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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Nolan is an elitist asshole and his movies are not that great, actually. That is just him going “kids these days” like an old fart. He is all in on the IMAX scam. He insists on bad audio mixing (horrible even on theaters) hiding under the “I only mix for IMAX theaters” excuse. At least he acknowledges that it is Hollywood that is terribly out of touch with reality. Backrooms is successful because it connects with the audience nothing to do with whether it uses CGI or not (the Oppenheimer nuclear explosion scene is SO bad in an otherwise fine movie). And Backrooms was filmed on a regular digital 35mm Red camera at 1.85 ratio with regular Dolby Atmos and you can absolutely hear the dialogue. He might denounce AI slop but doesn’t realize that he’s also been using tech as a crutch to his creative shortcomings.


  • The smartphone represents the death of ergonomics.

    A featureless and unremarkable slab of plastic, aluminum and glass. If one is to think that form follows function, then the function of an object should be obvious from analyzing its form. The smartphone defeats itself, its shape says nothing of what it does. Is it for taking pictures? is it for writing? is it for reading? is it for communication? When every answer is yes, then what is it good for? It’s not particularly good at any of those, it is just good enough. The most basic of the common denominator, an abstract rectangle, a basic black mirror of nothingness.

    Ergonomics are about shaping an object so perfectly to its function and to human biomechanics that its use becomes spontaneous when the object is used and it doesn’t hurt or harms the user. “The maximum of comfort, security and efficiency.” The smartphone is not any of those, for any of the things it does. It is awkward to hold for a call, it is strenuous to read or even watch media in, it is uncomfortable to hold to take pictures with, touch control are inefficient for gaming or typing.

    There’s one thing the smartphone is though, it is small and it is portable. That’s it.

    When you experience the functions of dedicated devices, the shortcomings of the smartphone show up even more evidently. Holding even a hobbyist camera, reading on an e-ink screen, playing games with an actual controller (or mouse and keyboard), writing even on a basic mechanical keyboard. A smartphone will never compete on that level of tactility and comfort.

    The smartphone is the death of ergonomics.






  • The costs have ballooned too much. When seasons were 18 episodes and it costs $100k per episode, it made sense to serialize. Often they were written as they were filmed. Now every episode costs $10 million and preproduction takes a year before the first scene can be filmed with massive post production. No one has really cracked the formula for making TV formats work well on streaming services. The all at once for binge watching only works if you already have a massive archive of shows to expose. The one episode a week for short boutique series that run a season every 3 years is not working well either.




  • Funny enough I had to rollback, since it doesn’t start in the latest version in my setup. I have to make a conscious effort to keep it one or two subversions behind. It is not the first time an upgrade breaks my install. It will probably be a whole thing when I decide to actually upgrade it again.




  • That’s a lot of words just to reiterate what OC said. None of your examples disagree with the fact that these companies are using AI for a ton of stuff they’re not good at. And the stuff it is good at are not bottlenecks. If you removed LLMs from the face of the planet today, code quality will not suffer significantly. Sure, doing code review en masse is good. But that is not what was holding back computer programming. It’s existence is not progressing software in any significant way either. It’s a nice to have, not a must have. Code was fine for four decades without LLMs. Indeed it makes me wonder, if a machine learning model was purpose made to do code review, instead of general purpose LLMs doing it, how much better it could be, if we actually leveraged what they’re good at.