Ask Them Anything

[Guest]

We have an interesting collection of people with all sorts of different careers and expertise. Tag a use and ask them a question about what they do.

[Guest]

@SaysWho?

 

How do you decide stories to pursue as a journalist?

[Guest]

@skillzdadirecta

 

what is your favorite editing program?

[SuperSpreader]

@sblfilms 

 

What's the grossest thing you've had to clean up at your theater? 

[Guest]

@Mr.Vic20

 

what is the largest disaster you’ve dealt with on a project?

[Keyser_Soze]

2 minutes ago, sblfilms said:

@SaysWho?

 

How do you decide stories to pursue as a journalist?

 

@SaysWho? will decide stories to pursue as a journalist.

[stepee]

AMA, but forcing it upon other people, I like it!

[Guest]

@legend

 

what is something in your field that you think will make a substantive difference in daily life for people in the next 20 years?

[Mr.Vic20]

1 hour ago, sblfilms said:

@Mr.Vic20

 

what is the largest disaster you’ve dealt with on a project?

Disasters on projects can happen in paperwork (more often then on site), so I'll share two. The first was when my environmental engineers failed to file a request with the DEC and it took me several hundred hours and over 30 meetings with federal agencies to prevent the scraping of a 33 million grant. That sucked. A lot. 

 

On site I had a 200 CYD concrete placement at a substation where the forms failed when the placement had reached a height of 16 feet. The forms blew apart and concrete flooded the sub terrainian slab and the conteactor had to hand shovel it all out before it hardened. We lost 2 weeks and a guy got his foot broken in the process. 

[Guest]

1 hour ago, SuperSpreader said:

@sblfilms 

 

What's the grossest thing you've had to clean up at your theater? 

This was in the early days of the first theater when I was working it myself pretty much every night. 
 

It was a terribly busy Saturday, I think maybe a Transformers or Fast and Furious flick was out. Our largest auditorium was packed with 340 people. In the middle of the 7:00pm show, the toilets stop flushing.

 

We had this problem before, so I had purchase a sewer jet attachment for my pressure washer like the plumbers, who got me for $850, last time use. I stand outside at the clean out port with no light but the fading sun and start running the line into the drain.

 

After a few minutes, a flood of poop water, tampons, and only God knows what else rockets out of the clean out all over me.

 

But the line was cleared and the night was saved.
 

And I’m sure I’ve got hepatitis now.

[SuperSpreader]

16 minutes ago, sblfilms said:

This was in the early days of the first theater when I was working it myself pretty much every night. 
 

It was a terribly busy Saturday, I think maybe a Transformers or Fast and Furious flick was out. Our largest auditorium was packed with 340 people. In the middle of the 7:00pm show, the toilets stop flushing.

 

We had this problem before, so I had purchase a sewer jet attachment for my pressure washer like the plumbers, who got me for $850, last time use. I stand outside at the clean out port with no light but the fading sun and start running the line into the drain.

 

After a few minutes, a flood of poop water, tampons, and only God knows what else rockets out of the clean out all over me.

 

But the line was cleared and the night was saved.
 

And I’m sure I’ve got hepatitis now.

[Chris-]

@stepee

 

Whats it like being hung like a Clydesdale?

[legend]

Neat topic idea.

 

 

1 hour ago, sblfilms said:

@legend

 

what is something in your field that you think will make a substantive difference in daily life for people in the next 20 years?

 

The most important effects will probably be some application I haven't yet thought of  I'll speak to AI more broadly, but for clarity, my particular subfield of work regards reinforcement learning (agent's that learn how to act from trial and error to achieve some objective). 

 

Some AI applications in 20 years that will either have direct impacts on most people, or large indirect impacts:

