Eventually, in moviemaking, generative AI is going to be seen the way CGI is. That is, how people complain about CGI when it's obvious/distracting/noticeable, but the best usages of it won't be noticeable.
Sure, and like CGI, it will change the nature of the media entirely.
Different stories shown with different treatment. With CGI, scenes zoomed out to wider shots and effects swelled even louder over lighting, intimacy, acting, etc.
Old styles didn't disappear or stop evolving entirely, of course, but the center of attention profoundly shifted and the "big" production money went with jt.
Generative AI will likely drive some kind of analogous shift in dominant film aesthetics. I don't know where, but I'm not particularly excited by it myself yet.
I don't know much about the movie industry, but I think the biggest commercial successes for early CGI was possibly Jurassic Park? I don't think it would have been nearly as good if it had all just been done with puppets.
Likewise, there's been a ton of movies since that could in theory have been done purely with SFX instead of VFX, but which is probably must better from having used VFX/CGI, titles like The Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Inception, Avatar, etc.
Obviously there was also charm in titles like E.T. and Gremlins, and I think there might still be a market for movies like that, such as the 2019 Netflix series The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (I loved the 1982 version as a child, though this sequel wasn't for me).
I guess the question is: will generative AI allow new movies to be made, the same way that CGI has? Or will it just be an economic shift: the same quality CGI but at a fraction of the price?
There may still be people out there who believe that AI will never be able to create CGI as good as humans can, these might be the same people who used to say that CGI can never look realistic. And if you work in VFX, I bet that you can spot a fake mountain with the slightly incorrect shadows in the distance easily, but as a simple movie watcher, I really don't see it, especially when it's only on screen for like 3 seconds.
If you look at the ten top-grossing films in the past 15 years, it's almost exclusively computer animations or SFX showcases with some token, quip-based acting thrown in every now and then (all the Marvel universe stuff).
Basically, I'm not even sure if replacing actors with AI would be stylistically perceptible for the average moviegoer. There are interesting films still being made, but almost no one is watching them, because you have the option to watch some SFX explosions and flying superheroes in Avengers VII.
This was tested in Singapore 10 years ago and successfully reduced the spread of Dengue fever by 77% and has not negatively impacted the ecosystem.
This isn't a project to eliminate all mosquitos. There are over 3600 species of mosquito - this project is only targeting one: Aedes aegypti, which spreads many diseases, and is in fact an invasive species. Anywhere you see an Aedes aegypti outside of North Africa, it was humans who brought it there in the first place. This project is just trying to undo that.
> Aedes aegypti, which spreads many diseases, and is in fact an invasive species. Anywhere you see an Aedes aegypti outside of North Africa, it was humans who brought it there in the first place.
My twisted brain spun out a version of this paragraph from some kind of parallel universe Hacker News (presumably where humans aren't the dominant species on the planet) that said:
> Homo sapiens, which spreads many diseases, and is in fact an invasive species. Anywhere you see a Homo sapiens outside of North Africa, it was humans who brought it there in the first place.
I think it's fun that my brain decided to come up spin the accepted African origin of humans and their proliferation around the world into this fun paragraph. No value judgement about humanity is implied.
None of what pg writes here is factually wrong per se, but he is obviously making a bigger deal out of a lot of these things than they really are (that is, he was obviously writing this to convince more people to start and join startups - hopefully at YC).
Some people (most people?) are perfectly happy with just working a stable job within a giant corporation. Either because they are capable of still finding fulfillment from work despite not having so much control (the kind of control that people who start businesses tend to crave), and/or because they find their fulfillment outside of work entirely.
Yeah, PG's essays are rather simplistic and not that insightful.
A far better approach is to start with theories from Psychology and Sociology and use them effectively.
One relevant theory is Self-Determination Theory (SDT) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination_theory) which is about the intrinsic needs of an individual viz. 1) Autonomy 2) Competence 3) Relatedness. As long as an organization provides the individual with a position in which to express and exercise those needs, it does not matter whether it is a large/medium/small one. Since each individual has different combinations and intensities of the above three needs, their preferred environment will vary accordingly.
