In related news, the Spanish soccer league LaLiga successfully won an injunction against Cloudflare so that during Spanish soccer matches ISPs have to prevent access for their users to the entire Cloudflare CDN network.
The reason is that the CDN network is/was being used to illegally stream games so access to the entire CDN network is closed.
I would politely and respectfully point out that you are being as performative as the administration is being performative on this issue.
In other words, you know exactly why they restricted Anthropic and as (presumably) liberal and thoughtful technologists it just isn't helpful anymore to apply the kind of reasoning you're trying to do on a situation that you know isn't based on previous era rationale.
The reason we need to stop is because they want people like us to get hung up over stuff like this (playing by the old rules) so they continue to steamroller their own agenda by the news rules. They divert and contain our energy that will go nowhere while they get on with their agenda.
You are appealing to reasoning which is in the gallery but no longer on the bench.
You're fighting their karate with your judo and it doesn't work.
Which makes me think the market for these is diet-focused folk. Get the FDA to clear it on medical grounds for a specific usecase then sell it more broadly.
This already happens with CGMs. The bulk of the sales is with people who want them for lifestyle monitoring even though they're only medically cleared for diabetes use.
It would be beyond stupid for a healthy "diet focused" person to want to use this. They're not at risk for ketoacidosis, and there is zero evidence that continually measuring ketones would be useful in any sense. That's different from the purported use of CGMs, which is to monitor for glucose spikes in response to specific foods (and even then, the evidence that monitoring glucose spikes in healthy people has any benefits is really thin).
If someone really wanted to measure their ketone levels there are simple urine tests that do it - there is no need to measure it continuously for healthy people. And if they want to see if they're in ketosis it's pretty easy to determine - if they're on an ultra low carb diet and their breath smells like shit, it's a good sign they're in ketosis.
At the border you have the same right to refuse to provide the pin/password on boot of your otherwise encrypted phone as you do to refuse to provide the key for an encrypted USB. (That right differs slightly depending on whether you are a US citizen or not).
What the subject in question of this new story did was cause the border official to inadvertently destroy the evidence on the phone and therefore indirectly destroyed the evidence himself.
(I'm not making a commentary as to whether or not it's a valid charge and criticism, or not. I'm just saying that's the material difference between your scenario and the original scenario)
An interesting read but also feels like the rearranging of the deckchairs on the Titanic given the forthcoming disruption from generative AI in this industry.
I spent some time last month with a relative in the industry (camera operator and producer) and he already uses some very sophisticated AI to map out scenes and shots in gen ai full video before they shoot IRL. It's mostly a cost saving exercise as well as occasionally helping to improve the quality of the deliverable.
He is totally expecting that the next shift will be that gen ai video will become good enough to be considered the master (ie no need to film) and he is already transferring his skills as a camera operator into prompting and AI assisted scene design.
He knows that many different disciplines he works with will all compete for that prompting work and there obviously won't be enough work for everybody to go around.
The first part of this is using human actors in front of 360 video stages like The Volume [0] to display the sets (which was pioneered by The Mandalorian) and then ultimately the actors themselves will be AI rendered.
And at this point it doesn't matter where this is filmed.
I grew up close by to Pinewood Studios 30+years ago - I can't imagine them putting a lot more investment and development into that lot given where this is all going.
1. Stagecraft/virtual production is a thing, yes, but the backgrounds are not "AI rendered," they're 3D scenes built in Unreal. They have to be, because they need to dynamically react to the camera moving to create parallax.
2. Yes, some people are using AI to plan scenes. With respect to your relative, those people are not the ones getting hired on large projects. When someone is hired in the film industry, they're hired for their specific taste, creative eye, and opinions. That contribution is literally their whole job. Outsourcing that task to AI is, within the industry, seen as an indication that someone is inexperienced or simply bad at their job.
Crews don't want to work for those people, and audiences don't want to watch content created that way.
3. It's easy to "expect" that "one day" AI might become the way movies are captured if you don't actually understand the limitations of AI video generation versus the demands of filmmakers and the expectations of audiences.
Putting aside the obvious stuff like continuity, shot duration, and resolution...GenAI is not color managed, it's not physically accurate, the results can't be copyrighted and it struggles with anything not in its training data (I.E., genuinely new ideas.)
This is NOT to say that this technology has no future in the film industry, obviously it does. But half the movies at the Oscars last year were shot on film, so the notion that all filmmaking is just going to turn into pixel soup being generated from prompts is just hilarious to everyone actually within the industry.
Stagecraft is just one implementation but you don't think that the Unreal 3D worlds that are used behind it are beginning to be generated with AI?
You're right that my relative probably isn't going to be at the top of the list to be hired for that work. He doesn't work in Hollywood level stuff and I also think that he knows he's going to have to fight to stay relevant and compete for the work that's available to him. Fortunately he's at the end of his career and his kids are adults. I think he can see the writing on the wall for his career either way.
Color management and maintaining context across multiple renders is actually the conversation we were talking about and the software that he is using has mechanisms to define context across a rendered shots and even across multiple projects. He just wasn't using them as it's an alien concept to him. My point is all of that is possible and solved and will become easier as the market matures.
I also have a friend who was significantly involved in Odyssey and I think the reason why so many films are made with film at the moment is because the industry is clinging on to what it believes is authentic when being pushed towards a commoditized race to the bottom.
As people stop paying to go to the cinema and Netflix demands tighter and tighter budgets for work, I think we will sadly see the end of this means of production because fewer and fewer people will want to pay for it.
