Two years ago we were installing 1/10th of Chinese solar today?
Where are we at today? Can we catch up under this administration?
Where do we compare on a nuclear basis? I know my state installed nuclear reactors recently, but I'm not aware of any other build outs.
In a war game scenario, China is probably more concerned about losing access to oil and natural gas than we are. Not that we shouldn't be building this stuff quickly either.
AI tools are becoming incredibly useful for our industry, but "prompting" without visual control sucks. In the fullness of time, we're going to have WYSIWYG touch controls for every aspect of an image or scene. The ability to mold people and locations like clay, rotate and morph them in 3D, and create literally anything we can imagine.
Here are a bunch of short films we've made with the tool:
> However, this technology is far too important to be in the hands of a few companies.
This is the most important assessment and we should all heed this warning with great care. If we think hyperscalers are bad, imagine what happens if they control and dictate the entire future.
Our cellphones are prisons. We have no fundamental control, and we can't freely distribute software amongst ourselves. Everything flows through funnels of control and monitoring. The entire internet and all of technology could soon become the same.
We need to bust this open now or face a future where we are truly serfs.
I'm excited by AI and I love what it can do, but we are in a mortally precarious position.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1m6eUR5V55QXA9p6SLuCM8LdFMBq... (NSFW, bloody/gory - the effects look bad because we did this for a "film hackathon" and had an extremely short amount of time with no chance to fix the editing, script, lack of locations, etc. Under four hours for the VFX work.)
Corridor Crew are making incredible stuff and teaching people how to do it:
There's so much use by actual artists. I don't have a list in front of me, but I'll start compiling that to share next time this comes up.
I am really salty about this because I am receiving hate and death threats because of this. I've had a film of mine booed in a live theater because I worked on a Blender + Mocap + AnimateDiff short film. I'm deep in the Atlanta film scene. I know a lot of the people that were in the audience personally. This was fresh off of the strikes, and the looming AI fears had people worried, so I understood the apprehension. But it still sucks to have your hard work and labor shunned like that in person. In any case, I won an award for that film. A year later, I did the same thing and everyone clapped. (It's not in my portfolio. I left a link in one of my previous comments if you care to dig.)
It's super easy to say "AI sucks", "AI bros", "kill AI artist", etc., but it misses all of the hard work being done by those using the tools.
I one day hope to have our small studio making high fantasy and science fiction films. I covet the art direction of Denis Villeneuve and Peter Jackson. I always have. My director friends that went to film school hoped to make films like that when they were younger, as I did I. The industry is very pyramid shaped, and unless you get really lucky or have nepo baby connections, you'll never get the chance to helm a project like that.
Tens of thousands of students go to film school every year, yet most of their dreams wither on the vine. That's incredibly sad. We only get a small slice of human creativity, and what we do see is usually pretty generic.
We have our Arris - that part has been democratized for a while. We have distribution. But we could never afford a $100 million VFX budget. AI changes the game and gives us so much hope that we can finally tell the stories we really want to tell in the way that we want to tell them.
Instead of thinking of AI as "just prompting", think of it as an exoskeleton for practitioners. One analogy is that cameras can be used by anyone to make all kinds of junk - selfies, food pics, "butt dialed" accidental shots. Yet professional photographers are capable of making incredibly captivating art and immortalizing Pulitzer Prize winning moments.
There are AI coding assistants for people who can't code (and I think this is awesome for accessibility and letting people act on their dreams - it's a gateway!), and there are AI coding models for full-time engineers. It's a lot like that.
I've made a lot of experiments in this space. Huge ComfyUI workflows, custom trained models frankensteined from stitched together modules, a lot of Unreal and Blender-inspired work.
I'm currently working on this [1] to enhance my own work. My desire right now is making it really fast to visually mold starting frames (which are like a director and DP blocking out scenes before shooting) and to precisely get the image you want before generating it.
This year I'm going to make full AI animations as well as a bunch of rotoscoped human + AI films this year. This stuff is going to be amazing for horror, sci-fi, and fantasy with live human actors. Those low-budget Blumhouse films are about to get real, and we're going to start seeing Lovecraftian horrors and actually good dinosaur movies soon. I'm really excited for this.
So I guess to return to my point, please please please don't hate all AI or especially insult people using it. This technology isn't distributed evenly, and in some pockets it's literally the most magical thing to have happened to the space. I wish I had this when I was much younger - my career would have looked a lot different. I'm really happy for the kids that get to grow up using this.
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Anyway, I came to this article because I love Smash. It's a fantastic article and the author did an amazing job compiling this. I mostly play "no items", but I did see these on rare occasions. It's funny how nostalgia can be triggered by low resolution billboard textures from Melee.
Sakurai, director of the game, is bullish on AI for game development [2]. I think he's thinking the same way we are - this is a creative exoskeleton letting us do more and achieve more of our vision against the friction of constraints.
