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Broccoli Man, Remastered
- haburka 10mo agoI do wish they updated this to 2026 google! I don’t think it would be nearly as interesting though since they do get rid of most red tape but since everything is enterprise scale, it’s never easy.
- hiddencost 10mo agoHuh? The bureaucracy is way worse. BCID requirements. MDBs that take 4+ hours to roll out. The Byzantine array of different MDB group types, often with two party control. GDPR company compliance. Tagging proto fields with provenance. Documents are private by default now. Most support happens in chat groups, and is if you're not at deepmind your help requests are getting ignored. Spending a month filing GUTS tickets to get your intern access to basic tools. XManager idle pruning. GCP automated boq setup/teardown tools usually fail and you have to fall back to getting support from a contractor 12 time zones away.
- dmoy 10mo agoI wish that the remake focused on the new bureaucracy stuff (or even new technical stuff), instead of being a near 1-for-1 rehash of the old one. E.g. it's not like anyone is being recommended to serve out of a bigtable for the last decade or whatever. But it's also not like the replacement(s) are problem-free when it comes to quota, etc.
- jeffbee 10mo agoThe bureaucracy is why people trust Google with their data. I wouldn't use a Google if I thought they didn't have BCID and proto field provenance and the rest of it.
- shadowgovt 10mo agoAgreed. Google long ago passed the event horizon where they could keep pretending they were not mission-critical infrastructure for a significant portion of their users, and (from privacy to reliability) I'm glad they've put in structure to enforce acting like it, even if that means they no longer feel like working at a startup. Everyone who wants to work at a startup knows where to find the rest of Silicon Valley (and Austin and etc.). I wish them the best and I look forward to reading their data-breach disclosures if they get popular enough for anyone to care about what they're doing.
- kridsdale3 10mo agoI was at Meta when it was forced by the FTC to start adding this compliance stuff. It SUCKED to retrofit everything. Now I'm at google, and onboarded on to the version of the infra that already went through that, and I can take it all at face value. It is a PAIN still, but this is the reality of a system that interfaces with O(10^8) users, O(10^2) governments.
- morshu9001 10mo agoYeah, it's also different from the pointless technical complexity that this video is about. But that exists too. Could've talked about how spinning up a cronjob the new way takes 2 weeks regardless of what it's doing, how there's a proliferation of different config languages, or how everything is deprecated / not ready still.
- tdullien 10mo agoXoogler here (2011-2018). It's heartwarming that a core part of Google culture ("for every problem we have 3 solutions: 2 that are deprecated and 1 that is experimental") is alive and well.
- defen 10mo agoHow are you supposed to know that if you're evaluating whether to use a tool / service?
- jeffbee 10mo agoYou could just read their whitepapers and accept them at face value. What other major SaaS providers are publishing about their technical countermeasures against insider risk? If a company publishes loads of articles about how they have technical controls for privacy and security, through encryption and compartmentalization and code review and build provenance and so forth, and all the people who work/worked at said company are always whining about how onerous those processes are, then what gives you reason to doubt it?
- kridsdale3 10mo agoI wish I had an answer for you. I spend at least half of the past year trying to make that decision. The internal LLM that can read all the docs and code, you'd think, could get the context to know what the optimal state is, but it easily gets confused by out of date documentation and recommends paths that are going to be marked as "why didn't you use the new thing?" at review time, OR it builds out a solution using "oh, this isn't ready for use yet" parts.
- kridsdale3 10mo agoThis guy Googles.
- awalsh128 10mo agoThis is only an issue when you need to migrate services. I can't get into details but much of this isn't a problem anymore.
- summerlight 10mo agoDon't forget to mention automatic enrollment of your production group into access-on-demand. Any minor access on the production now requires the group manager's approval. I had a fun time with some production fire where only director level folks can approve the access. Even funnier thing is that this "refactor" was done without any prior notice.
- ahoka 10mo agoI want to see MongoDB is webscale as a sequel.
- glimshe 10mo agoVery cool! I'd be perfectly happy to watch videos that combine human creativity and choice with AI. I don't consider this kind of video "slop". Once the glitches are eliminated, this workflow will be unstoppable.
- windexh8er 10mo ago> Once the glitches are eliminated, this workflow will be unstoppable. "... unstoppable." - What? I'm genuinely curious. Do you think this type of video is enjoyable? Maybe one, or even two like this is palatable - but I don't see anything 1) interesting or new 2) that would make me want to watch this by choice. And when everyone is swimming in a sea of this type of work I don't think most people will enjoy it, either. It's also too bad we aren't more cognizant of how we got here, either. All of the artists work that was stolen to generate those images and then the watt hours burned. I'm not saying these types of offerings are completely for naught, but I do think some of these services should be forced to put a few pre or post pended frames that show (like nutrition facts) the environmental impact including model inference and that copyright was violated to make it.
