Yeah, usually if I get stuck in my head I’ll just go work in the garden. Bit of sunshine and toil usually gets me unstuck.

Yeah I’ve got arms like an orangutan. Despite the amount of stuff I’ve smashed my watch 5 pro against it’s still scratch and scuff free.

A big problem in Aus is the industry culture. They don’t care about using technology to improve results. They only care about cutting costs, even if the final product doesn’t meet the previous standard.

And we’ve seen that with VFX across the globe, the overall quality dropped drastically. Because studios play silly buggers to weasel out of paying VFX companies what they are due.

From what I hear, even DNEG is in trouble, and were even before the strike.

It’s a race to the bottom it seems.

My honest hope for the film industry is likely the same as yours. That we have smaller productions with access to better post due to improvements in AI-driven compositing software and so on.

But it’s likely that a role that was earning $$$ before is devalued significantly. And while I’m an unabashed anti-capitalist, I think a lot of folks misunderstand what this sudden downward pressure on income can do. Cost of living increasing while wages shrink is an awful combination

I’m 35, left a six figure job, folding my company and starting an electrician’s apprenticeship. To give you an idea around what my views about AI are. And of course this is as an Australian. We have a garbage white collar work culture anyway.

I think there will be a net improvement. But I worry that others will fail to adapt quickly. Too many are writing off AI as this thing that already came and went, but the tools have just landed, and we don’t yet have workflows that correctly implement and leverage these yet.

There was a smallish VFX group here that was attached to a volume screen company. They employed something like 20 people I think? So pretty small.

But the volume screen employed a guy who could do an adequate enough job with generative tools instead and the company folded. The larger VFX company they partner with had 200 employees, they recently cut to 50.

In my field, a team leader in 2018 could earn about 180,000 AUD P/A. Now those jobs are advertised for 130,000 AUD, because new models can do ~80% of the analysis with human accuracy.

AI is already folding companies and cutting jobs. It’s not in the news maybe, but as industries shift to compete with smaller firms leveraging AI it will cascade.

I had/have my own company, we were attached to Metropolis which unfortunately folded. I think that had a role to play in the job cuts as well. Luckily for me I wasn’t overleveraged, but I am packing up and changing careers for sure.

I worked in environmental analysis and projection for a mutli-national engineering company and I have bad news.

In Australia we are currently voting on a constitutional amendment. It would create an advisory body that represents first nations people. It’s super basic, doesn’t really cover how it will work, because they can’t really even work on that until the amendment passes.

But presumably it will allow them to directly advise government, rather than through the spiderweb of community leaders, NGOs and whatnot that exist now, and provide some structure for Aboriginal representation in parliament

The sheer amount of disinformation circulating is staggering. I was lucky enough to really avoid most of the drama, until I went and had a look this past week finally.

What interested me, was rather than the usual short posts and snarky racist comments, of which plenty exist. These long diatribes were dominant, on places like Reddit and Facebook.

Then it struck me, they all sound like they were written by the same person. Not just a little, if you had removed the names and pictures of the users, I would have flat out assumed it was the same person.

We have opened Pandora’s Box. We don’t need “AGI” or whatever, this is plenty enough to do us in.

The issue is that ads on YouTube used to be fairly innocuous. Now I get batshit conspiracies pushed, non-stop Aussie gambling ads and so on.

Where I was once happy to sit through some food ads, or some tourism ads to support the platform. I’m not happy being blasted with non-stop, low-quality propoganda.

Granted the $22 family plan for me and my wife has worked well. We both use youtube music extensively as well. It’s the only streaming service I pay for, the only other subscription I have is for a VPN.

Yeah I managed to solve that for some games by installing the proton EAC plugin. Squad works for instance.

But games introducing kernel-level DRM I wouldn’t install on my Windows machine anyway. I guess the person I replied to potentially doesn’t know how to deploy a new operating system. So they might not care about all that anywho.

But calling everyone else dumb because they don’t know how to do something is ridiculous.

These days it’s more “which games don’t work on linux?” Rather than “which games work on linux?”

I pointed out that the Australian subreddits were being very obviously astro-turfed. And then I made a post naming the Aus PR companies that were openly running bot campaigns on Reddit and who was using them.

That account got banned in record fucking time lol. And no reason was given either, it was a site-wide IP ban. Luckily one call to my ISP and that was sorted lol.

The worst part is it you have enough family members who used these services your details are likely on there too.

Every light adds to light pollution though and makes it more difficult for earth-based astronomy. And that’s excluding events where satilites pass through observations.

Extremely annoying, but inevitable I guess.

Indie Devs haven’t even begun to fully leverage all the new tools offered by recent Blender / Unreal / Godot.

And AAA studios are too big to leverage them effectively.

I think we’re going to see continuing leaps forward in workflow and tools, allowing smaller teams to make whatever they want at any scale. We’re kind of already there honestly, it just about applying it all meaningfully.

Is there a joke in the comic anywhere? This is just an average morning in consulting.

Gamestop will moon any day now bro.

I mean things can get way worse. Look at Canada and Australia. No sign of a crash in either yet, prices just keep climbing. Homeless encampments and the like were alien to us up until recently. The median Aussie household income is ~$65,000. Homes start at about $600,000 and at that price a lot of them are teardowns, you’d be spending at least $200,000 in repairs.

Banks want 20% down.

It is scary, definitely.

I rent a nice house, I’m lucky. I’ve also not had a holiday in over a decade…

Yeah.

I’m personally lucky that my fav titles are CPU hogs, like ARMA 3 and X4: Foundations. Both run better under Linux.

Cyberpunk runs great too, I’m sure once we eventually get the updated drivers for NVIDIA we’ll get Ray Recon too.

Devices like this are a lifeline for communities in developing nations. Who are the first and worst affected by water shortages and salt water intrusions into their fresh water sources.

I dropped everything in my twenties to look after a dying family member.

Thought my family would support me when all was said and done. I left a very promising career to do this.

Everyone just kind of went their seperate ways and I almost ended up homeless. While my dad immediately found another woman, took all his money and fucked off.

I’m just starting to recover almost a decade later.

I’m kind these days, I think. But I’m not nice.

I just made the jump again and I don’t think I’ll be going back to Windows. I’m getting improved performance in many of my favourite titles.

Very happy to be free of windows finally.