Hey there,
Here's what caught my attention this week:
blog.banast.as
In 1977, a truck driver in Orange County walked out of Star Wars and knew his life had changed. He wasn't sure how. He just knew he couldn't keep driving trucks.
That driver was James Cameron. And in a recent interview, he laid out the cold economics of an industry that may no longer work.
"The theatrical marketplace has collapsed about 35%. It hasn't rebounded. The cost of making movies is continuously going up and the demand is falling. That's a little bit of a death spiral right there."
This isn't doom and gloom from some industry outsider. This is the guy who made the two highest-grossing films of all time, admitting that even Avatar isn't a guaranteed success anymore. Fire and Ash has to work financially. That's not a given.
Which makes his origin story even sharper.
Cameron wrote The Terminator as an unknown with zero credits. Studios wanted the script. Nobody wanted him to direct. So he sold the rights to producer Gale Anne Hurd for one dollar. In exchange, one promise: she would never make the movie without him as director.
The studios tried everything to split them up. Both refused. Every time.
"You don't deserve anything. It's just a question of what you can negotiate for yourself and what you can prove to the world you're capable of. Then the money will flow from that."
His advice to anyone feeling the creative pull: "When you can't not draw. When you can't not write. When you start thinking filmically about everything around you... you've got to tell somebody the damn story. You don't have a choice. Just accept it."
The industry might be in a death spiral. But someone, somewhere, is still going to walk out of a theater with their life changed. And maybe that's enough.
futurism.com
Tressie McMillan Cottom flips the AI debate from "will it save or destroy us" to the sharper question: who gets to decide, and why are the wealthy betting you'll accept their version of the future as inevitable?
cnbc.com
Nvidia just spent $20B to acquire the company that built Google's TPU, signaling that chip competition is getting real enough to buy out preemptively rather than compete against it.
odyssey.ml
AI models trained on video are starting to learn physics and causality instead of just pattern-matching text, and Odyssey-2 demonstrates what happens when you let them actually figure out how the world works. The shift from "better language models" to "world simulators" changes what these systems can do fundamentally.