Months after exiting soundstages, Quixote sells gear rental businesses, prompting layoffs - Los Angeles Times

At a time when news about the pace of film and television production seems to be relentlessly bad, a Hollywood real estate developer is ignoring the headlines and building a brand new studio. Construction is far along on Echelon Studios Hollywood: an old-school movie studio with all the standard features, but stacked in a single building rather than spread out on a sprawling lot. The challenge was to design a 10-acre movie studio for a 5-acre site, architect Andrew Wright of RIOS said. “Everything is crammed as tight as it can possibly go,” he said. Behind the $450-million venture is real estate developer and landlord David Simon, a true believer in Hollywood who came up with the idea of knocking down a former Sears store on Santa Monica Boulevard west of the Hollywood Freeway and building a studio that is set to open early next year. A rendering of Echelon Studios Hollywood being built on Santa Monica Boulevard at St. Andrew’s Place in Hollywood. (Design by RIOS / Rendering by Omegarender) He is a rare optimist in a business that has been struggling. Demand for film facilities in Southern California has sharply fallen as production has dwindled in recent years.

With Alberta seeing an early start to the flu season, residents are taking advantage of the province allowing pharmacies to administer doses earlier than planned. Heather and Hank Nottebrock were given the flu vaccine Thursday.

Claude Code creator Boris Cherny gave three tips for prompting AI. The days of the "prompt engineer" seem to be fading away. Boris Cherny, who created Claude Code for Anthropic, said that there's no need for long, formulaic AI prompts anymore. As models have gotten better, the need to perfect your prompt has diminished, he wrote in a Tuesday X post. "Talk to Claude the way you would a coworker," Cherny wrote. "There's no secret to prompting. There's no need to be overly scaffolded or prescriptive for most tasks. "Not long ago, AI users were passing around their favorite added clauses and sentences to get an AI chatbot to do their bidding. Anthropic's Claude was memed with a common prompting line: "Make no mistakes. "Now, Cherny said that users should prompt the model with three basic things:What you want it to doHow much effort you want it to spendHow it should verify that it did the right thingCherny also shared one of his prompts. It was casual, calling a podcast episode "really amazing" and asking Claude to build an artifact based on it. Claude should "use lots of tokens" and make the visuals better than a New Yorker or New York Times data visualization, he wrote.