masona

By design. An element of randomness in the reward drives creators to put more and more content into the Skinner box.

The first time definitely has a novelty to the experience of getting in the tank, settling, then floating. Then towards the end of the first session you really start to feel comfortable. Second time around you really get the max relaxation. Floating like that really lets your muscles settle in a way that they never have before - usually I carry that relaxation for a week afterwards. I never was much for massage but floating is amazing.

The fine art market has been doing this for decades by using auction records to set prices.

It was like this for me until I muted any word that was remotely political. All of a sudden it was like a toxic fog had been lifted and I could see clearly again. The article really undersells the importance of muting words. It changes everything.

You answered your own question - it's a play for the next generation.

My kids bounce between a multitude of shared digital spaces (games, chat, social, videos etc) and they would be right at home at some kind of metaverse that would bridge them all (if that's even possible).

Coming up with food photos for the Futurist Cookbook was one of the most fun projects I've ever done: https://annawilliams.com/VORACITY/CONTROPASTASCIUTTA/1/thumb...

It's amazing that Marinetti made a cookbook like this almost 100 years ago. It still feels experimental compared to the recipe junk that gets churned out these days. If he were alive today I bet he would make a new Futurist Cookbook of SEO-optimized AI-generated recipes that could never exist, designed to be eaten in a banquet served on an autonomous bus.

"For the extremist banquet, where no one eats, and the only satiety comes from online outrage, the guest may stay at the table only long enough to tweet."

Reminds me of Jonathan Harris's 2007 project 'We Feel Fine.'

http://wefeelfine.org/methodology.html

When I did some work on sentiment analysis using tools like Crimson Hexagon, it always felt like the data was skewed since what people post is different from what they say, which itself is different from what they do. Might need to be some kind of corrective filter that includes 'uncounted emotion' as a baseline.

Getty already offers free images through embeddable content as well as brand partnerships, so it's natural for them to want a fresh injection of great work. Especially since their library has been rather stale for so long. It's hard to keep nice pictures coming in when photographers are getting royalty statements of only pennies. Of course, that's still more than Unsplash photographers receive. It will be interesting to see how Getty leverages this new model of 'images as ad network.'

The Unsplash dashboard features the number of image views/downloads very prominently and artists treat it as a kind of cachet. An image with 100,000 views at $2.00 CPM is what, $200? It's strange to me that photographers brag about their view counts when it's plain evidence of how much the company is making off their shadow labor. Credit to the Unsplash team for taking this dissonance to its apex - it really did require a new way of viewing images as assets that hadn't exist before. I'm hopeful that they can bring that kind of thinking to Getty. I'm not that hopeful that any photographer benefits from this new partnership.

In the art world it's a pretty straightforward formula: -Buy out the estate of a 3rd tier artist who once drank a beer with a famous artist -Created slick marketing materials written by an art critic who was paid a lot of money to hold their nose -Place several key pieces up for auction and an accomplice buys them at inflated prices -Market is cornered, established prices are high, nothing left to do but sell to buyers who are too lazy to form a critical opinion and who instead rely on the manufactured signals from steps 1, 2 and 3. -Once all the best pieces are picked through you still have a bunch of inflated junk that you can use as collateral for other nefarious schemes. Source: worked in a gallery for many years.

A comment on HN the other day referred to this as the 'moral crumple zone:' how responsibility for an action may be misattributed to a human actor who had limited control over the behavior of an automated or autonomous system.

Seems like it works for design as well.

https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/260

That would definitely make sense if all the shots were from the same angle.

We designed/built a nursery that could accommodate shooting from all angles so that all the different shots would look like they could be in different places. That was important because there were infants (on the changing table) to crawlers (on a blanket) all the way up to toddlers (bumbling around).

Exactly. The thing is, even shooting tethered with medium format, the pipe just isn't big enough to keep up and the computer and/or capture software gets bogged down, too.

It's not about fps, though the shutter was really fast since babies move a lot. That was hard to balance with the lighting because we couldn't fire strobes since it would freak them out.

