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Animation Obsessive Staff's avatar

Thanks very much for the shout-out! You make excellent points about the problem of knowledge disappearing. It's something we encounter all the time in our research -- critical sources of information just vanish into thin air. Many of them can't be replaced, especially when it comes to the online stuff. (One of the first things we do after an issue goes out is make sure that all the sources are properly backed up, either locally or in the Wayback Machine!) There really is this idea that knowledge only increases over time, but it's so easy to lose things. Preservation is essential.

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Andy Williams's avatar

thanks! Preservation of knowledge is so important and that legacy is pretty fragile. Thanks for everything you do to keep that knowledge alive.

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Kyle T Webster's avatar

This is a great piece of writing.

Re: the dome in Florence, I very highly recommend reading the book, "Brunelleschi's Dome," by Ross King. https://www.strandbooks.com/product/9781620401934?title=brunelleschis_dome_how_a_renaissance_genius_reinvented_architecture

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Andy Williams's avatar

Thanks! I'll definitely check out the book on ‘Brunelleschi’s Dome’!

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Connor Lee O'Keefe's avatar

This was a great read, thank you! I edit films and this made me think of my students and the excitement we all experience when we first witness the minutiae of making cuts, how much of the work is watching and understanding, learning to look and perceive, cutting the same thing over and over again until it looks right. A lot of that may go away with AI. I hope we’ll find ways to preserve the arts of craft and observation, as well as so many others

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Andy Williams's avatar

Thanks! Yes, I also think about what's lost in the delegating of tasks to AI. Even something like automating scene edit selection to create sub-clips, as tedious as it can be, is taking something away from the craft of editing.

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Ryan Peter's avatar

This was a wonderful article; thank you. On a practical level, it makes you really question how we think that saving everything to the “Cloud” means it’s backed up and can’t get lost. However, we can see that this is not a very good long-term solution.

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Andy Williams's avatar

Thank you! Re the ‘cloud’…yes, it looks like that when they said ‘the internet is forever’ it wasn't a guarantee.

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Dean Stokes's avatar

I really enjoyed this - thanks for writing it! Can't help but think I need to document more...

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Andy Williams's avatar

Thanks! Yes, definitely good idea to document. Keep a log!

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Adam Ming's avatar

We do tend to buy in don’t we to the idea that someone else is saving all the good stuff… Maybe writing on her is a form of saving information.

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Andy Williams's avatar

Absolutely. There's a risk that we file the task as saving the good stuff as someone else’s job!

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