Invariably the comments (probably from non-artist consumers?) is full of hate. Many artists want to use this, yet we're bullied and hated for it.
This one, jeez:
> Dude's a hack and hasn't made a good game since Melee.
This is the same bullshit I'm getting on a daily basis.
The hate we get online is unreal. You have to see it to believe it. I'm talking death threats on a regularly recurring basis. I should blog about it.
So please internalize this plea. Whenever you see attacks like this, please say something to remind the other person that we're all human and that real artists are using these tools to make real art.
But ever since the YouWatch app came out in 2029, consumers could just say what they wanted to watch and get a personalized film tailored to their exact personality type. You just couldn't make money with single-version films any more, and nobody did. They shut down all the film schools, and destroyed all the archived knowledge online.
It was hard to get your hands on a camera anyway, after the passage of the Protecting Children And Securing American Economic Development Act (BIGGEST PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST Act) in Donald Trump's fourth term, which criminalised possession of a computing device capable of supporting independent thinking.
I want to make films that look like Denis Villeneuve's Dune. (Just to cite one example, not that I'm interested in replicating his style.) How am I supposed to do that?
You know what my sci-fi films look like? This is one of my productions, and it cost over $10,000 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-24s-AmqR5k (I don't even have a real link to the finished film, apparently. I don't typically do sci-fi because it's so inaccessible to do the things we want to do.)
We actually did a bunch of rotoscoping and VFX work for this. It was not bad for our budget, but I'm so tired of this. I have always dreamed of having my films look exactly like what I see in my mind's eye.
Why should I have constraints, and why should my audience dictate my constraints? It's my life, and I have a desire for my own creative output. My number one judge is myself, not you or anyone else. I make things to satisfy me.
I'm especially disheartened (?) angered (?) by non-artists stepping in to tell me this. People who haven't spent ten thousand hours on it.
> I want to make films that look like Denis Villeneuve's Dune. (Just to cite one example, not that I'm interested in replicating his style.) How am I supposed to do that?
As an artist you should know that being able to achieve whatever you want with whatever level of effort you want and get the reception you want is often not achievable
> As an artist you should know that being able to achieve whatever you want with whatever level of effort you want and get the reception you want is often not achievable
I love being told this over and over.
> the reception you want
I'm doing this for me. I live my life for me.
I'm lucky that I get to make friends and meet amazing collaborators in this journey.
The tech that you are defending is going to put your profession out of work. If you can write a prompt that gets you exactly what you have imagined for your movie, then your entire craft has been obsoleted and can now be achieved by anyone with an imagination (or even without).
Thanks for sharing. I’m really looking forward to a Cambrian explosion of weird little movies like Kung Fury as the costs of VFX shrink. I’m sure that there will be a ton of garbage, but that also means more gems that would’ve never been made if they had to raise money from bean counters.
Did you see the "trailer" for the sequel? [1] It looks so good! It's a shame that legal shenanigans are all that are holding it up [2].
You're absolutely right about this. We're going to see so many different kinds of small-studio films. Everything from Yorgos Lanthimos to Charlie Kaufman to Denis Villeneuve and back.
I expect lots of things we've never even seen before.
lol that was amazing and absurd, don’t know how I missed that, thanks! Sad to hear it’s stuck in legal limbo, though, that is a shame - it looks like they poured a ton of passion into it.
> Sakurai, director of the game, is bullish on AI for game development [2]
Your source is based on machine translation, and professional translators pushed back on the interpretation that he is enthusiastic about genAI. Apparently it came across more as resignation that AAA developers may be forced to resort to genAI in order to sustain the endless scope creep and content bloat endemic in the AAA space, which has led to the current absurdity of it taking an entire decade to make a new GTA game.
Open source purity is problematic. The OSI was established by the hyperscalers, who are decidedly not open source either.
Purely "OSI-approved open source" mandates having no non-commercial or non-compete clause, which means anyone can come in and bleed off profits and energy from the core contributors of open source projects. It prevents most forms of healthy companies from existing on top.
We shouldn't be allergic to making money with the software we write - life is finite and it's more sustainable over the long term to maintain software as a job.
The new "ethical source" / "fair source" licenses that have been popping up recently [1, 2] give customers 100% use of the code, but prevent competitors from coming in and stealing away the profits from running managed offerings, etc. (I wish Obsidian were this, but it's fully closed. Still, I do not admire them any less for this choice. We venerate plenty of closed creators - it's silly to hold software to a different standard.)
AWS profits hundreds of millions a quarter off of open source developed by companies thinking they were doing the right thing. AWS turned these into a proprietary managed solutions and gave nothing back to the authors. The original wind up withering and dying. AWS isn't giving back, they're just hoovering up.
Obsidian being closed means the core authors are hyper focused and can be compensated (even if it's not much). It's not like they can rug pull us - the files are text files, we can use old versions, and if they did piss us off I'm sure someone would write an open source version.
