Chris Ashworth

just to make sure it's clear, my comment here is not about someone feeling $100 is too expensive — that's fine, normal — but rather about the "I am not satisfied with how much free software they gave me, I should get more" part.

also, fun fact: QLab v1 audio was $49, which is about $90 today after inflation. One of my earliest entrepreneurial lessons came when I saw a lot of commentary from people who wouldn't buy it because it was too cheap to trust.

Vimeo was bought by private equity, fired a huge fraction of their employees, and now have doubled their prices. Google brings up any number of Vimeo alternatives, but does anyone have personal experience with video hosting that you like (or dislike)?

design may be "how it works", but in many contexts the "how it works" is how it works on, for, or otherwise related to humans and our particular assortment of messy essences. we can be good at our job in part because we have direct access to, say, how eyes see or how brains get confused.

(i've always said one of my biggest strengths as a software designer is that it has to be at least easy enough for someone as dumb as me to get it.)

one of the complications of AI is that past a certain point it does not copy information, it compresses it. (into learning.) on top of this, open models are compressed learning made "free", which further complicates the finger-pointing; the learning from the humans is arguably owned by the humans.

we rented an Apple Vision Pro for a few days to test immersive theatrical recordings. (test is still ongoing.) it's my first experience with the AVP and: yes it's too expensive and yes it's a little too heavy and yes it could improve, but holy heck is it impressive.

whenever people have to wrestle with the idea that we're not the pinnacle of universal existence, our egos do not like it at all. we want to be special by being the best: the only tool makers, the only language speakers, the only chess masters, the only ones that can hammer steel for the railroads.

really can't stress this dichotomy enough — and I've now found myself regularly self-censoring because of it. this doesn't seem like a great indicator for the health of the conversation, but then again, social media is where healthy conversations go to be burned alive, so

Two things I'd like to see in theater, from audiences: 1) stop giving standing ovations unless you've had a transcendent experience 2) every time someone trots out that "how's everyone doing? (mild cheer) you can do better than that!" sequence, do not respond at all

this Ezra Klein & Bill Gates AI interview. woof.

i haven't been practicing my picture-making nearly as much this year (it's been a year where a lot has been disrupted), but here's a few photos from recently

I heard Opus 5.5 got good at motion graphics. I gave it my PDFs of the brand guidelines for my theater and asked it to make a tool to help me generate clips for social media. It gave me back a ~1MB standalone HTML file that accepts photos and videos and generates stuff like this:

It can generate three kinds of templates, including one for a review quote. I can customize the focal points of each image and adjust timing of the elements. I can choose variations of the brand colors depending on the content. All just asking Claude on the web; not even Claude Code.

Meta's current focus on their new AI agent is (ironically!) much less interesting to me than their new VR glasses. Meta is a gross company that I don't like, but good VR at an affordable price is intriguing. I think it's the one thing that could clearly change the game for the economics of theater.

i'm, uh, in this movie? i might go see it next Friday night? i haven't seen it yet, so i don't know if i did a good job newnextfilmfest.com/film-2026/li...