This book enabled me to think better from first principles.
e.g. How might I go about optimizing a redshift query? Well, now that I have an idea about how data is laid out on disk, because redshift is a columnar store, if I try to optimize X query, here's how I imagine the index to be so that sequential reads would be faster.
I could find a reference on how to optimize redshift queries, but this book answers the WHY and not just the immediate how.
I've read so many books that were practical, yet became so much less useful over time. (e.g. reading a book about the specifics of the Angular API, whereas now I write mostly React.)
I keep returning back to this book for understanding a top-level view of the fundamentals of distributed systems, specifically data stores.
I hope you give the book a second look at some point.
For the longest time I believed that Kubrick knew exactly what he wanted before he began shooting. The finished film existed in his mind, and set pieces and actors simply had to materialize and adhere to that vision. I don't buy into that idea anymore.
An example would be that he's known for making actors do a hundred takes. Apparently he made Tom Cruise walk through a door for a hundred different takes! One interpretation of that would be that Cruise couldn't deliver what Kubrick had in his vision. The other would be that Kubrick was trying to tire Cruise out, so that Cruise be too tired to keep "acting", and bring out something neither of them expected, something "real" and "raw" and not rehearsed.
For a while, I was also obsessed with filmmakers who appeared to not adhere to a strict vision, and "discovered" their film, rather than try to construct the film to fit their rigid vision. The likes of Wong Kar Wai or Godard or Wim Wenders, who would write snippets of dialogue the same day they would shoot and improvise with actors. In particular, Wong Kar Wai was known for shooting for years on end, and discarding 95% of the film he shot. He couldn't have envisioned the final product at the beginning.
I find common in all of their approaches to include exploration. Filmmaking is expensive. It's not cheap like sketching with pen on paper, which is why I think most filmmakers "sketch" with the script, and less so while shooting on set, where every minute they are burning cash.
When I was a young teen, I'd look at the art of movies like Star Wars and I couldn't ever achieve anything like that on my own. What I didn't realize was that that art required iteration. Of course it's impossible to come up with a grand idea on the first try on a large canvas! Those concept artists didn't start by creating the final piece, but they drew hundreds of little thumbnail-sized sketches, playing with elements, this curve they like, or that feature.
I think of how much pre-visualization work went into the likes of Star Wars Episode 1, where you CAN'T stop the train once it's been moving, with hundreds of visual effects workers working on something that Lucas has decided on much earlier. In this, I think that the means of production of how people work have outsized effects on the final artistic product.
I've watched 2001 twice in my life. Once on my laptop screen, and once in a theater. Wildly different experiences.
On a laptop, it was maddeningly slow. I couldn't bear that scene where the spaceship docks on the space station while the Blue Danube Waltz played. Excruciating. I wish there was more explanation, as my mind was wandering watching this dull film.
In a theater, I experienced a completely different film.On the big screen, I could imagine the scale of this achievement, of a man-made spaceship landing on a man-made space station, all this coordination, against the Blue Danube waltz, and it was all I could see in my field of vision. Not distracted by other things as I was on my laptop. I didn't need explanation. I just felt it. I finally felt that I had "gotten" the movie. It was an experience. Not just plot and explosions and super heroes, like most movies are today.
A powerful film is expressed in images! Film. It's called a motion picture. The more a film can be expressed in images, the more "pure" it is to its medium! And most of the film was silent.
I'm glad Clarke got the chance to make it a novel, and told it in the form most fitting for him.
Kubrick was a filmmaker and Clarke a writer. I think it is natural that they would disagree on the telling of this story. Different mediums call for different ways to tell the story.
e.g. How might I go about optimizing a redshift query? Well, now that I have an idea about how data is laid out on disk, because redshift is a columnar store, if I try to optimize X query, here's how I imagine the index to be so that sequential reads would be faster.
I could find a reference on how to optimize redshift queries, but this book answers the WHY and not just the immediate how.
I've read so many books that were practical, yet became so much less useful over time. (e.g. reading a book about the specifics of the Angular API, whereas now I write mostly React.)
I keep returning back to this book for understanding a top-level view of the fundamentals of distributed systems, specifically data stores.
I hope you give the book a second look at some point.