Jim Bond's Notepad

ENTRY-LEVEL JOBS ARE VANISHING AS EMPLOYERS DEMAND SENIOR-LEVEL AI SKILLS, REPORTS BUSINESS INSIDER

Imagine waking up and realizing that your full time job entails using a digital cinema camera with a 65mm large format CMOS sensor fabricated on a sub-20nm semiconductor process, capturing 16-bit linear RAW image sequences at multiple gigabytes per second onto high speed NVMe media. Those images are then ingested into a distributed storage architecture, checksum-verified, transcoded into proxy codecs, synchronized via SMPTE timecode, color-managed through ACES pipelines, denoised with machine-learning models, reconstructed with optical flow algorithms, and composited using physically based rendering, ray tracing, volumetric simulation, deep compositing, photogrammetry, LiDAR scans, neural radiance fields, and GPU-accelerated particle systems and yet still.... deciding to believe that there's nothing artificial about any of it. Believing that only now are we entering an era of computer generated imagery.

Don’t lose your creativity chasing financial stability.

A conversation with Ed Catmull, founder of Pixar. I've been making podcasts about Ed for over 8 years. He invited me to his home and told incredible stories from his 60 year career. Ed worked with Steve Jobs longer than anyone else — for more than a quarter century. We talked about what he learned from Steve, the founding of Pixar, building a company at the intersection of art and technology, why getting the team right is the necessary precursor to getting the idea right, and so much more. Ed is full of hard-earned practical wisdom. Spending time with someone I’ve studied for almost a decade was awesome. I hope you listen. 0:00 Most Companies Are Full Of Shit 4:28 The Brain Trust Mechanism 10:13 Why Steve Jobs Was Banned From The Braintrust 17:48 Your Job Is To Manage The Dynamics 23:27 Betting The Company On Toy Story 24:35 Engineering Eisner's Worst Nightmare 36:51 Bob Iger's Crappy Hand 38:44 Why Disney Never Asked What Pixar Was Doing 43:48 Take The Hard Problem 44:38 The Director Can't Lose The Team 48:48 Quality Is The Best Business Plan 52:32 What Walt Disney Taught Him 59:25 George Lucas And The Motion Blur Problem 1:08:48 Now What's The Point Of My Life 1:13:31 How Much Of This Was Me 1:16:10 George Lucas Wanted The Whole Industry Healthy 1:25:11 Refusing To Let Anyone Feel Second Class 1:32:38 The Truck In The Building Includes paid partnerships.

Just watched this AI-generated short film and yeah… anyone still saying AI can’t create something watchable is seriously behind. This isn’t “AI makes trash” anymore, this is real storytelling, and real potential. The people actually using these tools already know: AI isn’t replacing creativity, it’s leveling it up. Studios aren’t ignoring it – they’re evolving with it. Watch this and tell me AI hasn’t come a long way.

It is humbling to consider that if we harness just 1 millionth of the Sun’s power for AI, that will be much more than a million times the intelligence of all of humanity