Matt Ebb

Unlike so many others, the @financialtimes.com nails the "OMG, 1.5℃ is gone" message: "Temperature overshoot requires urgent action" Yep. And every 0.01℃ matters. Reminds me of my NYT oped with @costasamaras.com: "The widely recited '12-year deadline' is wrong — and right." gwagner.com/12years

“A beloved, useful, free website, run carefully by a competent, honest person for nearly thirty years, was crushed between two features of the new AI economy.” (AI bots and prediction market dipshits.) [stephenfollows.com]

Just sharing this again at a time of what's happening in Australia. In Event Horizon Sam Neill requested that the Australian flag on his character's uniform remove the Union Flag from the corner & for it to be replaced with the Aboriginal flag, the way he thought it should look in 2047

it's been really fascinating watching this specific font become an easy AI tell

ChatGPT posters and flyers are polluting real life and driving me insane. Please respond to this with the worst ones you've seen irl. I'll post some in the thread www.404media.co/we-are-livin...

The normalcy bias we're all experiencing for global sea-surface temperatures becomes apparent if we look at the graph of SSTs 1982-2026 and remove the last three years 2023, 2024, 2025 from the picture:

Prof Dr. Style

New @stand.earth: Microsoft's 3 new gas data centres will - Increase Microsoft's emissions 160% - Have higher emissions than power sectors of each of Greece, Ireland, Sri Lanka, NZ etc... - Have higher emissions than pwr sector of 15 lowest-emitting countries combined stand.earth/press-releas...

Social media is no longer social. Most of it is passive viewing of videos and pictures from people we've never met. But we're still studying social media like it's 2010. We've entered the post-social media era — and research needs to catch up. osf.io/preprints/so... preprint w/ Richard Rogers

If someone had told us when we were working on The Lego Movie that a decade later we would have… this… 😮‍💨

This is nuts:

North Oaks, Minnesota is home to united healthcare executives and various CEOs. It's also the only city in the US that is not on Google Street View. A documentary filmmaker set out to change that. pretty interesting look at who gets privacy in America and how www.404media.co/mapping-goog...

Added adaptive subdivision and uv rotation to the #houdini Atlas Mapper, which enables sweet truchet tiles

Haunting blogpost points out the collapse of public coding forums leads to asking chatbots *directly* for answers in private chats, which also leads to debugging sessions with answers that only closed LLM service models have access to, locking out open solutions michiel.buddingh.eu/enclosure-fe...

Very, very grateful to find some of my work featured inside the ILM 50th anniversary book. Extremely proud of what our team in Sydney has contributed in the last 5 years of that monumental history

learning to program in the late 90s and early 00s, you’d inevitably run across classic works like Goto Considered Harmful and No Silver Bullet, even if you weren’t particularly bookish, and there was tons of discourse about HCI as well, all grounded in decades of research i’m afraid that’s all gone

OpenAI employees are very excited about how well their new AI tool can create fake videos of people doing crimes and have definitely thought through all the implications of this

Discovering computer as an adult makes you go crazy. Discovering computer as a baby makes you go crazy. In all of human history, there will only ever be one generation to discover computer at the correct age: 13

An old school ransomware attack has a new twist: threatening to feed data to AI companies so it’ll be added to LLM datasets. 🔗 www.404media.co/hackers-thre...

Ryoji Ikeda last night 🖤

I really hope we’re not dropping the "content" from "content creator". It’s a valuable label. Content is a very specific type of culture, one formatted according to the algorithms that determine its success.

it’s even more demoralizing when the history you’re repeating is history you were around for the first time

At the Sydney Film Festival many years ago I was walking behind Hugo Weaving to go to the bathroom. He wasn’t paying attention and went into the Women’s room - only to swiftly come back out and give me an awkward look.

Quite an honour to have some of our team’s work from the past few years featured alongside some of the most iconic shots in vfx history ❤️ m.youtube.com/watch?v=649P...

Brian Eno calls on Microsoft to cease its partnership with Israel and pledges to donate the original fee for his Windows '95 chime to victims of Israel's genocide in Gaza

May these words stick to Israel's already blood-soaked history for generations into the far, far future. May our children, and their children, know the term "never again" to include this evil. May those who allowed this to happen feel eternal shame. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/m...

Everything I do for a living is based on this. The things you find yourself pursuing as distractions from the things you think you're supposed to be pursuing might actually be your destiny.

Procedural nebula, created in @sidefx.bsky.social . Render engine: KarmaXPU. #cg #art #space #nebula

1. LLM-generated code tries to run code from online software packages. Which is normal but 2. The packages don’t exist. Which would normally cause an error but 3. Nefarious people have made malware under the package names that LLMs make up most often. So 4. Now the LLM code points to malware.

Love how after all the arguments of this stuff being transformative, intelligent, creative, Sam Altman just comes out with “haha ripoff machine go brrrrrr”

Seeing a lot of genAI art used in the service of fascism lately

Israeli forces attacked and detained the co-director of No Other Land, Hamdan Ballal, in the occupied West Bank. The Oscar-winning film documents Masafer Yatta’s struggle against Israeli demolitions, amid Israel’s escalating bombardment and mass atrocities in Palestine. apnews.com/article/no-o...

French researcher, going to a conference in Houston, was forbidden entry to US; his work and personal electronics were both confiscated. Why? Because a “random search” of his cell phone revealed a negative personal opinion on Trump and the Trump administration. www.lemonde.fr/internationa...

My latest: Generative AI is enabling a brute force attack against the algorithms that control reality. AI slop is taking over every algorithmically controlled social media platform and search platform, and the tech platforms are helping: www.404media.co/ai-slop-is-a...

# avoid the nightmare bicycle

What we’re witnessing in America is what happens when disordered discourse captures a political party, then the state itself. The Republican Party was the first to fall - abandoning truth for conspiracy, ideology for grievance, and policy for performative outrage.

I know it’s a bit uncool to linkedin-post on here but we’re hiring at work, I’ve been looking at quite a lot of showreels, so I wrote up some tips for making a great fx reel #vfx www.linkedin.com/pulse/creati...

Woah! Something new for #vfxnotes: We have changed to seasons! Our 1st season is on VFX Oscar nominees & starts with ‘Alien: Romulus’ --> Go behind the scenes of the creatures & space environments of Fede Álvarez's film with Hugo and Ian beforesandafters.com/2025/02/01/o...

OpenAI furious DeepSeek might have stolen all the data OpenAI stole from us 🔗 www.404media.co/openai-furio...

And a nice surprise this morning… first show I’ve been on as fx supervisor to be nominated for a vfx Oscar 😊

If you are feeling overwhelmed, I strongly recommend the livestream of the corpse flower at Sydney Botanic Gardens on YouTube. There are currently 1,500 people in chat waiting for a flower to open, and occasionally claiming that it definitely has moved this time. WWTF: We Watch The Flower.

💔

Very happy to finally be able share some of our vfx work on Alien: Romulus. Incredibly proud of our fx team that I supervised here in Sydney and the hard work put in to make things feel real. The planet and rings were a career highlight to work on. m.youtube.com/watch?v=Vsz1...

Very good read and sobering prediction of key sectors of tech (ai, autonomous vehicles, robotics, and sace travel). rodneybrooks.com/predictions-...