The end goal of all of this is actually customized content where the film that I see and the film that you see is different because it's rendered to our tastes. There's a whole school of thought there around a collective experience versus an individual experience, but the technology will allow it if it's completely digitally created and one would assume that will be where it will go.
In other words, I might want Odyssey but framed as a horror filmed in noir and you might want Odyssey framed as a rom-com and the AI will just generate the version for us based on the original directors prompt. I actually think that's kind of sad, but that doesn't mean that isn't where things are going.
> Stagecraft is just one implementation but you don't think that the Unreal 3D worlds that are used behind it are beginning to be generated with AI?
They are not. Source: I have run one of these LED volume studios for 4 years.
> Color management and maintaining context across multiple renders is actually the conversation we were talking about and the software that he is using has mechanisms to define context across a rendered shots and even across multiple projects. He just wasn't using them as it's an alien concept to him. My point is all of that is possible and solved and will become easier as the market matures.
These problems are solved...ACES, DRT, FDL, etc. exist, are open, and AI companies are welcome to utilize them. But for some reason, they don't (or can't.)
> I also have a friend who was significantly involved in Odyssey and I think the reason why so many films are made with film at the moment is because the industry is clinging on to what it believes is authentic when being pushed towards a commoditized race to the bottom.
The reason people are still shooting on film is because it forces you to slow down and think about every decision, because mistakes become very costly. The decision to shoot on film objectively does not make technical sense, and studios would much prefer people shoot on cheaper digital cameras. But filmmakers still use it because of the specific creative mindset it requires of you.
> The end goal of all of this is actually customized content where the film that I see and the film that you see is different because it's rendered to our tastes. There's a whole school of thought there around a collective experience versus an individual experience, but the technology will allow it if it's completely digitally created and one would assume that will be where it will go.
The end goal...for who? Totally fine if this is something you want and interests you, but unless you have a time machine, this is just speculation.
Your last sentence there seems a little too 'high fantasy' for me. People want a shared experience. Talking about the Odyssey and saying "I liked it, but with the rom com lens" is not a unified experience. Also it kind of shits over the director's vision, which they probably won't stand for. The whole point of art is a framing of an idea. If you add these different lenses, you remove the framing; they become distinct things in and of themselves.
Who cares about Oscars? It's about sales and mind-share. Ticket sales still have not recovered to pre-COVID levels, and they were already in a severe downward trend before the pandemic.
The trend is that increasingly, the entertainment people consume comes from small-time creators. And these small creators have thus far had very little capacity to create truly visually appealing content and take on more ambitious works. And still, they've been taking mindshare from the movie industry.
Increasingly sophisticated experiences are becoming possible for these creators via AI tools. Where do you think this is going? Keep on laughing it up at your award ceremonies, but the audience is moving on.
Sure, but saying that AI is the magic bullet to solve this is completely speculative. If and when a fully GenAI film is released and performs well at the box office, than I'm sure the industry will align itself to the new direction. But pretending like that situation is an inevitability is just wishful thinking...any number of things could, or could not happen.
If that happens, I'll never watch a new movie or show again. I'm already hating a lot of Netflix-ified shows that pander to phone slaves with no attention span, so have stopped that dreck already. I have tens of thousands of hours of old films and shows to watch and would never finish before I die, so I am good.
I'm with you. When you think about it, what you call "Netflix-ified" demonstrates this race to the bottom started even before than Gen AI. People claimed Netflix produced shows and movies done "by algorithm", and in a way, this is the first kind of thing that can be replaced by AI, because it wasn't that good to begin with. Sadly.
I probably wouldn't try to adjust for both of those at once. You could ask whether inflation-adjusted revenue is up, you could ask whether per capita ticket sales are up, but I don't think the combined concept, whatever it might be, is very meaningful.
The reason behind what you say is that Hollywood is effectively out of ideas and does not usually make risks with original stories (and/or wills to pay good writers), with Neflix churning out movies since years which felt like AI generated before it was a thing.
If they fully embrace AI and turn tha already existing slop production to hypersonic speed, the audiences will even be less interested. At least the audiences in my bubble.
Visual sophistication is not the top reason to visit movies since CGI got so good. In the 2000s nice SFX was also a key reason t visit a theater. Nowadays the less SFX the more likely I will like a film. AI is just SFX.
The future is probably not 100% generated, but probably a mix of generation + animation + motion capture. AI is not going to be able to replicate the deep and affecting performances you get from humans—I fully believe it can recreate some aspects of the visual arts, but no way is it going to get to the point where it will be the best of the best. It may become good enough, which is a thing and will make an impact, but I think creatives will still want that kind of control.
And when we see the edges of that control, people will be interested in seeing things that make it "the old way," part of the reason you see a lot more practical effects these days, and I would include the background-in-unreal backdrops there, because they read as more real than actors in front of a green screen—for reasons that are totally unconscious unless you are highly trained in the differences.
While I do think gen AI is going to change how movies and TV shows get made, anyone telling you it will be a whole hog replacement has not studied the history of multimedia and probably hasn't made anything that required a high-level of vision themselves.
With a few notable exceptions (James Cameron) the film industry is largely unconcerned with "possibility." I think this is often why there is such a big misunderstanding from tech folks about how movies are made, since tech is very feature and tool driven whereas filmmaking is very much process-driven.
