we do that, but we hold them to a very high standard of scrutiny, and I'm not convinced "That employer is underpaying their employee with too low a six-figure salary" meets that high standard of scrutiny.