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Longhornsnus

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Everything posted by Longhornsnus

  1. The best part about twitter (like YouTube) is the comments. Not being able to see the comments of videos without an account means I'm spending even less time than I already was on that site.
  2. Read this today, link from FT: https://www.ft.com/content/ab62af67-ed2a-42d0-87eb-c762ac163cf0 The US has accidentally been leaking info to Mali for a decade A simple typo has resulted in millions of sensitive US military emails ending up in Mali, according to The Financial Times. How? For a decade, many US military folks intending to send emails to .mil addresses (the suffix for the US military) have accidentally sent them to .ml, the suffix for Mali. And until yesterday (Monday), Mali’s .ml domain was managed by a Dutch consultant, who tried to warn the Pentagon. But now that Russia-aligned Mali has resumed control of the .ml domain again, it potentially has access to information like: Staffing lists at US bases The travel plans for the US Army’s highest-ranking officer, and Even corrosion problems impacting Australian F-35s. We didn’t need a reminder, but we got one anyway: national security systems can actually be pretty fragile, because ultimately they’re made up of people. And people make mistakes. Big ones. Also worth noting: Reportedly, none of the information sent to Mali was classified (such info is typically sent through separate encrypted systems). Unclassified info can still offer valuable insights to an adversary.
  3. Audio was horrible, what was the clap back?
  4. Looks like Derka's book club is reading one of those gay lame pop psychology books on stoicism that were popular the last 5 years for retarded dumb people and he's becoming a modern day Marcus Aurelius.
  5. ^^ Good point. I thought I shared this part of the article but what do you think of this as a response? -- Content costs a lot to produce up front, but the marginal cost of showing it again is effectively zero; that means the more times you can show a piece of content the more you can spend up front. The number of times you could show it, though, was, as noted above, governed by available distribution; if distribution was scarce than there was an opportunity cost of showing old content, because you couldn’t show something new (which again, was why talent wanted a share of multiple airings). What is critical to note is that this leverage was best realized by selling to as many distributors as possible. The classic example is the traditional movie window: first you sell a movie to first-run theaters, then to budget theaters, then to hotels and airlines, then to pay-per-view, then to videocassettes/DVDs, then to cable, and finally to broadcast TV. That’s seven distinct opportunities to sell a piece of content. Going straight to streaming, though, collapses seven windows to one, reducing the ability to make money off of a particular piece of content. Studios are enduring this cost, though, in the service of building up their own streaming services, but that has its own costs: running a streaming service entails being in the direct-to-consumer business, which is a costly one: not only do you have to build up and maintain the technical infrastructure of the service, and incur costs in customer support, but you also have to worry about things like churn that simply aren’t a consideration when you’re selling content. All of this is very expensive! The real pain, though, is opportunity cost: while studios are missing out on multi-window revenue and paying for their streaming service and trying to simultaneously acquire customers and stopping them from churning, they are also forgoing revenue from established services like Netflix that would not only happily pay them for their content, but could actually justify a much higher price given their significantly larger user base across which that cost could be leveraged. All of these costs, it should be noted, occur in the aggregate, which is a real problem in these negotiations: talent is concerned about their compensation on a per-show basis, but studios are bleeding money on an entity-level in their foolhardy pursuit of customer-facing streaming services. Most of the discussion about this mismatch are focused on how to properly compensate the talent; note this item from Puck: The union and AMPTP have by and large agreed on the residuals improvements the DGA obtained in its recent deal, but the union also wants 2 percent of subscriber revenue to be shared with the cast of a successful show, with success measured by Parrot Analytics, an analysis firm that looks at viewership, social media engagement, and other factors, to determine “demand.” That proxy metric was proposed because the companies refuse to share their internal measurements, of course. But the studios declined to engage on that issue, and the management-side source asked how the producer of a show could be expected to share revenue earned not by the producer but by the platform (i.e., subscribers pay platforms; subscribers don’t pay producers). I get the talent’s perspective, but I’m pretty sure the talent doesn’t want to pay for the cost of customer service or customer acquisition or churn mitigation! Then again, neither should the studios: it doesn’t make any sense to me why the studios decided they wanted to bear these costs, and that’s not the talent’s problem.
