Erik Hoel in take on modern cinema’s over reliance on CGI:

The problem is easiest to catch in the sci-fi and fantasy genres. There it is tempting to make use of the full horrors of graphics and post-production processing. It’s undeniable that remakes, from An American Werewolf in London to The Thing to the A Nightmare on Elm Street, have vastly inferior CGI effects compared to the original practical ones. Indeed, this over-reliance on CGI has ruined some of the best genre series. Consider Peter Jackson’s decline from The Lord of the Rings to The Hobbit trilogy. Or The Matrix’s sequels, which eschewed the original’s acrobatic stunt wire-work and practical fight scenes for the digital realm (a cosmic irony if there ever were one). The old original Star Wars trilogy comes to us as dispatches from a gritty world—it is a tighter world, yes, the shots are necessarily smaller, more closely-framed, but it all feels more viscerally real. Ever since the release of the Star Wars prequels in the 1990s, the actors stand apart from digital ghosts they can’t see.

[..]

Trends in cinematography are like fashion or architecture: almost impossible to see while you’re in them. We are always blind to our own age. Yet our era is dated very easily by the incredible unreality of its films, the fantasy of the whole thing, its emphasis on post-production and unreal colors and textures. It’s all just one long high-budget computer game cutscene. Your brain knows the difference, unconsciously, implicitly. And while we may have become accustomed to the digital slop we’re fed, the eyes of the future will pick it out, photon by photon, and judge.

Its going to be really sad when we re-visit these movies a decade or two from now and they will all look so terrible. Star Wars: A New Hope still holds up - Stars Wars: The Force Awakens already looks silly in comparison (I am just referring to the visuals - not the lack of plot).

Neil Young on why he left Spotify:

When I left Spotify, I felt better.

I support free speech. I have never been in favor of censorship. Private companies have the right to choose what they profit from, just as I can choose not to have my music support a platform that disseminates harmful information. I am happy and proud to stand in solidarity with the front line health care workers who risk their lives every day to help others.

As an unexpected bonus, I sound better everywhere else.

Neil Young’s main point here is exactly right: free speech works both ways. Joe Rogan has every right to say what he wants and Spotify has every right to associate with who ever they want. But Young has a right not to want to be with a services that associates with Rogan and the state that publicly.

I am glad that Neil Young is taking a principled stand on what he believes is right. And for any of you who think this is some kind of publicity stunt, he has done this all through his life. Genuine virtue, not mere virtue signaling.

Jessica Wildefire writes:

There’s not enough.

There’s not enough truck drivers. There’s not enough nurses. There’s not enough doctors. There’s not enough teachers.

There’s not enough baristas.

There’s not enough servers, or cashiers, or cooks. There’s nobody to froth your latte to perfection, or make your bed at the fancy hotel, or bring you peanuts and soda on your first-class flight to wherever, or watch your kid while you’re sacrificing the best years of your life.

Here’s the worst part:

There never will be, ever again.

Essential workers ran the economy. We did everything. In return, we got nothing. No raises. No bonuses. No minimum wage laws. No childcare support. No sick leave. When the pandemic dragged on, we were forced back into dangerous workplaces for one reason:

We had to protect the bubble.

We endured sickness and death to keep the fake economy going, to keep stock prices high. We took risks our billionaire overlords never would. Essential workers got sick with Covid, and they were fired.

Fired.

They were fired because they ran out of personal leave. In other words, they stayed sick for too long. Their medical bills got too expensive. So they were terminated. When they died, they left their families with staggering medical debt. If they survived, they had to find new jobs while managing the severe, lingering symptoms of a deadly disease.

There’s going to be a lot of theories when the economy collapses. (It’s already happening.) Here’s the simplest one:

We treated workers like crap.

So they quit.

I am sick and tired of business owners, CEOs and politicians (and I mean specifically Republicans) who are claiming workers are lazy. They just don’t want to work.

No workers want to be treated like human beings and respected for what they do for society. And in a long time, they are finally demanding it.

I am not a listener of Hip Hop - but Rick Rubin is the GOAT of music producers. He has produced the likes of Slayer, Danzig, Red Hot Chili Peppers, U2, Green Day, Adele just to name a few.

Interesting thoughts on the Book of Boba Fett and its portrayal of the Tuskans by an indigenous person.

