FtttG
User ID: 1175
Given the rank incompetence with which companies deploy AI I am happy to believe HBO just put the un-edited originals in some AI upscaler
That can't have been what happened, because the vomit hose guys weren't visible in the original 1080p episode. Ergo, one of two things must have happened:
- They redeveloped the footage from the original negative but at a higher resolution, then reconstructed the episode from scratch in a NLE.
- As above, but rather than redeveloping the footage from the original negative, they took the original digital video files which were created from the original negatives, upscaled those (perhaps using AI upscaling), then reconstructed the episode from scratch in an NLE.
If they'd upscaled the original video using an AI upscaling tool, you would've doubtless seen some weird upscaling artefacts and colour correction — but if the hose guys weren't visible in the input file, they wouldn't have been visible in the output file. An AI upscaling algorithm will invent visual artefacts, but it's not going to spontaneously hallucinate crew members standing behind the actors.
FtttG
8d ago
Don't get me wrong, I am enjoying it. But my progress on it has been slow because I've been busy and the print is very small.
I am highly skeptical the people who Bonnie Blue is friends with in real life regard her this way.
I am highly sceptical that Bonnie Blue has friends of any kind, at least as you and I would understand them.
If you had collectively starred in/produced dozens or hundreds of porn videos that made millions of pounds, wouldn't you be good at it? Why would people have to pretend you were good? As far as longevity Alexis Texas and Angela White have been doing it for over 20 years. I don't know what their earnings look like over that time but it's clearly an industry you can stay in if you have the talent and desire.
It's a well-established finding that a woman's sexual desirability tends to decline over time, which has obvious implications for a sex worker's expected earnings and career longevity. Of course there are women who can keep it up well into their forties, but such people are the exception. This deep dive into the stats of the Internet Adult Film Database found that 47% of female performers leave the industry after filming fewer than three films, and that the career of a female porn star who enters the industry in the 21st century lasts, on average, three years.
FtttG
8d ago
FtttG
8d ago
This is interesting, as I was never under the impression that Cameron stood down as a result of Piggate. He nailed his colours to the mast on where he stood on the Euroscepticism issue and put it to a referendum to settle the matter definitively, gambling that most Brits broadly shared his view. The gamble didn't pay off, and that was that.
For those of you who've never seen Mad Men, AMC's critically acclaimed period drama set in the advertising industry in the sixties, there's a well-known scene in the first season. After protagonist Don Draper invites his boss Roger Sterling over for dinner and Sterling makes a drunken pass at Draper's wife Betty (which she politely rebuffs), Draper hatches a scheme to exact his revenge on Sterling. Immediately before an important client meeting, Draper treats Sterling to a boozy lunch of oysters and vodka, then pays off the lift operator in the company's office building to tell Sterling that the lift is out of order, forcing Sterling and Draper to walk up dozens of flights of stairs to their office. Being older and less fit than Draper and a chain-smoking alcoholic, Sterling is not prepared for this level of physical exertion, and by the time they reach the office he's so exhausted that he promptly projectile vomits on the floor, directly in front of the clients he's eager to impress.
HBO recently produced a 4K remaster of the entire series for their streaming platform HBO Max. Supposedly, something went wrong during the production of this remaster, resulting in numerous shots in which crew and equipment are visible when they should not be. And we're not talking about the reflection of a boom mic just visible in someone's glasses: in the scene described above, the crew members operating the vomit hose can be clearly seen kneeling behind the cast.
My first thought was "ha ha, how clumsy and incompetent can you get". My second thought, less than a minute later, was "I bet they did that on purpose to gin up free publicity". As Scott would say, it's bad on purpose to make you click.
I'm not the only one to have this thought, and I find it almost impossible to imagine how such a thing could be the result of an honest mistake. Consider how many pairs of eyes must have approved this thing before it was made available for streaming on HBO Max. Errors of this kind most commonly happen as a result of remastering a piece of visual media for an aspect ratio different from the one it was originally intended for: many 90s TV shows were filmed in widescreen with the intention to crop the image to a 4:3 aspect in post-production, and many directors and DPs paid very little attention to the content of the shots on the extreme left and right of the image, knowing that it would be cropped out before broadcast anyway. As a consequence, HD widescreen remasters of, for example, Friends usually make it painfully obvious when one of the actors has been replaced with a stand-in in a reverse shot. (In fairness to these directors and DPs, they had no way of knowing that 16:9 would eventually become the industry standard in televisions and other monitors, still less that anyone would have any interest in watching Friends two or three decades out from its original broadcast. How many 90s sitcoms are popular enough to warrant the HD remastering treatment? Even the idea of buying entire seasons of TV shows on VHS or DVD was unheard of at the time of Friends's original broadcast.) But that excuse obviously isn't applicable here: Mad Men was originally broadcast in a 16:9 aspect, and so is the 4K remaster. I don't know what this "remastering" consisted of: the cheap option is just to take the original video file and run it through an AI upscaling program, while the more expensive option is to redevelop the original negatives (the first three seasons of Mad Men were shot on film, before transitioning to digital for the rest of the show's run) with a higher resolution, drop the resulting video files into your NLE, then replicate the shot composition and edits of the original broadcast. This is a labour-intensive task, but not one that strikes me as especially prone to error: display the original broadcast on one monitor and the remaster on the other monitor. Copy the original's homework. It's not rocket science.