  6. I'm halfway through "To Serve Man" where the books cover was translated and I've guessed the twist/ending. Doesn't seem like the strongest of episodes as far as twists go.
  7. Just saw it. Very "Gift of the Magi" in trope and not the best TZ episode, IMO. Saw this just now as well. It was pretty good, thanks for sharing.
  8. Sorry for the multiple posts, the edit keeps timing out on me. I thought the end of the article (I wish I could link, but it's a premium paid email) was insightful: For the video industry the first step to survival must be to retreat to what they are good at — producing content that isn’t available anywhere else — and getting away from what they are not, i.e. running undifferentiated streaming services with massive direct costs and even larger opportunity ones. Talent, meanwhile, has to realize that they and the studios are not divided by this new paradigm, but jointly threatened: the Internet is bad news for content producers with outsized costs, and long-term sustainability will be that much harder to achieve if the focus is on increasing them.
  9. Was reading something today that further reinforced Hank as the industry genius (re: AI being a headline but not a real lynchpin): The reason to start with 1960 is that that was the last time actors and writers were on strike at the same time; the primary driver of that unrest was the rise of television. As for the last actors strike, in 1980? That was about the rise of home video. This leads to the first takeaway: the most important driver of unrest between studios and talent has always been technological paradigm shifts, and this time is no different. In this case it is the rise of streaming that strikes me as more consequential than AI, but to first dispatch with the latter, it seems to me that writers are much more threatened by AI; it’s much more plausible today to imagine using an LLM to generating a B-movie script or filler television than it is to imagine AI replicating actors (particularly since actors licensing their likeness may in fact turn out to be very lucrative). What is worth noting about AI is that those concerns are in-line with traditional Hollywood talent concerns when it comes to new technology: both unions have in strikes past been focused on preserving union jobs in the face of technological replacements. That is what led to the rise of residuals, which were at the core of the 1960 strike: if studios were showing movies on TV, then that meant they were occupying scarce time with content that actors weren’t getting paid for, which is to say that the actors in the movie that was being shown were competing with themselves; thus the union demand that they be paid for it. This by extension is why I think the AI questions in this debate will probably be easier to solve: there is already a paradigm in place in Hollywood to make sure that the talent gets a cut of every airing of a piece of entertainment, and again, while you can envision an LLM writing a script, I wouldn’t be surprised if Hollywood executives primarily see the issue as something to give on while getting concessions on the more consequential issue. That, as I noted above, is streaming, and the reason why this negotiation is probably going to be very difficult is that it is exceptionally hard to divide up a pie that is shriveling before one’s eyes. edit to add: One of the ways Netflix broke into Hollywood was by forgoing residuals and just paying talent upfront: this removed the potential for huge upside if a show was a massive hit, but it guaranteed that talent got payed, even if a show wasn’t a success. Over time Netflix and other streamers have started to pay residuals, but as Federman notes, the lack of transparency into how exactly those residuals are calculated is a big sticking point. The entire idea of residuals arose from the idea that talent shouldn’t have to compete with itself when it came to re-running a movie or show; the key thing to note, though, is that this concern made sense in a world where there was scarce distribution. To go back to the 1960s, there were only three networks: that meant there were only 504 hours in a week to air content on television; airing a two-hour movie reduced the available space for talent to 502 hours. Streaming, though, is purely additive. The Internet makes distribution effectively free, which means there are an infinite number of hours available for talent to monetize. This does, it’s worth noting, render talent’s original argument for residuals moot; if anything Netflix had it right when it temporarily shifted the model to simply paying up front. In fact, Federman unwittingly makes this point when he describes the mindset of studio heads in 1960: Wasserman was right: studios were going to have to share the scarce resource, which was time on TV, with talent. Again, though, scarcity in terms of distribution is now gone; the only scarce resource on the Internet is consumer time and attention, and commanding that is far more difficult and risky. Look no further than the deteriorating financial condition of most of Hollywood: not only are the studios competing with Netflix and Amazon and Apple, but also with things like YouTube and social media. Indeed, you could very easily make the case that a far more legible labor action would be for the studios to lock out the talent in an attempt to remove residuals completely, given how much more risk any content producer is taking on today. This angle is, obviously, a non-starter, but it does point at why these negotiations are likely to be so fraught: actors and writers are angling to get a larger share of revenue that they arguably no longer deserve.
