Now this is something close enough to what studios would pay for
194 karma · joined January 6, 2017
It's so obvious that visual mediums are just going to continue to dominate time spent on screens. It seems odd that lots of the pixels we see today are manually put there by an artist or a sensor.
- Consensus around asset ownership -- every render to the network automatically ascribes authorship of the final render via a minting process a la NFT.
- Authorship/ownership graph -- Similar to above, in my mind the end game is an asset graph that tracks combinations of assets and their owners used to create final renders or assets. Piracy in digital assets is rampant and having a distributed source graph of "what assets are made of" isn't something tractable for a central body to take on but would reward impactful creators more meritocratically.
- From the above, a blockchain setup could bake in the direct monetization of IP, copyright, permissions, etc.
- Supply side incentives -- for all the misplaced hype, blockchain can actually nail financializing "sharing economy" primitives in a trustless way. I'm sure there are many people who don't want to trust running VMs on a closed network. Adding "liquidity" to the compute market here may be the biggest benefit IMO. Technically speaking it's doable without blockchain but I'm not aware of for-profit success stories, though happy to be proven wrong.
- Open source data -- The market doesn't incentivize open source data for a highly technical (and niche atm) segment like this. Intellectual property management and law could actually be much simpler if open was the standard.
- Licensing -- I have to think the service you suggest would be cease and desisted by a number of large incumbents on legal grounds of running a business without each node contributor having the right licensing permissions as well as the central body. IANAL but there's a sharing economy argument (similar to Uber & Airbnb) somewhere in here that brings the blockchain approach more into the legislative grey area in a way that makes the market more efficient.
Btw, it's not lost on me that these useful aspects present new classes of integrity, security, privacy challenges. Just trying to discuss in good faith as you mentioned. I think the blockchain aspect isn't super interesting on it's own right but brings the barriers for entry of a system like this way down.
With that said, an example would be a solo artist making CGI in C4D for a client/hobby (this is a small subset of potential use cases, but most relatable today).
Typical workflow costs would look like: - Local Workstation ($4K w/ 2 high end nvda gpus) - Render 2000 frames at 4K resolution for final render (need a better figure here but let's call it $500) - Time spent on workflow rendering - 5 hours - Time spent on final rendering - 10 hours
In a decentralized render situation: - Local computer ($500 - in theory no discrete graphics necessary) - Render 2000 frames at 4K resolution ($100) - Time spent on workflow rendering - 1 hour - Time spent on final rendering - 2 hours
I'm not trying to handwave at the data here btw, I just have a day job and want to answer promptly. RNDR is far and away cheaper at the moment than local or render farm compute: https://twitter.com/rsquires/status/1466599124451487744
Here are the main reasons why it's cheaper: - Most decentralized GPU operators are "running at a loss" -- people who own GPUs don't expect a return so any dollars earned while they're idle is good with them. - No "datacenter tax". Server GPUs are objectively more expensive than the network's GPU's which bias towards consumer. - In terms of time, rendering is one of the most parallelizable workloads. 2000 frames rendered sequentially on a cloud instance is just slower than 2000 frames rendered in parallel on 50 cloud instances.
For QoS, because it's so much cheaper, redundancy is much more justifiable to add to the system.
On compatibility, an SDK would allow people to build their own products that leverage the compute of the network. That's not something there is a high incentive for centralized render farms to offer.
If you want to go deep I highly recommend recent podcast with CEO of OTOY and the two hosts of the Mograph podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRtOMF4JKd4
Say more :)
Definitely with you distributed doesn't mandate decentralized and the two are easy to conflate.
Personally I'd think a bit broader than frame-streaming for achieving "console in the room" levels of video game fidelity.
IMO the project aims to solve a couple fundamental problems:
- Graphical computing power is prohibitively expensive
- Graphical computing power is inherently scarce and inaccessible, while most graphics resources are in reality sitting idle.
- Thermal/power constraints are incompatible with a mass-market form factor for VR/AR/XR.
Looking past the shilling in this tweetstorm I think it's the best summary of the core concepts I've seen: https://twitter.com/arbvision/status/1460774216136024071
[edit: appended "open standards" above]
I appreciate that he is qualifying or preconditioning the value of the idea guy as having intelligence along with other "mundane ingredients" like grit, sleep, stress, network, and passion. I very much agree with the approach and only wish for a framework to score these ingredients in the context of an entrepreneur's problem domain. I guess that's what VC's are supposed to do.
For folks who know any react I'd recommend react-three-fiber [1] as your entrypoint. It's ridiculously easy to get started. The creator (mlsarecmg on HN, I think), just came out with this tutorial today for beginners: https://twitter.com/0xca0a/status/1445409346305892353
It's paid but there's nearly endless free content as well between his twitter, the pmndrs discord, and the official docs [2].
I started using R3F and was able to put this [3] together, which is heavily inspired by Stripe design, in a couple weeks with some spare time. That is to say how easy it was and how highly I recommend the pmndrs suite for web 3D abstractions.
[1] https://github.com/pmndrs/react-three-fiber [2] https://docs.pmnd.rs/react-three-fiber/getting-started/intro... [3] https://r3f-gradient.netlify.app/
The point of stable coins is to have a working capital system that is compatible with the rest of the crypto ecosystem. The reason is that most services in crypto aren't natively compatible with fiat due to fragmented legal & regulatory environments. Stablecoins are instant transfers to anywhere in the world. It's why a lot of countries are trying to build regulatory frameworks for stablecoins.
Two caveats: (1) USDC actually can earn a lot more in a coinbase earn account or vault than your dollars in your bank account, so lot's of people are saving with stable coins via higher interest rates -- I just wouldn't call it "investing".
(2) Some stable coins are pegged to a value that isn't real fiat money. Some good thoughts here: https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1422993084002934788
Feel free to teach me a lesson, but I feel this could be possible because:
- If people were paid to stay, then the supply of engineers in recruiting pipelines would decrease.
- If top performers were paid to stay, then the mere existence of a "counter-offer" mechanism would open up the door for bidding wars, where each bid is actually positive indicator for the quality of the talent. Today bidding wars largely only exist for somebody with multiple new offers, where neither company actually has a great measure of the talent.
- Retention pay is likely a compounding expense for the employer. Finance departments hates compounding liabilities.
Altogether would it make the labor market more efficient? Probably. Would it make businesses less profitable? Probably.
The gap here for me is that AWS, GCP, and the like are perfectly equipped to build infra "from the edge in" as well. It's just not an advantage for Cloudflare -- I'd actually argue that AWS has the comparative advantage in building "from the edge in" given the clip at which they can turn out datacenters.
With the new Outpost model as well, I don't see too many hurdles for AWS to just start deploying their whole feature set in any old colo, in any old country, in a matter of months. They do have to set their minds to it though. At the very least, they should definitely have their storage services in every country with actual data locality laws.
I'm sure I'm missing something, but on the infra side I don't see what Cloudflare is better at in this regard. I'd also argue that AWS storage migration is just as good or better than Cloudflare's offering here. I won't comment on how users perceive/value each service because I don't use either much.
What I definitely DO agree with, is that infra "from the edge in" is a major threat to existing public cloud business models. At the point where you have your whole stack portable from colo to colo (or, gasp, as a dAPP), it starts to sound more like public cloud as a library, rather than as a centralized managed service.
Open source communities, unbundlers, and new-age cloud companies together will have a field day building 'library' versions of common cloud services and I think Cloudflare will pair nicely at that point. The question is when that becomes a reality.