Yeah, usually if I get stuck in my head I’ll just go work in the garden. Bit of sunshine and toil usually gets me unstuck.

Yeah I’ve got arms like an orangutan. Despite the amount of stuff I’ve smashed my watch 5 pro against it’s still scratch and scuff free.

We have a family premium plan and I still got this message. Guess I’ll cancel YouTube Premium now…

I get most of the content I want via patreon anyway now.

Ditto.

A big problem in Aus is the industry culture. They don’t care about using technology to improve results. They only care about cutting costs, even if the final product doesn’t meet the previous standard.

And we’ve seen that with VFX across the globe, the overall quality dropped drastically. Because studios play silly buggers to weasel out of paying VFX companies what they are due.

From what I hear, even DNEG is in trouble, and were even before the strike.

It’s a race to the bottom it seems.

My honest hope for the film industry is likely the same as yours. That we have smaller productions with access to better post due to improvements in AI-driven compositing software and so on.

But it’s likely that a role that was earning $$$ before is devalued significantly. And while I’m an unabashed anti-capitalist, I think a lot of folks misunderstand what this sudden downward pressure on income can do. Cost of living increasing while wages shrink is an awful combination

I’m 35, left a six figure job, folding my company and starting an electrician’s apprenticeship. To give you an idea around what my views about AI are. And of course this is as an Australian. We have a garbage white collar work culture anyway.

I think there will be a net improvement. But I worry that others will fail to adapt quickly. Too many are writing off AI as this thing that already came and went, but the tools have just landed, and we don’t yet have workflows that correctly implement and leverage these yet.

There was a smallish VFX group here that was attached to a volume screen company. They employed something like 20 people I think? So pretty small.

But the volume screen employed a guy who could do an adequate enough job with generative tools instead and the company folded. The larger VFX company they partner with had 200 employees, they recently cut to 50.

In my field, a team leader in 2018 could earn about 180,000 AUD P/A. Now those jobs are advertised for 130,000 AUD, because new models can do ~80% of the analysis with human accuracy.

AI is already folding companies and cutting jobs. It’s not in the news maybe, but as industries shift to compete with smaller firms leveraging AI it will cascade.

I had/have my own company, we were attached to Metropolis which unfortunately folded. I think that had a role to play in the job cuts as well. Luckily for me I wasn’t overleveraged, but I am packing up and changing careers for sure.

It’s a very dystopian realisation.

Something was done without the consent of your parents or yourself that has a lasting impact on the rest of your life.

I just hope we hold those responsible to account. This was researched in the 90’s and the scientista that worked on it were muzzled.

You can read about that here:

https://e360.yale.edu/features/a_warning_by_key_researcher_on_risks_of_bpa_in_our_lives

How do you explain vastly decreased rates of child abuse vs vastly increased rates of various disorders? This isn’t my area of expertise but it is my wife’s.

It’s kind of an a known at this point that there is something environmental affecting us. Given the number of recent studies, (check my post below) and the ramping interest in BPA/BPS and ~100 similar compounds, I advise watching this space.

One of the OG studies that raised the alarm.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6946218/

Recent study into specific harms.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0289841

https://www.pennlive.com/nation-world/2023/10/new-study-suggests-a-link-between-a-plastic-additive-and-autism-adhd.html

As more research is done, it’s going to end up being the lead exposure of our generation. (If I was to make a judgement call now)

Weird downvotes, I guess we love.3M and chemical coorporations now lol?

I’d go ahead and say the cause is likely related to BPA/BPS compounds in plastics. And the exposure of pregnant women to those compounds.

But ya know, that’s just me.

Edit: lol at downvotes, this is newish research. A lot of new information has landed literally in the last week. I sincerely advise keeping an eye on it as research ramps up.

I’ve posted a couple of papers below, one old, one new. As well as a link to an article that does a good job of summarising where our understanding is currently at.

In Australia we are currently voting on a constitutional amendment. It would create an advisory body that represents first nations people. It’s super basic, doesn’t really cover how it will work, because they can’t really even work on that until the amendment passes.

But presumably it will allow them to directly advise government, rather than through the spiderweb of community leaders, NGOs and whatnot that exist now, and provide some structure for Aboriginal representation in parliament

The sheer amount of disinformation circulating is staggering. I was lucky enough to really avoid most of the drama, until I went and had a look this past week finally.

What interested me, was rather than the usual short posts and snarky racist comments, of which plenty exist. These long diatribes were dominant, on places like Reddit and Facebook.

Then it struck me, they all sound like they were written by the same person. Not just a little, if you had removed the names and pictures of the users, I would have flat out assumed it was the same person.

We have opened Pandora’s Box. We don’t need “AGI” or whatever, this is plenty enough to do us in.

The issue is that ads on YouTube used to be fairly innocuous. Now I get batshit conspiracies pushed, non-stop Aussie gambling ads and so on.

Where I was once happy to sit through some food ads, or some tourism ads to support the platform. I’m not happy being blasted with non-stop, low-quality propoganda.

Granted the $22 family plan for me and my wife has worked well. We both use youtube music extensively as well. It’s the only streaming service I pay for, the only other subscription I have is for a VPN.

Yeah I managed to solve that for some games by installing the proton EAC plugin. Squad works for instance.

But games introducing kernel-level DRM I wouldn’t install on my Windows machine anyway. I guess the person I replied to potentially doesn’t know how to deploy a new operating system. So they might not care about all that anywho.

But calling everyone else dumb because they don’t know how to do something is ridiculous.

These days it’s more “which games don’t work on linux?” Rather than “which games work on linux?”

I pointed out that the Australian subreddits were being very obviously astro-turfed. And then I made a post naming the Aus PR companies that were openly running bot campaigns on Reddit and who was using them.

That account got banned in record fucking time lol. And no reason was given either, it was a site-wide IP ban. Luckily one call to my ISP and that was sorted lol.

Every light adds to light pollution though and makes it more difficult for earth-based astronomy. And that’s excluding events where satilites pass through observations.

Extremely annoying, but inevitable I guess.

Is there a joke in the comic anywhere? This is just an average morning in consulting.

Hahaha I’m an Aussie in my thirties and leaving the office behind to start an Elec apprenticeship. Honestly I was good at what I did, but I hated it, and “knowledge workers” don’t have a union.

I like the dopamine rush afforded by projects having a definitive end.

Yeah you put it really well.

I generally feel the same way about all Bethesda games. I’ll return after some DLC and Mods have been released.

There is some pretty cringe writing and stylistic choices this time around. Space cowboys and Freestar were conceptualized by a child and the PG pirate brigade are embarassing.

There are some bones for a pretty great empire building mod though. Can’t wait to see a sim-settlements type mod for Starfield.

We’re past the point where we can stop it wholesale.

We already have aquifers barely holding on, we’ve lost major sources of fresh water already.

I’m all for climate action, but we also need to starting developing technologies for living in the bed we’ve made.

Folks keep talking about climate change like it’s some future event. You are living through it right now.