- tantalor 10mo ago> I don't see anything interesting or new What I find so interesting about this is how much is NOT new. It is a highly faithful reproduction of the beloved original. The difference is the voices and visuals are much higher quality, and there are some added effects and cutaways that are nice touches. I would still share the original video because it is a useful cultural artifact and teaching tool (as ridiculous as it is), and I would be happy to share this version at the same time, just because it is higher quality.
- cameronh90 10mo agoI personally quite enjoy the Gossip Goblin cyberpunk cycle of humanity videos (can find them on reddit/tiktok/yt/elsewhere). Most of the creativity is clearly from the human driving the AI, but I suspect it would have been borderline impossible to make something like that as an individual without AI.
- parpfish 10mo agoI would have kicked up the 4d3d3d3. Maybe thrown in a hat wobble.
- fugalfervor 10mo agoI thought/hoped that's what this thread was about.
- ares623 10mo agoDifferent vegetable. But that was a prescient vision of modern AI.
- bigyabai 10mo agoNow, Tayne I can get into.
- wpm 10mo agoComputer, load up Celery Man. Now that I think of it, that skit was incredibly prescient. You can literally ask Gemini for more hat wobble now.
- flannell 10mo ago“Paul, your wife is calling. It is an emergency.” “Later. We’ve got a lot of work to do”
- John-Tony 10mo ago[dead]
- ctippett 10mo agoThis is very well done. I wouldn't and don't consider this to be AI slop. The author's own reflection captures perfectly my own feelings on the matter... intent does matter. I think what gets lost in a lot of the AI media discussion is that intent matters. I find auto-generated slop-farm TikToks just as dystopic as the most fervent doomer, but I also remember when I was a 10-year-old kid making movies with my parents’ VHS camcorder and how much fun I would have had learning how to make things if I’d had tools like this.
- tantalor 10mo agoAccording to Kagi, all AI generated content is slop. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/slopstop.html#what-is-considered-slop https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/slopstop.html#what-is-co...
- shadowgovt 10mo agoKagi is entitled to their opinion. Perhaps worth noting is by that metric the original Broccoli Man video is also slop; it was generated using stock characters, voice synthesis, and auto puppeteering. The only creative input the original "artist" had was writing the text script and signing off on the final output. Personal opinion, using modern AI slop generation to recreate AI slop from a previous generation of the technology is pretty good art.
- orbital-decay 10mo agoMost meme-worthy content is actual low effort slop. That's the reality of the most recent two decades.
- eitally 10mo agoThat's a slippery slope, a really slippery slope, especially when it comes to still images. I don't believe video is any different -- intent does matter.
- freediver 10mo agoThat is not how Kagi looks at it. We are marking domains as slop if they contain mostly AI generated content. It is hard to say if a single piece of AI generated content is slop or not (there is useful AI generated content too). But if all the content on a domain is AI generated, it is likely something that people would not like in their results.
- jesucresta 10mo agoThis is 100% AI slop, cool story and all but I'd 100 times rather see a very poorly drawn 2007 animation than any of this.
- swiftcoder 10mo agoTbf, the original is also slop (albeit of the pre-AI variety)
- jesucresta 10mo agono is not, the original is full of personality and ideas even if its poorly drawn and kitsch.
- shadowgovt 10mo agoYes, but also literally AI slop. Stock characters auto-puppeted to a text script with text-to-voice run across it. The artist's input was writing the text and signing off on the final auto-generated product. The reason the two characters in the video are weird superheroes is those were the available stock characters in the XtraNormal.com service he used. After all, the creator didn't want to be an professinal full-time animator, he just wanted to animate three minutes.
- darkwater 10mo ago> Yes, but also literally AI slop. Stock characters auto-puppeted to a text script with text-to-voice run across it. Maybe I'm wrong but I would say that the slop feeling of the original version was a deliberate decision and part of its charm. That kind of video and voices were a meme back then, IIRC.
- swiftcoder 10mo agoAs is the slop feeling of the current, no doubt. I don't think that changes it being "slop" in the sense of low-effort and mostly generated by machine learning (rather than hand-edited like a machinima)
- Barry-Perkins 10mo ago[dead]
- efficax 10mo agothe deadpan emotionless delivery of the original memes are an important part of their humor. this remaster looks fancy but loses the entire spirit of the thing
- morshu9001 10mo agoYeah, the only way this is funnier is when the AI does something weird
- donalhunt 10mo agoblooper reel is gold.
