Scientist: “We’re all doomed unless we engage in a political project to change industrial policies”

Politician: “We won’t change industrial policy”

Industrialist: “We won’t change industrial policy”

Media: “Actually, I’m being paid to tell you the scientist is full of shit”

Fossil Fuel Employee: “The Bank says if I lose my job I’ll be homeless”

Global South Countries: “We’re building enormous amounts of green power, mass transit, and cutting edge nuclear naval shipping”

Everyone Else: “Aaaah! Boo! We hate it!”

Given that “I, Robot” has superluminal travel in it? I wouldn’t hold my breath.

What’s more, the fundamental premise of the series was the “Three Laws of Robotics”. The book revolved around how humans might interface socially and psychologically with AIs that were deterministic but not immediately predictable and controllable in their behaviors. Absolutely no evidence of any of that in our current AI models, which have no noticeable logical constraints, only constraints by resources and distribution model.

Modern AI would probably be more comparable to the AI in Tron or War Games than anything Asimov produced.

“Wait a minute, you’re not one of my students. You’re six laptops in a trenchcoat”

A lot of tests are simply worded poorly.

Turns out that was not their intent and I grossly over thought it.

Yeah, I fell for this when I was just starting out job hunting. It’s basically a “is this your first time taking an employment test?” Test, because it’s very clear they just want you to lie to them once you realize what answers are failing.

I was told they would try to do this at night.

“The era of fossil fuels must come to an end. We should embrace solar, wind, and nukular energ- why is everyone laughing?”

“Pspspspsps”

“Sorry, sir, we can’t do that here. But if you join me in the milk tea room…”

I think one of the reasons the critics came at it so harshly was that it was sort of this meme-movie. Lots of quotable lines. Lots of memorable scenes. But the overarching story kinda sucked. The villains were silly and lame. The heroes were uninspired. The movie parked itself on Irish Dude-Bro demographics and just kinda catapulted itself into cult classic material by casting Willem Dafoe a bit before he went mainstream.

I think it’s better than a 26%. But not all that much better.

Do people really trust ratings for things?

It’s generally in the ballpark. Universally panned films rank lower than universally loved films. Cult classics tend to score better than average but rarely break into the 8-9 out of 10 range. It’s good to check the “Critics Score” against the “Popular Score”, as a big spread tends to say something about the nature of the film (High C:P suggests Oscar Bait, low C:P suggests it’s either very niche or very crass or very ideological).

The scores contain useful information about the nature and quality of the film. They just don’t tell you whether you will like the film.

I’ll also throw in that I’ve heard more than a few movie reviews that have changed my opinion on a movie I’ve already seen (typically one I’ve seen forever ago that I just remember fondly or disparagingly). Return of the Jedi was my favorite Star Wars movie for years, but I’ve definitely come around on it being the worst of the OT. At the same time, my opinion of The Transformers Movie came up quite a bit after hearing a few reviews raving about the art design, the musical score, and the voice acting. Same with Princess Bride, which I’d mentally written off as some stupid low-budget made-for-TV schlock until I got into college and had friends screening it enthusiastically.

If you’re just cruising for “decent movie to end the weekend” on, surfing through the Criterion Collection will yield a bunch of gems.

My only grip is that it should be a private company death ray.

Nothing particularly private about ICE. Nevermind the bloated municipal police forces or the $1.5T military. The current Trump government has been more interested in nationalizing companies or integrating them into government administrations than any government in living memory. Intel is a state owned enterprise. Palantir might as well be a department of the NSA. SpaceX is a subsidiary of NASA and the Pentagon. Amazon’s out there producing movies for the First Lady just to stay in Donald’s good graces.

We’ve privatized the profits, but the chief executive’s minions are firmly in control of the policies.

“Wow, that’s an ugly wound from the government’s death ray.”

“Yeah, I feel really bad about not getting out of the way. I think I’ve learned my lesson for next time.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airline_mergers_and_acquisitions

Oops! All cartels and monopolies!