Basically we were shooting a lot of captures really fast (but not quite burst shots) to get the perfect facial expression. Medium format camera digital back files are so huge that they can't cycle that fast. As it was, the photographer's team had to set up a system that got jpegs and RAWs at the same time: the jpegs were radioed into Capture One for immediate review, while the RAWs went to card and were imported afterwards. It was amazing to watch the team work. We had 30k captures after 5 days of shooting - it was a beast to edit down to 27 final shots.

The resolution is fine if you're in close like we were. But then you lose out on the room details which were needed the final composition, hence the CGI extension. The resolution is only a problem if you shoot pulled back and then try to crop in later.

That's what the photographer was shooting and it is definitely not big enough to pull back and crop in later.

The only way to get files big enough is to shoot medium format, but you can't because the files are too large for rapid-fire.

The article covers a lot of territory but I can say from experience that the limitations to current CGI techniques mean that automation is still a ways away.

I produced all the shots for a global diaper company that is on shelf today. The pack designs were a tough format: images needed to be extremely horizontal on one side, and vertical on the reverse. But you can't just ask the photographer to shoot wide and crop in, because the new HD Flexo printing is way more hi-res. The approach at the time was to take the baby imagery and 'paint in' the extra background in Photoshop, a very time-consuming process that had to be repeated for every single image for every single region, with wildly inconsistent results. We created a replica of the on-set nursery in CGI, all the way down to matching the lighting in the C4D studio.

Yes it made the process way more flexible, yes we could localize everything with a new render, and yes we could add props or change the decor. But every render required a human eye to match the camera angles/scale of the baby shots. The uncanny valley is real, even with all the little tricks you can do to make it seem more photorealistic.

I do like the idea of AI-generated baby faces - the casting process / ethnicity requirements / rights management challenges are real. And maybe it wouldn't be all that bad if everyone knew that the babies weren't human. But the cost to develop and manage that system require real experts, a huge expense for a company that only needs baby shoots every so often. I imagine a version of 'thisbabydoesntexist' and how that would even slot into the content production workflow - it feels impossible. It's much cheaper to outsource this stuff to production companies that are smart about how they capture all the different kinds of content.

There are definitely companies where CGI makes sense to develop in-house. IKEA's approach comes to mind since they have super modular and global approach to furniture. But most companies have such a big product turnover that photography is still cheaper. Don't even get me started on hard-to-render products that require serious expertise to visualize. We tried to develop a CGI diaper but wow it was insanely complex.

I'm optimistic about the future of the space since there is so much design territory to explore in terms of workflow improvements. But I still love something real - my wife is shooting a story for a national magazine today on a local woodworking artist and I know it could never in a million years be automated. The more that computational photography advances, the more important meatspace photography will become.

When I worked in an art gallery in Union Square in SF, we had a client coming in from China to look at an original Chagall. The problem: the crate was arriving from Switzerland only an hour before the client. When it got there we raced to unpack everything. The piece was huge - the extremely ornate gold frame must have weighed 80 pounds. And there was a stray nail sticking out of it! We only had a few minutes so I laid it down flat on the floor and unscrewed the back to take out the art.

I'll never forget the feeling - when I lifted the canvas out of the frame, it was as light as air. All those millions for this piece and it could have floated out of my hands. It was a beautiful feeling I've never forgotten.

We got the nail out out of the frame, patched it up, put the art back in, and sweated through the client viewing. They bought it, of course. It wasn't even that great of a painting. But somehow the framing adds so much to the aura of the piece. It's more than an art form to be honest - for most art out there it's the one thing that adds weight. For art that is valued at whatever someone will pay for it... the framing is everything.

I sent this to several of my friends who are professional photographers and all they could say was ‘shhhh don’t give away our secrets.’

It’s all about the light. Really beautiful demonstrations.

The biggest opportunity for disruption is the checkoffs.

These types of programs represent an already existing framework of farmers ‘paying’ for this type of knowledge. This model has proven scalable, even more so with the internet and social media making information readily available. Note this doesn’t prevent bad information from being shared, but since savvy farmers will try and eventually ignore unprofitable methods, one can assume this is an efficient system.