  10. Was reading something today that further reinforced Hank as the industry genius (re: AI being a headline but not a real lynchpin): The reason to start with 1960 is that that was the last time actors and writers were on strike at the same time; the primary driver of that unrest was the rise of television. As for the last actors strike, in 1980? That was about the rise of home video. This leads to the first takeaway: the most important driver of unrest between studios and talent has always been technological paradigm shifts, and this time is no different. In this case it is the rise of streaming that strikes me as more consequential than AI, but to first dispatch with the latter, it seems to me that writers are much more threatened by AI; it’s much more plausible today to imagine using an LLM to generating a B-movie script or filler television than it is to imagine AI replicating actors (particularly since actors licensing their likeness may in fact turn out to be very lucrative). What is worth noting about AI is that those concerns are in-line with traditional Hollywood talent concerns when it comes to new technology: both unions have in strikes past been focused on preserving union jobs in the face of technological replacements. That is what led to the rise of residuals, which were at the core of the 1960 strike: if studios were showing movies on TV, then that meant they were occupying scarce time with content that actors weren’t getting paid for, which is to say that the actors in the movie that was being shown were competing with themselves; thus the union demand that they be paid for it. This by extension is why I think the AI questions in this debate will probably be easier to solve: there is already a paradigm in place in Hollywood to make sure that the talent gets a cut of every airing of a piece of entertainment, and again, while you can envision an LLM writing a script, I wouldn’t be surprised if Hollywood executives primarily see the issue as something to give on while getting concessions on the more consequential issue. That, as I noted above, is streaming, and the reason why this negotiation is probably going to be very difficult is that it is exceptionally hard to divide up a pie that is shriveling before one’s eyes.
  11. ‘Mission: Impossible’ Opens to Lower-Than-Expected $56.2 Million https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-16/-mission-impossible-opens-to-lower-than-expected-56-2-million This movie was thought to be a bellwether for the Summer Blockbusters to come and if it was going to be a great Hollywood Summer (Barbie, Oppenheimer, etc.)
  12. Pinocchio (2022); not great Bob.
  13. ^^ This is an unpopular take for sure.
  14. Yea I get how people might not like it, I mean it’s not a beautiful example of hip hop artistry, it’s just the vibe for me me right now. A fun summer song with a fast pace and great energy for when I want to roll my windows down in this heat. That’s all; it’s a whole mood for me.
  15. re: Surly growth/place in the Social Media Foodchain Was reading an interesting article on Threads and saw this graphic and thought it relevant about where Forums/BBS like ours fit in the social media ecosystem and how "This is where the bit above about historical time comes in: another way to look at this map is as a representation of how content on the Internet has evolved; the early web, and early forms of user-generated content like forums and blogs, were and are still located in the upper left. This quadrant is fairly decentralized, and is Aggregated by Google and search. The lower left quadrant came next: one site held all of the content from your network, and presented it chronologically. Some sites, like Twitter and Instagram, stayed here for years; Facebook, though, quickly jumped ahead to the lower right quadrant, and organized your feed chronologically. This quadrant became the other major pillar of Internet advertising (along with search): figuring out what content to show you from your network wasn’t too dissimilar of a problem from figuring out what ads to show you, and the nature of a dynamically-generated feed that was unique to every individual was something that was only possible with digital media. The final stage is, as noted, represented by TikTok: once again your network doesn’t matter, because the content comes from anywhere. This world, though, unlike the open web, is governed by the algorithm, not time or search." "Twitter, Threads, and the Upper-Right I was honestly surprised to find out that both Twitter and Instagram were in the lower left quadrant until 2016; that is when both services started offering an algorithmic timeline. Of course the surprise for the two services ran in the opposite direction: for Twitter it’s amazing that the company managed to change anything at all, and for Instagram it’s a surprise the service stayed the same for so long. Since then Instagram has heavily invested in its direct messaging product even as it has slowly abandoned the public parts of the lower left: everything is an algorithm and, with Reels, completely disconnected from your network." Many of those knots are tied to that lower left quadrant: a predominantly time-based feed makes sense if a service is predominantly about “What is happening?”, to use Twitter’s long-time prompt; a graph based on who you choose to follow doesn’t just show what you want to see, it also controls what you don’t (Wei notes that this is a particularly hard problem for algorithmically generated feeds). Both qualities seem particularly pertinent for a medium (text) that is information dense and favored by people interested in harvesting information, a very different goal than looking to pass the time with an entertaining video or ten. It follows, then, that Twitter’s best defense against Threads may be to retreat to that lower left corner: focus on what is happening now, from people you chose to follow. The problem, though, is that while this might win the battle against Threads, it means that Musk will have lost the war when it comes to ever making a return on his $44 billion. In truth, though, that war is already lost: Musk’s lurch for the upper right was probably the best path to reigniting user growth, but if that is the corner that matters then Threads will win.