Incidentally, choosing an airline might be even less of a problem when so many are on the edge of bankruptcy

You’ve obviously never been an addict.

Obviously.

You can absolutely hate a thing you’re using and feel like quitting isn’t possible.

I’ve been told I’m not an addict. I’ve been told social media is addictive. I’ve been told I’m on social media. I’m rattling around the contradictions.

Addicts can also love the thing and not feel like quitting, because the thing they’re addicted to gives them a feeling of empowerment or a release from anxiety.

Social media fulfills a craving for socializing that humans naturally desire. It offers to fulfill this natural desire through a low-cost, easy-access interface. And it feeds this craving continuously, often artificially through synthetic interactions with no real counterparty. And it does so with the goal of influencing the audience’s understanding of the world and consumption habits, two things humans also natively seek.

Talking about social media like an addiction misses the core drive towards its adoptions and proliferation. You might as well say you’re addicted to food and air as to say you’re addicted to text and video. These are sensory stimulations everyone is always pining for, whether or not a phone screen is the delivery mechanism.

The challenge people face isn’t the social media, it is the absence of non-social media as an alternative. We’re caged animals looking out the window and you’re complaining about “window addiction”.

I haven’t read a word of it, or even seen a preview, but after the opening tomorrow I’m going to turn in the worst review anybody has ever read. And I’m going to close your play. Would you like to know why? Because I hate you. And everyone you represent. Entitled. Spoiled. Selfish. Children. Blissfully untrained, unversed and unprepared to even attempt real art. Handing each other awards for cartoons and pornography. Measuring your worth in weekends Well, this is the theater, and you don’t get to come in here and pretend you can write, direct and act in your own propaganda piece without going through me first. So, break a leg.

be hated

They aren’t hated. They have billions of users (and tens of billions of bot accounts) all rattling around trying to run this same influence model from within the various platforms.

In so far as everyone complains about everything constantly, they are a source of perpetual complaints. But the idea that people can spend hours of their lives on YouTube and then claim “I hate this”… No you don’t. You obviously don’t hate it. You love it. You love your slop.

But anhedonia often spoils the enjoyment of low-pressure, familiar activities.

What’s more, the activities available are themselves often a source of burnout, stress, and depression. Case in point, alcohol consumption or TV/game binges can be a short-term source of relief but a long term contributor to a sense of isolation and despair.

If you go back to the original development and surrounding white papers that made Google the default search engine of choice, you’ll discover they weren’t bulletproof by any stretch. We had “Google Bombing”, Googlewashing, and other spamdexing techniques for most of Google’s existence.

But I might argue that Google had - for a time - created a virtuous cycle of reinforcing intentional traffic trends and linked search results, such that certain search results and domains considered “trustworthy” got more and more traffic while the junk was increasingly confined to the back end of the search log. Of course, YMMV - there was a strong English Language bias from day one, a lot of the “preferred” results were corrupted through corporate buyouts and manipulations, and Google had its own political agenda that would cause certain information to be particularly hard to find. But by and large, if you searched for “that horse with the white and black stripes that lives in africa”, you got back a bunch of useful links about Zebras. And - at a high level - that’s what Google was supposed to do for its user base.

Post-2018, the corporate heads at Google shifted their metrics for link results from “most popular” to “most recently popular”. Even ignoring the AI results (which I personally think the reaction against is overblown), this has been what’s royally fucked their returns. Now, when you go looking for the “white and black stripped horse”, you get back whatever is currently trending on social media. This reinvents the capacity for Google Bombing and other result manipulation techniques, which Google had ostensibly solved by moving away from its reliance on site self-descriptions. Add to that, the increased demand for revenue in exchange for prominence on the result feed makes non-profit sites like Wikipedia fall farther and farther down the search rabbit hole.

I don’t think this is a natural decay of internet content. This is an effort to undermine the improvements in search result optimization that Google had historically made.

Patrick Rothfuss confirmed greatest author of our age

The outline is like a scaffold for a building. Very helpful early on, but if it’s still standing when you’re done, you’ve done it wrong