The Odyssey was shot on IMAX cameras half the size of a car that weighed 400lbs. It's easy to call that out as being ridiculous, surely a much smaller camera system could have achieved 99% the same results, etc. but that totally misses the point. Nolan could have shot it on anything he wanted, and he chose the less convenient way, because that is his process. If he was forced to use a more reasonable camera, it would not have been a Christopher Nolan film.
Sure, I'm down with that mix of generation + animation + mocap workflow. But at some point, people will going to look around at all the equipment, the people in mocap suits, the thousands of hours of generation and the millions of dollars of compute, and just wonder...wouldn't it be easier to just film someone with a real camera?
> Nolan could have shot it on anything he wanted, and he chose the less convenient way, because that is his process.
Kinda. There are also interesting technical reasons. From my lay person understanding:
1. IMAX film is physically larger and creates a higher quality image
2. Because of the size and machine noise close up dialog is normally redubbed.
3. Nolan (and team?) came up with a method of sealing off the cameras' noise that made them even larger, so they had a system of mirrors that allowed the actors to interact in a more natural way and allowed close in capture by IMAX with integrated sound.
The system of mirrors reminds me of Errol Morris' Interrotron which allowed him to film an interviewee's face directly from the perspective of the interviewer.
Nolan is irrelevant. He is the last of a dying breed. Once him and his ilk are gone, studios will go 100% into AI slop, Oscars be damned. No company is funneling 200 million into risky Oscar bait when they can make one hour Tiktok equivalents and get higher ROI. Movie theaters as a whole might go the Blockbuster route in a decade or two. The younger generations are not supporting the film industry with their eyeballs or dollars.
Someone else already replied to you politely explaining this from another angle, but for some reason you not to engage with him.
He is irrelevant to future trends, as should be clear from basic reading comprehension. And so what...? Tens of thousands of people, probably more, have worked in film. Each one of these is immune to criticism and an accurate futurist? My point remains, he engaged with every early comment except the polite one from xp84, which lays out the same general issue already.
How do you know Nolan is irrelevant to future trends? What's your expertise?
Your point most definitely does not remain. You're arguing with someone who knows his/her stuff. Your claim, which comes from no experience, directly contradicts what someone who works in the industry is telling you how it actually works!
The problem isnt that the future is going to be 100% AI driven, its that the cheap shit is going to be 100% AI driven and that's where new talent has to go to learn the ropes.
Like you mention James Cameron, and he is just one of hundreds of filmmakers who got their start with Roger Corman.
If the Roger Corman of tomorrow is budgeting 50 bucks + 1000000 AI tokens, you aren't going to get another James Cameron. The guy wont get a chance to make practical effects for a bunch of low budget practical films. We are already seeing this with CGI being so common.
>And when we see the edges of that control, people will be interested in seeing things that make it "the old way," part of the reason you see a lot more practical effects these days, and I would include the background-in-unreal backdrops there, because they read as more real than actors in front of a green screen—for reasons that are totally unconscious unless you are highly trained in the differences.
Yep, and we are already at the low end of people who can implement these techniques.
>has not studied the history of multimedia
Look at the animation quality of childrens media over the last 20 years. They have grabbed low quality CGI with both hands.
Remains to be seen. If you read the full thing from the copyright office they left a massive window open for anything with significant human involvement.
> half the movies at the Oscars last year were shot on film, so the notion that all filmmaking is just going to turn into pixel soup being generated from prompts
> audiences don't want to watch content created that way.
I want to point out a couple things. Not that I'd assert that you're wrong in basically your whole post. But...
Filmed movies and normal television programs aren't competing only with other content coming from (so-called) 'Hollywood studios.' They're competing for audience attention with all content, and to be thorough with any other activity people might get up to. The potential damage to (so-called) Hollywood is equal in these two scenarios:
1. 50% of films and TV shows shift production to AI-first: They use no real shots, they just motion capture a few actors and use AI and Unreal sets built primarily with AI and put the whole thing together digitally.
2. Of the time per week that people today spend watching films and TV, people shift 50% of that time to watching cheap, often-AI-produced junk on TikTok. Or for that matter, it doesn't even need to be AI-produced junk - it could just be influencers screwing around / ranting / doing sponsored content / etc.
Either way we lost 50% of the jobs. As for whether audiences want to watch that content, I'm starting to be concerned that we (human consumers) have lost most of our control here. Most people today consume content in a few ways:
1. Algorithmic feeds show us content, one item at a time, decided by a platform owner (Meta, Google/YouTube).
2. Streaming services. Again, algorithmic. You have to scroll like 12 sections down to get to "Resume Watching" - past 11 other carousels of What Platform Owner Wants You To See
Distant third: Movie theaters, but people usually go specifically to see a certain film. What movies you even know about hinges on either a platform owner deciding to show you a video discussing a movie, or ad spend. And some people block ads, and most others try their best to skip them - this is a far cry from the 90s, when movie ads were a staple of every commercial break. I used to at least know of every film in an 8-screen theater at all times, able to give a brief synopsis of the premise, just based on the linear TV advertising I saw.
Anyway just a long-winded way to say, don't underestimate the power of platform owners to force-feed us AI garbage and artificially generate "demand" if they decide that it's in their interest to - and this is exactly their playbook due to the cost savings potential. Same reason Spotify started padding their first-party playlists with AI slop.
I still don't understand why there's such a race to the bottom.
If they don't want to make a movie properly, why make it at all? The corner cutting across the board has become so bad that these movies are unwatchable.