  16. Just read this in NYT today and it seems to mirror exactly what @henrygandorfbeen saying. Are you a genius? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/14/business/dealbook/hollywood-actors-strike-costs.html
  17. The HR band conversations is a great reminder why the most important and best thing you can do for yourself when starting a new gig is a) know their comp plans (hopefully you have an insider who knows the lay of the land) and how they operate and what the benchmarking is and b) negotiate hard and be willing to walk. What you negotiate for yourself pays dividends (not just in raises but bonus, etc.) for the 2-5 years you are at the firm, unless you try to go MD/partner/shareholder route.
  18. I think this is what the writers/creatives are decrying about the advent of advanced technology and all industries being scathed. But the sooner you can predict and foresee the new way and what is coming, the better you can pivot and position yourself to suceed. The old ways are dead (or dying) and I do think it is wise to fight tooth and nail because I do agree that this next contract sets the tone and will set the benchmarks for how to succeed as a Hollywood Creative 2.0 (or 3.0?) All the writers/creatives who resist and just live in the past and bemoan how there used to be 30 episode seasons to work on and full writer rooms at full pay or whatever the past was, I think they will just be jaded and bitter as everyone else who is flexible adapts to the new way. Then they will say, I'm still a big writer, it was the AI-led industry that got small!
  19. Here is link: https://www.profgalloway.com/struck/
  20. I typically think Scott Galloway is a chose but thought this was interesting: Today, entertainment is no less relevant than energy was in the 1980s. But we’re increasingly getting it from somewhere other than a Hollywood writer’s room. The rise of reality TV (birthed by a writers’ strike in 1988) created an entire genre that relies less on writers. Cops, one of the first big reality shows, was conceived as content that could be produced during the strike. Live sports are more popular than ever — 94 of the top 100 telecasts in 2022 were sporting events. Apple paid $2.5 billion to stream Major League Soccer and is rumored to be readying a bid for the Premier League. There’s more of it to come: MLS, XFL, WNBA, PLL, hockey in Las Vegas. Even within the narrowing genre of scripted TV, there’s the accumulated competition of history: Friends wrapped in 2004, but in 2015 Netflix paid $118 million to infinitely stream all 236 episodes. The big threat isn’t other TV … it’s other than TV. Social media is, at its core, unscripted entertainment. YouTube has 122 million U.S. users every day, and YouTuber MrBeast has three times more subscribers than Hulu. But the biggest hands around the windpipe of scripted TV belong to TikTok. Short-form video, written and produced by amateurs, floods our lives by the gigabyte, endless in volume and variety — commanding 95 minutes a day of our attention. The younger the viewer, the more they prefer TikTok to television. Stranded on a desert island with Wi-Fi and only one screen, two-thirds of Gen Z say they’d choose TikTok over the entirety of television and streaming. Put another way, writers shouldn’t be picketing outside studios in Los Angeles, but Bytedance HQ in Beijing. Also, the culprit isn’t some cartoon-villain studio exec, but your nephew who’s never had cable and prefers to spend 45 minutes scrolling TikTok to paying $6.99 a month to watch The Witcher. He’s never heard of Stephen Colbert. It’s tone-deaf to ask Dad for an increase in your allowance the week after he’s lost his job. Comcast’s gross margin has melted from 27% to 4% in the past five years. Disney’s, from 16% to 4%. Warner Bros. Discovery, once a cash-generating titan, posted $7 billion in losses last year. Paramount lost $511 million last quarter on streaming and is cutting its workforce by 25%. Netflix is the only streamer that’s been able to increase its margin, but subscriber growth has hit a wall — so it’s cutting $300 million in costs. Of its existing viewership, 100 million are using passwords borrowed from friends/siblings/kids. For Sale: Writer’s Room, Barely Used Similar to the miners watching the mines close, writers have felt winter coming for years. Adjusted for inflation, the median writer-producer salary has declined 23% in the past decade. Much of this is due to streaming. While a traditional 22-episode broadcast program guarantees writers 30 to 40 weeks of work, the average 10-episode streaming series only guarantees 20. And streamers pay writers little or nothing in “residuals” — payments