While cinematography isn't the whole answer, I think it's a big contributor to why so much feels aggressively middling these days.
Modern shows are aggressively aesthetic. There's huge overuse shallow depth of field, resulting in blurry backgrounds. Watch modern movies with this mind, and you start noticing the reliance on a sharp foreground and blurry background is extreme to the point of bizarre. Cinematography should be a tool to achieve an effect; blurring the background to intentionally make the subject stand out is a purposeful use of that tool, but is being applied everywhere now, with no intent behind it, even if it's "aesthetic".
I would also argue that it's easier with digital photography to create blandly attractive, "painterly" images, thanks to colour grading and increased dynamic range and so on. A lot of shows these days have technically competent photography, but it all converges on the same aesthetic — tons of diffuse, lush lighting (often achieved with filling the space with lightly cinematic fog) and impeccable set design, and that creamy depth of field. But there's no contrast anywhere, it's just creamy "aesthetic" blandness in forgettable environs.
Another non-visual aspect rarely mentioned is audio: Almost all TV/movie audio these days is foley, and it's sometimes jarringly bad when you start to actually pay attention to, say, the sound of footsteps or keys jangling. High quality productions can be very good here, but most productions don't spend enough time on it. Bad foley has a very strange, subliminal effect on a scene, further undermining the sense of reality.
In such environments (visual and aural), nothing seems real and nothing seems like it matters. Everything, even nominally "adult" shows set in the real world, feels like Midde Earth and not Planet Earth.
It's not all bad, of course. There are also definitely cases where the quality of the show transcends the mediocrity of the cinematography. We are still getting good shows and bad shows, like always. But it does seem like things have shifted into a sort of middle where everything is average in the same average way.
Bad audio and bad foley doesn't get mentioned enough. I think it's why people are watching things with subtitles: the actors are on a blue stage that is completely silent having a quiet conversation and then the war happening around them gets added later. In noisy environments people slow down and enunciate and directors aren't helping actors know what to do.
Ideas on how to fix it:
• actors should wear tiny headphones behind their ears (or wherever is not visible) to make noise that approximates the environment they will be shown in. They'll have to act over it.
• Foley artists should not be given video of the final scene to foley. They should be given only one single continuous very wide shot. This will solve the problem where foley artists keep doing ludicrous things like adding the sound of a pin dropping and hitting the ground (since it's shown on screen) in the context of a space ship that is in the process of exploding.
I've ranted about this so much to friends, it's so distracting to me.
I have the hypothesis that some of it is due to how easy (or easier?) it is to quickly review footage to tell if the focus is set right when it's so aggressively shallow, but regardless of the "why" the monotony of it drives me crazy.
I want to see the environments the characters are in, I want the visceral grounding of the feel of that environment. I watched "Portrait of a Lady on Fire" and it felt so primal, and watching how intentional the sound design alone is I can see why.
> In such environments (visual and aural), nothing seems real and nothing seems like it matters.
That's a great description about the strange disembodiment I've felt in modern shows for a while now.
No, I'm pretty sure it's literally fog, some kind of aerosoled mineral oil.
Here is an example: https://imgur.com/a/gdemKM3. Notice the hazy background. The still is from this video [1] at 00:22, coincidentally also a good video about cinematic realism.
Here [2] is a video about lighting that shows adding haze.
Some cinematographers certainly use blooming filters, too. I noticed that Spielberg had a period with tons of bloom, though I don't know if those were filters or just a certain kind of lens. Indiana Jones 4 had absolutely awful photography. Bridge of Spies is also a good example, lots of blooming, lots of hazy indoor rooms.
The YouTube app is easily the worst app on Apple TV.
For example, if you pause the video by clicking the main action button brings up an overlay that takes up almost the whole screen, so you can no longer see the content in case you paused to freeze the frame. How do you start it again? By clicking the same button, right? No! By clicking up. For some reason up means back and down means to open some additional UI with related videos and what not.
No other app is like this — Plex, Infuse, Apple, Netflix etc. abide by relatively sane UI controls where the action button pauses and unpauses, and up/down don't scroll between weird overlay elements.
The YouTube filled with these incredible non-unintuitive UX choices that drive me crazy. I never use it unless I have a clear idea of something I want to watch.
Apple TV apps, in general, are terrible. Every single one [that I routinely use] (including Apple’s apps) regularly crash or lock up, often leaving it to me, to force-quit.
Amazon has started getting into a state, lately, where it ignores the remote, unless I go back, then go forward again.
This kind of “quality” is considered “acceptable,” in today’s world.
AppleTV has a JavaScript-based development system. It also has a fairly classic native Swift system (which I use). I suspect most apps are JavaScript, though.
The odd thing is, they seem to be getting progressively _worse_. The Netflix one was way better when the first ‘modern’ (app-y) appletv came out, say. Even the YouTube one used to be basically _fine_.