This isn't even a new problem. A lot of traditional CGI can still be bad enough to ruin the illusion when it's the state of the art and a lot of attention to detail went into it. We've been circling the drain for decades. I suspect this is why everything became superheroes for a while. The illusion doesn't have to be good to meet that low of a bar.
If the goal is to be as cheap as possible, you might as well release the story as a picture book written by AI.
> If they don't want to make a movie properly, why make it at all?
Hollywood moves have little to do with art or even entrainment for that matter. They are simply revenue generating machines. Rich people invest in a movie production and expect a return. Hollywood moves don't take artistic risks anymore which is why franchises have become such a big thing. If it make money before, it will probably make money again. Even if it's bad, fans of the last movie will buy a ticket just to see. If it's bad, well, you have their money already!
It's pretty similar to Silicon valley these days. The technology is just a vehicle to produce a return on VC money.
90% of movies aren't shown at cinemas. 90% of movies are for home consumption. 90% of movies are Paw Patrol or some low rent action filler for Primes catalogue.
It's the same forces driving software quality to the bottom. Simply put, enshittification has become the expected norm and there is more money to be made pushing out barely acceptable slop than the higher effort(and cost) of better made stuff.
Also, it's not exactly that the higher effort, better quality stuff is gone as it's been drowned out by the slop. Higher quality things are still being made(e.g. The Odyssey which uses minimal CGI), just much smaller as a percentage of overall.
Earlier unit economics of slop were roughly comparable to higher effort output. It was cheaper, but not dramatically so to push out crap code, so the volume of slop was a bit lower. Now, low effort slop is genuinely low effort due to AI, so the economics work out even accounting for the lower adoption and higher complaints from the users.
Time will tell if this is a temporary phase, or the new, bleak normal.
We've had low effort fraud for all of human history. We absolutely need to revise our definition of fraud to include AI slop. People need to wake the fuck up.
Nobody would accept a low quality product under any other circumstances, so why is AI different? We only have this large scale fascination with it because so many people are completely uneducated in computer science and have no clue how it works or what the limitations are.
A lot of people, especially left leaning and young people, are very against any AI use and especially for AI pictures or video. For them it's very cringe-worthy. So that would all need to change somehow.
Remember that a lot of the people driving opinions on stuff are the artists that would be displaced by this technology.
Also... Actors aren't hired based on acting skill. AI can't replace the notoriety part of why studios hire actors.
I was at a Brazilian restaurant in the US that had TVs showing a well-known Brazilian singer/guitarist performing, and the middle-school-aged kids at the table next to me were discussing whether it was AI. It was clearly not, to me, but it seems to be getting hard for the next generation to tell it apart. I think they will be craving authentic experiences, but also willing to accept inauthentic ones when they do not have the money for the real thing.
I think you're right. I think there will be a giant "tock" back to real experiences. I'm 37, and the internet was new and novel during my formative years, so we flocked to it. Now, as it's becoming the old new thing, internet fatigue will lead to more and more "offline experiences." At least, it already has started to for me.
Honestly I hope people's distaste for AI generated content grows stronger. The existing mass media is bad and inauthentic enough, AI content is even worse...
I find myself mostly watching small creators on YouTube these days and only pay to watch a film if it's unusually good... But I never want to pay a cent to consume the output of some statistical model.
Things change, and people forget why they were ever any other way. There are definitely resistance forces, but when the overton window flips, people just accept the status quo again.
Once it’s good enough no one will care. A green room in Atlanta can become Venice Beach.
Actors will still be in demand, at least leads and most speaking roles. 3000 extras, that’s going to be AI.
My hope would be this allows for hyper small budget shows to rival what takes millions today. Maybe we can actually get some creative stories instead of Marvel slop fest 43
> My hope would be this allows for hyper small budget shows to rival what takes millions today.
No way. Small creatives will go elsewhere. Unless the structural "winner takes all" economy changes, small players will have no chance, especially when they have to use monopoly expensive tech.
Good writing already left hollywood, hollywood is already repetitive reboot factory.
I hope you’re right because I like the film industry a lot. But I worry this will be a repeat of the model versus cgi thing where many of the purists were converted by the cost to get the picture they can seen in their minds get made and seen by the masses.
I think you're wrong. A lot of people who dislike AI in art are putting their money (and their actions) where their mouth is. They don't buy stuff done with AI, ask authors whether they use it, and ban it/kick it from their communities. I've seen it and done it.
I can't tell you whether this will be sustained in the future, but it's disingenuous to claim it doesn't happen.
> YouTube starts shoving AI generated shorts into my feed every time I login
> Accidentally click every once in a while or out of perverse curiosity
Tech Industry logic: revealed preference shows that despite user's "legacy content preference signals" via ad partners, AI slop clickthrough has increased 500% this month, increase recommendations to 3/4 of timeline surface accordingly. Their hypocrisy has also been noted.
> AI can't replace the notoriety part of why studios hire actors.
I mean it probably can if a few famous actors license their likeness to be used in AI films. And it's probably only a matter of time until fully AI actors get marketed and licensed for use in AI films. I don't see a fundamental reason why AI actors couldn't build the same kind of notoriety and following.
As someone who originally comes from a field that cannot be consumed by AI anytime soon (food service. AI can't actually be eaten) it's insane watching tech-dorks think "nobody actually cares about what they buy, which is why they will suck down all this slop because ultimately they just want output".
