dkh

Culinary skills at the high-end are typically passed on directly from chefs to their apprentices, intending to be used, built on, and passed down again. It doesn’t really work the way being described, which is fine, because there’s no way to shape this scenario into a comparable one.

Any attempt to compare the A.I. stuff to some analogous scenario is deeply flawed if it does not include 1) that A.I. instances are not humans, but computers run by companies, and 2) the incredible scale at which it can operate.

The actual actions taking place are secondary at best, and the situation cannot be judged on that alone. It must be debated in the context of the actions being undertaken by machines, owned by companies, motivated by profit/market share/growth/whatever, with little communication or collaboration with the humans who created the works, and that they can now generate outputs based on those works at a scale, frequency, level of precision several orders of magnitude higher than a human can ever compete with. It cannot be compared to any sort of person-to-person scenario. The enormous scale this operates at, by actors that are not human, is the core of the situation.

Often multiple times a day, but on top of that concern, also throw in various ethical concerns and a few questions about if it actually has value or should exist

When you learn of a situation that a lot of people care about and feel very strongly about, it would be wiser and more respectable to not immediately dismiss it. Since you admit to only finding out about the situation five minutes ago, you might not have a firm enough understanding of the nuance to reduce everyone involved to haters without valid concerns. If you dig into the subject a little more, the answer to your question will become apparent, even if you disagree it.

You can be a fan of that too if you want

Cool. I am a bit of a minimalist (one reason I've never felt the most comfortable with React compared to some other things) and equally not interested in bloat and differing opinions/principles from using component libraries for everything (and I almost never use them for UI) but, yeah, I also don't want to have to write my own high-performance basics. A few years ago when using Vue for something, I had to detour a lot to writing things like virtual list components because at the time they were not available. (I see Solid has a few of those.) Not ideal for a tiny team or as a solo dev trying to make a dent in something in my off hours

> Luckily integrating vanilla (or "headless") JS libs is dead simple once you have enough experience.

Good to know. I expect to need to write my own wrappers for certain things that are more niche, but some frameworks definitely make it easier than others, and I do tire of wrapping the same 153 events and properties and such for some component yet again when [framework of the month] has an annoying way of doing this

where are the mythical 100x engineers when you need them most

> Having used Solid on a largish web product for over a year

I am curious about your experience in this regard. I've been aware of Solid for quite a while (and plenty of other non-React alternatives that on paper seem "nicer") but the problem I usually quickly run into after exceeding the complexity of a contrived demo app is the ecosystem not yet having a number of components, library wrappers, integrations, etc. that I use all the time.

Have you found the Solid ecosystem sufficient for whatever your needs are, is it fundamentally easier with Solid to integrate things that don't exist yet, or did you go into it less spoiled/tainted as I by reliance on React's ecosystem?

They seem to use this monetization "system"/philosophy: https://value4value.info

..which is yet again something I find both interesting and kind of funny (that they have "standardized" the philosophy of "pay what you want")

Haha, the most recently uploaded/indexed "episodes" of a "podcast" on this site are individual songs from what looks like a podcast feed of a radio show. Just kind of funny

Very cool project

Oh the irony of wanting such a site to exist but to keep it a bit of a secret.

There are a zillion streams on this site, so unclear if enough additional traffic will be going to any particular one of them to be noticed by the sources. Certainly some number of media company employees will be aware of it due to it hitting HN, but I have my doubts that there are many media employees who read HN who didn't already know these things existed and/or would do anything about it

My guess is this was launched to get some attention or as some sort of proof-of-concept or whatever, and that it perhaps is not intended to be a sustainable platform, at least not in this form. And they probably assume if there's a problem, they'll just get a cease & desist notice and have to take the channel down (which is probably true).

Definitely has to be a bit of a #yolo project launch though. Other concerns as well including GDPR compliance

It's both. It's a FAST channel being used by I think Pluto.TV and Roku to give them another "live 24/7" "channel" for their catalogs, but underneath is just looping playlist of YouTube content.

That's actually what a huge number of the channels on this site are, and I do wish they were labeled and filterable that way.

They aren't making money from this, but they are likely operating at a scale where they either don't notice if 1000 nerds on the internet are piggybacking their feeds, or don't care all that much.

It is not likely useful to them in negotiating ad rates, at least not with how advertising is usually bought/sold, because the broadcaster has almost no information (if any) about anyone watching these streams, including if it's even a person. It's possible they could fold it into a more general ad package that places a lot of weight on total view/viewers numbers, but that is a lot less common these days, and when it is done, the rates tend to be much lower

I think a number of these are also public rebroadcasts piggybacking off a less-public source.

