Ray Tracer in SQL

agustechbro•about 3 hours ago

In the Age of AI coding, this lovely cool demos are no longer interesting anymore. I use to appreciate them by the craftsmanship and hacking aptitude they required, but now AI took away that joy of watch this for me.

bigmadshoe•21 minutes ago

Absolutely. These things are inherently pointless - what makes them cool is the human ingenuity required to achieve them. Remove that and it’s totally uninteresting.

tills13•about 2 hours ago

Yeah. Remember when that guy made Doom in TypeScript types? That was incredible. This feels shallow and dull. Interesting idea and cool that ClickHouse -- a primarily human made piece of software -- can even do this but I agree it no longer does it for me.

sublinear•about 2 hours ago

That feeling has nothing to do with AI. That's how art has always been. Most of these were bad at being art even before AI.

A good reference for exactly what I mean would be the demoscene (both back then and now). You can watch a thousand of those and be totally underwhelmed, but every now and then you get one that totally blows your mind.

There's nothing wrong with seeking novelty, but there is something wrong being jaded about it.

Moosdijk•about 1 hour ago

Who are you replying to?

laszlokorte•about 3 hours ago

Very cool! I did a similar (but much simpler!) experiment by implementing perspective projection via SQL, storing meshes (vertices, edges, faces), the camera position and the screen size in tables and building a single query that generates the SVG paths (including backface culling). Running via WASM SQlite inside the web browser. [1]

  SELECT project(...) as x, project(...) as y 
  FROM model, vertex, camera, transform 
  WHERE clockwise AND clipped IN BETWEEN -1 AND 1

[1]: https://static.laszlokorte.de/sql3d/

cma256•about 4 hours ago

Very cool project. Next they should create a database with SQL. Querying my database's database with my database's SQL's SQL would be trippy.

JSR_FDED•16 minutes ago

How do I join this awesome project?

Jgoauh•about 4 hours ago

Nice, but why ?

jareklupinski•about 3 hours ago

sir... this is hacker news

__alexs•about 3 hours ago

Good stress test for your SQL parser I guess.

mghackerlady•about 1 hour ago

Look, I love a good hack, but just. No. Why would you ever want to do this. The intersection of skill and masochism needed for this shouldn't exist and yet it does

Ray Tracer in SQL

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