The future of Hollywood was reshaped in 1997 with the founding of Netflix, an innovative mail-order DVD rental business by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph. Unlike traditional rentals, Netflix allowed subscribers to retain DVDs as long as they wanted but required returns before ordering more, allowing the company to collect uninterrupted subscription fees. By 2009, Netflix was shipping nearly a billion DVDs annually but had already set its sights on streaming. The transition to streaming, launched in 2007, faced initial challenges due to limited broadband availability but soon became popular, outpacing the DVD business and bringing Netflix millions of subscribers.
Netflix’s dominance drove traditional media giants to reevaluate their strategies. Disney, initially hesitant, eventually licensed its vast library to Netflix, contributing to the latter’s rise. However, by 2017, Disney pivoted to launch its own platform, Disney+, breaking its Netflix partnership and acquiring 21st Century Fox for content diversification. Disney’s decision sparked a broader industry shift as other studios also developed streaming services, aiming to retain full revenue from direct-to-consumer content instead of sharing it with theaters or traditional networks.
Disney+ quickly gained traction, especially during the pandemic, reaching millions of subscribers and temporarily boosting Disney’s stock. However, the reliance on streaming and subscriber growth strained Disney financially, with high operating costs and content expenses. Content exclusivity backfired, creating complexity for fans, particularly with interconnected Marvel shows, and contributing to user dissatisfaction. Additionally, Disney’s decision to release films like Black Widow simultaneously in theaters and on streaming led to backlash, lawsuits, and lost box office revenue, highlighting the downsides of simultaneous releases.
Facing ballooning expenses and subscriber attrition post-pandemic, Disney’s leadership returned to more traditional revenue models, emphasizing exclusive theater releases and licensing content to third parties. They also introduced cost-saving measures like job cuts and content reductions to stabilize financial losses. This shift echoes a partial return to pre-streaming industry norms as Disney and other studios explore “always-on” channels within their streaming platforms, aiming to balance direct consumer access with sustainable profit models.
Björn Ottosson proposed OKlch in 2020 to create a color space that can closely mimic how color is perceived by the human eye, predicting perceived lightness, chroma, and hue.
The OK in OKLCH stands for Optimal Color.
L: Lightness (the perceived brightness of the color)
C: Chroma (the intensity or saturation of the color)
H: Hue (the actual color, such as red, blue, green, etc.)
Motionity is an free and open source animation editor in the web. It’s a mix of After Effects and Canva, with powerful features like keyframing, masking, filters, and more, and integrations to browse for assets to easily drag and drop into your video.
Open Shading Language (OSL) is a small but rich language for programmable shading in advanced renderers and other applications, ideal for describing materials, lights, displacement, and pattern generation.
Benchmarks don’t capture real-world complexity like latency, domain-specific tasks, or edge cases. Enterprises often need more than raw performance, also needing reliability, ease of integration, and robust vendor support. Enterprise money will support the industries providing these services.
… it is also reasonable to assume that anything you put into the app or their website will be going to the Chinese government as well, so factor that in as well.
🔸 Gaussian Splats: imagine throwing thousands of tiny ellipsoidal paint drops. They overlap, blend, and create a smooth, photorealistic look. Fast, great for visualization, but less structured for measurements.
🔸 Point Clouds: every dot is a measured hit. LiDAR or photogrammetry gives us millions of them forming a constellation of reality. Amazing for accuracy, but they don’t connect the dots out of the box.
🔸 Meshes: take those points, connect them into triangles, and you get very realistic surfaces. Strong for 3D analysis, simulation as continues watertight models.
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.”
