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andyfilms1

It'd be cool to see these taken to the next level by showing actual live updated public transit and car traffic
Re:The Agent SDK on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @11:07AM (#50274953)
I would imagine that performance is coming from essentially dedicating 3x context windows to one task, rather than any particular inter-agent magic.
Re:The foolishness of "natural language programming" (1978) on Friday October 23, 2026 @11:51AM (#50211002)
That's not really what we're talking about though. Compiling verilog from simulink or whatever is totally different than an agent writing code.

If you design a custom piece of furniture, then hire someone to build it, that's totally fine! But if you then tell everyone "I constructed this cool table," well, that's just not true.

I love living in the future!
It's an unfortunate truth that there is the right way to do things, and then there is the way they have to be...
I was working on a project recently where I wanted to express a relationship (that I knew existed, but didn't know how to express) between four measured scalar values. Astra insisted there was no relationship, and that any correlation wouldn't make sense.

Eventually, by walking through them, it proposed an additional fifth value and from there was able to tie everything together.

Sometimes you just gotta hit the machine until it works again.

Re:How to build a printer on Tuesday September 08, 2026 @07:20PM (#49618532)
We finally have PADDs from Star Trek!
Re:Agent Memory as a File Format on Monday August 31, 2026 @09:22AM (#49509459)
It feels like 50% of AI "progress" is just finding different ways to say "tell the model things in English."
Re:Hollywood Stopped Making Movies in Hollywood on Monday August 03, 2026 @04:45PM (#49161178)
> Stagecraft is just one implementation but you don't think that the Unreal 3D worlds that are used behind it are beginning to be generated with AI?

They are not. Source: I have run one of these LED volume studios for 4 years.

> Color management and maintaining context across multiple renders is actually the conversation we were talking about and the software that he is using has mechanisms to define context across a rendered shots and even across multiple projects. He just wasn't using them as it's an alien concept to him. My point is all of that is possible and solved and will become easier as the market matures.

These problems are solved...ACES, DRT, FDL, etc. exist, are open, and AI companies are welcome to utilize them. But for some reason, they don't (or can't.)

> I also have a friend who was significantly involved in Odyssey and I think the reason why so many films are made with film at the moment is because the industry is clinging on to what it believes is authentic when being pushed towards a commoditized race to the bottom.

The reason people are still shooting on film is because it forces you to slow down and think about every decision, because mistakes become very costly. The decision to shoot on film objectively does not make technical sense, and studios would much prefer people shoot on cheaper digital cameras. But filmmakers still use it because of the specific creative mindset it requires of you.

> The end goal of all of this is actually customized content where the film that I see and the film that you see is different because it's rendered to our tastes. There's a whole school of thought there around a collective experience versus an individual experience, but the technology will allow it if it's completely digitally created and one would assume that will be where it will go.

The end goal...for who? Totally fine if this is something you want and interests you, but unless you have a time machine, this is just speculation.

Re:Hollywood Stopped Making Movies in Hollywood on Monday August 03, 2026 @02:39PM (#49159749)
With a few notable exceptions (James Cameron) the film industry is largely unconcerned with "possibility." I think this is often why there is such a big misunderstanding from tech folks about how movies are made, since tech is very feature and tool driven whereas filmmaking is very much process-driven.

The Odyssey was shot on IMAX cameras half the size of a car that weighed 400lbs. It's easy to call that out as being ridiculous, surely a much smaller camera system could have achieved 99% the same results, etc. but that totally misses the point. Nolan could have shot it on anything he wanted, and he chose the less convenient way, because that is his process. If he was forced to use a more reasonable camera, it would not have been a Christopher Nolan film.

Sure, I'm down with that mix of generation + animation + mocap workflow. But at some point, people will going to look around at all the equipment, the people in mocap suits, the thousands of hours of generation and the millions of dollars of compute, and just wonder...wouldn't it be easier to just film someone with a real camera?

Re:Hollywood Stopped Making Movies in Hollywood on Monday August 03, 2026 @02:29PM (#49159647)
Sure, but saying that AI is the magic bullet to solve this is completely speculative. If and when a fully GenAI film is released and performs well at the box office, than I'm sure the industry will align itself to the new direction. But pretending like that situation is an inevitability is just wishful thinking...any number of things could, or could not happen.
Re:Hollywood Stopped Making Movies in Hollywood on Monday August 03, 2026 @01:32PM (#49158907)
Man, this is so misguided....

1. Stagecraft/virtual production is a thing, yes, but the backgrounds are not "AI rendered," they're 3D scenes built in Unreal. They have to be, because they need to dynamically react to the camera moving to create parallax.

2. Yes, some people are using AI to plan scenes. With respect to your relative, those people are not the ones getting hired on large projects. When someone is hired in the film industry, they're hired for their specific taste, creative eye, and opinions. That contribution is literally their whole job. Outsourcing that task to AI is, within the industry, seen as an indication that someone is inexperienced or simply bad at their job. Crews don't want to work for those people, and audiences don't want to watch content created that way.

3. It's easy to "expect" that "one day" AI might become the way movies are captured if you don't actually understand the limitations of AI video generation versus the demands of filmmakers and the expectations of audiences. Putting aside the obvious stuff like continuity, shot duration, and resolution...GenAI is not color managed, it's not physically accurate, the results can't be copyrighted and it struggles with anything not in its training data (I.E., genuinely new ideas.)

This is NOT to say that this technology has no future in the film industry, obviously it does. But half the movies at the Oscars last year were shot on film, so the notion that all filmmaking is just going to turn into pixel soup being generated from prompts is just hilarious to everyone actually within the industry.