Eric Colson in Harvard Business review writes:

But the goal of data science is not to execute. Rather, the goal is to learn and develop profound new business capabilities. Algorithmic products and services like recommendations systems, client engagement bandits, style preference classification, size matching, fashion design systems, logistics optimizers, seasonal trend detection, and more can’t be designed up-front. They need to be learned. There are no blueprints to follow; these are novel capabilities with inherent uncertainty. Coefficients, models, model types, hyper parameters, all the elements you’ll need must be learned through experimentation, trial and error, and iteration. With pins, the learning and design are done up-front, before you make it. With data science, you learn as you go, not before you go.

[…]

In order to encourage learning and iteration, data science roles need to be made more general, with broad responsibilities agnostic to technical function. That is, organize the data scientists such that they are optimized to learn. This means hiring “full stack data scientists”—generalists—that can perform diverse functions: from conception to modeling to implementation to measurement. It’s important to note that I am not suggesting that hiring full-stack data scientists results in fewer people overall. Rather, I am merely suggesting that when organized differently, their incentives are better aligned with learning vs. efficiency gains. For example, say you have a team of three creating three business capabilities. In the pin factory, each specialist will be one-third devoted to each capability, since no one else can do their job. In the full-stack, each generalist is completely devoted to a business capability, increasing scale and learning.

I completely agree. In fact, I think the term “data scientist” is vastly over used and badly specified. I have worked with a lot of data scientists. They have all been incredibly intelligent group of people who can deep dive into data. But they are not necessarily capable of retrieving, manipulating, and organizing data into optimal streams for processing.

I think a “data science generalist” is going to be hard to find, but pairing data scientist(s) with a generalist developer would lead to an optimal pairing.

Gustavo Pezzi goes down memory lane of past great consoles from the perspective of a programmer:

It is always useful to look at the past to understand the current state of affairs. This article is a brief overview of the history of game consoles from a programmer’s perspective. Let’s understand the limitations and the driving forces that helped shape the technologies we use today in modern game development.

Good stuff - I still believe that the pinnacle of game development happened towards the later part of the 8-bit generation and the 16-bit generation. The technology was sophisticated enough to provide an engaging experience yet limited enough to force the developers to be creative.

Justin Sherman for Wired on our current state of digital privacy:

Companies like Acxiom, LexisNexis, and others argue that there’s nothing to worry about collecting and sharing Americans’ sensitive data, as long as their names and a few other identifiers aren’t attached. After all, their reasoning goes, this “anonymized” data can’t be linked to individuals, and is therefore harmless.

[…]

The irony that data brokers claim that their “anonymized” data is risk-free is absurd: Their entire business model and marketing pitch rests on the premise that they can intimately and highly selectively track, understand, and microtarget individual people. the data brokerage circus.

This argument isn’t just flawed; it’s also a distraction. Not only do these companies usually know your name anyway, but data simply does not need to have a name or social security number attached to cause harm. Predatory loan companies and health insurance providers can buy access to advertising networks and exploit vulnerable populations without first needing those people’s names. Foreign governments can run disinformation and propaganda campaigns on social media platforms, leveraging those companies’ intimate data on their users, without needing to see who those individuals are. Programmers don’t need names in a data set to create artificial intelligence tools that can’t accurately identify female individuals’ and Black individuals’ faces or tell police to patrol already heavily policed neighborhoods of color.

The issue is that the genie is out of the bottle and too much of the tech economy is based on the selling of sensitive data.

Since we can’t stop it, I propose that there should be a collective charge on all companies that traffic on sensitive data. The profits should be distribute back to the general public. After all, if they are going to use our data to make profit - effectively making us the product - we should be compensated.

Its not like there isn’t a precedent for this - the state of Alaska does something similar to this with the oil industry:

The Alaska Permanent Fund (APF) is a constitutionally established permanent fund managed by a state-owned corporation, the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation (APFC).[1] It was established in Alaska in 1976[2] by Article 9, Section 15 of the Alaska State Constitution[3] under Governor Jay Hammond and Attorney General Avrum Gross. From February 1976 until April 1980, the Department of Revenue Treasury Division managed the state’s Permanent Fund assets, until, in 1980, the Alaska State Legislature created the APFC.[4]

As of 2019, the fund was worth approximately $64 billion that has been funded by oil revenues and has paid out an average of approximately $1,600 annually per resident (adjusted to 2019 dollars).[5] The main use for the fund’s revenue has been to payout the Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD), which many authors portray as the only example of a Basic Income in practice.[6][7]

It’s time we demand companies that traffic and profit off our private data to compensate us - the creators of their product.

