dkh

Collateral was not the first fully digitally shot feature film. In fact, Collateral was not even fully digital. (The first major, all-digital, HD feature film was Attack of the Clones, but there were other fully-digital feature films before that, just not as major, and/or not always HD. Robert Rodriguez' Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2001) was fully digital.)

But you are right that Collateral did do something very new/unusual at the time, and that was shooting scenes in higher frame-rates than 24, and mixing multiple frame rates in a film. (This might not sound like much, but until this time, pretty much every film was 24fps for the previous eighty years and it had a very specific look that everyone's eyes/brains were conditioned for, unbeknownst to them.)

And the other thing that was very interesting thing about it (though not something very visible to a viewer) was that it was shot on the Thomson Viper FilmStream camera[1], which was the first major attempt at shooting not just digital, but very close to "raw". It was also a huge pain in the ass. The camera itself was massive, but due to the bandwidth, it recorded to an external storage array that had to be pushed alongside it at all times, and that was itself about the size of a shopping cart. (This device was hilariously referred to as the "Director's Friend.")

In 2002, my friend and I, both cinema nerds in high school, drove an hour away to the nearest theater showing a film called Russian Ark[2]. Why were journeying to to see a strange little Russian film where a never-named character walks the viewer through Russian history? Because just like each episode of the recently-released Netflix show Adolescence, this entire film was a single, very long, very complicated, unbroken shot. One shot. No trickery, no cuts that were just hidden to the audience, one shot, through streets, buildings, snow, ballrooms with a couple hundred choreographed actors, it was crazy. This is easy now compared to how it was back then.

As we've now established with Collateral (and this film predates it by 2 years), digital cinematography existed, but the storage was a real problem, the power was a real problem. Since this film was one shot, it needed almost 100 minutes of both, unbroken. And since it was a very complex moving shot, it had to be operated handheld. So essentially they had an incredibly ripped director of photography who operated the camera on a steadicam the whole time while a giant array of daisychained batteries and hard drives were lugged behind him. And they did it something like 100 times until they had a few takes where there were no mistakes.

None of this really means anything to anyone anymore, but at the time, to cinematography nerds at least, this stuff was all absolutely insane!

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20040103133953/http://www.thomso...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Ark

For people in within the industry or the tech side of it, Netflix’s engineering blog has always been fascinating and extremely useful because of the insane amount of stuff in this space they have solved or reworked. They have put more into tech side of modern-day TV/film than anybody else, and it's not even close. In a technical/workflow sense, working on a Netflix show is unlike working on any other. I have my issues with Netflix in other respects, but with respect to technology and workflow, they are awesome.

If you’re unable to appreciate a behind-the-scenes look at their engineering because the technology isn't for you or available to you, that's totally valid! But it's a you're not interested thing, not a Netflix is boasting about something that doesn't matter thing. Only a few thousand teams in the world need most of what they do over there, but that doesn't mean they aren't massive technical achievements. Most of them are. The scale, complexity, and cadence of modern production has given rise to some of the biggest technical challenges I’ve ever seen. And for anyone close to that world, this kind of content is of great interest — if not genuinely valuable.

> DOGE and Fiscal Discipline: The goal of cutting $1 trillion from the federal budget, a major libertarian priority.

Is the result all that matters, and not how it is reached? Life-saving funding for various programs around the world through USAID? Cutting the budgets of the NIH, reducing what the National Cancer Research has to work with by $1B? Suspending student loan repayment programs?

I understand that your belief might be that the US government should never have been doing any of these things to begin with. Fine. But since we have been doing them, often for a very long time, and with so many programs, organizations, and literal lives now depending on them, is just yanking all of it with no notice, no time to adapt, practically overnight, really the ideal way to handle it because it saves more money faster?

> Freedom of Speech

Pulling AP's press credentials for not acknowledging the Gulf of America? Detaining/deporting people in the USA legally for expressing pro-Palestinian views? Suing media companies for coverage that you just didn't like? Punishing law firms for once taking up causes against you or that you didn't agree with?

> Non-Interventionist Foreign Policy

We're going to take the Panama Canal, Greenland, and Canada?

Life expectancy has been falling, with the same decline not happening in other countries: https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/us-life-expectancy-decline-why-...

