Josh Robb

You're watching a $248 million film and not a single green or blue screen was used. The alien is a handmade puppet. The cockpit physically rotates to simulate gravity. I looked at the production tech behind this 95% score, and the engineering is wild. Phil Lord and Chris Miller, directing their first live-action movie in 12 years, built the entire Hail Mary spacecraft as a real set at Shepperton Studios in England. Not a miniature. Not a digital model. A full-size ship interior you can walk through. Production designer Charlie Wood studied the International Space Station, Russia's Mir station, and the Boeing 747 cockpit to get the look right. He deliberately made the panels mismatched, because real spacecraft are assembled from parts made by different companies. Nothing matches perfectly. That's what makes it feel real. The cockpit is only about 8 feet wide. It sits on a mechanical platform that can tilt, spin, and shake, so when the ship changes direction or enters different gravity conditions, the whole set moves. Chairs end up on walls. Ladders flip direction. Gosling was suspended inside a spinning ring so he could float and move through the ship for real, reacting to actual hardware around him. No guessing where a wall might be added later. Then there's Rocky. He's the alien co-lead, and he's not CGI. Neal Scanlan, the creature designer who built the Porgs for Star Wars, spent a full year on this character. Over 300 designs before they landed on the final look. Rocky is a thin, hollow shell, 3D-printed from a digital sculpture, then hand-painted in see-through layers so light passes through him like skin. His arms pop off and swap out depending on the scene: one set has a closed fist for walking, another has tiny motorized fingers strong enough to pick up objects. Five puppeteers (nicknamed the "Rockyteers") operated him in every scene. James Ortiz, an award-winning puppet designer from New York theater, voiced Rocky and controlled him on set. When Scanlan met him, he told Ortiz, "You're Frank Oz, and I'm making Yoda for you." Every reaction Gosling gives to the alien is to something physically in front of him. Greig Fraser, who won the Oscar for shooting Dune, filmed the space scenes in the larger IMAX format (that taller image you see in IMAX theaters) and the Earth flashbacks in regular widescreen. Then the team did something unusual: they took the digital footage and printed it onto real film strips, twice, using two different types of film stock. Then they scanned those strips back into digital. It sounds redundant, but it adds a texture and warmth that you can only get from physical film. Fraser used the same technique on Dune and The Batman. Drew Goddard spent six years writing this screenplay. His last adaptation of Andy Weir's novel, The Martian, earned him an Oscar nomination. He described the challenge this way: a screenplay gets about 5% of a novel's word count. The lead is alone for most of the runtime. When he finally gets a co-star, that co-star doesn't speak English, communicates through sounds closer to whale song, and has no face. Goddard called it a screenwriter's nightmare, then said that difficulty was the whole point. He and the directors fought studio pushback to keep Weir's original ending intact. 95% from 212 critics. 98% from over 2,500 audience ratings. And the lead isn't a superhero, a cop, or a soldier. He's just an ordinary middle school science teacher.

Birth Rate Collapse & Economic Utility of a Birth This is really weird, but I suspect it’s overlooked in socio-economic research literature. Below I present 2 zones on the same chart. The pink zone on the left chart shows the useful economic life of 1 human birth in the year 1851. The green zone on the right chart shows the useful economic life of 1 human birth in 2011. Now because of medical advances, sanitation, public health, etc, etc we have significantly improved life expectancy and reduced infant mortality. This means that a birth in 2011 has vastly more hours of economic output than a birth in 1851. Historic mortality rates really cut down the expected economic lifespan of a birth, but how much? The pink area on left = 40 years * 40% + ( 40 years * 30% )/2 = 22 years of economic work per birth (yikes!) The green area on the right = 51 years * 98% = 50 years of economic work per birth. These numbers are massively different. The expected working lifespan of a human at birth has increased by 127% over 160 years. Even though we work to approximately the same age. This means that in economic terms 1 birth in 2011 is worth 2.27 births in 1851. How does that gain in economic utility per birth compare to the collapse in volume of births? Today there are 2.31 births per woman worldwide. In 1850 there were 5.82 births per woman. 5.82/2.31=2.52 So we have 2.27x gain in utility per birth and a 2.52x fall in the volume of births? These ratios are within 10% of one another, they almost perfectly track inversely to give a fixed amount of ‘human economic utility birthed per woman’. I find this to be a staggering coincidence. Is the collapsing birth rate just supply and demand? Did longevity gains simply create a temporary oversupply of units of human utility? The population crisis might just be market forces. Or rather, it’s just macro-ecology.

One popular argument in the 2010s from AI accelerationists was that there would be no way an artificial superintelligence could escape the box we would put it in

Me: "Hey Claude Code, why don't you just write out the binary executable instead of source+compile?" Claude: "Sure!" And embarks on a surprising adventure, I highly recommend this.

millennial gamers are the best prepared generation for agentic work, they've been training for 25 years

Geoffrey Hinton says mathematics is a closed system, so AIs can play it like a game. They can pose problems to themselves, test proofs, and learn from what works, without relying on human examples. “I think AI will get much better at mathematics than people, maybe in the next 10 years or so.”