So, I surmise that HBO did this deliberately: they'll apologise for the "error" and promise that their editors are working around the clock to prepare amended video files with the errors fixed. Two weeks from now, these amended video files will be pushed to HBO Max. But of course, these "amended" video files will be the original video files approved and signed off on a year ago: most likely, they made the proper remaster first, then a bullshit version thereof with all of these incredibly blatant errors in.
And it occurs to me that just about every high-profile mishap in the entertainment industry over the last decade has been met with comparable accusations of having been deliberately staged for promotional reasons. When Steve Harvey announced the wrong winner of Miss Universe 2015, that was staged, or so the Internet thought. When Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway announced the wrong winner of the Oscar for Best Picture in 2017, that was staged. When Will Smith took the stage during the 2022 Oscars to slap Chris Rock across the face*, numerous people (including those in attendance) assumed that it was a pre-planned skit; nearly four years later, after Smith tendering his resignation from the Academy, receiving a formal ban from attending any Academy events and his film Emancipation being delayed owing to the negative publicity, I still routinely encounter people who are convinced the whole event was staged.
And I'm concerned about what this trend implies for political sense-making.
As established, I don't think the entertainment industry is above staging mistakes and blunders for the sake of a little cheap publicity. But this fact should not cause us to ignore a more fundamental truth: mistakes do happen. No one is immune from carelessness or errors. Even Homer sometimes nods. While remaining agnostic on whether the 2017 Oscars thing was staged or not, considering the amount of moving parts involved in a live event like this, someone reading out the wrong winner was bound to happen sooner or later, especially given the Academy's predilection for having the winners announced by established Hollywood lifers as a "passing-of-the-torch" gesture, people who by definition have poorer eyesight and are more prone to senior moments than younger people (when they made the erroneous announcement, Dunaway was in her late seventies, and Beatty in his eighties). Indeed, we should have a much higher prior on these mistakes being legitimate errors when they happen in live settings like award ceremonies, as compared to errors like HBO's (they could have uploaded the remaster to their servers whenever they pleased).
But there's a certain kind of person** who's extremely keen to claim that advertising doesn't work on him and he only buys products based on merit, and who can't stand the idea of falling for a publicity stunt which was disguised as something else — it makes him feel like a mark, no better than someone who eagerly replies to a 419 email. As such, whenever he encounters an event which seems to fit the broad contours of a disguised publicity stunt, he reflexively concludes that it must be, engaging in a lot of armchair theorising about how if it had been real then X would have happened, but because Y happened, it must have been staged. And a reflexive assumption that any apparent gaffe or blunder committed by any individual who works in the entertainment industry must have been deliberately, laboriously and painstakingly premeditated by the Powers that Be to garner clicks: I mean, it's not too much of a reach to see how this could push people into a more conspiratorial mode of thinking, is it? As Scott observed, it's "doing the very conspiracy-theory-ish thing of replacing a simple and direct picture of the world with a more complicated one without having enough evidence to justify such a move." A year and a half ago, Thomas Crooks shot Trump in the ear, and the attempt on his life was immediately met with accusations of Trump staging it as a publicity stunt. Compare the armchair theorising about the Will Smith slap ("A slow walk up, an open hand slap, no stagger, slow walk back with no scuffle and no security personnel stepping in? Feels absolutely staged for publicity") with the idle speculation about blood splatter packs concealed on Trump's person and how bullet wounds don't look like that (arguments usually made by people who proudly admit never to having handled or fired a gun in their lives) — I mean, they're not the same, but they certainly rhyme, don't they? Distrust of mainstream media narratives has traditionally been a right-coded phenomenon, but in the case of the attempt on Trump's life and the successful assassination of Charlie Kirk, it's been progressives who've been the most vocal in their disbelief of the official narrative (granted, many rightists, most prominently Candace Owens, also have alternative hypotheses about who's ultimately responsible for Charlie Kirk's death).