Definitely a lot of these are also [re]broadcasts from vendors, probably for a specific platform or distribution target, that people found the URLs for and that the original source isn't super aware of the details of

The definition of "public" in this context is not straightforward. I, too, doubt the site is long for this world, and due to its ease-of-use could possibly also draw the broadcasters' attention to all the unprotected streams they may have either not known about, or not cared about because they were only really discoverable/usable by a relatively small group of geeks

Most of these are being "offered" in a way not intended or desired by the broadcaster

Most [public] podcasts are registered in Apple's podcast registry, which is what most podcast apps with a global search/discovery feature queries, and why these apps can all turn up the same podcasts. There are also things like https://podbay.fm that put give it a more general web frontend.

I suppose that the not public podcasts could be aggregated somewhere, but I'm less of a fan of that, and there's also some technical reasons why this would be more difficult than it was to aggregate these IPTV HLS streams.

Being able to view them by country or whatever is interesting, though I think perhaps less so for podcasts than something like live news, but not a bad idea

I remember exactly when I learned that, and indeed I found it interesting and thought-provoking at the time. And it's still interesting now, but I personally think it's way less likely true than I did back then

At the time, yes, absolutely, and that's why I did it. It was a lesson that everyone understood intuitively the moment the saw the comparison, even if 30 seconds prior to that they thought it was nonsense, or didn't really have thoughts one way or the other because they never given much thought to frame rates before.

But would this experiment yield the same results today? For people in certain demographics or below a certain age, I think almost certainly not.

I also think that a lot of the people who would've easily identified the 24p clip back in 2004ish when this class took place may no longer do so now. I never would've thought this before 2018ish, but I had experiences with people around and since that time that surprised me and turned me completely around on this view.

Though there is one other alternative that that I wouldn't have difficulty believing. I think it's possible that more people than I just predicted would identify the 24p clip as "cinematic", but that they may not view it as a desirable look, inherently more dramatic, having much impact on the viewer, etc.

Netflix is still pretty cash-heavy on average, though with a lot more compensation going towards stock options in recent years. They let the employee choose the ratio. They pay extremely well, but this comes along with very high hiring standards and a very difficult culture.

The culture was and still is as you have described, with massively high pressure, "radical candor" taken to arguably very unhealthy levels, and with no hesitation in firing you. This is a major reason why, despite the fact that I am a video engineer with a film background who lives walking distance to 2 of their campuses and has a great amount of respect for their technical achievements, I never apply there.

Correct, theaters at the time could not really been project anything other than 24fps. So there were 2 parts to the shooting style, and one of them is what you describe, shooting at the higher frame rate used in order to have it play back slower when conformed to 24. But they did this in a pretty unusual way. During the action sequences, they would ramp up frame rate from 24 to 30 and back down. They would do adjust during the shot, so the action scenes had these subtle but constantly-occurring increases and decreases in speed that looked very interesting and had not been done before.

The other major part was the shutter speed. They of course could not actually shoot/project 48/60fps, but they a shot a lot scenes at the high shutter speeds one typically uses when shooting those frame rates, a lot of it had that "ultratrealistic" look that people had weren't used to in films, resembling more the look of video, TV soap operas in 60i, etc.

I feel slightly absurd even writing about this considering how little of this really applies today, and how inconsequential changing the shutter speed on a camera is now. "I hit the '+ shutter' button a couple of times, revolutionary!" But it's crazy how conditioned everyone was to these looks at the time due to how little variety there was. I taught this film class where I would demonstrate to everyone, with nearly 100% success, that they all were influenced by and conditioned for these frame rates, even if they didn't know what a frame rate was. We'd shoot a scene with multiple cameras side-by-side shooting at different frames rates, play it back to the class later, and ask which one looked "more like a movie" to them. Invariably, even if they couldn't explain why, everyone always picked the 24p version

I should’ve been more specific—I was referring to the modern-day workflow for producing a scripted series, which is what the article was about. In that context, Netflix has the most technically sophisticated workflow and tooling to optimize production of that kind of content, from the perspective of creatives working on those sorts of shows. Certainly they have major blind spots in a lot of user-facing stuff that they only recently started to care about, with live content being a huge one.

I've been a big fan of peaock! The Olympics coverage was massively impressive. Like much of what Peacock does, their success wasn't just about comprehensively covering it (which they did do) but also with how cleverly they packaged it, and all sorts of cool features it had that nobody else does/did, like the "Gold Zone" Red Zone-esque whip-around coverage, the constantly-updating highlights and key moments, etc. My impression of Peacock from the beginning was very good because their design and interface pretty much blows everyone else's away, and then I continued to be impressed after discovering a lot of these "cleverness" features, like when I noticed while watching soccer matches that the key moments/highlights were tagged and timestamped for easy access in real-time as they were occurring. I just wish they had a better catalog of shows to go along with. It is worth noting that while they are the smallest streamer, they do have one of the largest budgets and are probably the least burdened by existential risk because they've got Comcast behind them

