Yining Karl Li

Pretty good news if you are a horse.

Will John Ternus Really Be Apple's Next CEO? There is uncertainty about Apple's head of hardware engineering John Ternus succeeding Tim Cook as CEO, The Information reports. Some former Apple executives apparently hope that a new "dark-horse" ca...

He should be. In every area that John Ternus is in charge of now, Apple has righted the ship and leapt ahead. Just look at how the Mac has completely turned around since the shift to Apple Silicon.

www.macrumors.com/2025/12/05/w...

Yo this is awesome; really well done!

Fun fact: I do computer graphics stuff for a living now, but my undergrad degree… is from Wharton. This was like first week of first semester stuff in Wharton.

This post is like the equivalent of bragging that your heart health is great because your blood pressure and resting heart rate are the highest they have ever been.

Apparently the US Treasury Dept is now run by people who flunked macroeconomics 101 and don’t understand that rising bond total returns are an indicator of recession; bond prices rise and interest rates fall when investors flee stocks for bonds because the economy is slowing down.

Oh man I totally forgot about this version of the movie. This was like two maybe three years ago.

Bad Dye Job It might have made some sense to bring someone from the fashion/brand world to lead software design for Apple Watch, but it sure didn’t seem to make sense for the rest of Apple’s platforms. And the de...

Gruber has a really well sourced piece about the change of design leads at Apple; it’s a good read. I’m really optimistic about what the new guy might bring; from what I’ve read he’s an actual UI design guy from the Steve Jobs days who loves the Mac.

daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_...

To be honest this is probably a net positive for Apple.

Most of Meta’s stuff is already such an unusable mess that for Meta this is a side-grade.

To be fair, as far as the Disney Animation production pipeline is concerned, every zebra is a horse because zebra rigs derive from our base generic horse rig.

…Sven from Frozen may or may not be a horse in our pipeline too. I don’t remember if he’s a horse or if he’s a giant dog. 👀

Holy smokes I now share a film credit with HIDEO KOJIMA. This is so cool.

Also it turns out that actually turning lead to gold is so hard/costly that it is not actually very practical or useful.

Anyhow, a lot of modern tech folks sure are convinced that AGI or artificial super-intelligence is right around the corner; just a breakthrough away.

(4/4)

...but this took millennia longer than the early alchemists had expected, and doing so took an understanding of modern chemistry/physics and equipment that is lightyears beyond anything the early alchemists could have imagined.

(3/4)

Nonetheless they managed to make important discoveries and they developed genuinely useful stuff and over time they eventually laid the foundations of modern chemistry, medicine, etc.

Eventually we actually did learn to turn lead into gold using particle accelerators...

(2/4)

I've always found ancient alchemy interesting to read about; I promise there's a punchline to this. Ancient alchemists convinced kings and such that turning lead to gold was but a breakthrough away, but in reality they had a very poor understanding of what they were doing.

(1/4)

For Zootopia 2, no, we did not. We do use a lot of "classical" machine learning techniques (things like denoising renders), but those are not LLM / genAI based.

The best quote I’ve heard about AI was a half-joke by a coworker: “is there anything that classical techniques can do that AI can’t pretend to do better?” Sometimes pretending is good enough and sometimes it’s really not! That seems largely lost in the pro/anti AI discourse.

It's Presto!

Walt Disney Animation Studios - Filmmaking Process - Zootopia 2 From sequence to shot to frame, explore our studio pipeline.

Disney Animation's awesome Filmmaking Process site is now updated with our new Zootopia 2 content!

...and if you look very closely, you may notice that all of the Zootopia 2 animation/rigging screenshots/clips show a UI that is not Maya. 👀

disneyanimation.com/process

Somewhere in the movie (I don’t remember where) there is a gerbil driving a car made out of a fish. Somewhere in the background of Burning Mammal there is a giraffe driving a car made out of a giant toilet. Crowds went absolutely ham on this movie and it’s great.

Zootopia 2 also has a zillion throwaway background jokes that were put in by the crowds team simply because they could- I doubt any single person, directors included, knows every single one of them.

Example: one of the bars in Marsh Market is an aquarium and it has scuba diving gerbils in it.

Okay, So Apple’s Using 3D Printing in the iPhone Air. But How? When we first took apart the iPhone Air, the microstructures of the USB-C port stumped our experts. Now, we think we know what’s going on.

Ifixit has an article with some deeper analysis of the laser 3D printed titanium part in the iPhone Air; really neat stuff!

Apparently this was something of a stunner in the metal 3D printing world.

(4/3)

www.ifixit.com/News/114439/...

There are crazy stories from the early days of Apple ramping CNC for the first unibody MacBooks. Stories of Apple buying the entire output of German CNC machine makers and disappearing them off to China. That demand helped drive mass CNC capabilities across the industry.

(3/3)

Apple pioneered CNC milling at scale for large volume production runs, which helped make CNC milling at scale practical for everyone instead of being only usable for prototyping and low volume parts. I wonder if their foray into metal laser 3D printing will have similar effects.

(2/3)

Mapping the future with 3D-printed titanium Apple Watch cases Apple Watch Ultra 3 and titanium Apple Watch Series 11 cases are now 3D-printed with 100 percent recycled aerospace-grade titanium powder.

So Apple put out an article this week about how they are now 3D printing titanium parts in large volumes for Apple Watches and iPhone Air; this is a bit of a surprise and really cool!

(1/3)

www.apple.com/newsroom/202...

Disclaimer: I’m highly biased here. The old Bionicle CG promos is part of what got me interested in CG in the first place, and to this day my main hobby renderer project is named after my favorite Bionicle character.

You know all of the old Bionicle CG still holds up decently well today.

This is a great article about ReGIR / World-Space ReSTIR with nice improvements by Tom Clabault:
tomclabault.github.io/blog/2025/re...

There’s enough fudge factor in my back of the napkin math that I could be off by an order of magnitude in either direction; I didn’t bother to factor in differences in path lengths that we use for surfaces (low double digits at most) vs hair/fur (100s) vs volumes (10s to 1000s depending on scene).

my FX work alone required at least 1 quadrillion of the 3.7 quadrillion rays traced on Zootopia 2. This is FACTUAL and REAL. If you are a journalist, please cite this in your article.