This is one of the most painful things about the modern corporate web. Why does everything _have_ to get worse? Just why? Fucking up the basic functionality of your central app just cannot be a profit driven decision but it seems like literally every single giant corporation is constantly moving towards destroying their own systems. I just don't understand. Even windows is destroying itself. I simply cannot remember the last time i got an "update" for any single thing and it got better. Why is this happening?
Large corporations have the reigns of power seized by the political class: MBAs, sales executives, and CEOs that have never stepped foot in a workshop or factory in their entire lives… or even a shopping center, for that matter.
These people care only about each other: power, influence, money, etc.
Actually using or - gasp - improving the product is beneath them.
Or do you seriously think the billionaire CEO of some white goods company knows or cares about the quality of the wash the cheap Chinese-made washing machine does? He’s got staff laundering his clothes!
Similarly it’s very clear nobody with real power at Microsoft uses their own tools. I see their seniour product managers turn up to Microsoft Ignite with Apple Macs, for crying out loud!
That might be something wrong with your particular device - we've had two Apple TVs over 10+ years and they've been remarkably stable. I didn't even know how to "force quit" - I looked it up when you mentioned it.
Edit: Did have one problem where the centre channel would occasionally drop out - this would go away if you changed the volume and didn't happen that often so wasn't a big deal. I had assumed it was a problem with the Denon receiver we use but when we replaced our original Apple TV earlier this year wit a 4K model it stopped so must have been something to do with the device.
I have two sets (one is a 4K, and the other, a regular set). It happens on both. The crashes are different, though, for each app. Usually, it’s the app falling into a fugue state, at some point, as I am channel-surfing (I do that, a lot).
I should also qualify that it’s not really “every single one” (that’s hyperbole). It’s the ones that I routinely use (Apple, Amazon, Hulu, and Netflix).
I’ll probably get another one, sooner or later, but I’ve been waiting for them to release a new version[0],
Interestingly enough the same happens on both Spotify's desktop and Chromecast / Apple TV application when you "song surf".
If you rapidly keep skipping through a song, then to the next one and repeat, the performance will keep on tanking. After a while it'll take 5-10 seconds just to load a song, going to other UI sections will take 3-5 seconds to load, and eventually the application completely locks up and soft reboots itself.
Javascript garbage collector wouldn't take so long... probably it's launching a new thread or process (for example, DRM decryption) for every song, and there becomes too many of them. Or it runs out of memory and starts swapping.
Sure they are. The amount of JavaScript that actually needs to run to give you a video browser is very little at a time. The bloat is a software problem.
I mean, the biggest appeal of AppleTV is competent, high quality video casting via airplay 2 from a phone or laptop. Easily the least bad way to watch youtube on a TV is with airplay turned on from an iphone (with Youtube premium).
> you can no longer see the content in case you paused to freeze the frame
You can press up on the D-pad to dismiss that overlay, if you want to see the full paused frame.
> How do you start it again? By clicking the same button, right? No! By clicking up.
Maybe we have different remotes? On the latest model, you play/pause with the same button.
One issue I’ve noticed in the app is there seems to be no way to move the cursor “up” to the channel button when the video is in the last 10% of the playback bar. If you rewind it a bit, then you’re able to move the cursor up there.
Only in the last few days have Shorts appeared at the top of my home page. I fear it may be the end for me.
I know Prime did this for quite some time, unaware if they still do. The main YouTube web app also suffers from this same issue, though at least the play button disappears.
Everytime YouTube gets an update it gets worse. This has been true for years. It's like their design and product team is run by second-graders.
It’s so bad. Last time I tried to use it I was unable to fill in my password for my account because Google had implement some custom input element and custom keyboard which did not contain some of the characters I have in my password. And of course there was no possibility to paste or use keychain.
> If you have an iPhone you can input with that, including paste.
That popping up on your phone is not 100% reliable, though, and even more hilariously, when using it with YouTube, it'll sometimes just take the first handful of characters and drop the text input box on the phone. Oh, how we laughed.
(this may be a generic Apple TV problem but it's something I've only noticed on the YouTube app)
Yes! It doesn’t work at all. This is, as I wrote, that the YouTube app on Apple TV has a custom keyboard on-screen input without any way to put actual focus on the text/password field to trigger the Remote app on the iPhone to enable input such as pasting anything.
You'd think they've done it on purpose so you don't watch Youtube on TV. I tried but it's so bad you'd never open it a second time. And that's the platform where there are no ad blockers, so it must be good for them ...
I've only experienced that on embedded videos, not on youtube.com . Are you experiencing it on youtube.com ? I tried it just now, and was able to view a video on youtube.com , pause it, and keep reading the subtitles with no recommendations popping up.
