h. Play

George Lucas famously said that sound is 50% of the cinematic experience.

Watching the Mandalorian, sound design is responsible for at least 70% of the experience.

Without sound design those small green screens, sound stages, 3D graphics, plastic props and foamy “metal” boxes would have no weight, no flavor, no strength. They’re not believable because they visually exist. They’re believable and enjoyable because of sound and music. Sound makes us forget their weaknesses.

Every single clickety sound for droids or spaceships, landscape ambiences, creature growls, reverbs giving a sense of space. Voice filters sending us immediately into a future that doesn’t exist. Staccato strings rising our heartbeats. Growling bass waves making us excited.

Sound is so immense.

I mostly walk to the skatepark, but I always ride back from the session down the street. The asphalt is pretty rough. One day it came to me:

I sound like a hand-cranked Tie Fighter.

As the “engine noise” relates to how long I can roll on this raw surface (not for long, there you go), I’m not very menacing, yet still loud and ominous with the sound reflecting off of cars and houses. It makes me giggle.

Sort of related, I’m currently catching up with the Mando. Pretty good.

Lots of tough subjects lately, but man it feels good to clear one’s mind in a format and way that expands it.

You might have heard of her by now.

Her daughter being in junior high with me while having the same haircut and smile as Gisèle, the survivor, is getting to me.

I don’t think it’s possible to betray someone more.

It shouldn’t have happened.

Those men should be castrated and/or killed.

I think about the miles we walked in Paris, against violence perpetrated against women, in the 00s. How in some ways, it looked like maybe we were going too hard on this. We weren’t.

I am so sorry Gisèle and Caroline. May you find some peace.

I won’t be able to ship my gifts until next year

“What are these movies?” the Hollywood producer asked me. “Are they successful movies? Are they not? They have famous people in them. They get put out by major studios. And yet because we don’t have any reliable numbers from the streamers, we actually don’t know how many people have watched them. So what are they? If no one knows about them, if no one saw them, are they just something that people who are in them can talk about in meetings to get other jobs? Are we all just trying to keep the ball rolling so we’re just getting paid and having jobs, but no one’s really watching any of this stuff? When does the bubble burst? No one has any fucking clue.”

Fabulous article on Netflix.

Perfect, real life example of how we need Universal Income so that people take care of themselves at home instead of having meaningless, truly not bringing anything to the world jobs.

Look at it this way: people get into debt to obtain a degree in a film school, move to Los Angeles to displace people who have been living here for 40 years, to work on movies and shows that no one gives a single fuck about, not even the people who should. And then get let go.

It’s beyond meaningless.

Cancel that subscription, watch something else y’all. Same with Spotify, etc.

ChatGPT and generative AI will change how we work, but how different is this to all the other waves of automation of the last 200 years? What does it mean for employment? Disruption? Coal consumption?

AI and the automation of work — Benedict Evans (ben-evans.com)

It’s different because of the last 200 years, lol. Those 200 years have seen us get from nothing to now. From horses, to Waymo. From the start of photography, to 4K/120fps in your pocket.

What all technologists completely miss about the future of work and economics, is that we already have plenty. We have tons. We have insane amounts of everything. There’s nothing to produce more. There’s no need for more.

That’s the massive difference compared to the start of the last 200 years, in 1823! At that time, the world seemed to be gigantic and wild. Today it is the same Starbucks, TikTok and phones in hands from Jakarta to NYC to Brisbane. There’s nothing to produce at massive scale anymore. We have far too much of everything, and it’s available pretty much everywhere.

Look at creative industries! The job market is dire there because guess what, there’s far too much entertainment. I can’t even remember when I downloaded Ted Lasso season 1 and I still haven’t watched it because well, there’s tons of entertainment available and I keep forgetting about it. Not so long ago, you would watch a movie or show religiously, and most people tuned in. Today, it’s just so granular and weird.

Now, the real thing we could do, is re-distribute that wealth properly. That would change everything.

“So, we don’t know what the new jobs will be, but we have a model that says, not just that there always have been new jobs, but why that is inherent in the process. Don’t worry about AI!”

Of course we do worry because the point is not that there won’t be new jobs, the point is that there are not enough jobs for an economy as large as the West Global Capitalism, even with new jobs. The real world is finite. Computers in the past 30 years already have cut a lot of people off from having a job. AI is even better at this! I’ll take my mom’s career (accounting) as an example:

1970s: accounting firm (10-15 folks).

1980s: mom is independent (her, an assistant and 3 computers for 40 years). She semi-retired in 2020.

2020s: one accountant part-time, Excel, maybe an assistant? Taxes can be taken care of automatically with so many services already.

2030s: this intellectual career that no one could have possibly imagined being done by a computer (lots of reading), for which my mom graduated from a top 10 business school in the world, does not exist anymore.

That’s progress! But that also means less jobs. Period. I hate that naïve techno-optimism that’s only here to push more tech, but refuses to think about societal changes related to this. Tech is great and is modifying society heavily. We should focus on that instead of being vague and wrong with “this is progress as usual!” takes.

It’s truly a brand new world. New life conditions. It’s different.

(edit: older post from last year, still on point or even more so)

Comment that I see all the time since ChatGPT came out, and every single time that it does something that we thought would happen in 5+ years, not now (this is about the latest o3 release):

From IT bubble it’s very easy to have impression that AI will replace most people. Most of people on my street do not work in IT. Teacher, nurse, hobby shop owner, construction workers, etc. Surely programming and other virtual work may become less paid job but it’s not end of the world.

Everything is connected in this world! I can’t believe people don’t see it.

Construction worker: yeah, we can 3D print now and tons of tools are power tools and robots, increasingly, which means probably a reduction of construction workers by a lot in the next 20 years. You could say “well, buildings are going to be made more and more in factory, we’ll need drivers!”. You already know what’s going on with that.

Hobby shop owner: this person is already down bad in 2024 without AI! He’s not thriving, he’s doing OK. He might want to move to a web front, AI assistants and robots in a warehouse, saving him from renting a very expensive place in a less and less populated downtown.

Nurse: they’re actively leaving! Covid broke them. AI assistants and robots, just like for constructions workers, are going to mean that we need less of them. Note the important thing: there will still be a need for nurses, of course, but a lot less.

Teacher: They’re fighting for their lives right now! AI, smartphones and the internet have completely, absolutely changed their careers. School is more than ever about socializing than having a teacher teach you things. Tech has so massively and rapidly changed education that we do not know what the fuck we’re doing, at all. What’s a GPA in the world of perfect, 24/7 slaves with all the knowledge in the world? Nothing.

This wasn’t true five years ago.

Everyone is impacted by AI because AI impacts everything and everything is inter-connected.

What that means is the same productivity we have today, with 1/10th of its labor force. Capitalism will never ever give up on that. It’s a wrap.

Demand Universal Income. It’s urgent now.

My package for France sent on 12/9 came back yesterday due to a mistake in the custom form (???) so I know it will not be there for family on the 25th and I’m all like