To head off one obvious objection: I don't think this trend is evidence of media consumers becoming more savvy and clued-in, less gullible, less prone to falling for state propaganda dressed up as objective, disinterested journalism. Rather, it's a toxic stew of motivated reasoning, Gell-Mann amnesia and isolated demands for rigour: we've all become postmodernists when it suits us, believing the mainstream narrative when it fits our worldview and jumping to paranoid, conspiratorial explanations when it doesn't. The BBC or the Washington Post are, at once, trustworthy outlets when we agree with them and establishment Pravdas when we don't. I don't think it's much of an exaggeration to say that any sufficiently politically active American of either stripe believes that American elections are simultaneously the most and least secure elections in the world, literally the dictionary definition of doublethink. As someone who believes that Biden was elected legitimately in 2020 and that Trump was elected legitimately in 2024, I find this intensely concerning. People will scoff at me and tell me that our brains didn't evolve to seek the truth but rather to help us survive and propagate and so it's silly to get so worked up about biases and motivated reasoning when these things are the water we fish swim in. But I don't care: I do not believe that it is psychologically healthy to hold two beliefs at the same time which on their face seem mutually exclusive and contradictory. It is not conducive to good mental health to simultaneously believe "The [2020/2024] (strike out as necessary) American presidential election was secure and legitimate, but the [2020/2024] (strike out as necessary) election was rigged and manipulated".
I don't like that HBO almost certainly included these "errors" in the Mad Men remaster deliberately. For people who fall for it, they'll think HBO are incompetent and careless, and I think it's profoundly unbecoming for someone to present themselves as stupider than they really are just to get attention (and hence revenue) in the short-term. I particularly don't like that HBO will probably blame their perfectly qualified editors for a decision made by the executives and/or marketing department. But for people who don't fall for it (like yours truly), it's providing additional evidence for the "major media companies are lying to you and the sheeple are falling for it hook, line and sinker" mindset. It's contributing, however indirectly, to the erosion of social trust, the assumption that we cannot accept what huge media conglomerates (and large corporations, by extension) say at face value. Per "Bounded Distrust", we expect companies to make technically-true-but-misleading claims about the qualities of their products. Historically, we did not expect companies to intentionally release substandard products as publicity stunts which they pass off as the result of human error, only to release the quality product after the fact. Now that's a new item added to the "buyer beware" list.
Wait — intentionally putting out a substandard product as a publicity stunt, just so you can pull it and replace it with the product you intended to sell all along. Is the Mad Men remaster just New Coke all over again?
*Not strictly a "mistake", as Smith intentionally struck Rock, but certainly an instance of a live entertainment event not going as the showrunners purportedly intended.
**People like us, really.
FtttG
8d ago
A long time ago I heard someone observe that progressive messaging makes a lot more sense if, whenever you read "misinformation", you mentally substitute "blasphemy".
FtttG
9d ago
One-third of the way through Cryptonomicon. The likelihood of my finishing this book before the end of the year is narrowing.
FtttG
9d ago
I'm in the same boat as you, I've received nine rejections from literary agents in the last three weeks. I've no idea where I'm falling down, if it's the quality of the writing or if the query letter isn't grabbing their attention.
If you'd like some feedback on your query letter, feel free to DM me.
Even if AI can act, it can not match the real thing in scandals and messy divorces.
It's interesting because this is a double-edged sword. Messy scandals and divorces indisputably garner publicity for actors and by extension the movies they star in. On the other hand, actors being human means they sometimes have to be sent to rehab to dry out (holding up production on their latest movie and costing the studio millions), or get arrested for sexual harassment or domestic abuse (meaning the studio has to just sit on their latest movie until the scandal blows over), or simply express a controversial opinion in an interview that goes viral.
There's no doubt that there are financial benefits associated with actors being flawed, imperfect human beings, but there are also costs. I have no doubt that there are individual films which have posted a loss specifically because one of the lead actors did something suspect in their private life. I think it would be legitimately difficult to definitively say whether the fact of actors having private lives outside of their work is a net help or a net hindrance to movie studios.
Renaming a park because it's named after a Jew and, decades later, some unrelated Jews did something you don't approve of strikes me as the definition of petty.
FtttG
11d ago
If the decline is in part caused by schools being too willing to indulge blatantly unwarranted requests for "accommodations" for students who clearly do not suffer from any disabilities which would have a meaningful impact on their academic performance, at whose feet should we lay the blame for this state of affairs? The administrators? Legislators? Assorted departments of education?
I'm reading Cryptonomicon and came across this line:
Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be — or to be indistinguishable from — self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.
Uhh — something you guys want to tell me?
FtttG
11d ago
I never claimed that the average Arab Israeli is an enthusiastic supporter of the Zionist project, or that the majority of that group are, merely that it's misleading to claim that all of them are opposed.
A survey from a year ago found that 58% of Arab Israelis believe the most recent conflict has "fostered a sense of shared destiny between Jewish Israelis and Arab Israelis". An earlier survey found that 55% consider themselves "proud citizens of Israel".
That's not exactly unreasonable, the Israeli Arabs aren't enthusiastic participants in the Zionist project.
Some and some. There's at least one sitting Knesset member who's part of Bibi's Likud party, for example. Likewise, many Israeli Arabs have served in the IDF.