No. It is one of the most wasteful systems I've ever seen. Take one look at the reports they put out to justify their existence and you'll see that it is filled with ridiculous math, where ROI is based on outputs instead of outcomes. The data being collected is junk, all the vendors are super-insidery and collaboration is a political minefield at best. There's so much room for improvement you could throw a dart at any of the checkoff 5-year ROI reports and blindly hit an area to innovate on.

I've been seeing a lot of that lately on Twitter: accounts post inspirational quotes/images about being an entrepreneur and 'transparency' about how much money they've made. Always followed by a link to their Gumroad: "Pay me to tell you how to take advantage of people like you, who just paid me."

Working at an agency that mostly did CPG work for P+G, I remember how so much of the design work was about catching someone's eye on shelf: how to stand out in a sea of packaging. Millions (and millions) of dollars were spent trying to crack the code.

But it's no longer a flat canvas where you can see everything all at once. The shelf is not flat, it's deep. You have to move through products one by one. In the article they say that the first spot is 'valuable.' More like 'life or death.'

The best way to start generating income is to change your mindset.

Instead of asking other people, all of whom have found their own specialized niche that will never be applicable to anyone else, step away from the computer and look around.

Just in the past week I have heard from so many friends that are looking for good people. They never post stuff on job sites - it's way more trouble than its worth. They ask around.

Get outside and talk to people in your community. Call friends, call relatives. Volunteer your time. There's an abundance of opportunity right now in this churn - make it happen!

The quality of the shoe you buy is the necessary determinant of how well it will perform.

Is that really true if the mind is what makes it so?

Product advertising convinces you that you can do a thing, so you succeed. Emotions are much more powerful than rational thought and in the case of the shoe, can be a catalyst for a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Performance is almost never purely mechanical with products that interface directly with the human body.

The paper uses the word 'information' throughout as some kind of agnostic store of pure facts, as if you could break down any product into a black and white description of its fundamental reality and/or benefits.

I spent several years at a respected branding firm whose primary methodology boiled down to '16 ways to poke the lizard brain.' Even if your mind mistakenly believes that it makes rational choices, there's a section of that methodology that knows just how to appeal to you.

Someone said it better than me - human psychology can't handle how good we've become at manipulating it. Advertising is the primary driver behind this, but it only exists because reality unfolds through an array of complex sensory inputs that are mostly made up of subconscious impulses.

A game is something that you opt into doing because you want the experience of playing it. Labeling every obstacle you run into in life, a game quickly robs the term of any meaning.

This strikes at the heart of the pernicious trend 'gamification of all the things.' Those tools have nothing to do with games and everything to do with dark patterns.

part of playing a game is taking on a responsibility that you weren't required to take.

Gamification is the opposite - pulling you into an engagement you wouldn't otherwise choose (for better or for worse).

This new 'quarantine work' is just an awkward retrofit - those positions (and their managers) were never designed to work remotely in the first place.

I spent 4 years remote in a position designed for it, and it was still a challenge even on the best days. You have to communicate twice as much as everyone who is on site.

It's hard to learn all the remote working lessons at the same time as everyone else in your family is also learning them. Crash course in boundaries.

I always wanted to be able to play a version of Red Dead Redemption where you just build a homestead, ride your horse and play through the story with no killing.

As a small part of a massive digital transformation project last year, it was clear to everyone involved that no amount of good organizational design could succeed without significant adjustments to organizational behavior and culture.

We made all these logical plans but implementing them was about as effective as dipping them, bloodsoaked, into the piranha pit of legacy culture.

A better model for staying informed of developments as the organization scales is for groups to publish status updates as part of the regular cadence of their work.

I mean, it sounds great. But politics just eats this stuff alive. And the more I felt empathy for the various factions, the more I realized that real, honest change takes unrelenting and sheer force of management will. Which is itself a kind of culture.

Thanks for the note!

I'm hoping to do a larger run at some point in the future if I can get distribution but I'm not in a hurry. Card quality is super important to me so I would rather stick to printing with USPCC, which is more expensive.

Let me know if your friend is interested - I shipped 16 decks yesterday from that comment alone.

I’ve found that quick games are way more popular with my kids - easy to set up and take down. Games like Coup, Love Letter, and Exploding Kittens only take a moment to get ready so you can get in a few rounds before dinner.