• Robotics in social environments, especially for elderly care. Requires advances in robotic control, high-level decision making,  language processing, perception, rapid task acquisition, etc. I'm not sure we'll get all the way to the dream in 20 years, but I think we'll start seeing it in some meaningful capacities. Nearly every robotics talk starts with "imagine you want a robot to get you a cup of coffee." Roboticists apparently think about coffee a lot and don't like getting it themselves, so this one will eventually be solved by force of will  
• Energy and process management. Climate change is fucking us all. Better energy management is going to end up being important in the fight, but managing energy for large systems is very often a complex and would benefit from adaptive autonomous systems that learn how to optimize it. I've seen some interesting work coupling RL with things like solar alignment, managing heat in compute clusters, etc. So while this one isn't going to make a direct difference in people's life, it will make a big indirect difference.
• Assistive music composing. Only a subset of the population will interact directly with this kind of tech, but the ramifications will touch all of us.
• Assistive art generation. We're basically there as it is. People are already doing it with the publicly available stable diffusion model. But in 20 years it will be hard to imagine how modern art production worked without it. (There will always be artists who stay pure, but I'm thinking about things like movies, games, promotional art, etc.)
• Translator for verbally spoken words in the world. Maybe with speech synth that mimics the speaker's voice, or alternatively with text translation in AR.
• Virtual environment reconstruction. Look up Neural radiance fields ("NERFs") if you want to see an example of this. NERFs let you create *very* good 3d reconstructions of an environment from a bunch of sample images. This technology is improving very fast right now. Google maps is going to get a lot more impressive in the coming years, and when I think about coupling this tech with VR and AR, it will be *very* cool and useful. It will let you effectively transport yourself to some other environment, maybe even a shared space with other virtual or real people.
• Self driving cars. I *hope* this will be solved in 20 years, but there are still big problems to overcome. I also would prefer to have better public transportation systems, but I think self-driving will also fill a niche given how spread out the country is and self-driving cars have the potential to make everything more safe and give people back time to do things while they travel.
• Video games will increasingly incorporate AI technology into them. This will include things for asset generation (e.g., physically plausible animation controllers that are adaptive to the game environment, texture synthesis, stylizing world, etc.), QA for the games, AI opponents, AI that coaches you how to play in competitive games, better NPC companions, etc.
• Agriculture robotics. We've already got a lot of this, but it will explode even more with more robust self-sufficient systems.
• Robotics for managing dangerous environments. For example, with increasing wildfires, deploying robotics will increasingly be preferable.

 

 

 

[stepee]

33 minutes ago, Chris- said:

@stepee

 

Whats it like being hung like a Clydesdale?

 

it’s like being a kid in a candy store but you can’t fit your hands in the bins

[Remarkableriots]

@sblfilms Do any of your movie theaters still have candy bins or just prepackaged candy now?

I loved getting sour belt candy at the theater.

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Remarkableriots said:

@sblfilms Do any of your movie theaters still have candy bins or just prepackaged candy now?

I loved getting sour belt candy at the theater.

We only sell boxed candy now. I kinda shudder thinking about self serve candy given how nasty humans are 😂

[Guest]

@Signifyin(g)Monkey

 

 

I’ve always been curious 

[Fizzzzle]

@Jason Do you consider all your years of education "worth it" (whatever that means to you), and do you find that it benefits you day-to-day?

[Fizzzzle]

@sblfilms What is a project you attempted that failed miserably and what happened?

[silentbob]

Sorry to hound @sblfilmsbut what’s the worse thing to happen to your projector/booth wise at your theatre(s)? 
 

I’ve dealt with 2 floods, great northeast power outage, manager dropped a 35mm print of Black Hawk Down during a transfer, bulb exploded during Attack of the Clones and I canceled a show because I broke a nylon screw changing a bulb. Oh and one side was pretty active with spirits and I wasn’t the only one to experience them.  

[Remarkableriots]

@sblfilmsDo you have more or less issues with digital projectors compared to previous projectors?

[Guest]

3 hours ago, Fizzzzle said:

@sblfilms What is a project you attempted that failed miserably and what happened?

We took over a dine in theater in the Dallas market. It was both a bit of hubris and a legit desire to help out this elderly couple who got scammed by a guy who was supposed to be their business partner. I legit believed we could turn that sinking ship around, but it was like test driving a used car only to find out two weeks later they had duct taped everything together so that it worked just well enough for you to say yes.

 

2022 me would have known better, but I was only 28 at the time and our first two theaters were killing it so I had this feeling of the Midas touch, you know? I probably learned more about business from that abject failure than any of the success we have had. And it was a costly miss. I think I probably sunk $200k into making it work. Just a bad location, and a poorly designed space. Would have needed $3 million to do something interesting there.

[Guest]

1 hour ago, silentbob said:

Sorry to hound @sblfilmsbut what’s the worse thing to happen to your projector/booth wise at your theatre(s)? 
 

I’ve dealt with 2 floods, great northeast power outage, manager dropped a 35mm print of Black Hawk Down during a transfer, bulb exploded during Attack of the Clones and I canceled a show because I broke a nylon screw changing a bulb. Oh and one side was pretty active with spirits and I wasn’t the only one to experience them.  

We had an issue with one of our Barco projectors where a thin pair of vertical blue lines would appear vertically down the middle of the screen. It was completely random as to when it would occur, other than it for sure would happen on crazy busy Saturday nights. Barco had never seen anything and even dispatched one of their engineers to check it out and could never figure out the issue!

