←back to thread

388 points pseudolus | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
Bukhmanizer ◴[] No.43485838[source]
I’m surprised not many people talk about this, but a big reason corporations are able to do layoffs is just that they’re doing less. At my work we used to have thousands of ideas of small improvements to make things better for our users. Now we have one: AI. It’s not that we’re using AI to make all these small improvements, or even planning on it. We’re just… not doing them. And I don’t think my experience is very unique.
replies(21): >>43486104 #>>43486264 #>>43486456 #>>43487649 #>>43487671 #>>43488414 #>>43488436 #>>43488988 #>>43489201 #>>43489228 #>>43489488 #>>43489997 #>>43490451 #>>43490843 #>>43491273 #>>43491336 #>>43491568 #>>43491660 #>>43492193 #>>43492499 #>>43493656 #
baazaa ◴[] No.43488436[source]
I think people need to get used to the idea that the West is just going backwards in capability. Go watch CGI in a movie theatre and it's worse than 20 years ago, go home to play video games and the new releases are all remasters of 20 year old games because no-one knows how to do anything any more. And these are industries which should be seeing the most progress, things are even worse in hard-tech at Boeing or whatever.

Whenever people see old systems still in production (say things that are over 30 years old) the assumption is that management refused to fund the replacement. But if you look at replacement projects so many of them are such dismal failures that's management's reluctance to engage in fixing stuff is understandable.

From the outside, decline always looks like a choice, because the exact form the decline takes was chosen. The issue is that all the choices are bad.

replies(33): >>43488541 #>>43488644 #>>43488809 #>>43488874 #>>43488894 #>>43488954 #>>43489176 #>>43489496 #>>43489529 #>>43489552 #>>43489570 #>>43489702 #>>43490076 #>>43490205 #>>43490296 #>>43491212 #>>43491465 #>>43491538 #>>43491547 #>>43491626 #>>43491950 #>>43492095 #>>43492352 #>>43492362 #>>43492581 #>>43492773 #>>43492829 #>>43492886 #>>43493251 #>>43493711 #>>43495038 #>>43495649 #>>43495778 #
chii ◴[] No.43492362[source]
> Go watch CGI in a movie theatre and it's worse than 20 years ago, go home to play video games and the new releases are all remasters of 20 year old games because no-one knows how to do anything any more.

None of the things you said are actually true. Only superficially, because you've only seen those mass market crap.

Good movies are still around, and yuo don't even notice the CGI, because they're cleverly done. For crap like the recently released snow white, it's obvious that the CGI is badly done - it doesn't make it an indictment against all movies released of late!

Same with games - just because there's lots of AAA studio flops that look terrible, doesn't mean the medium is all terrible. There's so many good indie games that you can never truly play them all.

But if your exposure to these products are only the mass market crap, then you might certainly feel that way.

replies(1): >>43492765 #
snozolli ◴[] No.43492765[source]
Good movies are still around

Compare 1997 to today.

Major hit after major hit was being released that year, and they were overwhelmingly original and creative. There had been a boom in independent filmmaking and many of the big production houses had started up smaller studios to attract the talent. Unfortunately, Hollywood did what Hollywood does and killed everything that made them good.

Nowadays, we have endless releases of super hero sequels that are, fundamentally, the same movie over and over. We have endless remakes and reboots because nobody wants to take a chance.

Yes, you can find creativity if you look hard enough, but in 1997 it was everywhere, and in your face. You can't pretend that it doesn't matter or that it doesn't mark an enormous shift in culture (business and society).

replies(2): >>43494165 #>>43494217 #
1. bitwize ◴[] No.43494165[source]
What's more, the biggest hit of 1997 swept the Oscars the following year. I'm not the biggest Titanic fan in the world, but it gave moviegoing masses what they craved: spectacle and pathos. And it was considered the best film of the year just for doing that with aplomb. It was very Old Hollywood in a sense. These days, "blockbusters" are thought of as just expensive-to-produce slop for the lumpenproletariat, so the studios treat them as such. No one wants to produce a blockbuster with the sort of care and attention to detail that went into, say, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Or even Titanic.

What's worse is that comedy is a minefield, as somebody somewhere is bound to be offended and launch a cancel campaign. So comedy films, including the once-beloved rom com, just don't get produced anymore like they used to. Any attempts at humor in movies has to be rolled in to something else -- superheroes talking in aggressively annoying Whedonese and the like -- and housewives must content themselves with Hallmark Channel glurge. And what humor is there is cringey as fuck because it's either entirely toothless or it's a "Straight white men, am I right?" type of thing because you are still allowed -- and encouraged -- to mock that group.

I mean, the normally sequel-averse Jim Carrey came back to do three movies about a video game hedgehog because those are the only movies being made in which he gets to flat-out do Jim Carrey stuff.