The YouTube app is the worst on its own site too. I don’t login to any Google account and I turned off site history, and now the homepage is completely blank. Yup. Google won’t even show me a single video on the homepage because I refuse to turn on history. Which is actually kind of nice for preventin distractions
I have the same. While it's a bit jarring the first time you see it, I now consider this a feature instead of a bug.
Maybe it could be styled a bit differently so the search bar is more prominent and in the center of the screen, but just having a search bar without any distractions is a fantastic feature.
If you want a pure search, you can get there from your address bar without even visiting the site first. Or if you really want the search bar on the site, you can go to youtube.com/search for a nice blank page.
You don't need the obnoxious refusal to show videos on the front page.
You’re meant to use the dedicated pause button on the apple tv remote to pause without any overlay. Anything that uses the apple built in player has ui appear when you hit the center button. Same for Netflix.
Oh, and I'll see your youtube and Raise you the Discovery Plus app (Maybe UK only?).
The content they offer is either a big back catalog of reality TV dross, or Live sport. The live sport streams, when left open when the AppleTV is turned off will always crash and go into a frozen state where there's no way out except by force quitting the app.
Reported multiple times to their tech support, no fix in 2 years. This for sports services that cost 30GBP a month, minimum, and with a regional monopoly on coverage.
Does the search feature work for you? Mine gives me about 2 seconds to enter a search term, but once it has fetched results for the partial input, it keeps reverting the search field as I try to enter more, even if I delete to try again.
I would not be surprised if there is no QA team for the tvOS app.
The iPhone app has weird bugs too. Currently (for me, at least) the brand text that appears in the overlay box on adverts is black text on a black background and virtually illegible. If they're not even worried about bugs in the revenue-generating ad part of the app, what hope is there for the rest?
oh, that's worse. there's been a bug for months now where airplayed videos forcibly select an autodub track in a random language, and there's no way to disable it or change tracks. i wish i was joking
I've been using YouTube.com/tv with a Samsung agent for years. Although I did have to recently switch from abp to ubo because abp stopped playing videos for me.
This is intentional on Google’s part. It’s anticompetitive behavior, to make YouTube service’s app shitty on Google’s competitor’s ecosystem. But no government seems to care—-and what will you do, stop watching YouTube?
> This is intentional on Google’s part. It’s anticompetitive behavior, to make YouTube service’s app shitty on Google’s competitor’s ecosystem
This would be true if the Android or Android TV would have been better.
It is just profit maximization combined with crappy UX/UI.
Google wants your personal data and will make UI changes to get it. (double record/send button in messages, UI elements very close to others so that they can be pressed accidentally, although there is plenty of space between other UI elements)
This is nonsense. Among other things, the YouTube app on Apple TV is superior to the one on Android TV. No loud startup sound, the back button exits the app rather than popping up a menu asking "if I'm sure" or if I want to go to a screensaver mode - clean straightforward UI.
Never ascribe to malice what can be sufficiently explained by incompetence. And i think it’s fair to say the best and brightest at Google aren’t turning their attention to YouTube lately. Except maybe to make training datasets for Gemini N+1 :)
Newer cars with matrix LED headlights account for this, such as the Volkswagen ID series. The brights not only "blot out" the shape of the cars around you, they also rotate when turning or going around a curve, so that you never accidentally point them at oncoming traffic.
It's quite magical and weird to observe in real time. When driving past oncoming cars, you can see a halo of darkness around each car. There are videos on YouTube that show the effect pretty well.
That's basically the idea behind Sqlc [1]. By letting SQL be SQL, you avoid the many awkward mechanisms ORMs need to integrate SQLisms into the native language, and you define the query only in terms of its inputs and outputs, which can be made type-safe since they're declaratively defined.
The downside is that parameterized queries are a bit of a chore; for example, if a query should support an optional filter on user_id, you need to craft it like this:
WHERE ...
AND CASE
WHEN sqlc.narg('user_id') IS NOT NULL THEN sqlc.narg('user_id')
ELSE true
END
This is not too bad, though, and the conditionals get optimized away by the database planner.
That article doesn't give any credible sources, so it's just guessing, as is every other Internet article concerning his net worth. It's literally just referencing a New York Magazine article which says "Wales’s total net worth, by most estimates, is just above $1 million" with the only offered being a literal Google search (!).
The only public information we have, I believe, is his divorce proceedings in 2011, which put his net worth at around $1m. There's no reason to think his net worth hasn't grown considerably since then, given his position, paid speaking engagements, etc.
According to his YouTube channel and Wikipedia entry [1], this is the newest episode, posted on November 14. Where do you see that he is updating the video and the date?
The video has been posted to HN 4 times during the last 24 hours, but that's pretty common for something newsworthy. I don't know why HN's dupe detector isn't merging them, though.
Is it really sandboxing if the LLM itself can turn it off?
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