USA is one of of only three countries to have fallen in the Social Progress Index over the last decade: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2020-09-...

The US economy has been strong, but almost every other well-being metric has declined: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/04/briefing/the-us-economy-i...

Massive rise in income inequality and concentration of wealth: https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide...

Housing affordability is at historic lows, both for home ownership and rentals: https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/state-nations-housing-2023

Are you actually condoning this practice?

Speeding is a choice, one that's extremely easy to change, and it ultimately an exceedingly trivial matter.

You are born with your genetics, and you can’t change them. You are them. They will likely impact how and you die. All you can do is be aware of them so you can try to be proactive.

So there’s really no comparison between that and voluntarily driving a car too fast

If that’s genuinely how it worked, where the more health problems you are at risk for, the more money you have to pay, this would result in the people who already have the shittiest stuff to deal with in their lives having that compounded by also having to pay more than everybody else.

Not sure what more needs to be said, but if there is anyone out there who is unconvinced, I probably won’t be inviting them to dinner parties anytime soon

This is not the sort of thing a genetic test can determine

> Generally, I've found Cursor works correctly after business hours.

Interestingly the times I've experienced the most weirdness were during extremely not normal business hours (from the California perspective). For 3 nights in a row last week, I found myself coding at/after 2:30am during what were apparently periods of excessive load on Claude Sonnet. When asking Cursor to do things, it would fail, tell me about the high load, and encourage me to try again soon. Well, I just kept clicking the button over and over again, thinking it would eventually be able to handle the request properly, and otherwise continue presenting the error. Not the case!

Incorrect/hilarious things Cursor/Claude did at points during those nights:

- repeat the inquiry back to me in full, then do nothing at all after that

- confidently assert it had located the bug I was looking for, then direct me towards the entire codebase

- assert that it had done what I asked, and request that I approve the changes it wanted to make to my code, which were... nothing, none whatsoever

- (possibly the most hilarious) begin to answer questions in borderline leetspeak, randomly substituting numbers in place of letters in words, before eventually devolving into total gibberish

Mostly just annoying due to the wasted time, though it's possible the entertainment value negated it. I don't expect miracles from Cursor to begin with, nor do I give it wide latitude to change very much in my projects, so the risk of damage wasn't really any worse then than at any other time. Of course, I am not a team working against deadlines on critical projects, just a guy screwing around at 2:30am.

Right now, yes. But early in 23andMe's history (I got it done at the very beginning) they were pretty much the only game in town. They were the first to make such a service widely accessible to the public, and they helped establish the market in which better alternatives would eventually emerge.

I don't tell anyone now to use 23andMe specifically, but the warnings and risks being discussed here apply to existing customers, to people who have already done it, and I am just speaking as one of those people.

One of my good friends discovered her biological half-brother on 23andMe who she had never been told about. They met up, and got along remarkably well, and have actually remained pretty close since! These things do happen. Glad you got something out of it, too.

Yeah, these experiences may or may not be rare. I was positing that they might be rare mostly to try to meet the person I was responded to halfway and because I don't actually have evidence one way or the other

Meaning what?

I am adopted. I spent most of my life having absolutely no idea whatsoever where I was from, or what biological risk factors I might have. 23andme was valuable to me on many levels, and even with the state the company currently finds itself in, it is not a decision I regret.

My wife also did 23andme some years ago, through which she discovered she had Factor V Leiden—a fact which became extremely important very soon after her discovering it, leading directly to changes in her treatment and how closely they monitored her for blood clots (she had a PFO and some other stuff going on that was already compounding her risk of clotting and stroke), and very possibly may have saved her life.

I’m supposed to go in and delete every trace of it out of fear of what the down-on-their-luck company might, or simply could, do?

While I know that my experience might be rare, I would regardless suggest that you reserve your skepticism, because you aren’t really in a position to assess who did or did not derive a justifiable amount of value from it or how informed of a human being they are

> The broader context is that most LLM scrapers are a plague, and I cannot wait for this bubble to pop.

My thing is, there are legitimate uses for automated browsing, uses that could be extremely useful and yet nondamaging to (or even supported by!) site operators. But we'll never get to have them if the tools/methods to implement them are the same as the ones used by people inadvertently DDOSing the site they're trying to inhale the entire contents of. For them to not get lumped together, purveyors of the tools cannot remain "neutral" or hide implementation details or condone, whether explicit or implicit, bad behavior. We've seen this happen on the web before, and we're already seeing desperate organizations implement nuclear-option LLM scraper blockers that also take out things like RSS readers. Anyways... I may just have to write something about this...