Some of us remember the story of the Luddites and hope that this time might be different with 200 years of social progress.
so I hedged with "anytime soon" (we'll call it 5 years?) and also robot food production is not "AI" as "AI" is generally considered to be software (and the hardware that runs it I guess like the chips/data centers) and robots are hardware.
Also, how old is your cute youtube video? Isn't the fact that 99% of restaurants are still some dudes working on stoves and friers all these decades later proof that the technology isn't there (and can you prove it's price and not something else limiting uptake? Aside point, if I said "we can't go to Mars anytime soon" would a video of the moon landing disprove my statement in your mind/elicit "that's a cost not a technology problem"?)
Furthermore, if we're trying to extrapolate my statement out far enough to make it bad, wouldn't like Swanson's TV dinners be enough to show that I'm "wrong" that the food industry is largely automated/human free production? It sorta falls apart when we talk about food SERVICE which is the specific industry I was talking about (and which will never be killed by AI, because it's based in community and culture, things that you can't get a clanker to do).
McDonald's is perfectly fine food, depending on the problem you're solving for. If it's nutrition, you can do that. If it's affordability, you can probably do that. If it's availability, you can usually do that. If it's preferred flavor profiles, you may be able to do that. If it's moral issues, probably can't do that.
I worked in James Beard nominated restaurants and have eaten at 3 star restaurants, I have no qualms with fast food as food that couldn't be expanded to most of the industry.
Honestly I don't really see use of AI in films or music any worse than use in say programming. Actually even less so. Output is fixed and much easier to verify. So if it is reasonable and it sell why not go for it instead of expensive way things are now done.
What will probably happen is that they'll buy the rights to use faces of famous people (actors or not) and use AI (or cheap actors) to do the real scenes.
Expensive movies are liked because they look impressive much more so than cheap movies. Say Titanic in past. Or Lord of The Rings. If AI can do the same they don't actually care if it was expensive or not.
> He is totally expecting that the next shift will be that gen ai video will become good enough to be considered the master (ie no need to film) and he is already transferring his skills as a camera operator into prompting and AI assisted scene design.
Yes. Asian drama is already there.[1] The first AI-generated Asian vertical-format drama was released in November 2025. Now, about 400 new ones are released each day. The tools are online, and you can sign up for a few dollars a month.
Quality varies widely. The visuals are now quite good, but chatbots used to generate screenplays still have trouble holding the plot together. Much of this stuff looks like fan fiction authors are at the controls. When someone competent is driving, the results are quite good. Cost is about 10% of live action.
Hollywood probably has less than three years to live.
Can you link to a high quality example of a short drama?
The article mentions ShortMax's "Too Late! The Daughter of Olympus Forsakes You" and NetShort's "One Move God Mode". I found something on YouTube for both, but there's zero chance what I saw was Hollywood level quality (unless you really hate Hollywood movies!)
Most of these things have awful plots. As yet, the AI systems used are not very good at plotting. If given a screenplay and character sheets, they can do reasonably well. But the "generate a 60 episode drama from one prompt" jobs are not very good. This is more of a problem with the Asian drama industry than the technology. There are not that many different plots.
The visuals are consistently good now. If you put in a decent script, there's a good chance of getting something good. The script has to tell the characters what to emote. The automation isn't good at that yet. Nor are the vocals good at all.
"Old people don't have that because they didn't grow up with computers."
You know, it's time to stop this trope.
People who are 60 today were born in 1966, they probably entered the workforce in the mid 80's. They probably are not even retired yet. They know how to use computers, they own a smartphone (or if they don't, it's probably for economic reasons unrelated to their age).
As a founder and product manager, this kind of thinking is unhelpful as we design the future. In many ways it's actually ageist to imply that old people are unable to utilize everyday technology.
I was building public service websites (BBC News website) back in the early 2000's where accessibility was a real and important consideration. Technology progresses, and the bar for accessibility has moved up.
My father is about to turn 80 - he checks his heart with his Apple watch, video calls his grandson from his iPad, and asks ChatGPT questions from his iPhone and MacBook Pro. Maybe he's more unusual for 80yo's but it's time to stop this lazy trope that old people are technically illiterate.
(also, shit, I'm only 15 years away from being 60 myself :/ )
I think the relationship people are seeing is "80 year old can't fill out my form, must be because they can't use a computer." But international surveys like PIAAC [0] indicate that adaptive problem solving is the real problem. 30 percent of adults are at or below Level 1; I've copied and pasted what that level represents below:
> Adults at this level are able to understand simple problems and develop and implement solutions to solve them. Problems contain a limited number of elements and little to no irrelevant information. Solutions at this level are simple and consist of a limited number of steps. Problems are embedded in a context that includes one or two sources of information and presents a single, explicitly defined goal.
This test is administered on a tablet, so I think scores can be interpreted as a sort of combo of computer use and problem solving.
A full 40% of adults from 55-64 are at that level or lower. Wikipedia thinks that a novel online form would be a Level 2 task, provided it involves navigating across more than 1 page. Based on that framework and assuming your dad can use the sort function in his email, he represents a top 20th percentile adult for the 55-64 age group. It's probably even higher considering his age as the trend is towards older groups having a rougher time with the survey.
I also think it's ageist to assume that older people can't use a computer. But assessments like this indicate that a full quarter of the US regardless of age would have trouble with some of the basic tasks we associate with computer use. So designers should consider their intended audience when deciding what's simple or not simple enough.
