laddershoe

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

I'd like to read that book too... but "how to do a certain kind of difficult new thing" in their case involved more than solid execution. It also needed an owner/investor with extremely deep pockets and technical capabilities that vastly accelerated their work, who was willing to throw huge amounts of money at the problem for years, along with favorable economic conditions (zero-percent interest rates) for long periods of time, at the right period of time. I give Waymo tons of credit for their work here, but the conditions that enabled it aren't easily repeatable IMO.

laddershoe

vor 3 Jahrendiscuss

I can highly recommend an episode of 99% Invisible [1] about the musician's strike of 1942, which was a fight about royalties from recorded music, but was in large part actually about the the loss of livelihood from music recordings. Very little new music was recorded for over a year, and the president of the musician's union was pushing for record labels to pay into a fund that would benefit unemployed musicians in order to end the strike. I didn't make the connection when I heard this, but yeah, it does feel analogous to what we're facing now.

[1] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/one-year-the-day-the-...

laddershoe

vor 3 Jahrendiscuss

Oh man, you're bringing the flashbacks. My siblings watched that movie constantly when I was a kid, and some of those scenes traumatized me for years (I was a sensitive kid).

laddershoe

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

Modern Disney filmmaking (Pixar, WDAS) is much closer to the Miyazaki approach you describe than you'd think. It's very, very iterative; each film goes through 5-6 screenings, during which the story structure can and does change dramatically. People are very definitely working on the final product while the story is still being worked out. One pretty common pattern: with 8-9 months left to go until release, the entire third act has to be scrapped and reworked, and often big chunks of the first and second act reworked to match. Voice actors for the main characters are involved throughout, and often come in many times to record new pages of freshly written dialog.

If all this seems chaotic, it is. It leads to untold stress as the release date looms closer and closer and the ending still isn't figured out, which compresses the schedule for each department to deliver a finished product. Very very rarely, the release date is allowed to slip (see "The Good Dinosaur" for example) but that's really the nuclear option, as it involves shuffling the release schedule and incurs a ton of cost. This is a big part of why these movies cost so much: compressing the schedule means hiring tons of people and paying them tons of overtime.

Source: I worked the better part of a decade at WDAS.

laddershoe

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

Anecdotally: I don't have any smart home stuff, but literally every other member of my family does (parents, siblings, inlaws, etc). I've had numerous conversations in which they ask me why we accept an Echo or a Nest or something as a Christmas present, but my privacy concerns are always greeted with a blank stare. They just don't see it as an issue.

To them, the (perceived?) issue is how hard everything seems to setup and maintain. I haven't tried connecting any smart stuff lately, so maybe it's really easy for all I know, but all that stuff seems really advanced to them and they seem kind of afraid of it.

laddershoe

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

Man, does that thing bring back memories. I did my PhD in computer graphics (though I no longer work in that field) -- I've written several papers and read more than I can count. That bunny is iconic and still shows up in some absurd number, although it's considered a trivially simple model now. Even so, it can find ways to bite you; there are holes in the base can cause problems with some algorithms (sure you can find watertight versions... but that's cheating ;)

Fun times.

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