A daredevil trick; a bus debunk; and more ducks!

• I cannot believe the amount of effort, both physical and mental, that goes into Michelle Khare's Challenge Accepted videos. In six weeks, she trains for and attempts Houdini's most deadly escape. It's worth acknowledging her whole team here: everyone from the folks training her, to the safety team, to the video editors. And of course, do not try this at home (even though there's a bit of my brain saying "huh, I wonder if I could train to do that...").
   
• I have a lot of thoughts on the music video for Billy Joel's new song Turn The Lights Back On. Near-flawless de-aging effects are now within a music video budget — granted, a music video for one of the greatest living American singer-songwriters, but still a music video budget. I assume this is body-doubles and deepfakes, with a lot of human compositing and tweaking work, plus adding things like film grain, lens flares, gate weave and so on. I can see a few of the joins, but I suspect the target audience for this will have too many tears in their eyes to see it closely. (Also, as someone who just had a montage spanning only ten years' work, I can't imagine how seeing a fifty-year career edited like this must feel.)
  
  And all that is impressive, but most of my thoughts about it connect to...
   
• ...the new announcement of OpenAI's Sora video generation AI, summed up best by Marques Brownlee here. The reaction to Sora among the techie folks I know, and YouTubers of all genres, has been the same as I felt almost exactly a year ago with text-generation models: that a big step-change is coming, and the future is becoming even weirder and unpredictable. But I've talked to a couple of non-technical folks, and their reaction was, in short: "oh, I thought computers could already do that". Because of Marvel movies! And Billy Joel videos! Text-generation is impressive to the public, but video-generation isn't, because they don't see the enormous number of VFX artists who work, underpaid and overstressed, on every single show. I suspect that may change when, in a couple of years, the public have access to this as easily as they do to ChatGPT now. As Marques says: this is the worst that this technology's ever going to look.
   
• I've linked to the Prague-based "Honest Guide" channel before: not only do they show off great parts of their city and the wider Czech Republic, but they're also doing solid (and, I suspect, somewhat dangerous) work tracking down and exposing scams and scammers. But for once, the identities in how TikTokers created teenage scammers are blurred: because most of those scammers are kids who've been convinced that fraud is a good way to make a quick buck. It looks like this is the start of a series: it's worth subscribing.
    

• Some digital archiving: John Graham-Cumming tries to look at the original proposal for the World Wide Web. The catch is: it's a Word for Macintosh 4.0 file created in 1990. Seeing it "as the author intended" is difficult, and that may only get more difficult over time.
   
• An excellent debunk: is this bus actually ignoring busy bus stops?
   
• Transport for London is running an "AI tube station experiment", which sounds like either Orwellian dystopia or Silicon Valley tech-bro rubbish. The truth, at least according to this article by James O'Malley, is probably a little of both. Projects like that one of the less-splashy but perhaps far more wide-ranging effects of the current AI rush.
   
• A Conspiracy To Kill IE6 did the rounds again this week: the story of how, in 2009, a few rogue engineers at the newly-acquired YouTube managed to finally kill the much-loathed but still-used Internet Explorer 6 browser, and make web development so much easier for so many people. (Or, if not fully kill it, at least start the series of mortal blows that would follow.)
   

One quick correction from last week: while I do double-check the links in here, occasionally human error slips through. Here's the correct link to Madeon, talking about how he made Pop Culture!

And finally: you can't hurry ducks.

All the best,

— Tom