A study by BambooHR found that about 25% of executives and 20% of HR professionals hoped return-to-office (RTO) mandates would lead to employee resignations. Despite some staff quitting, the exodus was insufficient, prompting some companies to undertake layoffs. The study indicates that RTO policies have fostered a distrustful and performative work culture, negatively impacting productivity and employee happiness.
By drawing an analogy to a children’s game where noise in sentences must be corrected to reveal coherent plots, Zicherman elucidates how AI models iteratively remove noise from images to generate clear visuals. The process involves training AI to recognize patterns in noisy data and directing it with specific textual prompts to produce desired images. This demystifies the complex mathematics and computing underlying modern AI image generation.
Based on the new Blackmagic URSA Cine platform, the new Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive model features a fixed, custom lens system with a sensor that features 8160 x 7200 resolution per eye with pixel level synchronization. It has an extremely wide 16 stops of dynamic range, and shoots at 90 fps stereoscopic into a Blackmagic RAW Immersive file. The new Blackmagic RAW Immersive file format is an enhanced version of Blackmagic RAW that’s been designed to make immersive video simple to use through the post production workflow.
Teaching computer graphics programming to regular folks. Original content written by professionals with years of field experience. We dive straight into code, dissect equations, avoid fancy jargon and external libraries. Explained in plain English. Free.
Airplane manufacturing is no different from mortgage lending or insulin distribution or make-believe blood analyzing software (or VFX?) —another cash cow for the one percent, bound inexorably for the slaughterhouse.
The beginning of the end was “Boeing’s 1997 acquisition of McDonnell Douglas, a dysfunctional firm with a dilapidated aircraft plant in Long Beach and a CEO (Harry Stonecipher) who liked to use what he called the “Hollywood model” for dealing with engineers: Hire them for a few months when project deadlines are nigh, fire them when you need to make numbers.” And all that came with it. “Stonecipher’s team had driven the last nail in the coffin of McDonnell’s flailing commercial jet business by trying to outsource everything but design, final assembly, and flight testing and sales.”
It is understood, now more than ever, that capitalism does half-assed things like that, especially in concert with computer software and oblivious regulators.
There was something unsettlingly familiar when the world first learned of MCAS in November, about two weeks after the system’s unthinkable stupidity drove the two-month-old plane and all 189 people on it to a horrific death. It smacked of the sort of screwup a 23-year-old intern might have made—and indeed, much of the software on the MAX had been engineered by recent grads of Indian software-coding academies making as little as $9 an hour, part of Boeing management’s endless war on the unions that once represented more than half its employees.
Down in South Carolina, a nonunion Boeing assembly line that opened in 2011 had for years churned out scores of whistle-blower complaints and wrongful termination lawsuits packed with scenes wherein quality-control documents were regularly forged, employees who enforced standards were sabotaged, and planes were routinely delivered to airlines with loose screws, scratched windows, and random debris everywhere.
Shockingly, another piece of the quality failure is Boeing securing investments from all airliners, starting with SouthWest above all, to guarantee Boeing’s production lines support in exchange for fair market prices and favorite treatments. Basically giving Boeing financial stability independently on the quality of their product. “Those partnerships were but one numbers-smoothing mechanism in a diversified tool kit Boeing had assembled over the previous generation for making its complex and volatile business more palatable to Wall Street.”