Fully agree that pushing OSI is just posturing. After all, Amazon/Google/Facebook have made literal billions by commercializing open source software. I release stuff on MIT all the time (for things I'm okay with people poaching) but I'd argue the only "pure" OSS license is GPL, which comes with its own problems (and, as we all know, it infects everything it touches).
The problem with FSL is that it hasn't been tested in the courts yet (afaik), so it's a bit of a gamble to think it'll just "work" if some asshole does try to clone your repo and sell your work. Maybe it's a decent gamble for a funded startup with in-house counsel, but if you're just one guy, imo keep stuff you want to sell closed-source, it's not that big of a deal. We've been doing just that since the 70s.
Logging, tracing, observability, and control plane (flags, etc.) should be open.
We built 100% in-house pieces for all of this at a major fintech a decade ago. Everything worked and single teams could manage these systems.
Someone in leadership said we had to get rid of all "weirdware". Open solutions weren't robust, so we went commerical.
SignalFX got acquired, immediately 10x'd our prices and put all hands on deck to migrate. Unscheduled, stressful, bullshit. We missed the migration date and had to pay anyway.
LaunchDarkly promised us the moon to replace the system my team built. It didn't work with Ruby, Go, and the Java client sucked. It couldn't sync online changes at runtime like our five nines distributed and fault tolerant system could. We had to upstream a ton of code. And their system still sucked by the time I left the project.
These systems need to be open and owned by us. Managed is okay, but they shouldn't be proprietary offerings.
I could extend that one step further to cloud itself, but that's an argument for another day.
> I could extend that one step further to cloud itself, but that's an argument for another day
Absolutely. OSS platforms like k8s got a long way. Openstack was the dream (deeply flawed in execution). If we want to seriously talk about resilience we can’t accept that almost all major clouds run proprietary systems and we just have to trust them that they’ll be around forever.
NIH syndrome isn't sustainable, unless you're like Google and have more money than sense.
> These systems need to be open and owned by us. Managed is okay, but they shouldn't be proprietary offerings.
You could say this about all software in the world, but good luck with that... people who make money off of making things and selling things are going to keep doing so in non-open ways, because it's advantageous. And customers will keep buying them, because it's better than the alternative.
My last place also rolled their own feature flag service as their business logic around users/orgs/segments didn't neatly match anything off-the-shelf. It did what it was meant to and worked fine. OTOH we used Datadog for telemetry, which was expensive but made sense since we didn't have enough headcount with the skills to support something self-hosted.
At the end of the day, you just need to make good decisions based on honest analysis of your needs, capabilities, and general context.
> NIH syndrome isn't sustainable, unless you're like Google and have more money than sense.
Control plane and observability are key concerns of a fintech handling billions in daily transaction volume.
We had teams building and managing our solutions. After the migrations, we had teams managing the integrations. The headcount didn't change, we just wound up paying external vendors and sequencing multiple provider moves and company wide migrations. The changes caused several outages and shifted OKRs.
Traditionally an editor would be obligated to review the material and redact info that could be harmful to others. The publisher has distinct liability independent of govt opinion.
> and redact info that could be harmful to others.
of course, these concerns are only applicable when these "others" are Americans and the American institutions.
Everybody else can just fend for themselves.
Whats good for the goose, should be good for the gander. If American journalists feel like there is no problem with disclosing secrets of, say, Maduro, then they should not be protecting people like Trump (just as an example).
Also: life on earth is almost as old as the universe itself, within the same order of magnitude. 4.1 GYA (billion years ago) vs 13.8 GYA. We're old and intelligence is hard.
We'd almost certainly find some way to kill them if we ever ran across any of them.
We're pretty good at accomplishing things like that.
One day, there's some space sharks swimming in a sea of liquid helium and doing deep dives to get to the smaller creatures that devour the seabed of diamonds.
The next day, we're figuring out how to use space shark squeezings in our fusion reactors.
Unless, of course, the space sharks figure out how to kill us first. They will probably try if that's useful to then.
> We'd almost certainly find some way to kill them if we ever ran across any of them
There is a credible argument that what the literature terms genocidal tendencies—where conflict isn’t resolved when it ends, but when the enemy is destroyed—is a precondition for conquering a world. So if we met space sharks, barring enlightenment, they’d probably seek to destroy us, too.
That's not that early, no? There was probably enough C, H, N, O, P, S, Na atoms for life to start 10B years ago. You probably couldnt rely on iron being everywhere though but that's not such a hard requirement.
Where are we at today? Can we catch up under this administration?
Where do we compare on a nuclear basis? I know my state installed nuclear reactors recently, but I'm not aware of any other build outs.
In a war game scenario, China is probably more concerned about losing access to oil and natural gas than we are. Not that we shouldn't be building this stuff quickly either.
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