I think there is something like Parkinson's Law: "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."
This is more like the engineering team scales to match your budget.
It is why successful companies, when starting out and getting to their defining project completion state have significantly less engineers then 10 years later when they are massively more successful.
The cost of having the engineers is nothing compared to the profits, so why not hire more so you can defend your position. Are 80% of them needed to keep the system going, I think Elon showed that you can prune most of them away and the system will keep humming along (ignoring some initial problems). The trouble is bureaucracy, lack of technical knowledge at the top, and the hazy difficulty of identifying what is needed is really difficult, and if you mess it up, you could ruin a billion dollar business to save a hundred million dollars in salaries.
That is the crux of it. You can't know who to cut, and even if you are really good at it, you will still create problems and create ill will. Elon was pretty successful, but it did have some momentary problems. If his negative cult of personality didn't get in the way, it would have been better off.
I certainly wouldn’t go anywhere near Twitter these days, but the question is how much of that is to do with engineering failures and how much is to do with the overall change of culture and moderation practices that Musk has introduced.
I don't know it has as much to do with scale of the system vs the general architecture. E.g. the system I primarily work with these days has millions of lines but most PRs are for a small changes which are well contained in scope by the overall architecture.
It's a cultural thing, but you can do incremental PRs towards a large goal. Giant PRs that are expected to be reviewed never really seemed worth it imho.
I don't think a PR needs to be tens of thousands of lines for a review to take more than 20 minutes. I've worked on projects where you can't reasonably get a branch set up and running somewhere to test it within 20 minutes if you need to set up dependencies, peripherals, external systems, etc.
reasonably you should already know what the code and project is supposed to do before they even start writing code, so you can get directional feedback in.
then you are maybe reviewing 1 out of 7 PRs that implement the agreed upon change
Funding research to create a deadly virus and becoming the nations head of the taskforce in fighting that virus and associated with the companies that made fortunes using a recently created poorly tested vaccine technology on the world to fight the virus.
Seems like a set of people that suddenly made themselves really useful.
...
You can also look at lots of events that trigger wars where the side looking to get into the war seems to have a very convenient tragic even to validate their entry into a war.
Or situations where people make other dependent on them so they can constantly save them from not being able to be independent.
Or people who like to pick fights try to make it so someone will do something that will unwittingly offend them.
The world is full of setups, many subconsciously created, so that one person can be the hero or main character in their own narrative.
Heck we even do it to ourselves when we procrastinate so much that we have to save ourselves with Herculean effort to get something done on time.
There's actually some different content covered later in the article, but yes it is quite long. I'm sure plenty of people consume articles like these by asking LLMs for a summary.
I had Claude do a "short, succinct summary" of two bugs I found in someone else's Python code: one was missing parentheses around subtraction (x = a - b - c instead of x = a - (b - c)) and one was `SomeException("asdf")` instead of `raise SomeException("asdf")`.
Both explanations were a paragraph of text, each about six lines long, which I replaced with a single sentence each.
When it spits out 4 pages of explanations, when I'm asking it what's better postgres locks or redis locks (two dbs I already have in my project), I sometimes tell it to keep it shorter than a few sentences. We don't need an essay for every decision.
I think I wrote this in an HN comment before, but knowing what I do about linguistics and people, I think some of the AI writing styles will be re-enforced and organically more popular even for human authored writing over the next few years. We're all being unconsciously exposed to those language structures and they will feel comfortable, normalized, and we'll be inclined to repeat them.
I don't like it necessarily, but that's the way it works. Repeat exposure creates that.
Unfortunately, I suspect this phenomenon will not be limited to rhetorical style.
To pick a proximate example: It’s often the case that the assertive, confident LLM LinkedIn-ese is obscuring an invalid argument.
It would be surprising if repeat exposure to nonsense across billions of people—and indeed the particular nonsense embedded in the LLM world models—didn’t have some real bad effects in aggregate on humanity’s ability to cogitate reliably.
In the last 5 years so much of the legislative pressure is coming down to remove anonymous Internet access to save the children or protect us from some harm.
In the end it is all being used to track and control us.
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." -Benjamin Franklin
Never truer words ever spoken. And yet we keep slipping down this slope again and again and again and it seems there is never a way to climb back out.
So basically they get paid peanuts and are overworked and so no one wants to do it.
Also seems like something AI could really cut into. You could have a master animator doing much of important thoughtful work and AI filling in the obvious as well as doing tweening (sound similar to programming)
Really, who needs a studio if you have the creative talent and ability to leverage AI for the grunt work. Or have a couple grunt work humans paid these rates to manage the tedious work of leveraging the AI to make it look seamless.
AI image generation is just not there yet. Say what you want about Luddites and whatnot, but the quality is just not good - the amount of effort given compensation that (especially Japanese) artists put into anime styled imagery makes too little sense that AI can't compete, even in generation time if time for retakes are accounted for.
That's just texturing over a labor intensive 3D animation that doesn't seem like a production quality one. IIUC, geometrically correct 3D animations are basically worthless. You're already lost if you need perfect 3D renders as the reference.
>That's just texturing over a labor intensive 3D animation
>You're already lost if you need perfect 3D renders as the reference
The reference is far from a "perfect 3D render". That's a rudimentary 3D blockout. The characters are basic mannequins without specific geometry, and the environment is composed of untextured, flat-shaded boxes. The demo uses stock assets so effort meter is even more skewed in AI's favour but even if it wasn't, this is significantly less labor-intensive than hand-drawing every frame or creating a fully rigged, textured, and lit 3D scene for traditional production.