received when a show goes into reruns and syndication, once a huge source of security in an insecure sector. Studios are also getting craftier about relying on junior writers, reducing the number of writers on a show, and barring writers from working on other shows for longer periods. Ten years ago a third of writers worked at what’s called the “Minimum Basic Agreement,” the minimum amount studios have to pay. Today half do. In anticipation of the 1984 miner’s strike, Thatcher built up massive coal reserves, key to breaking the strike. The staggering overinvestment in content that streamers engaged in over the past decade hammered profit margins, but also built a reservoir of shows consumers can’t see beyond. I watch a lot of TV, but my Netflix queue will outlast the writer’s strike fund by a decade. Q: What do late-night TV and downtown office space have in common? A: Neither will recover. Few kids grow up dreaming of being a miner. One sign of how fucked up our nation is? The most cited career American youth aspire to: “influencer,” a creator who runs ads during their content. Entertainment professionals have always had to contend with bus and planeloads of hopeful young people arriving in LA and NYC. Now those millions arrive each day on people’s phones. The One Where a Robot Takes Your Job On our Markets podcast this week, Prof G Media analyst Mia Silverio interviewed some of the picketing writers in New York. And they assured her that what they did, the magic of their creativity, was a distinctly human trait, not something AI could replicate. Their union isn’t as confident as they are, though. One of the sticking points in the negotiations has been the use of AI. Specifically, the union wants to bar the studios from using it. While the writers have a valid point asking for a form of residuals from content that informs large language models/generative AI, asking studios to not use AI has the same probability of succeeding as demanding they give up texting and air-conditioning. As with near-every technological innovation, AI will inspire job losses in the short run and then, over the long term, net job creation. Automation destroyed jobs on the factory floor, but at first we didn’t see the jobs that heated seats and car stereos would create. There will be a plethora of new service providers in the streaming business that leverage AI. In addition, there is usually a “winner takes most” effect. A decent writer gets culled, a great writer earns more. In sum, AI won’t take your job, but someone who understands AI will. Pro tip: While you’re on strike, let your Netflix queue grow and play with Notion AI. The writers strike and its outcome will boil down to incentives and leverage. The studios need a pause that cauterizes their unsustainable spending. However, the break would need to be multilateral so no one company grabs share by maintaining those higher levels of investment. Enter the gift to end all gifts, providing the studios a recalibration of the economics of streaming without the risk of losing share. “I just don’t feel a sense of urgency to end this strike,” said every studio head
  21. Which is why I think, if true that writers/actors are dying on the AI hill, I don't see savvy executives and business people kowtowing to the creatives on AI. I think we all know how this is going to end, and it ain't gonna be a great deal for the creatives wrt AI.
  22. How do you take Queen on here saying that, in fact, AI is a big sticking point (contrary to what your insiders say)?
  23. Yes, agree, that is a much better analogy. The studios/execs are trying to nerf the writers because they have a lot of other costs now, it seems?
  24. I just read Iger's comments: It almost feels like a situation where the writers (and to a lesser extent the actors) were locked in a bad deal during the most heady of times, that are never coming back, but want the new deal to reflect what they missed out on? It seems like it could be a situation illustrated by the analogy of an NFL running back with the writers being the running backs. The running backs want the money they see literally everyone else getting (QBs, WRs, LTs, CBs, TEs, etc.) and they want to come back in time (unrealistically) to when RB's were strategically valued across the board and as a monolith, versus the top 5% unicorns. Writers aren't so debased in Hollywood and AI/technology isn't there to run off the bottom 50% of the profession yet and there will always be a place at the table for the top quartile of talent, but I can see where Iger is coming from in this new world of show business distribution and economics.
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