nimbleal

You’re right the VFX is often rushed and under budgeted. However realistic fire IS really hard and frankly I’m sceptical you can do it yourself on your desktop. On its own on a plain background, maybe. The moment you comp it in to a live plate our uncanny valley spidey senses kick in — to take it beyond “looks good” to “oh, I didn’t notice that was a VFX element” is still REALLY tough in many situations.

Either the most violent or the least depending on how your gerrymander your sample.

Hypothesis: violence is effectively monopolised to a degree it has never been before. So it is used far less frequently but when it is used, is far more destructive (see world wars).

Agree it has nothing to do with AI. Even if we, for the sake of argument, agree that human beings are machines, why should the appearance of human-mimicking reasoning imply sentience above and beyond any other (complex?) computation? Why are LLMs possibly sentient and not, say, pocket calculators?

Yes, it’s terrible at writing fiction. Cliché laden, dull, repetitive prose and somehow, in terms of actual content, it never generates anything of interest. Its desire to always wrap things up into a happy ending within a couple of paragraphs also means it’s almost incapable of generating conflict. At best it can generate teenage fan fiction — and bad teenage fan fiction, at that.

A stop is double the amount of light. Useful for equivalence across different ways of changing exposure. So I halve my shutter speed I’ve lost a stop. But I increase my aperture from 4 to 2.8 I’ve gained that stop back. Or I double the sensitivity of my film or sensor (eg. iso 400 to 800).

So yes, in terms of data if using linear gamma exactly equivalent to bits. This is why log gamma curves are used to store for eg 16 stops of light info in 12 bit format

Or ND the windows. Or shot on a modern cinema camera, tbh. 1000x is what, ~10 stops? Arri claims 17 for the new 35, though I’ve not had a play

I hear this a lot but have never seen anything other than hypothetical mechanisms. I’d be interested to see actual evidence, if there’s any you can share. I’m cautious here because it’s the kind of thing that plays to my own bias.

Interesting— I like both but I wouldn’t think of Tarkovsky as having an influence on Malick. What would you say are the similarities, for you? Tarkovsky is intensely formal, seems blocked to the point of almost being choreographed, while Malick is quite the opposite in both regards.

By adding noise to the world, perhaps we can all recalibrate our noise floor, so to speak, and lose some of the human-generated nonsense along with ChatGPTs? My hope is that these tools will end content farms and thus (eventually) improve my Google search experience. As the cost of creating low-effort SEO filler tends to zero, Google will have to radically rethink the way they rank sites.

Though maybe I’m too optimistic; they should have done this a long time ago. I’m tired of searching for, for eg. “boiling point of X” and I get a poorly written 1500 word article —- clearly aimed at robots and not humans —- instead of my desired answer.

There's correlation in longitudinal studies, I recall. Not sure how robust the findings are though.

The “unto what end” vs “due to what cause” definition of “why“ but, yes — I’m aware.

“Whys” are hard but arguably —- and not a direct answer to your question of course — the why of cows producing (most of their) milk is analogous to the why of dogs acting cute: it’s for humans.

Although I understand it differs hugely by country, so worth investigating your own location. Not everywhere is as horrible as the US in this regard.

Perhaps we’re looking for the feeling of memory or dream. I believe that’s why 24 fps persists in film, for example — because it’s less real in the immediate, analytical sense, but more real in that it feels closer in some undefinable way to the way we imagine or remember — or even perhaps in our non-analytical moments directly perceive — things to be

That’s about as fair as a characterisation of that debate as saying “people want to keep R vs. W because they love killing babies”. The simple difference between the sides is one thinks whatever it is that’s in the womb is a human life, the other does not. Both sides’ believe their positions are essentially rooted in compassion — one for the adult, one for (according to their understanding) the child.

> wondering maybe you're starting from a fairly low skill level

It's a fair assumption but unfortunately I think I would lack in specifically the areas that online courses don't tend to address, i.e everything that's involved in working on a large codebase as part of team that's not algorithms, testing and language stuff. I don't know anything about deployment and management for e.g.