They've done a lot of great stuff and I've always followed their engineering-related tools and content as well! In particular they made some major contributions to media archival and analysis tools, and, yes of course, to web players. Unfortunately they haven't put as much focus on a lot of it in recent years, at least not in the tools they've opened sourced and topics they used to write about a lot

All of the players in this echelon have contributed massively, and all of them have pretty wild workflows and impressive solutions to technical problems. If we were measuring technical achievement across the broader history of filmed entertainment, there’s a strong case to be made for Disney as the most influential. But when it comes to how content is produced and distributed today, Netflix has definitely invested the most into tackling modern challenges and continues to do so, and these efforts feed directly into the meticulous, end-to-end workflow that’s applied across every production.

There are plenty of people who have worked on Netflix and non-Netflix shows and would would argue that Netflix's workflow and high standards are difficult if you're not used to it yet, or more stringent than they'd like, but very few would deny the end results or technical superiority

A Mercedes van to lug it all around is both hilarious and also probably the coolest way to do it.

While working on set between 2012-2014, we were shooting all RED, and I had a 12-disk ATTO FC RAID10 rig on set at all times borrowed from RED. Not needed for speed of frames by this time of course, but for the ridiculous total storage required shooting 6.5k raw and the time needed to copy it all. On paper this system should've been good/safe enough. In practice, we almost lost it a handful of times within a month, each in a unique way, including the time a stunt driver messed up, veered off course, and plowed directly into video village, striking the RAID and killing exactly the maximum number of disks in one mirror it could tolerate, but thankfully no more. (Needless to say the shoot was a massive learning experience and I have never managed data the same ever since.) By the time the shoot was over, the RAID was alive, but it was absolutely beat to shit, and I was afraid of how the guy from RED would react when he came to pick it up. When he did, he was completely unphased. He chuckled and said, "You should've seen how messed it was after Ridley Scott's crew borrowed it!"

Very cool background though, I was not quite old enough to get into it all quite that early! When the Viper came out, I was still in high school, just exceedingly nerdy. I believe to this day I have PCs with ATTO Disk Benchmark on them

There is still a lot of manual, error-prone work, even at Netflix. Netflix just has workflows that ensure so many passes are of each task are done, with so many failsafes, fallbacks, tests, checks (both human and automated), and they start doing them all earlier in the production process than most other studios so they can handle things they still didn't account for.

Yes, it's pretty vertical, but essentially every big streaming platform or production company is. There's a very specific Netflix way that governs how all Netflix shows are produced. There is a very different but still meticulously standardized way that governs how all Hulu shows are produced, one for all Warner Bros. shows, etc. This is an area where being vertically integrated is totally fine. It not only makes enormous sense for these studios, but nobody outside of those environments wants or needs these workflows. Netflix's workflows are there to aid Netflix even more than their shows, and while there's a lot of excellent stuff in their workflows that most productions should utilize for efficiency/safety/whatever, there's also a ton of stuff that would make no sense to use independently.

The technical requirements always seem to increase at the same rate as the technical advances. I've found this especially true in film/TV. Sure, by 2014ish we were shooting on solid state and had giant RAIDs on set and storage was cheaper than it ever had been, but we easily negated all of that by shooting on multiple RED cameras in raw at resolutions of 6.5k+. Terabytes of new data each day, even duplicating it before leaving took a lot of time! And then storing it at the office while letting more than 1 editor work with it at the time meant building a 36-disk ZFS server with 10GbE to each client. Just playing the footage back on a computer required a dedicated PCIe card

So in the context of this specific goal—shooting a feature film in a single unbroken shot—digital was a pain in the ass, but this was close to impossible to do on film, and Russian Ark was the first to ever do it, on any medium.

Simply shooting a feature film digitally was not that complicated by this time, or at least it didn't have to be. The Sony CineAlta F900 was the camera developed to shoot the Star Wars prequels, and was revolutionary at the time, became the gold standard for years, and very convenient relative to film. Tons of things started to be shot in 1080p around that time, and it was very nice to work with. Collateral was insane because they wanted to shoot raw and at high frame rates. Russian Ark needed a single unbroken shot in a form factor that one human would be capable of holding for that long. Aside from very specific and/or boundary-pushing needs, the arrival of the F900 in 2000 was effectively when digital was more convenient than shooting film while also meeting the technical requirements of high-end production (though it was many more years before most cinematographers agreed that the image quality was comparable)

3 different copies driven to 3 different places by 3 different people before you leave set for the day continued to be how it was when I was working on set. And believe it or not, there was still one incident in 2015 where Murphy's Law negated all 3 and I spent about a week file-carving the $60k worth of footage we didn't have the ability to reshoot again if we had to

At last I've stumbled upon somebody using Gleam without expressly going and looking for it