I'm curious how this lines up with US literacy rates. Is the group of people who can't navigate a two page online form the same as the one have reading comprehension skills on a 5th grade level or lower? Or do they at least largely overlap? In my experience they do, but it'd be nice to have confirmation.
I got taught in school to check whether or not the piece of paper we got with the test on it had something on both sides, so you didn't hand in a test that was only half done. I thought that went without saying back in the day, but given that filling out a two page form is a non-trivial task for what should be literate people, I guess it doesn't.
Your intuition is largely correct. For any given level of adaptive problem solver, approximately 55% of those people share the same literacy level (i.e. a Level 1 adaptive problem solver is also a Level 1 for literacy around 55% of the time). 35% have a reading level that's 1 up from their problem solving ability, and around 10% have a literacy level 1 below their problem solving ability.
I'm familiar with the beef he has with CF, but why put up the fake cloudflare interstitial to me the end user who is just trying to use his service. I remain confused...
It's funny how developer time is considered free, but tokens are not.
In other words when it comes to FOSS contribution, developer time can be donated but tokens can't - so as we move into agentic code era all FOSS development carries a cost unless it is purely done by hand (which more often it isn't).
Not saying this is what is going on here but it's presumably a factor if the author was looking for an employer to sponsor development with his labor (and tokens).
I wouldn't want a touchscreen MBP even if it was free, anyone else feel similar?
I don't get the draw - we already optimize for keyboard commands to avoid living our fingers over to a touchpad. Why would I want to start clicking on my screen?
If you're using your computer for tasks (rather than entertainment) and you're not a visual designer, I don't get why Apple are apparently going to be putting them into the new MBP line later this year.
I feel like the point isn't "there should be a touch screen MacBook" but more "holy shit we simulated a working touch screen by looking at reflections coming off the glass, isn't that cool".
Sometimes, if I’ve been using my iPad for awhile and switch over to my MBP, I might reach out and touch the screen out of habit. I can’t be the only one.
I had the opposite problem when work issued me a ThinkPad - I would accidentally brush my screen with my caveman knuckles once a day and somehow nuke a dozen lines of code.
My kids do this all the time. They also use the touchscreen in conventional laptop configuration (not folded-flat tablet mode) on their Chromebooks all the time. It's bizarre to me. I'm always trying to get them to use the keyboard, but they don't care. Example: enter password on the keyboard, then tap the log in button on the screen with their finger, rather than just pressing enter. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
My 3 year-old never had access to tablets or phones but sees us using phones all the time. So when he gets curious and touches the laptop screen (something he does with our phones occasionally as well), he's shocked to see it doesn't react.
I do this on my iPad with Magic keyboard and I'm a die hard command line user otherwise.
I think the reason I started doing it on the iPad is that the keyboard focus is sometimes inconsistent, so clicking or tab-tab-tab-enter is slower and less reliable vs. just touching the screen. Definitely feel the gorilla arm though.
I had a laptop that folded to 180, without touch screen, and had a webcam hidden under F7 so it either looked straight up your nose or showed your huge fingers
You're essentially holding a large tablet upright, but all the weight is taken up up the base. Rather than finger-painting, try holding it on both sides like a tablet or gamepad and operating with thumbs.
Scrolling/controlling checkboxes and switches feels GREAT. Depends entirely what you're using it for.
While I'm the same and totally agree with you, the few times I've been using touchscreen I find the habit sticks so hard that for days I keep touching my macbook screen, so there is definitely some subconscious desire for this (or I would have defaulted to using the trackpad even if my brain thought touch was available)
> Based on current internal deliberations, the company could launch its first touch-screen Mac in 2025
It looks like those leaks aren't too far off what I'm saying. Deadlines slipping by 1-2 years isn't way off especially for such a new/different product direction. And the rumor also said "could" which means even internally, it wasn't a strong claim.
Yes and it's an article about a leak 3 years ago. And there were more "leaks" before that. I just can't be bothered to research and link the obvious to argument against an "opinion".
Because it would blur the lines between the iPad and MacBook to much. Right now it's two clearly distinct product lines, with separate use cases. Adding touch to the MacBook could hurt iPad sales (in the pro segment).
I also think Apple knows that their laptops doesn't need touch. It's a gimmick and adds nothing to the usability, but raises the cost.
All my Windows laptops have touch screens and I love it. What is the problem with having another input method available? You only use it when it’s appropriate.
It just feels ancient and weird now that I can tap every screen I own, except my Mac. I don't want to replace the Mac's keyboard & mouse with a touchscreen, I would simply like it to support touch.
(This also made me realize the impending obsolescence of the Studio Monitor XDR: no touch support.)
My iPad is mounted next to my Macs. I use it as a media player, checking deliveries, personal messages when I'm on my work laptop, and such. All of that is done via touch. When I need to flip over to my Mac to do the same thing, I have to use a 40 year old interface (a mouse).
It's not hard. I don't think we need to make everything touch-size on Mac. Small icons & buttons are perfectly fine in a production environment, and they're considered to be accessible. Just let us touch the screen.
Tech-reviewers keep harping on the MacBook for not having a touch option, but I think it's mostly of check a box.
Something no one seems to address is that it makes no sense to have touch on the laptop screen, because you honestly don't use it much, at least in a professional setting. You'll always dock your laptop anyway, either for comfort, or legal compliance (or both). My 27" monitor doesn't have touch, that's what I use 99% of the time, the laptop screen is a small auxiliary screen on the side. Why I reach out and touch it? That's also why the touch bar made no sense, it was on a keyboard that I almost never use.