For an introduction to SDT see; Why we do What we do: Understanding Self-Motivation by Edward Deci. Highly recommended reading for everybody (especially managers/leaders). A review can be found at - https://thorprojects.com/2020/05/04/book-review-why-we-do-wh...
In the decade I have been reading pg, my opinion of him is that he is like Nietzsche, or Ayn Rand or Karl Marx or Hayek or (the HN frequent front-pagers) Scott Alexander or Maciej: catnip for "free thinkers", a ready-made meal for people who crave thinking different; but ultimately fairly empty compared to the hype. Making grandiose theories, out of the flimsiest of observations, that fail at the slightest contact with reality, and only good at motivated reasoning.
That sounds like a typical philosopher for better or worse more than than sophistry per se. They have been plagued by a preoccupation with 'purity of thought' and separation from the 'practical' world since Ancient Greek times, almost certainly related to them being sponsored by essentially aristocrats.
It doesn't, because "it was so common to", as OP stated, is not the same thing as "you were supposed to". There's no reason it should be corrected, it's accurate.
Carry-on luggage is usually not weighed, there are simply safety margins in place for that sort of thing. (A human probably isn't capable of carrying a bag heavy enough to erode those margins.)
And fuel burn is the least of the concerns when it comes to weight - a far bigger issue is how it affects balance and engine lift. But on a plane the size of a jet airliner, this too is almost never a real concern when it comes to passenger weight - a standard weight is just assumed for each passenger and their carryon. (It's a concern for cargo weight, but that's why cargo is always weighed and balanced properly.)
Maybe if the airline notices that all the passengers are sitting on the left (for some strange reason) or something like that, they would reseat people.
> Maybe if the airline notices that all the passengers are sitting on the left (for some strange reason) or something like that, they would reseat people.
I was on a turboprop plane when they made a few people switch seats to balance the weight: the seats were arranged Seat - Aisle - Seat - Seat , and all the singles on the left side were filled to the back, with only a few seats on the right side taken.
I disagree completely. Backwards compatibility has precisely nothing to do with why Windows is terrible nowadays.
And that's also entirely orthogonal to hardware - the hardware battle between ARM Mac and ARM PC is really a battle between Apple and Qualcomm (Apple won).
In hindsight, rather than relying on Snapdragon, Microsoft should have started designing their own high-efficiency ARM SoCs 15 years ago like Apple did. But I mean, everything is clear in hindsight isn't it.
> That's... an incredibly narrow law, that only covers a class of games which are particularly stupid by design. (Continuous cost without continuous revenue.)
Eh, it sounds unintuitive, but in practice it's extremely common. Almost every first-person shooter (well, you could really expand that to "almost every competitive multiplayer game") made by major studios is either a one-time purchase or entirely free. The ongoing revenue comes from cosmetics and other in-game goodies.
This sort of economy makes sense when you consider consoles (especially back in the day), where it's easy to get people to buy a disc but hard to get people to sign up for a subscription.
It baffles me that they do this. I have to disable push notifications from Lyft entirely, so instead they send me ride updates as text messages, which surely must cost them way more money. Why not just introduce a "ride updates only" push notification category and stop this madness?
> It needs to be enforced by the OS or by law. Like how you get transactional emails without getting marketing spam.
What glorious universe do you live in where email is respected enough to have transactions separate from marketing, and that this is not only required by law but also enforced?
There's a pretty healthy regulatory environment around it, though I have noticed a resurgence of opt-out marketing communications on signup forms, which is unwelcome (I don't know if some legal decision changed, but it seemed like for a while this was not allowed, and maybe something has made companies think that it is again).
(I decided to look it up, here's the UK rules: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/direct-marketing-and-pr... . It looks like it is allowed to be opt-out if you buy something from them, which I do dislike, but there are rules and the ICO does have teeth)
Not sure about your experience, I’ve almost never encountered a marketing email that didn’t have an unsubscribe link, as is mandated by law in some countries. So I’m not really sure what you’re talking about.
reply