> So, amusingly, they seem to have added a "ethical scraping" page[1] to their docs in between me looking at this a few hours ago and now.

Congrats, you made an impact :)

You make the tools, what people do with them isn't up to you. I can tolerate some form of that opinion/argument on some level, but it is at the very least short-sighted on your part to not have been better-equipped for how to respond to concerns people have about potential misuse.

If what has been said elsewhere in this thread is true about providing documentation on how to circumvent attempts to detect/block your service and your resistance to providing helpful information such as IP ranges used and how user agents are set, then you have strayed far from being neutral and hands-off.

"it's not our place" is not actual neutrality, it's performative or complicit neutrality. Actual neutrality would be perhaps not providing ways to counter your service, but also not documenting how to circumvent people from trying. And if this is what your POV is, fine! You are far from alone--given the state of the automated browsing/scraping ecosystem right now, plenty of people feel this way. Be honest about it! Don't deflect questions. Don't give misleading answers/information. That's what carries this into sketchy territory

> to use the internet just as you would

Your premise is flawed, or at the very least, far from guaranteed. One could use tools like this to use to browse the internet only as they would otherwise. One could also use it for mass scraping, and many do. If you've looked at HN on previous days this week, there's been a front-page story nearly every day about problems resulting from exactly that.

The parent comment was perhaps a bit too snarky with the assumption that this could/would only be used for malicious behavior on a large scale, but your assumption that it wouldn't be is not any better, and also runs contrary to what people have been experiencing and discussing in this arena in recent days

Nice work.

I feel like there's a lot to unpack here, and still much to discuss in the broader context.

There's a few things that can be excused or at least reasonably argued. Multiple IPs makes some sense since requests are being made through random proxies, and I don't think on its own demonstrates intention of bad behavior. If it was, I think you would've seen all four requests as coming from different IPs and with different user agents all posing as legitimate user browser sessions.

But the rest is inexcusable. Providing documentation on how to circumvent countermeasures without even acknowledging, or presenting a viewpoint on, the concern many have with the potential malicious use of these tools. Taking the time to respond to your inquiry about the IP range and UA but giving an answer that is somewhere between intentionally incomplete and intentionally misleading. (Is the actual IP range even within the large Google IP range given the source of the proxies as mentioned elsewhere in this thread?) Just very poor decisions on how to handle the extremely predictable resistance they were very obviously going to encounter

I want to be this man when I grow up

This is wonderful. It’s also true! Even when I was running a very small business and not particularly bothered by what people were doing that could be argued as resembling trademark infringement, I was urged to be vigilant about it because if you don’t defend your trademark, you risk losing it. That’s how the law works!

If that really is the reason you’re threatening action against someone, they may just understand if you’re nice about it!

That said, while it may foster more goodwill towards your company, it probably isn’t as surefire a way to generate the swift response you want as being a dick and making the threats

I get an adrenaline rush just reading it

This man is my hero. What an absolute legend

That’s why you make public schools better instead of drain more money from them to give a limited number of people lifeboats. It doesn’t matter if individuals acting in their own interest would choose to use them. Of course they’d use the vouchers for their own kids even if that meant a little less money available for public schools.

The fact that people would use the vouchers is not proof that the vouchers are a good idea or that public schools are not. It is simply the very predictable outcome of pretty much any time you give individuals the choice to act in their own self-interest over the needs of the population as a whole.

Many/most people if given the choice would also opt to skip jury duty, or to not pay taxes, or to cut to the front of busy lines. This is not evidence that those things are bad. It is evidence that you can’t give them the choice

I'm not saying it's not on the table. My example included platforms being seized or forced to shut down. It just shouldn't be our starting point or our goal.

It shouldn't be the only viable option because we have no other legal mechanism with which to regulate these platforms before they have become enormous and powerful and spiral out of control.

If it needs to be done, it should be done for the right reasons. (Not that a TikTok ban would be bad, or that it's not a sensible move geopolitically, but in the context of the discussion in this thread, a TikTok ban is definitely not on the table because we've agreed that society is harmed by addiction to a centralized social media platform, or whatever. Any side-effects in those areas as a result of the ban would just be collateral.)

