…Before any of them were rigged on Stage 27, Beebe, chief lighting technician Mike Ambrose and lighting-desk operator Brian M. Fisher turned to Unreal Engine to design their varied looks and light the stage virtually. All of that data was exported directly to the lighting console, which gave the team a critical head start on a shoot whose first two weeks would be consumed by concert sequences.

…The lighting rig used period fixture housings that were re-lamped with Fuse LED lamps, which had to look authentic because they would be visible on camera behind actor Jaafar Jackson. Replica stamped-aluminum gel frames were attached to the front of each unit to help sell the period look. The LEDs were combined with more than 500 tungsten PAR cans, with aluminum salad bowls mounted on them to mimic period scoop lamps. The rig took six weeks to construct…

I never intended to write about this industry. I came to it not as a journalist but as a disgruntled, broke TV writer determined to make a dent in student loans and keep paying LA rent while my industry withered in front of me. But working with and for AI had proven even more cruel than I could have ever imagined. Mercor says it employs about 300 full-time staffers. Meanwhile, each week it keeps some 30,000 independent contractors caught up in a fever dream of aimless, directionless urgency, corralled across Slack channels by achingly young adults, sending messages at 3 am to “push on” and “finish strong” and “lock in” and “Go Team GO!” All in service of the grandest purpose in history: to successfully remove a scuba diver from a picture with one click of a mouse, transport him to the moon without any glaring artifacts—and bring him back again.

The next generations of team leaders won’t know our specific talents or our unique skills, but they will know the Average Time it takes us to annotate a grainy video uploaded without the owner’s consent into a vast catalog of other possibly stolen videos. They will be tasked with making us work faster, and longer, with more precision, more control, fewer errors, fewer overheads, fewer costs. To make the machine more human, they will make us more like the machine.

One of the first things Sharma did after getting the Xbox CEO job was announce Helix in a post on X, promising that the next Xbox console “will lead in performance and play your Xbox and PC games.”

Alpha versions of Project Helix are heading to developers in 2027, so the next generation of Xbox is still a ways off. Sharma didn’t reveal much more about Project Helix during her all-hands, though. “We have to deliver Project Helix as a big step forward, for our console games and also our PC games, as well as performance and security,” said Sharma.

Microsoft still hasn’t answered exactly how Project Helix will run both Xbox console games and PC titles. Is it a PC underneath? Does it still use the Xbox OS? It feels like we’re going to be waiting a little while longer for answers to these questions, but the reinvestment in the Xbox console and Xbox OS is intriguing after a lack of updates.