I wouldn't want a touch screen to become the primary input device, but I think it would be useful on occasion. Not entirely unlike how we still have touchpads even though we try to use keyboard commands.
> I wouldn't want a touchscreen MBP even if it was free, anyone else feel similar?
I don’t want a touchscreen MBP, but as long as touching the screen is an optional interaction and everything else is the same, I see no reason to reject it if it was free. I can just not touch the screen.
> we already optimize for keyboard commands to avoid living our fingers over to a touchpad.
“We” is a much smaller percentage of people than you’re likely thinking of. We’re outliers, not the norm. Yes, even amongst professionals.
I have 2-3 old touchscreen laptops lying around. The touchscreen is useless to me. Worse than useless. If I ever use it, it’s accidentally, and I end up annoyed.
Well, when I am doing rather thinking work, so not type in commands as fast as possible - I very much do like my laptop to have a touchscreen. It is way more ergonomic and comfortable, but yes, slower. But when the real work happens in my head, I like to be rather comfortable.
(Also I can immediately test touch features of the apps I develope)
Seems like it only makes sense if it's a hybrid tablet laptop like the Yoga. Otherwise it's a nice gimmick. I can also see Apple being terrified at someone's dirty fingers smudging the laptop, though they'd have some anti-smudge coating built in at that point
Macs are definitely not optimized for keyboard commands. If you feel the software you use is keyboard optimized, odds are it's not really Mac software.
Linux/windows: ctrl+shift+c (unless you want to cripple proper ctrl+c functionality in which case you can (maybe) activate it from a UI menu)
The command key on Mac is somewhat magical and engages in all sorts of productivity and finger efficiency related context switching so that you can do more with less physical movement.
I’m genuinely curious who you think does it better
I really just discovered after many decades that you can still just select text and paste it with the middle mouse button just like you could in the Solaris days. No need for any keyboard command.
Even better is that it's a separate clipboard from the ctrl+shift+C clipboard, so if you want, and you're careful, you can copy-paste two things independently from each other.
macOS has been one of the best keyboard OSes for over a decade, maybe longer. Nearly everything is bindable without additional software or third party apps. This can be done on globally or app-specific. A lot of this comes from the deep script ability that used to be a priority but has fallen by the wayside in recent years.
I had been using Windows my entire life and using a Mac in 2009? was awful. How do I get to the menu bar? Ctrl-F2. They keep changing the behaviour of the menu so that cursor keys don't wrap at the bottom of a menu so you have to know which direction you want to go to get to a menu item - make your choice! Up or down!
How do I get to the dock so that I can open the Applications menu? Ctrl-F3. left left left left left up. Then the popup menu doesn't respond to any letters.
All of this contrasted with Windows which had Alt + key for the menu. I learned it from Windows 3.11 for incredible speed:
- Alt space - show the window menu
- Alt space x - maximize
- Alt space n - minimize
- Alt space r - restore
- Windows key - start menu
- Windows key > P > right cursor > N - notepad (the right cursor = accessories)
This was broken in later start menus. The modern start menu is absolutely useless and takes forever. Up until XP this worked fine.
- (with Quicklaunch): Windows + N (number) - launch that item. Eg. Windows + 3 will launch the third item across. No idea if they broke this in Windows 11.
Under Windows 98 all of these were lightning fast. Explorer behaved as you'd expect too.
None of this was possible on the Mac and using it was very very very slow with a mouse to wave around the screen.
I mean, all of this is available in MacOS as well, and configurable even—your main complaint seems to be that it works differently from Windows?
MacOS is a different operating system with different paradigms; instead of a start menu, you'd use Spotlight search for the same effect, which can be invoked with CMD+Space.
No, the main complaint is that you can't do half of those things with a keyboard. Eg. how do I maximise a window on macos with my keyboard?
I have been using macos for decades and use it daily at work so I understand it is different. I am just saying that the out-of-the-box functionality for keyboard usability is very poor compared to Windows (and Linux DEs which imitate Windows).
I end up using Rectangle on macos for moving windows and maximising them using keyboard shortcuts because else it's infuriating for window management to have to move from the keyboard to the mouse all the time. The usability under Tahoe for window edges etc. is even worse with a mouse than previous versions and a complete joke, so I am stuck on Sequoia.
> how do I maximise a window on macos with my keyboard?
System settings > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Window > Fill. Default on my machine is fn+control+f, but you can also reassign that there of course (which AFAIK is something Windows doesn't let you do, by the way.)
> I end up using Rectangle on macos for moving windows and maximising them using keyboard shortcuts
I also used to use Rectangle, but by now the built-in window management shortcuts fulfil the same purpose out of the box (almost, that is; where Rectangle can move Windows onto the next screen, that is arguably where the built-in shortcuts fall flat, only being able to arrange on a single screen)
Also, somewhere in accessibility settings, you can turn Keyboard Navigation to On - this allows you to tab through just about any control on the screen - very helpful. I find keyboard navigation much more fluid and easy on my Mac than my windows machine, but then I’m rarely doing anything serious in windows anyways and there’s a ton of muscle memory built up at this point
I'm surprised you feel that way. I fight with my mac every day for one reason or another. At least it's not as bad as the days where some software used Cmd + letter and some used ctrl +letter, but for instance Cmd tab will switch to the wrong window when I go back and I have to use the mouse. Window switching in general is a lot harder if you only have the keyboard because the laptop is docked without a magic trackpad
strange. Some keyboard shortcuts in os x are kinda weird and not intuitive to linux or windows users, but they are there. It's totally possible to use mac without trackpad. even cmd+tab switcher has a lot of hidden (but googlable) things: while still holding cmd after initial cmd+tab, you can close apps with q, switch to other apps with tab and (cmd+)shift+tab or left/right arrows, show app windows with down, etc.
