meebob

A large amount of animation made in Japan is still initially animated by hand on paper, actually! The anime industry is remarkably conservative, technologically, which makes it all the more impressive that its animation production output dwarfs that of most other places, including ones that have largely switched over to 3D or puppet rigging for animation productions...

Something I really enjoyed about this article is that really helps explain a counterintuitive result in hand drawn 2D animation. It's a well known phenomenon in hand drawn 2D animation that naively tracing over live action footage usually results in unconvincing and poor quality animation. The article demonstrates how sampling and even small amounts of noise can make a movement seem unconvincing or jittery- and seeing that, it suddenly helps make sense how something like simple tracing at 12 fps would produce bad results, without substantial error correction (which is where traditional wisdom like arcs, simplification etc comes in).

This website fills me with nostalgia! I used it many years ago to make a tiny 8ft yurt, which was a fun little project. Putting up a yurt is really satisfying- the way the lattice walls flex is very cool, and seeing the way tension works across the structure is fun.

The title has two parts, both of which you've provided ample commentary on, but only one explicitly. In Their 20s, Struggling to Save... and Tired of Being Lectured About It. "Ridiculous" and "and so can you" come down on one side of the question of, how should we morally judge people about their savings?

What we're talking about here is the immanent arrival of it being impossible for a very large number of people to get a career in something they enjoy (making images by hand).

It's fair to suppose (albeit based on a very small sample size, i.e., the last couple hundred, abnormal years of history) that all sorts of new jobs will arise as a result of these changes- but it seems to me unreasonable to suppose that these new jobs of the future will necessarily be more interesting or enjoyable than the ones they destroyed. I think it's easy to imagine a case in which the jobs are all much less pleasant (even supposing we all are wealthier, which also isn't necessarily going to be true)- imagine a future where the remaining jobs are either managerial/ownership based in nature or manual labor. To me at least, it's a bleak prospect.

I would point out that many (most?) people are in programming to make money, rather than get things done per se.

If an AI were to make it impossible to make a living doing programming, would that be an improvement for most readers of this site?

I do appreciate that the way in which a piece of code "works" and the way in which an piece of art "works" is in some ways totally different- but, I also think that in many cases, notably automated systems that create reports or dashboards, they aren't so far apart. In the end, the result just has to seem right. Even in computer programming, amateur hour level correctness isn't so uncommon, I would say.

I would personally be astonished if any of the distributed systems I've worked on in my career were even close to 95% correct, haha.

I've been finding that the strangest part of discussions around art AI among technical people is the complete lack of identification or empathy: it seems to me that most computer programmers should be just as afraid as artists, in the face of technology like this!!! I am a failed artist (read, I studied painting in school and tried to make a go at being a commercial artist in animation and couldn't make the cut), and so I decided to do something easier and became a computer programmer, working for FAANG and other large companies and making absurd (to me!!) amounts of cash. In my humble estimation, making art is vastly more difficult than the huge majority of computer programming that is done. Art AI is terrifying if you want to make art for a living- and, if AI is able to do these astonishingly difficult things, why shouldn't it, with some finagling, also be able to do the dumb, simple things most programmers do for their jobs?

The lack of empathy is incredibly depressing...

Some other fun examples of points in the music notation space are the various notation systems used by traditional Japanese musical instruments... For instance, the shakuhachi (a type of bamboo flute) has a system where various combinations of fingerings/blowing technique are each assigned distinct characters (the same pitch, but achieved with different fingerings, and therefore having different tone colors, will have different characters). Rhythm and ornamentation are then indicated with various annotations on these characters. You could maybe make the analogy that Japanese music notation relates to Western classical notation in a similar way to how Chinese characters compare to alphabetical systems...

Other instruments have similar (but generally mutually unintelligible!) systems, with different characters assigned to particular notes/techniques peculiar to those instruments.