S.A. Bach

If 10 years ago you told someone that 1) a Jewish comedian who depicted himself on live TV playing a piano with his wiener 2) And a former Syrian Al Qaeda commander Would 1) lead their respective nations 2) hug it out openly as allies They’d consider you schizophrenic

Warm colors increase your heart rate. Cool, washed-out tones lower it. Every remake you’ve watched in the last decade has been deliberately color-graded to flatten that signal. It started in 2000. The Coen Brothers shot O Brother, Where Art Thou? in Mississippi during summer, when everything was, in Joel Coen’s words, “greener than Ireland.” They wanted a dusty Depression-era look. Cinematographer Roger Deakins tried every trick in the book: chemical treatments, lens filters, old darkroom techniques. Nothing worked. So they did something no one had done before: digitally scanned the entire film and recolored it frame by frame. Deakins spent 11 weeks turning lush greens into burnt yellows. No feature film had ever been entirely digitally color graded before. Every major studio adopted the technique within a few years. And then the problems started. Modern film cameras don’t capture what your eyes actually see. They intentionally record flat, grey, washed-out footage to capture as much detail as possible. The plan is for the color team to add vibrant color back in later. But the people doing that work stare at grey footage for weeks. Their eyes adjust. One filmmaker admitted he’d bring saturation up to 120% and feel satisfied, then realized the image still looked desaturated to everyone else. He had to crank it to 200% before it looked normal. That’s just eye fatigue. The color draining also happens on purpose. Muting colors hides bad CGI. If a computer-generated background doesn’t quite match the actors, draining the color smooths over the mismatch. The Lord of the Rings extended editions look flatter than the theatrical cuts for exactly this reason: the added scenes had less polished effects, so they were washed out to cover it. Then streaming made it permanent. Bright colors look messy when video gets compressed for phones and laptops. Dull colors look consistent whether you’re watching on a 75-inch TV or a 6-inch phone screen. So studios color their movies for the smallest screen in the room. Your brain registers the difference even if you can’t name it. Your eyes are wired to perceive warm, rich colors as closer and more immediate. Washed-out tones create emotional distance. When a studio drains color from a scene, they’re dampening the emotional signal the image sends to your brain. Old film stock didn’t have this problem. Kodak and Fuji films had rich, punchy color built into the physical chemistry of the film itself. Each brand had a distinct look you could recognize. Digital cameras capture flat, neutral data by default. Getting that warm, vivid “film look” from digital requires skilled work that costs time and money. Most productions don’t invest enough of either. Modern cameras can capture a wider range of colors than film ever could. The technology has never been better. The choices have never been lazier.

The ’90s comedy rapper used the First Amendment to peacefully fight back against police overreach—he should inspire us all, writes Josh Kaplan. thefp.com/p/afroman-is-a…

Years from now, it will be obvious why, in this specific moment in human history, as we faced high-powered technologies and political ideologies aimed at paving the way for their dominance over humans, what emerged—what had to emerge—was an intense, global debate about, of all things, Zionism. tabletmag.com/feature/zionis…

Credit to @alapshah1 for having the most original/creative AI take I’ve heard in years

The stupidest of many unfathomably stupid things about my life is that there is a city that is known as “Music City,” and I’ve never been.

Today is my last day at Anthropic. I resigned. Here is the letter I shared with my colleagues, explaining my decision.

As a neuroscientist, here are 8 ways to maximise misery: 1. Check your phone immediately after waking. Flood your brain with news designed to make you anxious and angry.

I plan to badly abuse this knowledge

So after all these hours talking about AI, in these last five minutes I am going to talk about: Horses. Engines, steam engines, were invented in 1700. And what followed was 200 years of steady improvement, with engines getting 20% better a decade. For the first 120 years of that steady improvement, horses didn't notice at all. Then, between 1930 and 1950, 90% of the horses in the US disappeared. Progress in engines was steady. Equivalence to horses was sudden.

Much respect

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#OTD in 1968… The band were in the studio, mixing: Honey Pie, Martha My Dear, and While My Guitar Gently Weeps. And recording: 67 takes of 'It’s Been a Long Long Long Time'. They finished at 7am on Tuesday, by which time Long Long Long had truly earned its (new) name.

@mattyglesias Do you like the other albums?

They really got the answer to this and still put Best Burgers on the cover?

HMMMM…sounds juicy!

Stanford paid 35,000 people to quit social media. This was the largest study on emotional health in history. The results were so shocking, scientists called it "comparable to therapy." Here's what happens when you break free from the algorithm: 🧵

Do the African kids get their anti-HIV medication back now?

Chicago Pope, Tuesdays on NBC