This particular one could be ok for them? A major cost for Netflix in the modern era is licensing contracts that never adjusted to the streaming world. As such, consumers may actually get access to some backlog of WB stuff that is otherwise not worth offering?
My guess is you are right for some properties that WB owns outright, but legacy IP that has rights shared, especially pre-streaming rights will still have a lot of barriers/untangling to do.
I think Netflix is the most well run media company today by a mile, but also on the spectrum of quality/art -vs- straight money/tech domination they fall into the latter category, and they are the among the least friendly to creators as far as contract/rights.
In their books (e.g. "No Rules Rules" Netflix seems extremely attractive to creators because they pay top dollar, as a general policy, and have the internal decision-making processes that support making bold bets on art without committees that push "safer" creative choices.
And this is precisely because Netflix doesn't have to hit the jackpot with each new movie. They just have to keep people hooked on that subscription. It's one of the few times where the subscription model works best.
Totally fair. The rights around a lot of media is a giant mess. Is why songs used on some movies are not the same as the ones that were used in theaters. And is just baffling for people from the outside to consider.
Netflix is a terrible media company. They don't invest in their library and are happy to cancel shows without concluding them screwing the creators and the fans.
They canceled a show within the same month it released!
If a show does somehow get more than one season they can also be painfully slow. Stranger things took a 9 years to drop just 5 seasons. The Witcher was 6 years for just 4 seasons.
I mean, I'm not going to try and defend them from never having made bad calls. But, I'm not clear that they are any worse at this than other media companies?
To wit, finding a show that was canceled the month it was released probably isn't that hard? Same for shows that had trouble keeping cadence. Especially during COVID.
Do we have data that shows they are worse?
(Also, I think it is perfectly valid to object to this acquisition on other merits. I just would love some old backlogged cartoons to get wider distribution.)
And to be further clear, I don't mean that as a way to assert you are wrong. I legit don't know if Netflix is better or worse than the norm in this area.
Netflix really struggles to make quality content. If we could somehow divorce the studios from the platforms, that would be ideal. But that ship sailed a long time ago.
To be fair, the actual lesson of Fight Club is that maybe you do need a woman in your life. :D (That and don't delude yourself into believing the fascist inside of you.)
What really killed corporate loyalty for a lot of us was the lack of jobs that have lifetime pensions, if I understand it correctly. Why would I agree to work somewhere til retirement if I would be better jumping somewhere else to make more money now?
I don't know how delusional you have to be to look at the conditions behind the Iron Curtain, where nations had to build walls to keep their citizens from leaving and a meaningful number of people were willing to risk death to get out, and say they were flourishing, but I'm glad I don't have what it takes to get there.
Name the Eastern nations plural that built these walls please. As far as I am aware, the G in GDPR stands for Germany, a country/nation/state which is (and always has been) firmly Western. People on here have such an infantile recollection of actual history.
Anyway, leaving aside debates of where the prime meridian of West vs East falls, it should've been manifestly obvious that in 2025 I was talking about China...
You mentioned one, which is North Korea, and I'm sure you're going to concoct some story to deflect the fact that China only began moving towards any semblance of prosperity after ditching Mao's fundamentally flawed economic policies, so have at it.
As Sartre said - it's pointless debating people like you because you're just amusing yourself and it's only my responsibility to use words responsibly.
You ran the usual leftist playbook of bobbing and weaving around the list of atrocities combined with a round or two of no true Scotsman. You skipped the attempts to change the subject with some whataboutisms for some reason, but that's fine.
You said people were flourishing in the East under the opposite of "toxic individualism", which would be the collectivism of the numerous failed attempts to implement socialism.
I pointed to the fact that those nations (past or present) do not allow their citizens to leave freely, including building physical barriers to prevent people from leaving, and you try to argue that I was only talking about the Berlin Wall and that East Germany, a vassal state of a USSR that generally isn't considered part of the traditional western world, is clearly part of the west. I'd say that's wrong, but it's far from the only example so it doesn't matter.
I did mention the iron curtain, but another primary example is North Korea, and you no true Scotsman that away and say you were obviously only talking about China.
The same China that doesn't allow citizens to leave freely, where millions died under idiotic leftist economic policies, and where the rise from abject poverty to a middle income nation is perfectly correlated with the rejection of the path to communism and the adoption of more liberal, individualistic economic policies, and is another great example of my point.
In short, see my comment above, get bent, and go troll elsewhere.
This is almost certainly a nice story we tell ourselves about a mythical past that just didn't exist.
It can be annoying to say, but modern factory produced things are in an absurdly higher quality spectrum than most of what proceeded them. This is absolutely no different from when machined parts for things first got started. We still have some odd reverence for "hand crafted" things when we know that computer aided design and manufactured are flat out better. In every way.
As for ownership, I hate to break it to you, but it is very likely that a good many of the master works we ascribe to people were heavily executed by assistants. Not that this is too bad, but would be akin to thinking that Miyazaki did all of the art for the movies. We likely have no idea who did a lot of the work we ascribe to single artists throughout history.
On to the rest of the points, even the ones I somewhat resonate with are just flat out misguided. People were ALWAYS resources. Well before the modern world.
Computer and machine manufactured parts can be better, but it's a mistake to believe they always are. Take two contrasting examples.
In guitar manufacturing, CNC machines were a revolution. The quality of mid-range guitars improved massively, until there was little difference between them and the premium ones.
In furniture, modern manufacturing techniques drastically worsened the quality of everything. MDF and veneers are inherently worse than hand-crafted wood. The revolution here was making it cheaper.
