diskzero

It wasn’t the renderer as much as the pipeline. The renderer is just one process in a stunning amount of complexity that must be managed. We may even agree that Renderman was better than the PDI renderer but there was so much much more.

Dreamworks used Renderman(Pixar’s Renderman) along with several other commercial package for a Shark Tale. When Dreamworks acquired PDI, who made Shrek under contract for DWA, there was essentially a war between the two pipelines and PDI won. I was on the PDI side of the company, but there was a lot of positive things about the Renderman pipeline.

No need to bet. You are right. It wasn’t possible at the time.

I posted then deleted some anecdotes I heard at NAMM or AES from Gary Katz thirty years ago, but found this Sound on Sound article about the sessions which is way better than my memory. https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/classic-tracks-steel...

I just looked at my copy... Yes, Chapter 4: How Technology Shapes Music. He also discusses how he decides which "flubs and mistakes" he wanst to fix, remove, replace or keep.

Donald Fagen is/was well known for doing take after take after take when recording looking for what he found perfect. He would sample notes, replace notes, replace drums and cut and paste until he made the mix he wanted. I was in the music software/hardware industry at the time and the Wendel and Wendel Jr. computers/samplers/drum replacers along with Garfield Doctor Click rhythm controllers were heavily used. I am sure he also did a ton of old school punch in/out and used other mechanisms to get things just the way he wanted.

The point I am trying to make is that the processes that used to take a maniacal amount of time, resources and attention to detail can now be done quickly and automatically. Does Steely Dan's Aja sound better or worse than a modern album produced using modern techniques?

This comes down to taste and who am I to determine what someone else finds appealing in their music? Producers have been "producing" songs and moving them from their originally recorded state into something entirely different for decades.

I personally miss singers being slightly out of tune and beats being slight out of time in songs. I love hearing imperfections in older music. But, would Trevor Horn have pulled some of the singers he produced back into tune before pressing the vinyl? Someone should ask him. I am inclined to say yes.

Ok. So we just need enlightened legislatures to enact these processes into law and fund them. I actually agree with what you propose, but am having a hard time seeing how to get such a system in place.

Who does the selection? Who approves the applications? Who ensures the process is open? It always comes down to winners of elections. The USA isn’t a technocracy or meritocracy, for better or worse.

Who does the selection? In the USA, doesn’t it always come down to voter choice one way or another? We typically elect a sheriff but a mayor appoints a police chief. The mayor is elected however. What process could be used to determine process and selection that would avoid voter input?

Steve Jobs himself talked about the bozo explosion that occurs when A players stop hiring A players. Was Alan Dye an A player? Certainly not to me. Who was the last Apple UX A player? Bas Ording? Mike Matas? Greg Christie? Imran Chaudri? The DNA is gone and the depletion started the moment Steve died and the infighting began leading to what we have today.

I worked with all of the aforementioned people at various companies and cannot see myself working at any of the companies where this experience would be useful or could be transferred to others. Apple, when I left in 2006, was almost unbearable to me.

I don’t know if this means I am jaded, burnt out, overly cynical or what, but the thought of working at Apple, Google, Facebook or any other big tech company is anathema to me.

Steve Lemay worked with a bunch of us, including a very curmudgeonly Don Norman, but just look at what happened to Apple UX while he was there. Yes, he is now running the team and the small improvements may be a direct influence of his, but he sure was steam rolled by others the last twenty years.

I worked on perception systems five years ago and we had de-noising algorithms that are much better now. We would never have dared to drive in obscured lanes, but I assume Waymo’s high resolution maps and sensor fusion are extremely good, but yeah, are the vehicles going to plow through the unofficial lanes?

Yes, there are still jobs where you have to do novel and interesting things. It is hard to compare these to the work the Draper Lab did, but that was an exceptional moment in time that an exceptional group of people were able to do because they were at the right place at the right time.

Much of the interesting stuff I was able to do in the past was a result of being at the right place at the right time, but others were because I took some wild chances. I realize it can be a privilege to take wild chances and it isn’t an option for many.

