OpenAI employees are very excited about how well their new AI tool can create fake videos of people doing crimes and have definitely thought through all the implications of this

Discovering computer as an adult makes you go crazy. Discovering computer as a baby makes you go crazy. In all of human history, there will only ever be one generation to discover computer at the correct age: 13

An old school ransomware attack has a new twist: threatening to feed data to AI companies so it’ll be added to LLM datasets. 🔗 www.404media.co/hackers-thre...

Ryoji Ikeda last night 🖤

I really hope we’re not dropping the "content" from "content creator". It’s a valuable label. Content is a very specific type of culture, one formatted according to the algorithms that determine its success.

it’s even more demoralizing when the history you’re repeating is history you were around for the first time

At the Sydney Film Festival many years ago I was walking behind Hugo Weaving to go to the bathroom. He wasn’t paying attention and went into the Women’s room - only to swiftly come back out and give me an awkward look.

Quite an honour to have some of our team’s work from the past few years featured alongside some of the most iconic shots in vfx history ❤️ m.youtube.com/watch?v=649P...

Brian Eno calls on Microsoft to cease its partnership with Israel and pledges to donate the original fee for his Windows '95 chime to victims of Israel's genocide in Gaza

Missed this when it came out, amazing stuff. Hard times for the CIE XYy horseshoe www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...

May these words stick to Israel's already blood-soaked history for generations into the far, far future. May our children, and their children, know the term "never again" to include this evil. May those who allowed this to happen feel eternal shame. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/m...

Everything I do for a living is based on this. The things you find yourself pursuing as distractions from the things you think you're supposed to be pursuing might actually be your destiny.

Procedural nebula, created in @sidefx.bsky.social . Render engine: KarmaXPU. #cg #art #space #nebula

1. LLM-generated code tries to run code from online software packages. Which is normal but 2. The packages don’t exist. Which would normally cause an error but 3. Nefarious people have made malware under the package names that LLMs make up most often. So 4. Now the LLM code points to malware.

Love how after all the arguments of this stuff being transformative, intelligent, creative, Sam Altman just comes out with “haha ripoff machine go brrrrrr”

Seeing a lot of genAI art used in the service of fascism lately

Israeli forces attacked and detained the co-director of No Other Land, Hamdan Ballal, in the occupied West Bank. The Oscar-winning film documents Masafer Yatta’s struggle against Israeli demolitions, amid Israel’s escalating bombardment and mass atrocities in Palestine. apnews.com/article/no-o...

French researcher, going to a conference in Houston, was forbidden entry to US; his work and personal electronics were both confiscated. Why? Because a “random search” of his cell phone revealed a negative personal opinion on Trump and the Trump administration. www.lemonde.fr/internationa...

My latest: Generative AI is enabling a brute force attack against the algorithms that control reality. AI slop is taking over every algorithmically controlled social media platform and search platform, and the tech platforms are helping: www.404media.co/ai-slop-is-a...

# avoid the nightmare bicycle

What we’re witnessing in America is what happens when disordered discourse captures a political party, then the state itself. The Republican Party was the first to fall - abandoning truth for conspiracy, ideology for grievance, and policy for performative outrage.

I know it’s a bit uncool to linkedin-post on here but we’re hiring at work, I’ve been looking at quite a lot of showreels, so I wrote up some tips for making a great fx reel #vfx www.linkedin.com/pulse/creati...

Woah! Something new for #vfxnotes: We have changed to seasons! Our 1st season is on VFX Oscar nominees & starts with ‘Alien: Romulus’ --> Go behind the scenes of the creatures & space environments of Fede Álvarez's film with Hugo and Ian beforesandafters.com/2025/02/01/o...

OpenAI furious DeepSeek might have stolen all the data OpenAI stole from us 🔗 www.404media.co/openai-furio...

oh did deepseek train on GPT-4 and llama? that's so sad. unfortunately it's transformative, also you can't prove it did, plus deepseek couldn't exist without it so we have to accept it. to the Ai company investors, employees: don't worry about your future, i'm sure there'll be a UBI at some point

And a nice surprise this morning… first show I’ve been on as fx supervisor to be nominated for a vfx Oscar 😊

If you are feeling overwhelmed, I strongly recommend the livestream of the corpse flower at Sydney Botanic Gardens on YouTube. There are currently 1,500 people in chat waiting for a flower to open, and occasionally claiming that it definitely has moved this time. WWTF: We Watch The Flower.

💔

Very happy to finally be able share some of our vfx work on Alien: Romulus. Incredibly proud of our fx team that I supervised here in Sydney and the hard work put in to make things feel real. The planet and rings were a career highlight to work on. m.youtube.com/watch?v=Vsz1...

Very good read and sobering prediction of key sectors of tech (ai, autonomous vehicles, robotics, and sace travel). rodneybrooks.com/predictions-...

These are some incredible sentences. www.reuters.com/world/asia-p...

Trying to explain to a three year old who’s grown up with streaming that I can’t just “start the fireworks on tv right now”

Added secondary layer to the spherical analytic media with its own params for color and phase function. Here the first layer is with Rayleigh scattering and the second with Henyey Greenstein for fog www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNJ-...

The snow thing #UnrealEngine #RealTime

Physically testing code

Bartosz Ciechanowski’s explainer articles are always masterpieces of both excellent educational writing and stunning interactive visualization, and his latest article about the moon is his best one yet: ciechanow.ski/moon/

Here it is, the longest piece of nonfiction I’ve ever written, CENTURY-SCALE STORAGE. The kind folks at @harvardlil.bsky.social let me investigate the present and future of digital storage, and how we steward and preserve our most treasured cultural objects lil.law.harvard.edu/century-scal...

Hajime Soryama, poster art for Naked Lunch, 1991

So what is the tiniest possible fluid simulation? Can we get anything interesting from a single cell? For this we'll be using a standard MAC grid, which means we'll represent horizontal velocities (red) on the vertical edges and vertical velocities (green) on the horizontal edges of each cell.

Very nice location for our ILM effects dept end of year party (ps we are hiring in Sydney 😇)

Lol. One week after the Economist published this chart showing the dude can't stop tweeting in the middle of the night, Elon removes time stamps from tweets.

Doing some testing of indirect path guiding in Karma, quite a game changer for rendering caustics in production. #houdini

Little Apex explainer targeted at experienced Houdini folk. It's rough (got a cold, ugh), but figured it'll be useful to people like me who were simultaneously interested and apprehensive. Will likely re-record later when my voice recovers and I learn more things... www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9-e...

There's something I need people to understand. The studio that made this released some numbers. They had to produce 85 minutes of footage to find 15 usable seconds for this ad. The machine that creates moving images out of nothing has a failure rate of 340:1 and the best 15 seconds... is this.

Shout out to ILM colleague Marc Whitelaw who’s been doing some amazing cloud work in Houdini/Karma 80.lv/articles/bea...

Vray 7 introduces support for ray tracing against 3D gaussian splats as part of an otherwise normal scene- as far as I'm aware this is the first production-grade renderer that is doing this. Very very cool stuff! www.chaos.com/blog/3d-gaus...