CNC and other machining techniques raise the high bar for what's possible, and they have the potential to lower costs. That's it. They don't inherently improve quality, that's a factor of market forces.
I would wager that the general change in availability of wood is by far the biggest driver in difference for the markets you are describing?
Particularly, furniture benefits greatly from hard wood. At least, the furniture that is old that you are likely to see. It also benefits heavily from being preserved, not used.
> MDF and veneers are inherently worse than hand-crafted wood.
Generally incorrect, but it depends. Wear can cause mdf/veneer to have "bad optics" compared to solid wood, but mdf/veneer can have more suitable physical properties and enables more consistent visual quality and design possibilities.
I suppose it depends on your definition of worse. It is more versatile. It's also toxic and fragile, and far more likely to break in ways that are hard to repair. I can only think of one object I own where the physical properties of particle board or MDF are a positive: a subwoofer where its consistency helps with acoustics.
If the cheap thing replaces the expensive thing and there is no same-price comparison, is it absurd? My point is that many products that were handmade at high quality no longer exist because of modern manufacturing. If you want a chair or, say, a set of silverware at the same inflation-adjusted price it would have been available for seventy years ago, you can't get it because the market sector has shifted so thoroughly to cheaper, worse products (enabled by modern manufacturing) that similar quality is only available through specialty stores at a much higher price.
This happens even if the specialty stores are using computer-aided techniques and not handcrafting, because of the change in economics of scale.
The catch here is that most people did not have high quality hand made furniture. Most people had low quality hand made things. Pretty much forever. And is why they aren't here for you to see them.
Modern process controls allow us to hit intended outcomes consistently at lower costs. But that doesn't mean the intended outcomes are always better that what you would aim for with less capability.
There are real customers that want cost reductions that lead to reduced lifetimes, because they have no intention of using the thing they are buying for decades. It isn't just manufacturers looking to make money through planned obsolescence.
I confess this largely surprises me for reasons that I think should not surprise me. I would expect current AI is largely best at guessing at what some writing was based on expectations of other things it has managed to "read." As such, I would think it is largely not going to be much better at hand writing than any other tool.
Yet, it occurs to me that that "guess and check" is exactly what I'm doing when trying to read my 6yo's writing. Often I will do a pass to detect the main sounds, but then I start thinking of what was current on his thoughts and see if I can make a match. Not surprisingly, often I do.
I am a little confused on the idea that the "C [node] appears twice" in the diagram. I would expect that both of those are the same node such that the standard BDD implementation would already have reduced those. Though, my understanding for BDD is more that a label will only appear once per path to TOP/BOTTOM. Not that they only appear once per diagram.
Fun to consider how to use these for type checking. I hope to spend a lot more time reading more on this. Love that one of the linked papers has exercises in the appendix.
You are right, poor phrasing on my side. Instead of focusing on C appearing twice, I should rather focus on how complex the expansion is, meaning that everytime we have to expand the BDD (which we need to do during subtyping or emptiness for example), we end-up doing a lot of repeated operations. I will push an update, thank you for commenting.
Kudos on the article! My understanding on BDDs is sadly not as strong as I would prefer it to be, so I'm guessing I am not quite caught up on how they are being used here.
I think I was expecting to see the algorithm for merging multiple BDDs that I saw in Knuth's work. Though, in that regard, I would expect a ZDD approach would be a lot easier to start with. That or you would have to make the BDD to merge be a big chain of every variable before the stuff to be merged where true goes to BOTTOM, and false goes to the next variable before new first to merge.
Again, kudos on this. I do look forward to trying to understand it more!
I've grown to see math as far more pattern matching than I remember it as a kid. I think that explains why "rote memorization" works more than folks want to admit for it.
This doesn't end at kid level maths either, I have seen people get bachelors and masters in maths without understanding much of it intuitively or being able to apply it.
Mostly because they have rote memorised it (and partly because much of the education system is a game to be played e.g. speaking with professors during office hours can give very strong hints to exams).
My professor said this was an inevitability that holds people back who don't understand it is. After a certain point, you can't understand it all, because actually understanding it requires understanding the 1000 page proof. After a certain point, in maths, you must rote memorize the tools, add them to your belt, and trust the centuries of work before you, so you can apply them to your problems. It serves no purpose to "understand" them, many cannot be put into an intuitive framework, and attempting to make "understanding" a prerequisite to your progress will mean you will eventually fail out of the program.
Right, I've also seen people that couldn't get some higher math items because they haven't learned to recognize some things on sight. Curves are a good example. You should be able to roughly sight identify basic curves. Or distributions based on their shape. With obvious caveats.
I suspect this is a lot like being able to recognize a piece of art to the artist by sight. Strictly, not required. But a lot of great artists can do it.
For real fun, I saw an interview with Magnus Carlsen where someone was quizzing him on famous games. He was able to say the match on the first 2-3 moves a remarkable number of times.
Ish? Look into towns that didn't have a high reliance on tech. In particular, look for ones that didn't ride the rollercoaster of really high wages that a lot of tech drove and is now flattening off.
Looks like shipping is also an industry that you probably don't want to track on this search. Other than that, places that saw modest wage growth saw similarly modest housing cost growth. And haven't seen it fall back, yet.
You get the same behavior from any editor, though? Hell, you'd probably get similar behavior if you switched brands of power tools. People are attached to their tools.
That said, it would help if you didn't have hyperbole there. Many of us do not, in fact, have to live with the editor freezing on a regular basis.
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