There's also a cmd+` for switching between one app's windows. I still find that distinction weird from usability perspective, but it's not too hard to adapt to it.
As I discover every time I have a mouse fail, it is exceptionally difficult to use a modern Mac without a pointer device because at some point, it became quite difficult to get from (eg) the settings nav panel to the settings panel. I can CMD+SPACE to open spotlight, type 'Settings' to get to a settings panel, type 'Bluetooth' to open the bluetooth settings, and where I feel like I _should_ be able to `Tab` or `Enter` into the devices list, or have SOME way to navigate over there, the only way I've found to be able to is to plug in a physical mouse
Moreover, I occasionally encounter modals that won't let me tab to their action buttons, requiring a pointer device click to dismiss
Take a peek in the accessibility settings - there is a setting for keyboard navigation that defaults to Off - setting jt On should let you navigate those items
huh. I just did what you describe above (on tahoma) and was able to tab into the list of bluetooth devices, no problem.
do you have "Settings > Keyboard > Keyboard navigation" on? I thought it is on by default, but apparently it isn't. Without it "tab" only jumps between text fields and checkboxes.
There's also an "Accessibility > Keyboard > Full keyboard access", which gives more controls.
Cmd+Space to open spotlight, type in the first 3 or 4 letters of whatever you're trying to do (an application to open, or a system setting to change) and then Return gets me about where I need to go most of the time. Cmd+Tab and Cmd+` for window selection. I don't do much else on the OS itself so my bases are covered.
This is true for the most part, unless you adjust keyboard settings in System Settings to let all UI elements be focusable with the keyboard (for tabbing between UI elements). I think it used to be under "keyboard" but they might have moved it in the recent Control Center reshuffle.
Really? I find that on MacOS apps are very inconsistent about whether popping open a menu shows me hints for selecting items in that menu. Those same apps are consistent about it on Linux.
And then there's the bonkers window manager which can't move focus directionally (e.g. Super + left) and so you have to fall back to Cmd + tab tab tab tab but even then there's no consistency about whether you're switching between app instances or windows instances within the same app...
Display of shortcuts in menus is the responsibility of the app developer (especially in the case of use of foreign UI toolkits). If you don’t see them it’s because its dev dropped the ball and the Mac version is an afterthought.
I think its more about priorities. I expect touch related features to be a bit rough on Linux and I expect the same for keyboard focused things on Mac.
I have a lot of complaints but I would say my three big gripes are:
- Window navigation within (rather than between) open programs. Mainly if one is on an external monitor, this is just a nightmare and I end up using expose and clicking the window instead.
- Window positioning (I installed 3rd party software called Rectangle for this last year so it’s kind of solved but if we’re talking about the vanilla experience this is a big one)
- Having to switch focus to the dock and navigate one by one through shortcuts to open them instead of the Super+Dock position shortcuts that Windows and KDE expose
Interesting, those are problems I don't have, I guess due to my work and workflow.
Command-` works for window switching as I expect, probably simply due to being used to it so I know exactly how It works.
Window positioning is an interesting one. I can't stand windows being positioned through tools, I stack them like you would with papers and shuffle through so the edge overlap is really important. Probably showing my age there!
And I never use the dock. Spotlight gets me everything I'd need from there.
They kinda added window positioning with Tahoe -- there are things I like more about it than Rectangle (resizing), but I found that it was janky enough I switched back to Rectangle.
I rarely use the Dock, it's somewhat eye candy I leave up, or add stacks for folders that I use, but typically for keyboard action I reach for spotlight (cmd+space). Now, spotlight occasionally shitting the bed, that's another issue...
Annoyingly it doesn't even maximize properly. You have to use alt-click for sensible behaviour.
They also decided about 10? years ago to make it behave as a "fullscreen" button which was really useless to me on a Mac Pro with 2 screens, where it would only ever "zoom" to one screen and then make the other screen display the desktop wallpaper - not the actual desktop - the wallpaper.
There is no comparison. I even use their trackpad in my desktop setup. The keyboards are fine. I prefer a mechanical keyboard, but this is a laptop of course. I do want to strangle someone over at Apple for deciding to NOT put the control key in the bottom left corner though. Luckily it's not a hard fix.
I completely disagree. I've got a laptop with a touch screen, and it's occasionally very useful. It's rarely my primary input method, but when you're not constantly using the mouse, how often do you lose track of where the mouse cursor is? Instead of reaching for the mouse, figuring out where the cursor is, and then carefully maneuvering it over the button I want to click, I can just reach out to the screen.
A touch screen is incredibly useful when you're not currently already holding your mouse. It's easier to switch from keyboard to touch than from keyboard to mouse.
Yes, I feel like it'll be a degrade in quality if they do this with any of their current line up. If they want to make a Macbook Ultra or whatever with it, that's fine -- I would have no interest in it.
The reason is that the CDN network is/was being used to illegally stream games so access to the entire CDN network is closed.
https://apnews.com/article/laliga-cloudflare-piracy-spanish-...
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