Links and Notes - January 28th 2026

This was published on January 30th. Kept the title as is though because I wrote it and just forgot to press publish in the night on the 28th

Video generation by AI is still weird

Honestly, I wanted to write that video generation is a dead end. But I prefer to not be too predictive about things I don't understand deeply enough. But have you seen modern AI models and their showcases? Check out Kling AI today (this may be irrelevant in the future).

This is on their homepage. And it's terrible. The bike looks out of place in several background. The cat's fur looks like it's sitting down flat. But here's more

This godawful video of cats rocking out with two kittens at the drums and confetti coming out of nowhere
This soulless slop trying to show a man riding on a bike away from a bear. I cry thinking of how artists carefully craft scenes like this to give it impact, weight, and emotion. This looks like nothing. Just moving pictures, never mind all the aberrations.
This... this slop.
And more slop

I can't. The only area where I've seen video generation look impressive is where it takes some kind of existing footage and changes a style or clothing while retaining the underlying structure of the existing video. This also applies to videos which merge something such as an image of a person with a video of a person doing an action.

The latter has actual use cases which many VFX studios would probably love. Small shots where replacement has to be done in a hand tracked way, including with stunt doubles, would all be such a weight lifted off of VFX houses which would then free them up to go do actually difficult stuff. Like making a video of the below scene that actually looks impactful

I don't understand this tech at all. I know it's progressed a lot but its trajectory still looks awful for doing any kind of meaningful creative work (great for awful stuff like impersonation and disinformation though). It's super expensive to provide. And it still fails on so many basic levels. The latest video generation model from all providers was unable to even generate a decent video of people throwing their graduation caps into the air with the camera being at about waist level and pointing up. Caps appeared out of nowhere. Caps stayed on heads, then disappeared.

This is frontier? Nay sir. This is weird.

Carlos Alcaraz is art

I'm learning tennis. And with just a few hours on court the best I can do to accelerate my learning is to study the players whom I admire the most. And with a focus on movement to compensate for lack of experience in play, I often turn to Alcaraz to study how he moves. All I can say is that he is art personified on the tennis court. There is no one else today who moves like he does. Dancing. Bouncing. Floating. And then still. For a brief moment. He stops. He rotates. The arm comes forward. The head stays still, eyes locked on the ball. And then everything unwinds and his feet come forward taking him back to an effortless float.

I could see myself learning how to strike the ball like a pro. Maybe even like Carlos. Even if I couldn't do it as consistently as he does, I can see myself learning it given enough time and coaching. But I could spend a lifetime practicing movement and I don't think I could ever come even close to the grace and art of Carlos Alcaraz.

The kids that could have been, and the one's that made destiny

Speaking of Alcaraz, there's footage of him playing at 10 year old that has been unearthed. The commentary is hyperbolic; "You have never seen a 10 year kid playing THIS well!". He plays very well. He has a mean dropshot. But he also plays like a lot of 10-12 year olds I see playing local tournaments in the sense that his game style is not too far removed from theirs. His consistency, fitness, and tactics are definitely far more mature. But contrast his current self to any 23 year old I know in Sri Lanka and there's no comparison at all. There's no one who plays even 1% of his game.

But what about the other kid in that video? Who is he? I managed to dig up the results from 2014 for Ivan Trevisiol from France. He has not been active in tennis since 2019.

And the others in that tournament? In that same tournament, Carlos would go on to lose in the round of 8 to a Serbian kid, Viktor, who dominated him 6-1, 6-1. Same kid would win the tournament in dominant style. Viktor won multiple tournaments that year and the year after that. In fact,But, that would be where the stories would diverge.

Alcaraz's ATP rankings records start from 2018 and show a season high of 1407. Not bad. Not what one might imagine to be anything major especially considering that he ended the year dropping off a cliff to 1495. Trawl through Alcaraz's match results and you'll find nuggets of gold in there too such as his loss to Holger Rune in straight sets in the quarter final of an under 14 tournament (2016). He would beat Rune in 2018. But even after that, there would be people like Rudolf Molleker who would win against him in 2019 but whose rankings remain stubbornly in the 100s to 400s.

But what happened to Viktor then?

Viktor's ATP ranking records start in 2021with a season high ranking of 929. And... That is as far as the story goes.

Today Alcaraz is number 1 and while Viktor's career high is 729 he never really escaped the 900s fully. Today he's ranked 1605.

One has to wonder... How do these paths diverge so wildly? What is it that these kids could have been? Looking at Viktor, it's not like he played an unorthodox game or developed poorly either. If I'm right, this may be footage of him from 2016 or so. He was obviously well supported in his tennis career. If I have found the right person, this is a little montage of him and at 7:36 there's a photo of him with Novak Djokovic too. So how then, does his career diverge so wildly away from that of Alcaraz's?

I suppose the real question comes from the other side. How is it that the reigning champion of the world changed his own trajectory so wildly that the kids who used to beat him at 13, 14, even 17, are either nowhere or have almost no chance against him now when they face him in the grand slams? How did he create the divergence? Somewhere there there's a story of a champion in training to be told.

This blog doesn't have a comment box. But I'd love to hear any thoughts y'all might have. Send them to [email protected]

Posted on January 30 2026 by Adnan Issadeen