The orb is free yet comes at a cost. When I wrote the equivalent of the orb 25 years ago I had to go through the book “Real-Time Rendering” by Tomas Akenine-Möller and Eric Haines, the first edition with the chameleon. I remember the smell of the book. I learned that 3D projection was not mostly trigonometry (as I believed) but instead “just” multiplications and an occasional division, mind blown! I learned while skimming through the various chapters in the book how little I knew and how much there was to explore, creating a sense of excitement and craving to understand and implement algorithms from shadow volumes to spherical harmonics, and acquire first all the mathematical prerequisites. And I had the rewarding feeling of accomplishment when my orb was rendering.

Now all of that is gone, if you choose so, and what’s left is brainrot and the equivalent of doom scrolling.

Some people just want their car fixed when it stops working. They don’t want to read an entire manual and spend many hours of their very limited lifespan fixing the problem.

This is not brain rot, it is a good thing. I am glad Einstein focused on physics and not every single interesting thing that popped up.