When I read this site, or the media in general, AI exuberance and/or doom and gloom is everywhere. I also felt like the opportunities you are thinking about are vanishing. My current job is actually pretty exciting to me; building a new distributed audio software and hardware solution. The hardware element makes it very real; there are no endless cloud compute resources to help out. I guess what I am saying there still seems to be interesting and challenging tasks out there, but the green fields do seem to be vanishing.

A somewhat odd question and the best we can do is theorize and come up with opinions gathered from those who knew or associated with her. Maybe others who worked with her will comment here. We do know that the people who worked at the Draper Lab were "hackers" given one definition of hackers as a group of people who were fascinated with computers and systems that interconnected them. The Draper folks were certainly part of that early MIT culture.

I know from personal experience working with Draper alums that many of them had very close personal and economic ties to the military and other government agencies and were not at all into Kevin Mitnick-type hackers.

She certainly kept a low profile and maybe wouldn't want to be memorialized or maybe just didn't care. We are so used to people promoting and pushing their accomplishments these days, she seems somewhat of an anomaly; an extremely skilled and influential technologist who was content to continue doing the work that suited her without endless self-promotion and aggrandizement.

She did accept the Presidential Medal of Freedom, so she was willing to accept some accolades.

I was able to meet her, and others who worked at the MIT Instrumentation/Draper Lab, as a start-up I was with received funding from a VC firm founded by other Draper Lab members from the Apollo era. I was totally out of my league talking with them. This was thirty years ago and I remember her talking about formalized control systems. It was fascinating but went totally over my head. My startup was a fairly silly multimedia CD-ROM company and I was just happy to be in the room.

Thanks for the useful tasks. If I actually had your setup, I might do those things. Like you, I am not going to ask Meta, et al. to do those things. I also am hesitant to invest in setting up a new system. However, I do have a M2 Mac Studio, so maybe I am closer to being able to run a local system than I thought.

I am a technical person and while I appreciate the challenge of buying the hardware, setting up the software stack and managing the system, I can't figure out any use cases that would justify the work. This is the main issue I have with Muse, Dots, etc. There just must be something about my routines that don't align with what these companies are expecting their users to do. I do take advantage of the investor subsidized coding agents, but it will take years of my usage of their services to come close to initial start up cost of my own system.

I am very curious as to what other people of using these agents for? Some of the use cases I hear; comparative shopping, travel planning, etc. don't appeal to me. Our people using them to manage family life issues like school schedules, meetings, etc? I feel like I am missing out, but I also am not seeing the greater appeal yet.

Yes, I could have done without the ice maker. It never broke, but it did have a tendency to turn the ice cubes into a solid block.

The previous house I moved from had a Subzero fridge in it from 1990. It was serviced in 2012 and was still running strong when I left. One thing that pleased me was the easy access to a parts catalog and the ability to easily order replacement parts. Some of the tray slides had cracked and I just ordered them online after consulting the catalog. I know the unit cost a fortune in 1990, but decades of service and the ease of ordering parts was certainly nice.

We ended up with a Samsung fridge in our new home. It has no external display or any other indication that it is a "smart" fridge. I only found out when a friend visited who has a Samsung phone and the phone offered to connect to the fridge. We spent the next 30 minutes removing panels from the fridge and found the wifi/bluetooth antenna on a small board under the top-right hinge cover. The board was disconnected and the fridge continues to operate normally.

I am now eyeing my dishwasher very suspiciously.

Interesting and useful. I would welcome societal action and have no faith the government can do anything at all given the government has no idea what to act on. I have seen the “government” wage a war on drugs, allow encampments to sprawl only to bulldoze them later, allow cars and RVs to serve as ad hoc housing only to tow them away, provide injection sites only to close them down, etc. Whatever the government does it reverses itself and we can’t seem to make progress.

I’ll use the word though; our inability to provide housing and basic essential services to our fellow human beings is a blight.