FtttG
11d ago
“Insecure narcissists demand omnipotence from others and detest omniscience” is vacuous. It’s a fully general argument. Any time you want me to do something, you’re demanding omnipotence, and any time I dare to disagree with you, I’m just mad about your omniscience.
I understand if you find TLP's writing style and personal vocabulary frustrating in a Continental philosophy sort of way (hell, I agree with you: Sadly, Porn was probably the single most impenetrable book I've ever read, bar none). But this is really just a flowery way of saying "insecure narcissists demand that the world bend over backwards to validate their preferred image of themselves, and become extremely hostile and defensive when the world refuses to do so, seeing the narcissist as he is rather than as he would like to be seen." Maybe you disagree with @gog's application of the concept in this context, but the concept in itself seems sound – pretty close to a dictionary definition of what an insecure narcissist is, really.
Echoing @gog below, I agree that gaming the system isn't necessarily indicative of TLP-style narcissism, if you're fully aware that that's what you're doing and have no illusions about it.
Think back to the Varsity Blues scandal, in which various wealthy parents (including your woman from Desperate Housewives) were found to have bribed elite universities to get their children places.
Now, if these parents were thinking "I know Little Jimmy isn't too bright, but I really want him to go to Harvard, and if that means I have to pay some apparatchik under the table, so be it", that's not narcissism.
But if, on the other hand, they were thinking "Little Jimmy is a genius, but he has a special kind of intelligence that can't be captured by a blunt instrument like the SAT. I know that once he gets to Harvard he'll flourish, and if I need to pay someone off to get him in, so be it" - well, yeah. You see where I'm going with this.
In real life, I imagine there are some parents who have no illusions about how smart or capable their children are, and are just using every exploit they can think of to get their kids into top universities they never could on their own merit, including spurious requests for accommodations for disabilities their children don't have. Nothing narcissistic about that – dishonest, yes; selfish, yes; burning the commons, yes; making it harder for the legitimately disabled to be taken seriously, yes – but not narcissistic.
But I agree with @gog that there are a nonzero amount of parents who really think their children are exceptionally intelligent in a way which, for some reason, never manifests in an SAT-legible form, and for which special accommodations are required so that it can express itself. That is narcissism.
FtttG
12d ago
Exactly, it's blank-slate thinking all the way down.
One might have thought that even progressives would be willing to concede that a non-verbal child who is physically unable to feed himself or use the toilet is not as intelligent as Albert Einstein – but apparently not, according to Lutz.
I recall reading an article a few years ago (I'll see if I can dig it out*) that claimed that the absolute number of black Americans with engineering degrees actually declined in the years after affirmative action in university admissions was introduced.
The reasoning was elegantly simple. Like it or not, everyone in a classroom setting is acutely aware of where they sit in the hierarchy of their peers when it comes to how effectively they are understanding the material: people at the top of the class know they are, people who are struggling know it, people who are getting by know it. If you're a mediocre student in a mediocre school, you'll be doing okay: if you move that mediocre student into an elite school, he will be struggling, almost by definition. Ask yourself who's more likely to drop out of an elite school: someone getting straight As with ease, or someone barely scraping by with Ds?
This article argued that affirmative action in university admissions essentially migrated a huge number of mediocre students out of mid-tier colleges (in which their skill level would have matched the content they were expected to master, at the pace they were expected to master it) and into elite Ivy League colleges (in which they were bound to be near the bottom of the classroom distribution: if they wouldn't be, they wouldn't have needed affirmative action to get in). Faced with the demoralising prospect of always being near the bottom of the class, far more of these students dropped out before completing their degree, when compared to an earlier cohort of black students who attended mid-tier colleges. I don't know about you, but I think going to a mid-tier college and getting a degree is more impressive than going to Yale and dropping out after a year because you can't hack it.
It wouldn't surprise me if we end up observing a similar trend here. No genuinely smart student actually needs "accommodations" to get into an elite college, so the only ones who try to game the disability system to do so will be mediocre students. Like the black students in the paragraph above, they will find themselves near the bottom of the classroom hierarchy, constantly struggling to grasp material their classmates master with ease. Consequently, they will be far more likely to drop out without receiving a degree.
You're correct that getting the skills and the credentials is only one reason people go to college, end networking opportunities and so on are also a big part of it. But if you're doing a four-year degree and you drop out one year in, it stands to reason you'll have max one-quarter the networking opportunities that someone who completes their degree will have, so it may end up being a waste of your time anyway.
*I'm not sure if this is the article I was thinking of, but it makes the same general argument.
But as I said in the OP, that can't be the cause of the error here: the original HD release of Mad Men was widescreen out of the gate. It's not 4:3 being upscaled to 16:9, it's 1080p 16:9 being upscaled to 4k 16:9.
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