"the future of film making", not the current reality. Big difference there. Given how far we've come so quickly I think it's well within reason that within my life time the results of AI film making will be both indistinguishable from our current methods and cheaper than even $400k to make a movie (although that's less than the cost of a house in half the country so isn't that crazy of a cost to make cinema).

I'm not talking about how Hollywood does or will use AI, I'm talking about when the technology matures more and the potentials for small film makers that AI will bring and they are absolutely huge. The sky will be the limit for creatives as they will no longer be limited by money. Cinema will become as accessible to artists as painting is and I can't wait for that to happen.

I think the future of film making is a small handful of creatives using AI software to make a movie and overall I think this will be good for cinema. While I do think it will be a shame to lose all of the acting and craft person jobs (amongst others) making movie making cheap enough for the common person to enter into the field without major financial backers means opening the way for a lot more creatives to make good cinema.

And before I hear it, yes this will mean a ton more crap movies out there as well. If we can find the good stuff to watch on YouTube though then we'll be able to find the good stuff for cinema under the conditions I describe as well.

Basically, an era where big Hollywood will no longer be able to act as gatekeepers to what we watch? Count me in.

That's fine, I'll just play them a few years from now on an emulator and Sony won't make any money off it.

I couldn't agree more with you here. I'm lucky enough to work for a good employer right now but have worked for awful ones in the past. The improvement in my general wellbeing moving from bad to good was significant enough to where it's become a significant part of my calculations in regard to whether I should change jobs/employer or not.

If that was a viable solution to employer abuse or poor practices we wouldn't have needed to pass all the labor laws we have that have dramatic improve things like work place safety.

Your citation is some one said so? I'm asking for data backing what you are saying. In other words, a proper citation. An authoritative person saying something doesn't make something reality. For instance, Trump says things all the time that don't match up to reality.

Probably because we were busy learning what constitutes a proper citation rather than off walking around being condescending to people. What should I expect though from someone who believes a state with property values like California's can also be a hell-scape at the same time. Hint: People don't pay California money to live in a shitty place.

And Brin makes up half of all billionaire wealth in California?

It was a question with a point.

Good lord you're tiresome.

Cite a source.

I've been hearing for decades this thing or that would doom California for ever and yet here we are in 2026 and California is still the largest economy in the union by a long shot. At this point, wolf has been cried so many times I'll need some real tangible evidence before I'll believe anything conservatives are trying to tell me about California.

Making people wait an extra day because of crappy delivery methods is bad for business. Then there's the issue of waste as many of us don't like seeing stuff go through all of the efforts and energy expenditures of being manufactured only to be destroyed without even being used once.

Got of those, too (the early USB 1 ones, with the exposed ATAPI connector. I ended up buying Iomega's Firewire expansion that attaches on the back of the slim USB and latches on that ATAPI connector, as Firewire 400 had much better bandwidth than USB 1, provided enough power and thus required only a single cable, and I had a cheap Firewire 400 adapter laying around from some video project (funily: the Firewire 400 card was a free bundle bundled with some crappy movie software that was selling poorly and was on heavy sale at the shop I bought it from. Threw the useless CD, kept the Firewire card).

Mine still works too. The most difficult was trying to find the barrel power plug (since back in the days I was mostly using the Firewire attachment and because Firewire provides enough power, I wasn't using the barrel jack much. Nowadays most of my machine are USB only.

Yup. The slim USB were also a good solution to carry data around.
Bring the slim USB and the cables at the university, download shit with the fast bandwidth, then bring the drive back home, plug into the Firewire attachment and load it onto the computer.
Later the university aquired computers (from Dell) that came with ZIP IDE drive built in, so I only carried the Zip250 disks and kept the drive permanently plugged into the Firewire attachement. And almost lost the power barrel adapter as mentioned above.

There is a very rational argument in that bunch of insults and expletives. Do better.

Yes, that ass-backward approach came in my mind.
Your bank notes are too easy to copy now that color photocopiers and color laser printers are a thing?
- Rest of the world: make better banknotes (see swiss money, euros, etc.)
- USA: make bank note detection software mandatory on each piece of tech (HP and other US manufacturers have a boner at the thoughts of the sudden illegalness of cheaper competitors from countries without that function) and also mandate yellow dot tracking (now in addition the police-state is having a boner, too) (*).
- Rest of the world: why the hell is my color cartridge constantly empty on yellow and why is this preventing my to print even black and white?

Same here:
USA: has a problem of violence, bonkers level of gun proliferation, on tops of tons of ways to make life shitty for everyone (lack of proper health care, social welfare, etc.)
also the USA: lets add "gun detectors" to 3D printers so nobody prints a gun without a serial number. Surely that's the best solution to address all of the above, right?

Trouble is that this time, most 3D manufacturers ARE NOT in the USA.
Most of them are in China, and the US is only a fraction of their exports, and the required function requires magnitude more compute power to implement than the tiny micro-controller that is usually found in those printers and implementing would require massively driving up the cost of the printer.
Chance are high that the manufacturer will just say f-u, and merely just stop selling complete pre-assembled kit to the USA, only stuff that can circumvent the restrictions (e.g., kits with only motor and drivers that require adding a sold-separately microcontroller).

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(*): fun fact: on some printers (E.g. with very low memory) those "functionnalities" were implemented in the drivers instead.
My ancient HP color lasterjet works this way. There are no yellow dot when I print from CUPS.

It's entirely possible that the "gun detection" is going to be the same: crappy buggy detection +additional privacy invading tracking implemented into the management software shipped next to the 3D printer as the MCU cannot handle that. Circumventable by downloading Octoprint from some european server and running that on a Pi to manage the printers.