 

We also had some honey bees make a nest in one of our projectors and merc’d the exhaust fan to the lamp 😬

 

Besides that, I think most of the normal issues

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Remarkableriots said:

@sblfilmsDo you have more or less issues with digital projectors compared to previous projectors?

I actually started in the business right when the digital transition was finishing, so I’ve never dealt with film myself!

[silentbob]

1 hour ago, sblfilms said:

I actually started in the business right when the digital transition was finishing, so I’ve never dealt with film myself!

You Lucky Whipper-Snapper

 

 

[silentbob]

2 hours ago, Remarkableriots said:

@sblfilmsDo you have more or less issues with digital projectors compared to previous projectors?

I’ll give you my opinion on this matter and for ease of use Digital all the way. Christie were our digital projectors brand of use. Film has so many issues that wouldn’t really matter in a digital theatre setup. The only real issue with digital is download speed of a print to a theatre hdd, but might of gotten slightly faster just as I was leaving for my new job. Most movies we got came on a HDD and download individually in each theatre’s HDD slot, and put together there with trailer, ads and lighting ques. Just as I left most movies were being downloaded still from a HDD but too a central 10TB Hub that could now send digital prints to each theatre screen it needed. They were sending some via satellite download that we used for live events at the theatre. After that the only worry was remembering updating weekly your digital copy keys that unlocked the prints for viewing. Sony lasts months almost years but someone like Disney was only 1-3 weeks before updating your unlock key. Plus we could play video games on these guys and we did.
 

Movies on print could easily scratch and the Dolby track gradually degrades too. Ran on a scale of 0(Best) to 6(the worse) or it would kick into an analog read track too carry on. DTS was finicky because it had to sync up to the accompanying disc containing the track, but would loose sync often and cause pops in sound. If you wanted to add an extra screen of a busier the. Usual movie and cancel a lesser show. You needed to add extra blank film leader and have your print travel on rollers around your walls, sometimes across hallways too and could do up to four theatres with one print, but max we ever did was 3. Which also meant moving heavy prints between theatres, risk of dropping them (like my manager did above) and added worry all rollers and film run properly. Takes a long time to make up the prints by taping them reels together, making sure splice is ok, your in frame (some were real dark) making sure you add foil tape to trigger lights. These foils would also sometimes stop being shiny enough to be detected by the reader and needed to be replaced. Pain in the ass to real it to get too and reverse back into space. Trailers and ads were a pain because I had at one time 12 35mm projectors, some with 2 different films playing, and 16 ads to add/remove and placed in a certain order. Digital is drag and drop, these put blisters on my fingers. Bulbs lasted longer but inners could handle a bulb explosion with sits metal reflectors but digital have glass to help reflect the light. 

[Signifyin(g)Monkey]

19 hours ago, sblfilms said:

@Signifyin(g)Monkey

 

 

I’ve always been curious 

 

Now an advisor on macro trends for a consultancy, while doing coding side-gigs. (mostly stuff for e-commerce sites in C#/.NET, but I've been trying to work more closely with the firm's machine-learning team in recent years to apply Big Data techniques to macroeconomic statistics, and also hatch a plot to take over the world)  Used to do research for an economics department in academia, but like most others I soon realized it's a dead-end in the long term unless you get on the Tenure Track (the odds of doing so are roughly equivalent to winning the Powerball) or go work in admin, which did not appeal to me at all.  Took me awhile to segue into the private sector, though, after having committed the sin of specializing in mostly heterodox (read: realist) economic frameworks, rather than swearing unbending fealty to the glorified astrology that is mainstream econ.  Luckily once we complete the transition firms quickly tend to realize us heterodox guys do all the best analysis.  

[SaysWho?]

On 8/28/2022 at 12:57 PM, sblfilms said:

@SaysWho?

 

How do you decide stories to pursue as a journalist?

 

It all depends:

1. Finding someone with an interesting story while doing normal shit outside of work,
2. Coworker knows someone, or knows someone who knows someone, or met someone who needs help/has an interesting story,
3. An idea comes to my head for an interesting angle locally, ex: how people used video games to stay connected during lockdowns, or a look at something with deep history in Florida, which can be harder to find because people didn't start moving here until A.C. was a thing,
4. Big name is coming to the area and I pursue an interview,
5. Someone is running for office and I pursue an interview,
6. Interviews with artists/entertainers performing in the area,
7. Viewer tips,
8. Paper pursued an interesting story that we want to follow up or tackle from a different angle,
9. Calling government officials, school district PIOs, etc. to see if there are big projects they're tackling or if there's a student or student group pursuing a cool project, respectively.

 

There are actually many ways! Since I work with a reporter during two of my shifts, she brings story ideas to me and I listen to them and either decide on one or offer another.