Its real to people who want it to be real.

The US dollar has value because it is backed by the largest, most stable economy in the world that is defended by the largest military the world has ever known. Cryptocurrency has value because people want it to have value.

If you still believe in cryptocurrency - sorry but you are an idiot.

From the Associated Press:

Madden gained fame in a decade long stint as the coach of the renegade Oakland Raiders, making it to seven AFC title games and winning the Super Bowl following the 1976 season. He compiled a 103-32-7 regular-season record, and his .759 winning percentage is the best among NFL coaches with more than 100 games.

But it was his work after prematurely retiring as coach at age 42 that made Madden truly a household name. He educated a football nation with his use of the telestrator on broadcasts; entertained millions with his interjections of “Boom!” and “Doink!” throughout games; was an omnipresent pitchman selling restaurants, hardware stores and beer; became the face of “Madden NFL Football,” one of the most successful sports video games of all-time; and was a best-selling author.

Most of all, he was the preeminent television sports analyst for most of his three decades calling games, winning an unprecedented 16 Emmy Awards for outstanding sports analyst/personality, and covering 11 Super Bowls for four networks from 1979-2009.

Madden will to me always be the voice of football. His everyman demeanor really made the intracies of the game understandable to the audience. Not to mention the countless hours I spent playing the football game series that bears his name.

Once they were there, and he had called them there, I think it was only going to go one way.

Anyone with a pulse knew what was going to happen. The real question is who willfully ignored what was obvious, and why?

An excellent interview as always by Christiane Amanpour with Robert Plant and Alison Krauss. Two masters of their craft collaborating to make amazing music.

Ed Zitron on the impending worker revolt in the US:

The whole great resignation conversation we’ve been having continues to miss the obvious problem - that so much of our current capitalism is dependent on people being willing to accept bad wages and bad working conditions. 64% of retail workers don’t get paid a living wage, despite how important retail sales are to the economy, and as Omicron grows within the states during the biggest shopping season of the year, they’re at risk, which is why 685,000 retail workers quit in September.

What I am sloppily constructing here is a series of events that leads to a massive worker revolt - a reckoning like we have never seen in modern society. America’s response to the pandemic has always been half-measures - insufficient stimulus, insufficient PPE, insufficient testing, insufficient safety standards, insufficient everything, all of which most directly hit the people that had to leave the house - retail workers, restaurant workers, hospitality workers, nurses, and so on.

As I’ve said before, this was a time when corporations could’ve proved to their workers that they mattered - that the danger they put themselves was appreciated - and treated them with dignity, by which I mean more money and better working conditions. Instead, members of the government spread a lie that they weren’t working because of increased unemployment benefits, and companies proceeded to do just about anything other than pay them more.

]..]

America runs on the backs of poorly paid-and-treated workers, with several of the top 10 companies in America relying heavily on these kinds of poorly-paid customer-facing roles. And yet they seem incapable of accepting their hand in the deaths of these workers, or at least said acceptance doesn’t extend to paying them an actual living wage - $16.40 an hour, by the way, is not close to what a living wage is in most states.

This entire transaction of bad pay for awful work has worked for so long because these companies know that many of these workers don’t have a choice. Except the additional variable of crazed, violent customers and an invisible, murderous virus is enough to make these jobs untenable. It’s grotesque to say, but so many companies calculated pay and conditions for workers based on how little dignity their workers had, and now that calculation is going to bite them on the ass hard enough to make sitting impossible.

Exactly - for the first time workers have real power. Let us hope that the silver lining in all of this misery is that we come out on the other side with real labor reforms and a new found respect for the ‘everyday’ American.

When an aeroplane crashes, it's left to investigators to sift through the wreckage to recover the black box.

It's hoped the recorded contents can be used to help others avoid the same fate.

And so it is with Earth's Black Box: a 10-metre-by-4-metre-by-3-metre steel monolith that's intended to be built on a remote outcrop on Tasmania's west coast.

Chosen for its geopolitical and geological stability, ahead of other candidates like Malta, Norway and Qatar, the idea is that the Tasmanian site can cradle the black box for the benefit of a future civilisation, should catastrophic climate change cause the downfall of ours.

If that sounds unhinged, it's worth remembering that we're currently on track for as much as 2.7C of warming this century.

