Hello, I’m Oliver Taylor

Oliver Taylor

Welcome to my website. I’m a former Visual Effects professional who is trying to figure out what comes next. Here I write about things that interest me and publish some of my more formalized writing.

Writing

DARPA, Skunk Works, & Bell Labs: Structured to Innovate
An attempt to summarize the common ethos and project management approach of The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works, and AT&T's Bell Labs. And to create some basic guidance teams and organizations might adopt to follow in these organizations' footsteps.
Systems Engineering at NASA
This study attempts to summarize how NASA's System Engineers operate in order to better understand how to manage complex technical projects.
Systems Engineering for Visual Effects
This paper describes Systems Engineering, as practiced by NASA, and explores the application of its principles and techniques to the operation of visual effects (VFX) studios. It discusses challenges in VFX projects, like complexity management and technical/artistic integration, and proposes that VFX studios could improve their engineering and operations by adopting the perspective and methods of Systems Engineering.

I enjoyed Rented Virtue, by Will Manidis & Nabeel S. Qureshi, because it rightly points out that the desire to commune with the transcendent is central to the human experience. Our hunger for it is unstoppable and manifests in many complex structures of human activity and community. But I agree with Dorothy Sayer:

Her argument was that the church had catastrophically failed the working person by treating work as merely instrumental — a way to earn money for living and giving rather than as something sacred in its own right. The church told the carpenter not to drink and to come to services on Sunday. It never told him that the quality of his carpentry was itself the religious act.

AI is only beginning to change the way we all use computers and how we work. To get a glimpse of the future I think the best place to look is to what programmers are experimenting with today.

One thing that's unique about programmers is that they can build the tools they need to do their work, thus programming tools (if you can learn them) are always extremely valuable to know (see my note about writing in plain text).

This write-up, from Mitchell Hashimoto (creator of Ghostty, a terminal emulator), is an excellent glimpse into how we all might use computers in the future, and a method you can begin to experiment with now. If the essay seems too technical, or you don't understand any of it, ask your favorite AI to re-contextualize it for you!

Claude Code is as good as everyone says it is. I just started trying it seriously this week and so far I've knocked a few long-standing projects off my list.

  1. Created a "Novel Writing" major mode for Emacs.
  2. Added 2 sections to one of my essays that I've been thinking about for months.
  3. Finished an entirely new essay that I spent a whole day failing to make progress on last week.
  4. I refactored my entire website to markdown and built a script to convert the files to HTML so I can manage the entire thing in markdown. So, basically, created a mini CMS. In one night.

Each of these hook a few hours. I even updated my website with this note just by telling Claude to do so.

Thin Desires Are Eating Your Life

A thick desire is one that changes you in the process of pursuing it. A thin desire is one that doesn't. […] the person who spends a year learning calculus becomes someone different, someone who can see patterns in the world that were previously invisible, who has expanded the range of things they're capable of caring about, who has Been Through It. The person who checks their notifications is, afterward, exactly the same person who wanted to check their notifications five minutes ago. […] The business model of most consumer technology is to identify some thick desire, find the part of it that produces a neurological reward, and then deliver that reward without the rest of the package.

The only thing that is doing the thing is doing the thing.

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