I've only dabbled with Blender but from what I saw of geometry nodes it's quite a long way away from competing in the same space as Houdini. Houdini's biggest single feature and the thing that allows film studios to use it at complexity and scale is the HDA system and there's no real competition for that.
A lot of art is about pattern recognition. We represent or infer objects or ideas through some indirection or abstraction. The viewer or listener's brain (depending on their level of sophistication) fills in the gaps, and the greater the level of indirection (or complexity of pattern recognition required) the greater the emotional payoff. This also applies to humour.
I have a few friends who've done well out of crypto, and they seem to struggle to follow your advice. I think the success they have with it also gives them a false sense of confidence, like they know what they're doing, rather than bzzzzzt number goes up.
One of them was defrauded of their entire savings, and only discovered at the point where they needed it as a deposit on a house. The person had spent over a year worming their way into their confidence (not just online), and was regarded as a good friend. They managed to convince them over a long period of time that it was safer for them (as a financial advisor) to manage their funds for them. Once the wallet was out of her control, the 'friend' disappeared entirely.
That's an interesting point. I can see that, as you say puberty and hormones impact brain function and hence behaviour, and those are inate and not learned. But at least superfically that would appear to be primarily broad behavioural effects, similar to what might be induced by medication. Rather than something that impacts pure abstract problem solving, which I guess is what the Atari games are supposed to represent?
By innate do you mean evolved/instinctive? Surely even evolved behaviour must be expressed as brain function, and therefore would need a brain capable of handling that level of processing.
I don't think it's clear how much of a human brains function exists at birth though, I know it's theorised than even much of the sensory processing has to be learned.
It's always a treat to watch a Carmack lecture or read anything he writes, and his notes here are no exception. He writes as an engineer, for engineers and documents all his thought processes and misteps in the exact detailed yet concise way you'd want a colleague to who was handing off some work.
One question I would have about the research direction is the emphasis on realtime. If I understand correctly he's doing online learning in realtime. Obviously makes for a cool demo and pulls on his optimisation background, and no doubt some great innovations will be required to make this work. But I guess the bitter lesson and recent history also tell us that some solutions may only emerge at compute levels beyond what is currently possible for realtime inference let alone learning. And the only example we have of entities solving Atari games is the human brain, of which we don't have a clear understanding of the compute capacity. In which case, why wouldn't it be better to focus purely on learning efficiency and relax the realtime requirement for now?
That's a genuine question by the way, definitely not an expert here and I'm sure there's a bunch of value to working within these constraints. I mean, jumping spiders solve reasonably complex problems with 100k neurons, so who knows.
I don't think this is just about convenience - you're not going to get these results with a 14B video model. I'd much prefer to have something I could hack on in ComfyUI but the open weights models don't compete with this anymore than a 32B LLM competes with Gemini 2.5 Pro for coding. And at least in coding you can easily edit the output from the LLM regardless...
I don't pay it because I don't watch television anymore, live or otherwise.
However I do find the overreach of claiming I need to pay the license if I watch any form of live broadcast is ridiculous. If I wanted to watch the occasional live stream of a football game online via Amazon Prime then I would need to pay the license fee.
I kind of agree - since the Bostrom book there is a cottage industry of people with non-technical backgrounds writing papers about singularity thought experiments, and it does seem to be on the spectrum with hard sci-fi writing. A lot of these people are clearly intelligent, and it's not even that I think everything they say is wrong (I made similar assumptions long ago before I'd even heard of Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity, although at the time I would have guessed 2050). It's just that they seem to believe their thought process and Bayesian logic is more rigourous than it actually is.
I would assume this comes from having faith in the overall exponential trend rather than getting that much into the weeds of how this will come about. I can sort of see why you might think that way - everyone was talking about hitting a wall with brute force scaling and then inference time scaling comes along to keep things progressing. I wouldn't be quite as confident personally and as have many have said before, a sigmoid looks like an exponential in it's initial phase.
The evidence given really doesn't justify the conclusion. Maybe it suggests 2.5 Pro might be better if you're asking it to build Javascript apps from scratch, but that hardly equates to "It's better at coding". Feels like a lot of LLM articles follow this pattern, someone running their own toy benchmarks and confidently extrapolating broad conclusions from a handful of data points. The SWE-Bench result carries a bit more weight but even that should be taken with a pinch of salt.
I wonder how much even this approach would help. I would liken it to studying past exam papers with the solutions on hand. My experience is you actually have to solve the problems yourself to actually properly absorb the concepts, rather than just copy them into your short term memory for a short while.
Different tools for different purposes. Blender is in the Maya paradigm, and doing pretty well in that. Houdini is more like a DSL for computer graphics and can end up being both the most low level and the most high level tool in the industry. There's no mystery about why the industry has mostly settled on Houdini + one other complimentary DCC.
Exactly, the UK’s number one priority right now is growth, otherwise we’re headed for austerity and possibly an election victory for Reform/Nigel Farage. I don’t think entering into a standoff with Apple over this is going to do much to give the impression the UK is great for business.
Given the desperation for economic growth in the UK, the idea that they would inflict such a massive bit of self harm on themselves over increased spying options is frankly ludicrous.
If you're unable to focus at work because of some personal trauma, then the best thing to do at most companies is talk to your line manager about it to explain the situation. That's entirely reasonable and I would think that most people will respond empathetically in that situation.
I don't think that's typically what is meant when discussing 'leaving politics out of work' though.
That would still be politics, yes. What would be the benefit of discussing it at work? The particular example you give is one which is especially divisive. If someone feels emotionally affected by an issue to the point where they cannot focus on work they should take a leave of absence.
Honestly as someone that learnt to mix many years ago on vinyl, the technical skill required to do this well doesn't translate into a better experience for the people dancing. It's not a rock concert with a performer, there's no need to look at the DJ anyway. I care infinitely more about the DJs creative sensibility than their beatmatching skill.
I would say from the outside American politics seems to have devolved into this ultra-polarised culture war/identity politics that doesn't seem to benefit the left at all electorally. It probably helps the biggest proponents of it (on either side) in terms of playing to their base, but it feels like it's overall a net win for the right.
But I don't know how big a factor this is in reality versus the economy.
If the multimodal model has embedded deep knowledge about words, concepts, moving images - sure it won’t have a humanlike understanding of what those ‘mean’, but it will have it’s own understanding that is required to allow it to make better predictions based on it’s training data.
It’s true that understanding is quite primitive at the moment, and it will likely take further breakthroughs to crack long horizon problems, but even when we get there it will never understand things in the exact way a human does. But I don’t think that’s the point.
I think it comes down to your area of interest. As a musician and music lover, I spend a significant amount of time trying to find or create music that is both original and good. AI generated music can be a competent imitation of well established ideas and forms, but that’s of zero value to me - I’m not looking for ‘more of the same’ - quite the opposite.
Not sure why you're being downvoted. Unless the employee has hybrid working in their contract then the decision to reorganise their life around it is their own responsibility, not the company's.
It's very difficult to have a conversation when you're making so many projections about a business you likely know very little about. Most of the employees in the industry I work in are artist, not SWEs, and they're working on creative problems with often loosely defined briefs that change every day, and require teams of people to work closely together for many months to achieve. They're also using complex and often poorly documented software that may have been built to solve a specific problem they're attempting to solve.