I would just prefer a ban never needing to come into play because we don't let things get bad

Did you mean Valkey, or has the js community now managed to shoehorn an entire high-availability database server into a javascript object proxy?

This is essentially what all in-memory data stores have always been

Kinda refreshing to see someone own it and run with it

Based on this thread, I'm not sure you would want to use this over keyspace notifications, but I will also say that there comes a point in the maturity of a system when keyspace notifications become a complicated, unreliable, resource-heavy nightmare. They work fine is your needs and scale are limited, but it's definitely not what you want if handling lots of frequent chances across craploads of keys, with complicated logic for who needs them and how they get routed to them, and where it matters if the notification is successfully received.

But certainly you could build something to handle these and most other needs in this realm with mostly just redis, using streams for what needs to be more robust, in tandem with pub/sub, keyspace notifs, etc. in the areas they are suited to.

We don't need (and shouldn't want) bans at all. We need very strict criteria on what platforms can or cannot do, how they can or cannot operate. They should be massively scrutinized, with an enormous amount of regulation and oversight, that results in such platforms being unable to take actions deemed unsafe for the public. (At the very least, in the form of eye-watering fines or disincentives, but perhaps extending as far as limiting the field to non-profits, and/or the risk of the government taking control of your platform if it does not comply.)

He does know this, he just wants it to stop.

There is a massive amount of very high-quality compelling (and damning) studies on this subject, with more coming in all the time, and very little that contradicts the premise of "yeah this stuff can be really bad for us".

But what's next? The social media companies aren't going to do anything about it. They will fight fight any attempt to admit it, discuss it, legislate it. And unfortunately it just so happens that these same companies and social networks are also most often the conduits by which people try to spread information to the masses, to make things known and to get people to care about them. Quite a predicament

Well, how does it work now? Do you think the only solution to this problem is the one we have now--a centralized, primarily profit-focused, zillion-dollar business entity?

An enormous centralized business does not possess magical fairy dust that negates the problems of international compliance. The underlying solutions to this are technical and social. Big business is merely able to get them done faster and more effectively because their profits are in jeopardy if they do not.

But there are plenty of ways to design applications and protocols such that different groups of people have different featuresets and limitations. We already kind of see that now with things built on top of ActivityPub, ATProto, etc., just not for this reason. For instance, there are some broad-scoped, full-featured social networks running on ActivityPub, but other platforms that just do microblogging and nothing else. They are both built on ActivityPub but can do very different things. You could apply this same concept to different countries and regulations, where the client/network someone uses only does the things that region allows, and then enforce it at the network level.

(Do I love that idea? No, but my point is, it's definitely not a technical impossibility.)

It is easy in a physical and technical sense, and it also probably be easy in the other senses if the power to make that decision was held by a different group of people than those who currently do.

Nobody is saying that it is "easy" to mean that there's no friction preventing it and that it's astounding that it hasn't been done. On the contrary--the fact that certain beneficial things are very easy in a logistical sense but incredibly difficult in a power/cultural/social structure sense is the core of the problem. And it's worth reminding people about.

> Human Attention cannot be exploited at population scale or there will be chaos.

Related and very relevant paper: https://hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/ujvharkk/release/1

Attention is being exploited at scale. It's continuing, and evolving, and might soon manifest as other things (like intention).

I am not sure your predictions are accurate, but I at least would like a couple of them to be. I have thought a lot about the idea of certain ubiquitous and permeating things like social media as utilities, or at least non-profits with a public oversight and standards/requirements to comply with that are substantial, limiting, and entirely designed around what is good for the public rather than what is good for a business. Not sure this will ever actually happen, as time goes on, I only find more arguments for why it should, not less.

His thoughts and opinions are not related to FT's and so while the combo of his article title + a paywall might appear ironic, in reality it's just happenstance, with no deeper meaning or hypocrisy.

The "walled gardens" that he and others speak about in this context do not refer to sites/apps that cost money, they have a massively different meaning. But perhaps it wouldn't be fair to expect you to know this if the paywall prevented you from reading the article. Fear not, now you can: https://archive.ph/4Vvms