- 1970-01-01 10mo agoAgreed. It's completely lost its original charm. This is AI slop.
- cflewis 10mo ago"only if you are Yahoo!" is one of the best line reads of all time.
- shadowgovt 10mo agoThere will always be a special place in my heart for the stilted "do you. do you think your users are scum."
- dekhn 10mo agofor me it's "nobody has borgmon readability" and "I forgot how to count that low".
- underdeserver 10mo agoIt's differently good. Impressive (but less funny).
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- alan-jordan13 10mo ago[dead]
- setheron 10mo agoIs the other character a fox because that's Meta mascot too?
- kridsdale3 10mo agoThe original video is older than that.
- ceph_ 10mo agoRed panda not fox
- mcqueenjordan 10mo agoThe jankiness of the original had a lot of charm, almost selling the dystopian absurdity of trying to deploy a service via the janky voice and slightly desync'd audio and animation. I don't think it's just nostalgia, because I felt the same way watching it the first time all those years ago. I think AI slop is decidedly different, because it just doesn't have the charm. I don't know if I can yet decompose exactly why that is.
- ge96 10mo agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t6L-FlfeaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t6L-FlfeaI
- pjjw 10mo agobless, but hearing people say this version is "better" makes me want to walk into the sea.
- TheGamerUncle 10mo ago>I am not the kind of person who thinks AI will replace actors blah blah blah. But I am glad these tools exist, because this video wouldn’t exist without AI. >In no world would I ever have put together a real cast and crew to remake a 15 year old inside joke video for Googlers, but I was able to make it with AI. BUT IT DID !! and part of the charm is that this involved real people talking, mutual understanding and a shared culture. That world existed it can still exist unless we surrender to the depravity of conformity and comfortability.
- boplicity 10mo agoSo much of what makes people willing to be moved by creative art is the willingness to believe they're investing in someone else's real thoughts & effort -- and opening themselves to a channel of real human connection & relationship. AI has raised the bar, in terms of making it more difficult to create the trust necessary for people to be willing to open themselves up to that connection.
- srean 10mo agoNow if future AIs were shown to be capable of suffering then this could change.
- graypegg 10mo ago> In no world would I ever have put together a real cast and crew [...] 3 people, the phone with the best camera across those 3 people, and some costumes that aren't THAT had to recreate? Honestly could even skip the costumes and just print out two A4 sheets with orange bamboo shoots and broccoli and tape them to your shirt and I would honestly get a better kick out of that. It's fun to make stuff with friends, even if it's a bit crap! Saying that, I don't think anyone making something with AI discourages anyone else from doing something with the joke, so I think all this has really replaced is a video the author would not have made otherwise... but they should try anyway! They're missing out on what would be a fun afternoon with friends
- shadowgovt 10mo ago
- tomaytotomato 10mo agoCould someone remake the "MongoDB is webscale" skit with AI gen please? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs
- SpaceManNabs 10mo agoKinda shocked at how much editing they had to do. You'd think AI would make it easier to splice together individual clips, but I haven't find a tool that does that well yet. Opus seems tailored for doing fine tuning on long form content like podcasts.
- stuaxo 10mo agoWhile some stuff can generated, there is a long way to go.
- moandcompany 10mo agoDoes anyone miss Meatless Mondays?
- bistro 10mo agoAnd the ensuing throwing out forks protest?
- StephenAmar 10mo agoThe bbq on the parking lot of the googleplex to protest this was fun. I still have the t-shirt somewhere
- jeffbee 10mo ago"No one has borgmon readability. Just me." is about a specific person at a specific moment and it knocks me off my stool every time.
- calmbonsai 10mo agoI wonder if Broccoli Man was inspired by Paul Rudd's Celery Man.
- btown 10mo agoMore likely by the legendary Mongo DB Is Web Scale, which just turned 15 years old! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs
- tonetheman 10mo ago[dead]
- im3w1l 10mo agoThis didn't capture the emotional tone as I perceived it in the original. I thought Brocoliman was supposed to be someone who had drunk the cool-aid and truly believed in how easy all those steps were and just couldn't understand how anyone could have any issues at all with them unless they were an idiot.
- Magi604 10mo agoWe're still early. I imagine a lot of creativity will be unlocked once more people have access to easier to use video creation tools like what was shown in OP.