> How do you have 20 years of experience yet no portfolio?

(There is another similar question below)

I never anticipated doing this as a career, so the projects are just scattered over the hard drives of old laptops. Also, some of them are a bit too idiosyncratic (for e.g, in recent years I mostly treat PHP as a functional scripting language — with no good justification other than finding it fun — rather than doing OO stuff) for mainstream applicability.

I’m currently in a part-time work situation that more than covers my expenses but leaves me with a lot of time on my hands (I.e a great position to be in). However, for non-career related reasons, I don’t anticipate that lasting more than another six months or so. Thanks for your advice!

I’m pretty sure we don’t know that. A 400lb person will probably be healthier a year from now if they eat 1500 calories of MacDonald’s a day vs. 4000 cals of “home-cooked plant-based foods”.

These practices would typically be associated with the idea that the dead have a genuine existence beyond simply “existing in my memory of them” and would be restricted in the forms they take by surrounding ritual, so I’m not sure there’s a direct point of comparison, though?

It would also seem to be a pretty obvious fallacy (although I’m very happy to hear the counter argument). It assumes the “game” is not only infinite in length but infinitely open in terms of the space it explores: a million monkeys on a million typewriters may produce Shakespeare but they’ll never produce a bowl of ice cream.

> we won't know what's real at all. I am struggling to see how we will function

That's where we started, in a way. Perhaps our short time of feeling we had a grip on reality will just have been a passing phase, before returning to normality.

May be a US/elsewhere thing but for me more important in this sort of circumstance are >= middle class dress, hair cut, accent/idiom if spoken to, demeanour etc. Not directly related to race.

Good thing, yes, but the parent argued omicron “happened because there isn’t enough vaccines in third world countries.”

I’m asking if that makes sense given the evidence, and commenting that my (lay) intuition says it isn’t.

The question is — is it significant enough for:

a) eradication to be a possibility (intuitively, it would seem not); or, failing that

b) to lower the possibility of novel mutations emerging to a negligible level (I don’t have the knowledge to answer, so this is a genuine question, but again intuition would suggest not)

if, say, 99% of the population is vaccinated.

Do the vaccines have a significant enough impact on transmissibility for that to be true? My understanding is that, while they significantly improve instances of serious illness and death, the effect on transmission is limited (or at least not high enough for “eradication” to be on the cards).

All for greater support of less developed countries in terms of vaccine supplies, but not sure this is the argument for it.

Yes, but as mentioned elsewhere weight alone would do little to solve this issue. Males would still dominate.

So presumably you include other factors — but then you are simply dividing by ability. You could conceivably attempt to divide by innate ability (theoretically allowing competitors to compete against one another based on nurture, not nature) but that would be impossible to do fairly or in a way that would make sense to audiences.

Hmmmm. At that point are you not simply beginning to divide by ability? Basketball for short people? Weightlifting for weak people? It would seem to both go against the spirit of sport and be impossible to implement in practice (for e.g how many different ways do you cut it?)

Perhaps the more fundamental question — once again leaning on apparently somewhat flimsy terminology — would be: is biological sex something worthy of celebration and note? Half of our species is born a certain way, whatever we call it. Is that grouping to be given certain opportunities to demonstrate their talents that would not be afforded them on a level playing field?

I may be a few years behind on terminology (?) but surely sports has everything to do with sex and nothing to do with gender?

No one cares what pronouns an athlete uses, how they dress, what roles and behaviours society traditionally assigns/expects of them and how they respond to those traditions. They care entirely about biological advantages and disadvantages.

So the division is based on — again unsure of the terms here but — “sex” not on “gender”.

And no sport is trans exclusionary as far as I know: the person in question in this article would be welcomed everywhere to compete against other biological males, and any biological female would be welcome to compete against others of their sex whatever they identify as (so long as they haven’t taken testosterone). I’m not sure I understand why this has become an issue.

Most religions would say much the same, in fact — if you read the “experts”. So it’s very similar: a laity who believe everything is understood and a priesthood in awe at the mystery.