Ask any climate scientist what happens when warming breaches 2C, and they'll almost invariably tell you it's not worth thinking about.

Plenty of past civilizations and empires have collapsed in the face of less.

Could this be a future generation’s or visiting alien’s monolith?

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today granted Emergency Use Authorization to Pfizer’s (PFE) Covid-19 oral anti-viral pill:

FDA has authorized the emergency use of Paxlovid (nirmatrelvir) for the treatment of mild-to-moderate COVID-19 in adults and pediatric patients with positive results of direct SARS-CoV-2 viral testing, and who are at high risk for progression to severe COVID-19, including hospitalization or death.

The treatment includes nirmatrelvir, which was specifically designed to block the activity of the SARS-CoV-2 Mpro, an enzyme that the coronavirus needs to replicate.

Pfizer said the pill will be made available to patients in the U.S. immediately. According to CNBC, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla had earlier stated that the company has already shipped some of the pills to the U.S. so they can be prescribed as soon as the FDA authorization comes through.

This is great news - another weapon in our war against COVID-19. Lets hope this works just as well against the COVID-19 Omicron variant.

When this baby hits 88 MPH, you’re going to see some serious shit

88MPH: The Story of the DeLorean Time Machine, a feature-length documentary about the Back to the Future and the DeLorean used in the movie. The full documentary is available for free on YouTube.

One of the greatest movies of all time with arguably the perfect script. The 80s were the greatest time to grow up in America.

I don’t watch or follow football - Ted Lasso has more knowledge of the sport than I do. But you recognize perfection when you see it. This video of Lionel Messi from 2009-2013 is just mind boggling.

I dont’t think I have ever seen someone master their sport to this level. Not Jordan. Not Tiger. Not Brady. Lionel Messi is the GOAT of GOATs.

Ed Young in The Atlantic: America is not Ready for Omicron:

Will the new and rapidly spreading variant overwhelm the U.S. health-care system? The question is moot because the system is already overwhelmed, in a way that is affecting all patients, COVID or otherwise. “The level of care that we’ve come to expect in our hospitals no longer exists,” Lowe said.

The real unknown is what an Omicron cross will do when it follows a Delta hook. Given what scientists have learned in the three weeks since Omicron’s discovery, “some of the absolute worst-case scenarios that were possible when we saw its genome are off the table, but so are some of the most hopeful scenarios,” Dylan Morris, an evolutionary biologist at UCLA, told me. In any case, America is not prepared for Omicron. The variant’s threat is far greater at the societal level than at the personal one, and policy makers have already cut themselves off from the tools needed to protect the populations they serve. Like the variants that preceded it, Omicron requires individuals to think and act for the collective good — which is to say, it poses a heightened version of the same challenge that the U.S. has failed for two straight years, in bipartisan fashion.

[…]

Here, then, is the problem: People who are unlikely to be hospitalized by Omicron might still feel reasonably protected, but they can spread the virus to those who are more vulnerable, quickly enough to seriously batter an already collapsing health-care system that will then struggle to care for anyone — vaccinated, boosted, or otherwise. The collective threat is substantially greater than the individual one. And the U.S. is ill-poised to meet it.

The key message is that this is a collective threat - and America has forgotten how to work as a part of the collective.

At the risk of sounding like a total nerd - okay who am I kidding - Spock said it best:

Were I to invoke logic, however, logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

And Kirk replies:

Or the one.

Hopefully the sliver lining of this pandemic will be that Americans learn to that sometimes individual rights have to take a backseat for the common good.

A four-minute animated short with Ted Lasso and the gang called The Missing Christmas Mustache. A nice way to kick off the holiday festivities.

With holidays upon us, families around the country will be generating millions of images and gigabytes of video files. Unfortunately these will remain on people’s cell phones until a catastrophe happens. Either they lose the phone or a device failure will render their memories lost. The only way to protect yourself is to have a clear back strategy.

Here is where the 3-2-1 backup rule comes into play.

Backups are good, but they may be useless without redundancy. This being said, a good backup strategy is a sure way to protect your data from any malfunction, erroneous activity, or disaster coming your way. Here, the 3-2-1 rule comes into play.

Key parts of this strategy:

• Three copies of all data locally.
• 2 backups - each on a different physical media.
• And finally, a copy goes to the cloud.

This may seem overkill but the cost data loss is too high, which is why it is very smart to be ready even for any eventuality. The 3-2-1 backup rule is your way to keep data safe.