haldean

> They cannot make money otherwise.

This is obviously, hilariously untrue when Amazon produces hundreds of billions of dollars of profit every year: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AMZN/financials/

It's definitely important for editing video and doing VFX work, and lots of the editors/VFX folks I know are using Studios. Raw footage from cine cameras now can be 50-100 MB per second now that we have 12 or 18K cameras, and even the low-quality proxies people work with are still pretty heavy, so in-memory caches aren't really an option and stuff is constantly being read from (and cached to) disk.

If you want a synth you can buy that has a similar playing style, you could check out the Modern Sounds Pluto: https://www.modernsounds.co/pluto (the original run is sold out but you can find them on ebay/reverb)

It's two of these 4-note step sequencers with some fun timing randomness. Similar to the OP's synth it uses knobs to set pitches but the knobs are picking notes from a specific key so they always sound good together. It's a lot of fun to play and doesn't require any musical knowledge!

There are quite a few cine cameras that are more than 10x this amount, and there are a few that are 100x. For example, there are Panavision cameras that you can only rent direct from Panavision that require that you have half a million dollars of insurance coverage to rent. There are ARRIs that you can buy from B&H that are $100k. $30k is definitely in the range of something that individual DPs/operators could own, although it’s getting into rental territory for lots of people.

who cares

There's lots to laugh at here but my favorite dumb part is talking about wages and wealth inequality:

> But the good news doesn’t stop there. We also get higher wages. This is because, at the level of the individual worker, the marketplace sets compensation as a function of the marginal productivity of the worker. A worker in a technology-infused business will be more productive than a worker in a traditional business. The employer will either pay that worker more money as he is now more productive, or another employer will, purely out of self interest. The result is that technology introduced into an industry generally not only increases the number of jobs in the industry but also raises wages.

and later

> As it happens, this was a central claim of Marxism, that the owners of the means of production – the bourgeoisie – would inevitably steal all societal wealth from the people who do the actual work – the proletariat. This is another fallacy that simply will not die no matter how often it’s disproved by reality. But let’s drive a stake through its heart anyway.

He's just lying! There's no evidence to support this at all in the modern US economy. The gains in wealth from automation over the last 50 years have almost _exclusively_ gone to the owners of the means of production. The median US household income went up less than 20% between 1983 and 2016 while the 95th percentile more than doubled.[0] This is just VC pump-and-dump nonsense pure and simple; it seems incredibly likely that any financial gains from AI making workers more productive will flow directly to the same people who have been reaping all of the gains from our increased productivity: Andreesen and his billionaire colleagues.

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...

Mac Mini with M2 Pro

Ah yeah forgot about V-Ray. I haven't tried Redshift on Metal, nope; all my work has been Renderman and Cycles recently. Curious to hear how well it works, people online seem to say it's pretty fast but hard to tell marketing copy from actual performance when it comes to renderers.

FWIW Cycles is definitely slower on my M2 than it was on my 3080 but it's not a huge difference -- maybe 20% slower? I still have to let the render run overnight either way haha.

Octane, Redshift, and eevee/Cycles all work on Metal, and Renderman and Mantra are CPU-only for now -- RM/Mantra have beta-versions that are GPU enabled, and Karma is nvidia-only and RM XPU doesn't work on macs at all yet, but I don't think many people are using either in production very much yet. I think the only GPU renderer people are using in production pipelines that's really locked to NVIDIA chips is Arnold, right?

If I received the second email there I would think the sender was a psychopath

Most big-budget feature films are cut on Avid and that's been the case for a while now; for indies my impression is that it's 50/50 Premiere and Resolve, yup.

The workflow many post-production studios use for editing/grading is to keep files on a NAS with proxies (i.e., lower-quality transcodes of the video clips in the edit) on a local disk -- that's the workflow I use even with my desktop machine, and I bet it'll work well with this too.

There's a crazy downside to make_shared that I learned recently because of this: if you have a weak pointer to a shared thing, and the refcount for the shared thing drops to zero, the weak pointers will keep the allocation for the object "alive", because they still need access to the remnant and the remnant was created in the same allocation as the object so they can't be freed separately. So now I only use make_shared if I know for sure there won't be a weak_ptr pointing at it (or if the base object has a relatively small memory footprint after it's been destructed).

There’s Geometry Nodes now which let you write smaller procedurals that you can combine together the way you’re describing: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/modeling/geometry_...

They’re extremely new (2.92 I think) so the framework is there but there aren’t many nodes yet; 2.93 introduced a whole bunch of new nodes though.

Do you have a link for the HDMI dongle thing?

'12, same

I don't think it's "supposedly", they're all GenZe-branded.

I love Scoot but I'm still peeved at the way Bird handled rolling their scooters out in SF. I trusted Scoot to do the right thing when it came to engaging the city and making sure they use public infrastructure responsibly, but I have none of that trust for Bird. I guess we'll see how it goes, but maybe it's just time to buy my own GenZe :(

I'm probably going to buy it; I do 3D animation/simulation stuff that gets huge benefits from parallelism, and it sounds like the Ryzen 9 beats everything other than the top-line Threadripper 2990WX (which has 32 cores but only 3GHz base clock with 4.2 boost). The Threadripper isn't a clear winner (the base and boost clocks are quite a bit lower), and they're super pricey ($1.7k). $750 for 16 cores at 3.3/4.3GHz is incredible.

Architecture/immersive media previz seems to be all C4D + Octane, and I've seen lots of the same in 3D motion graphics as well (although I'm less familiar with the field).

There's Octane, too, which afaict is used a little more than Redshift, at least in my circles.

Adobe Media Encoder (and by extension Premiere and AE) can do multi-GPU rendering as well, which starts to matter when you have huge comps. I've worked with 2D animators who need to turn around footage really quickly and a bunch of them are on multi-GPU rigs.

Not deleting OpenGL support would be nice, too.

Extremely unreliable; I've only taken the Lake Shore Limited and California Zephyr, so I can't speak for the whole thing, but I'd say I had cell reception about half the time, maybe less.

I'm not colorblind, but this is almost illegible to me: https://i.imgur.com/izGP46r.png

This is the luminosity of that mapped to grayscale. You can see why it might be difficult for colorblind people to read: https://i.imgur.com/Pyxt1NR.png

My guess was going to be 09 f9 11 02 9b

But they haven't robbed the anti-vaxxers of their platform: they've let them keep their platform, but have decided to not give them their money. They aren't silencing the group at all. That feels like a good way to walk the line (and I'm usually the last person to compliment Google).

What were your compilation flags?

Presumably the UBI would be untaxed, so you can reduce the liveable wage amount by around 30%, right?

C is a little better than presented here because they add a header to the standard library with a #define in it that gives the new identifier a reasonable keyword; for example, you can access `_Bool` as `bool` if you `#include <stdbool.h>`. I actually think this is a reasonable compromise; you can opt in to the new "keyword" at the compilation-unit-level.

What is "properly" though? There's many real numbers that don't have finite representation. Arbitrary precision is all well and good, but as long as you're expressing things as binary-mantissa-times-2^x, you aren't going to be able to precisely represent 0.3. You could respond by saying that languages should only have rationals, not reals, but then you lose the ability to apply transcendental functions to your numbers, or to use irrational numbers like pi or e.

Performance is only part of the problem, and what it prevents is more-precise floats (or unums or decimal floats or whatever). The other part of the problem is that we want computers with a finite amount of memory to represent numbers that are mathematically impossible to fit in that memory, so we have to work with approximations. IEEE-754 is a really fast approximator that does a good job of covering the reals with integers at magnitudes that people tend to use, so it's longevity makes sense to me.