Seedance is supplying most of the visible production value: character designs, faces and expressions, linework, backgrounds, lighting, and a coherent anime rendering. It is even generating the secondary animation: the physics and flow of the hair and clothing, which the rigid 3D models completely lack. Far more work than 'just texturing' here.
To see this and imagine this it without seeing context and intention, outside of a production proper, is missing the point. Of ot doesnt do exactly what you envisioned with the ease of your current tools or better is pretty much useless. Ai art looks good for non artists, ai writing for non writers, ai medical advice… for non doctors.
You're not wrong. But there is a common perception that we value things made by humans more. The problem is that grunt work actually serves as a pipeline for industrial training. Even with AI, the distribution of value doesn't get resolved automatically.
Of course, I think it would be great if grunt work disappeared, but I believe skilled workers ultimately need grunt work. It's like saying that since AI automates everything, programmers don't need to know how to write methods. The core issue here is that grunt work, which AI excels at, plays an educational role in our society.
Of course, I admit my thinking is quite old-fashioned. This educational model could change. But I'm not sure whether that would be good in the long run. It could be beneficial in the long term. Humans evolve, after all.
Hand-made anything tends to be a Veblen good, which means it's there to signal status, which means it's expensive.
But expensive doesn't work in mass-media. So a hand-drawn anime isn't going to be more profitable than an AI-animated one.
As for education - possibly, but this is the end of a process that started with digitalisation. I'm a huge fan of hand-drawn pre-Illustrator graphic design, especially 1960s-80s. I think it has a liveliness and freshness that post-Adobe design is missing.
But I'm not the usual audience, almost no trained designers can hand-draw lettering today, and neither the industry nor buyers/consumers seem to care.
Likely the same thing will happen with AI. It will just become the new normal, with skills to match.
There are plenty of people who do. A minority perhaps, but your absolute statement is wrong.
> Hand-made anything tends to be a Veblen good, which means it's there to signal status, which means it's expensive.
Many people don't give a shit about status signaling, but do care about supporting people and their craft. Some folks have a a niche making something by hand, but far removed from the concept of Veblen goods.
The world isn't as flat as you're making it out to be.
> We do not value things made by humans. Hand-made anything tends to be a Veblen good, which means it's there to signal status, which means it's expensive.
I read this as we do value things made by humans, we just don't incentivize the mass market to prioritize handmade things
> Of course, I think it would be great if grunt work disappeared, but I believe skilled workers ultimately need grunt work. It's like saying that since AI automates everything, programmers don't need to know how to write methods. The core issue here is that grunt work, which AI excels at, plays an educational role in our society.
It's not just educational. The more thinking you offload to AI, the more your own skills degrade [1] - and it makes sense, intuitively. If you repeat tasks, you gain experience and get good at it... but if you cease that repetition, eventually your skills break down.
It seems to me the problem is not having to do grunt work but that it's impossible to make a decent living at it even though it's widely agreed to be a necessity to develop higher level skills. By 'decent living' I mean being able to support yourself and have adequate rest and so forth.
My impression is that a lot, if not most, anime was always cheap. Lots of stills, few frames, and CGI as soon as it got remotely good enough (and often before). Like Hanna-Barbera cheap. That was my impression when I used to be moderately "into" it 25-ish years ago, but judging from youtube channels like Mother's Basement, it hasn't gotten better.
It makes sense that they would be the first to use AI for whatever they can get away with.
> My impression is that a lot, if not most, anime was always cheap. Lots of stills, few frames, and CGI as soon as it got remotely good enough (and often before). Like Hanna-Barbera cheap. That was my impression when I used to be moderately "into" it 25-ish years ago, but judging from youtube channels like Mother's Basement, it hasn't gotten better.
Individual frames of anime, they generally had a lot more 'packed into' the frame. This is part of the reason the motion wasn't great; they were spending most of their time budget of big flashy frames.
Disney, when they made animation, was more focused on hyper stylized characters that moved in a very specific way. There's an entire book on how to make animation 'The Disney Way." Some friends of mine ended up working in animation, and that's how I learned about this.
I really despise this kind of thinking, this "optimization" that only serves to benefit the people at the top who hoard the fruits of other people's labour. Why is your solution to underpaid/overworked animators to just eliminate them entirely, instead of just treating them fairly?
People DO want to do these things. They're overworked and underpaid, but they still do it, because they're passionate about it. Not just about the end result or the money, but about creating things.
I continually see AI proponents fail to recognize this across all art forms, for example the Suno AI idiot:
"I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music." [0]
It's ridiculous nonsense, and this widespread eagerness to throw away quality and human talent for convenient, soulless slop has made me increasingly disillusioned with the tech industry.
If AI is making our anime anyway, why do we need an anime industry? Let's just get rid of it and we'll all generate our own shows to watch. Why should I pay a platform for someone else's slop when I can make my own?
Business leaders and AI chuds seem to be forgetting that if AI can meet the needs of their business, then we no longer need the business.
It's already happening. Individuals are already creating multiple-minute elaborate AI videos. Fanfics will soon no longer be merely text or crude images.
reply