Show HN: Jotchi, a smart scratchpad for the busy brain

https://jotchi.com/app

I love the idea of projects like Obsidian, but since I already have difficulty dealing with one brain, the idea of managing a second has never really worked for me.Since I'm always working on a bunch of stuff, I never really know if a particular piece of information will be important later or not. Ideally, I wanted a place that I could just dump notes into, and let the notepad itself organize...

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Re:PGSimCity - How PostgreSQL Works on Sunday July 26, 2026 @10:46PM (#49064661)
This is good general advice. If your software needs a "tour," that's a good indicator you should work on your UX instead. If you're just excited to tell the user about a new feature, they'll discover it when they need it.
Oh, so mass theft is okay as long as American companies are doing it
Re:Filmgrab: Films A-Z on Wednesday July 15, 2026 @09:08AM (#48920298)
If this is important to you, Shotdeck is a (paid) alternative with tons of detail about every shot.
Re:Understanding the Odin Programming Language on Sunday July 12, 2026 @03:48PM (#48884044)
I used WASM
Re:Understanding the Odin Programming Language on Sunday July 12, 2026 @03:47PM (#48884033)
Okay, I mean obviously :D I was more trying to convey the feeling of it.
Re:Understanding the Odin Programming Language on Sunday July 12, 2026 @12:57PM (#48882578)
Odin is not like JS or something where you'd need a VM or transpilation process to target an embedded system. It's just C with nicer syntax and modern data structures, there's no "squeezing" required. You just compile for the target you want to run on.

Here's a UI framework, if you scroll down you'll see it on a Raspi Pico: https://github.com/MadlyFX/Ansuz

Re:Understanding the Odin Programming Language on Sunday July 12, 2026 @12:53PM (#48882544)
You can look at my repo here: https://github.com/MadlyFX/odin-embedded-boilerplate

I don't believe Xtensa (ESP32) is supported yet, but people have been asking for it, so it may happen at some point. ARM is well supported now though, obviously.

Re:Understanding the Odin Programming Language on Sunday July 12, 2026 @10:10AM (#48881360)
I've been using Odin for about 6 months now, and to be honest, it's hard to find fault with it. I've used it for STM32 microcontroller firmware, web and desktop applications, and all are performant and compile quickly.

My one issue is (and I'm fully aware it will never happen) I do wish there was some sort of first-class solution to inheritance. I've grown to love procedural programming, but some problems really are just better solved with a more OOP approach. Just because classes exist does not mean they need to be used.

But as far as a language to "get stuff done" with as few tradeoffs as possible, Odin is about as good as I can imagine a language being.

Re:Microsoft Fire IdTech Team at Id Software on Tuesday July 07, 2026 @06:53PM (#48825104)
And therein lies the rub. Unreal 5 is massive and complex, and there comes a point where it takes longer to understand how to layer on your own customizations than just to start from scratch. Especially for indie developers.

I wanted to make a little editor utility (the UE editor is built in UE) that changed the way viewport selection was handled. I think I got to 5 layers of abstraction before I gave up. 5 layers, for a left-click object select.

Can I ask a dumb question to those smarter than I: Is this way of visualizing temperature/pressure accurate, or is it an abstraction for convenience in the same way that depicting electrons "flowing through wires" is?
Re:Half-Baked Product on Friday July 03, 2026 @10:56AM (#48775822)
The key difference is the founder built a product in search of a problem to solve, rather than the other way around.

The "secret" is just to talk to people in the field they're trying to "revolutionize," and ideally observe them work. Often, people become blind to workflow problems and workarounds become normal process. They never even consider to look for a better way to do something. Those are the opportunities for founders to solve.

But what I've seen a lot is founders just arbitrarily coming up with an idea that sounds cool on paper, raising money, and only realizing too late that there is zero actual market fit.

Re:How to ask for help from people who don't know you on Thursday July 02, 2026 @03:43PM (#48766391)
When I was younger, I was always paranoid when I reached out to somebody and didn't hear back. Now that I'm older and busier, I totally get it. Clearly state who you are, what you want, and what your timeline is. It's far easier to reply to a message like that, than to parse paragraphs of fluffery looking for an ask.
Re:When I reject AI code even if it works on Saturday June 20, 2026 @10:15PM (#48615052)
I will say--as someone who has fielded late night troubleshooting calls--I totally understand OP's point of view. It's reasonable to expect that you will be able to answer questions about something that you ship, or brainstorm ways to solve a problem a customer is encountering while using something you provided them.

The obvious counterargument is "well, just ask the AI for those answers," but the AI lacks the context and experience that you have. Sometimes, genuinely, the user really is just "holding it wrong," but none of the current AI models would ever admit that, and you'd spend hours trying to solve an unsolvable problem.

Gridfinity is fun, but just about any other organizational method is easier and faster.
Additionally, without the knowledge of how you got from A to B, you don't know what else is possible (or impossible.) In the process of doing something manually, you may stumble across a particular setting or effect that creates something you never even considered. And now, that is knowledge you can use on the next project.

Show HN: One-Shot Program Generation Through Direct Memory Diffusion

https://github.com/MadlyFX/Direct-Memory-Diffusion

This is a POC of an idea I've had for a while. Rather than using LLMs to generate code, what if we could just write a software image directly into memory?At the end of the day, programming languages are an abstraction to make development easier for humans. Using an LLM to write code is like having someone else chew your food and spit it into your mouth--it gets the job done, but it would be...

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