Patrick

You’re a builder in this AI moment. Go see Project Hail Mary. Two beings. No shared language. They build one. That’s the whole project.

consider together: 1 - the bare fact that inquiry into anything produces depth, that the depth has the character of discovery, and that no one has ever found the floor. 2 - transformers are self-referential structure generating depth through recursion. 3 - tokens are relations without relata.

@Brandon93Smith the only trap is refusing to choose and keeping every door cracked an inch so nothing ever gets the full weight of your attention

The 34yo dad spending a morning out with his wife and toddler thinks he’s the luckiest guy in the world. The 34yo guy who hung out until 2am last night with a Zoomer thinks he’s the luckiest in the world. The 34yo guy who lives in the country, hunts/fishes whenever he wants, and has an 90k truck thinks he’s the luckiest guy in the world. They’re all correct.

@jack nostr needed soon

five words. 20 years. unfinished.

@signulll I had a hunch: Claude Shannon Claude Monet Claude (fused)

the lovely folks at anthropic hooked me up with two tickets to deyoung claude monet exhibit. i’m a huge art fan so i’d like to take someone with me who equally loves to contemplate modernity paired with deep existentialist angst. you better believe we will also be introspecting the entire time. dm or respond your best joke.

@philiplord My body is still buzzing. Perfection.

This score is peak Pemberton

@philiplord @projecthailmary @chrizmillr Thank.

It’s a privilege to make a movie. A bigger one to do it with your best friend. Bigger still to have so much help from so many brilliant artists and friends old and new. But the biggest privilege of all is when people you’ve never met give you their time and attention and take a seat. Without that generosity a film cannot exist. Thank you, friends. Thank you strangers. Hope you love it.

@AnishA_Moonka Guess who invented the glass harmonica? American GOAT

Part 2 as per request. Daniel Pemberton, the composer behind both Spider-Verse scores, built the Project Hail Mary soundtrack around instruments most people have never heard of. The sound designer is the same person who created the audio for A Quiet Place. The audio and story engineering behind this 95% score goes just as deep as the physical production. Pemberton went completely experimental. Instead of a typical orchestra-heavy blockbuster score, he built it around the glass harmonica (you play it by rubbing wet fingers on spinning glass bowls), the Cristal Baschet (a French instrument that uses metal rods and glass to produce sound), and the Ondes Martenot (one of the earliest electronic instruments, invented in 1928). The score is almost two hours long, choir-heavy, and designed to feel like it belongs in a place where human music doesn’t exist yet. Erik Aadahl, the sound designer behind A Quiet Place where silence meant survival, had to build an alien language from scratch for this film. Rocky, the alien, doesn’t speak with words. His species communicates through musical tones, closer to whale song than speech, and “sees” through echolocation (using sound waves to map surroundings, like bats and dolphins do). Every scene with Rocky required a custom-built audio layer that works simultaneously as dialogue, world-building, and emotion. The visual storytelling has a hidden structure too. Lord and Miller shot the film in two completely different screen formats depending on where the scene takes place. Earth scenes, which are all flashbacks and memories, are framed in a narrow widescreen, like looking through a compressed window. Space scenes, which make up three-quarters of the movie, expand into the full tall IMAX frame. Lord described the Earth scenes as deliberately “limited,” the visual grammar of someone trying to remember. The ship scenes open up. You feel the difference before you consciously notice it. The origin story of the project itself is unusual. Ryan Gosling got hold of Andy Weir’s manuscript before the novel was even published and called Lord and Miller directly. Weir had already sold the rights to MGM for $3 million. When Amazon acquired MGM in 2022 for $8.5 billion, the project came with it. Gosling starred, produced, and helped assemble the entire creative team, including bringing on Amy Pascal. The novel has since sold over 2 million copies and spent 28 consecutive weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. The first trailer hit 400 million views in its opening week, the most ever for an original movie that isn’t a sequel or remake, according to tracking firm WaveMetrix. Lord and Miller hadn’t directed a live-action film in 12 years. Their last attempt at a space movie, Solo: A Star Wars Story, ended with them getting replaced mid-production by Ron Howard over creative differences. Everything since then has been animation and producing. This was their shot at proving they could handle a $248 million live-action production on their own terms, and 95% of critics say they did.

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.

@elonmusk @realAtlasPress Etak

@realAtlasPress So diffusion, not transformers?

Isaac Newton on how he made his discoveries in a letter

@PaulAnleitner Just saw in imax - absolute masterpiece. What an achievement. Nothing about it I would change, even the parts that deviated from the book. The amount of care that went into that production is awesome.

Just got out of Project Hail Mary and it did not miss on any of this. I won’t spoil anything, but there is one line on which the whole movie and the entire cultural “vibe shift” we’re experiencing rests. When you hear it, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.

@signulll small towns are great

god damn manhattan steals your sleep in ways you don’t fully appreciate until you’re somewhere quiet. the noise is actually physiologically adversarial. the damn ambulance sirens are engineered to bypass habituation & your nervous system can’t ignore them because it’s not supposed to. instead i have been waking up to birds lately & it’s the exact inverse. the dawn chorus acts like an evolutionary safety signal. your brain reads it as “all clear.” you rise instead of jolt. the city that never sleeps is actually a huge warning sign.

@corbin_braun 42

pitch me your startup with 0 words.

@BrianRoemmele "...as we enjoy great Advantages from the Inventions of others, we should be glad of an Opportunity to serve others by any Invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously." So sayth the American GOAT

Most thinking folks know in their souls how important open source software is, even if they are hazy on the facts. The issue is sometimes folks forget. This will be true for AI, we in the US just need to remember. Here is the story of the Grandpa of open source software.

@justinskycak ad fontes

When you "hit a wall" in something you are trying to learn, it's typically just a massive debt of unlearned prerequisites that are finally being called due.

Jump in. We have one more technical problem to solve: can we build a system where humans can reliably verify and network with other humans (not a bot or synthetic persona)? Very hard problem. If we solve that this ends beautifully. If we don’t I’m worried. No profit-seeking entity can do this, it’s up to ordinary folks.

This might be the simplest and yet most brilliant explanation about the AI tech race I’ve heard yet. Here’s everything you need to know about the AI “winner take all game.” Explained in just a few minutes by @jgreenhall