amccollum

My uncle (John Monsour) worked on this movie as the “24 Frame Computer Sync Engineer”. Because film cameras and CRT monitors have different frame rates, you needed to use specialized electronics to synchronize them with the camera frame rate otherwise you would have banding and weird moving artifacts on all the screens. It’s crazy to imagine needing to do this for all the screens visible in these shots.

Later monitor technologies like LCDs don’t have this issue because they don’t have the same moving electron beam illuminating each line of pixels, and it also became cheaper to just replace all the computer screens with CG, so eventually this specialized technical work wasn’t needed anymore, and my uncle ended up doing other things on the movies he worked on.

Ben & Jerry's actually adds/discontinues like 5+ flavors / year. I was told that flavors don't go to the flavor graveyard unless they have an interesting story, but it seems like they just haven't been adding any for a good while now.

The standard tax deduction for car travel is $0.70 / mile in the US, which accounts for things like insurance, gas, maintenance, and depreciation. So $500 / month is around 700 miles, which probably around 90% of US drivers surpass.

I used to feel this way. In the early days of "ride sharing," I preferred Lyft and would sit up front so I could have a conversation with the driver, which they encouraged. It was really fun for a while, and I enjoyed meeting people from different walks of life. Over time, though, transportation became much more functional for me, and now when I take non-autonomous rides, it's more irksome than enjoyable when drivers strike up conversations.

Why the change? I think a big part of your experience is the fact that you "rarely take taxis." Once you're doing it daily or near-daily, the amount of smalltalk becomes more tiresome. Also, with kids and a busy life, I'm usually either looking to get things done or enjoy a rare moment to myself as I'm moving from place-to-place. I agree with OP that Waymo is a huge step up on those dimensions. There's no other human in the same space to feel awkward around.

The fact that they drive more safely and smoothly is a huge improvement, as well. Ironically, I thought this was going to be something I would hate about Waymo. "You mean it drives the speed limit and follows all the traffic laws? It will take forever to get anywhere." It took approximately one ride for my perspective to completely flip. It's so much nicer to not feel the stress of a driver who is driving aggressively or jerking to a stop/start at every intersection. It's not like you can tell them to just ease up a bit, either. When we ride with our kids, we feel massively safer in Waymos.

Yes, it will be disruptive, and I don't particularly love the dominance that big tech has in all of our lives, but I do think Waymo is a marvel, and I hugely appreciate it as an option. As soon as they can take kids alone to all their various activities, it will be yet another massive unlock for parents.

They're not, at least not really. From Wikipedia:

  In April 2016, Rovi acquired TiVo for $1.1 billion.[8]
  
  In December 2019, it was announced that TiVo would merge with Xperi Corporation. The merger completed in May 2020.[9]

Xperi itself also split apart in 2022, so it's effectively 3 companies removed from its original roots. Basically at this point it is only valuable for the vague nostalgia consumers have for the brand.

If everyone is using LLMs to write new code, and LLMs are trained on existing code from the internet, that creates an enormous barrier to the adoption of new programming languages, because no new code will be written in them, therefore LLMs will never learn to write the code. It is a self-reinforcing cycle.

I've experienced this to some degree already in using LLMs to write Zig code (ironically, for my own pet programming language). Because Zig is still evolving so quickly, often the code the LLM produces is wrong because it's based on examples targeting incompatible prior versions of the language. Alternatively, if you ask an LLM to try to write code for a more esoteric language (e.g., Faust), the results are generally pretty terrible.

People were saying we would all be getting in our cars and taking a nap on our morning commute. We are clearly still a pretty long ways off from self-driving being as ubiquitous as it was claimed it would be.

The story of the bank built from bricks sent through the mail reminds me of the time I completed a move from Austin to Boston by packing all my possessions into rubber tubs and sending them by parcel post.

The delivery date was a range, and I wasn't there on the day of the first attempted delivery. When I called the post office about it, their response (in a thick Boston accent) was, "oh, so you're the tub guy, huh?"

All in all, it was a really convenient way to execute a cross-country move, assuming you don't have a lot of stuff!

I don't know about the author's case, but often asset purchase agreements will make the principals / shareholders party to the agreement personally with specific liability provisions. If there are no assets left in the company, the buyer has no recourse against it, since it is essentially an empty shell (in certain cases, insurance could be an exception to this). As a buyer, you will want to have some protection against issues you don't know about at the time of sale (perhaps because you weren't told about them, or the seller was negligent).

Maybe because JS files (specifically add-ons) run from the local filesystem are given escalated privileges compared to normal usage, perhaps for ease of development. I'm just speculating, though.

Ha, yes — I haven't been at Facebook since well before they acquired Instagram, but you're right to note a certain amount of irony in the situation! Of course, I don't mind the comment, and happy to post another way to see what we did with the project!