When I lived in downtown Los Angeles, I volunteered at the Midnight Mission and various veterans organizations dealing with addiction and homelessness.

Only you can really define what is productive to you, but people are always needed for running the shelters, working in the kitchens and more. It isn't glamorous at all.

People need to be transported from one facility to another, to medical appointments, to court, to counseling and more.

I currently work with youth at risk, helping them finish their high school degrees and families who are right at the brink of falling into serious problems.

I can't really tell you which organizations to volunteer, as there is a spectrum of them; some are religious like the Salvation Army and some have social and political agendas that may not align with you. Without recommending or condemning, for example, you will find organizations who work with pregnant teens who are anti-abortion. This may not be for you. The same goes for sexual and gender identity issues.

One thing that seems very unpolitical to me, and it is how I started, was volunteering at a local shelter. If you have more affinity with helping women, there are shelters that deal with them. If you have more affinity with dealing with people with addiction issues, there are shelters dealing with them.

Because of my background in the military, education and addiction, I find affinity working with veterans, addicts and at risk youth.

The problem is daunting, and the needle feels unmovable most of the time. In the big scheme of things I feel powerless, but I know reducing local misery is possible and is something I can help with.

"Cars are plentiful and cheap in America and can be had next to free in many cases." What is the buzzword bingo and what is my bent?

I think it should be permissible to allow some dude to live out of a 2002 Town and Country that parks at a revolving series of strip mall. I currently work with several people who use a similar method to keep themselves and their kids off the streets.

The phrasing might be bad in that I was pointing out the overall bleakness of the overall situation; no insurance, no registration, no maintenance, but the intent was to show that they are teetering on the brink of falling into an abyss that is very difficult to come out of, not that they were some sort of anonymous nebulous mass.

The main thing I have been struggling with personally with working with this issue (housing, addiction) over 25 years is that it is such a huge, seemingly unsolvable problem that no one is able to address systematically and when I think about the big picture I feel overwhelming helplessness, but find hope working in much more local situations.

The car comment was just an observation to the parent comment, with some additional commentary on how it isn't at all a big luxury, rather a bleak situation where the car owner is in a very precarious situation. Reading it now, I do see how it could be misconstrued as some sort of zealotry of people of a certain bent, but I think I am might be bent the opposite way of what you think!

I agree and understand part of what you are saying. I am not exactly sure what the privilege was, but I do understand your observation about the tone-deafness. It is for certain that current job outlook seems bleak and this is extremely difficult. In general, I admit I am very privileged in that I was able to live in a time when certain types of jobs were plentiful and there seemed to be limitless opportunities available to me.

When you put it this way, it is very anxiety inducing and I understand that. What this is helping me realize is that my childhood, and our lives of our children were different than many of the commenters, not necessarily better or worse.

As children, my siblings and I didn't have a lot of stuff, and our family didn't have a lot of stuff either. It certainly wasn't our intent to traumatize and stunt our children and this doesn't seem to be the case. I will certainly ask them.

Yes, I can see this now. Thanks for the insight.

Very good points. Thanks for the insight and critique. There is a reason I don't wade into social topics and usually only comment on technical things I have worked on and this is helping me understand why!

Got it. I mainly work with people who have severely fallen off the cliff with almost no way to climb back out. I totally see how this new gear could keep someone from reaching a critical breaking point.

A very interesting and valid observation. You and your children are super fortunate and your approach seems like a very good hedge against some serious uncertainty coming up.

We weren’t quite in the same position until much later, and I am somewhat envious of your position. Best of luck!

There is no implication here. It is clearly stated as "Our primary goal", not your primary goal. You are reading way too much into this.

I agree it is a modern post-WW2 phenomenon, but not sure what is funny about it. Societies and systems constantly change and evolve. This is part of progress, and yes, can also cause setbacks.

My use of the term "conflict" might be what is triggering. Maybe "bucks the trend" or "not in line with" would be better.

Many approaches to parenting are successful. I presented my approach. Others work.