Must be a slow news day. Any space that needs to have some level of functionality will start to have similarities to others. The MacDonald brothers famously applied Ford's assembly line system to a burger joint, and when you go to any fast food place that esthetic echoes. It's not surprising and is expected. You could completely reinvent the coffee shop pipeline and customer experience, but that's really hard and would be likely expensive. The food service industry has enough difficulties.

I think it's simply because there are too many audio options, and not enough financial interest in doing 5 different audio mixes to play well on all the potential systems. I watched Coppola's The Conversation in the theatre when it came out, and the entire film is based on the perception of sound and dialog. You better believe if Nolan remade that movie now it would get terrible reviews due to inscrutability. They mix these movies, and now tv shows, in very hi-tech studios ostensibly with the ability to mimic all sorts of audio environments, but believe me they're mixing for a state of the art studio, not the average family with their Best Buy sound bar. When there were fewer audio choices(mono/stereo tv and the movie theater), you almost never heard people complaining about being unable to understand what people are saying. I mean, Orson Welles got grief over a little overlapping dialogue.

Agreed. As always, it's the lack of skeptical thinking that is the root of most of the damage. As a relatively old fart I must admit I've been taken off guard by how fast this has exploded and how splendidly useful it can be. There have been specific times in my life where the new tech has genuinely astounded and excited me - push button dialing vs dial, the birth of the PC(after feeding cards into a hopper of the shared mainframe at university), cell phones reinventing communication, then again when more sophisticated computing replaced those with handheld computers...I mean what a ride! I embrace it. I work in the visual arts and all the freaking out about AI replacing writers, artists, 3d modellers and texture artists...well, you know what? It's got a degree of truth. *Some* artists have their jobs at risk, but the genuine creatives I think are safe for quite some time, arguably forever. I have yet to see(or hear) creatively generated AI content that isn't just a regurgitated content. That doesn't take away from the fact that it's interesting, it can amaze and affect us, it can actually be incredibly useful as a machine to stimulate and create ideas in the same way listening to a Bach fugue can take you in a completely different mindset when trying to compose a folk song. Bring it on, but use your head.

I hope you're being jokey here. It's not "interesting", it has tangible negative health and safety effects, it was based on zero factual information and it's stupid. Some article you read somewhere has convinced you screwing with our internal clocks bi-annually is enough of a boon to "many people" to warrant such an idiotic policy. Might want to check your newsfeed options.

I think you're understandably using the word "fishy" just because we never hear of larger companies behaving decently nowadays. They aren't really that huge - I believe I heard they are under 300 employees - and it sounds to me like they are simply tired of working on ulcers every time they go to bed at night. Basically it's just not worth it for them personally. They're trying to do the decent thing for their staff, and while I agree it's unclear what the path is moving forward right now, I respect the hell out of them for at least trying to not leave their staff out on the street. They might well have plans they aren't sharing just yet, as you suggest.

Absolutely agree. There are a lot of very stupid and poorly informed people in the world, and there always has been. Social media has simply become more user friendly. Does it empower them? Of course it does, the same way it empowers everyone. Did it "make people stupid"? Of course not, good lord.

VR has been dying for some time, studios invested millions prepping to make content until they figured out nobody wants to drop hundreds of dollars per person to come over on Sunday and wear helmets in somebody's living room, especially since the failure of 3D television. I find it humorous he still wants to dive in head first to this technology. Part of me thinks it's all a scheme to leave that tainted Facebook name behind. As far as Snow Crash, I don't think Zuck suggested he would be replicating millions of people live meeting in the 'verse, I suspect he's aiming for what MMOs already do - multiple servers with maybe a few hundred people interacting. We can't even wrap our heads around being in a live million person construct, we just want interactivity immediately around us. Of course he can promise whatever he wants, he's got the money to fail.

What I have never understood is that a company hires a lot of people but apparently has no way to tell if that staff is actually accomplishing anything. I get that not everybody is making toasters and you can't just count boxes at the end of the week and know who is productive. However the notion that you can "hide" in a large company and wank around all day without consequence just means they've got things set up incorrectly. Having big brother visually spy on you surely must be the last resort and an admission of defeat?

I come from a less popular position - while I also grew up with Asimov and absolutely adore him, I personally preferred him as an idea guy over a writer. The three laws of robotics stuck with me much longer than the prose of I, Robot. His science books enthralled me and partially made me the nerd I am today, plus he just seemed to be such a *nice, smart guy*, but Foundation just put me to sleep, truth be told. The concepts were fascinating, however. I'm not holding out a lot of hope for the show being an actual enjoyable watch because it appears to be taking itself so very, very seriously - which to be fair the books did as well. Even with two of my favourite actors(Pace and Harris) to raise the show up, I'm concerned it will come off like The Cloud Atlas(loved the book, the movie didn't connect). You're right, of course, wait and see. My expectations are low, but I'm hoping to become engaged with the characters more than the source material. The big kaboomy trailer that gives away most of the plot isn't really helping.

The stories they're basing it on always read to me like fables from the bible. "Boggins begat Blarty who begat Bindy who was slain at the Battle of the Five Rabbits at the Gates of Bunion." The backstories for The Hobbit and LOTR were just that - tremendously detailed backstories that were "historical" records that take themselves *so* seriously. Not anticipating a good romp from this. As far as money goes, I work in the post business and I'm having serious trouble figuring out how they can spend so much money in such a short time. Craft services must have busted out their foie gras wagyu burgers for this shoot.

I think the entire point is she's not in the field. People in the field are too invested in it(literally) to give trustworthy observations, and your dismissal of her as a quack appears to be based on the assumption you're not allowed to call the use of the term AI bullshit unless you code. AI is another hucksterism like "information superhighway" was in the mainstream a couple decades ago. It's a misleading term used by people to sell things.

Citizen Kane was generally not well received when released, there were a lot of negative reviews. How this translated into a perfect score that is usurped by someone finding a single bad one they missed sort of shows how meaningful the site is.

The fact they aren't broadcasting on a network will help with that. I think the sort of person that would fund a kickstarter of a Gremlins 2 riff isn't going to scream it's pro-Trump because Clamp was basically a decent, if misguided character, or would take to the streets to riot it's anti GOP because Clamp is a money grubbing capitalist. You might as well say no more comedy because the US is being torn apart. You guys need it more than ever.

While I get why they wanted to do a "stunt" like this, I don't think his entire catalog is enough data to generate a good result. I mean - it *might* have been, it was worth a shot, but I suspect that's the reason it's lacking. If you fed it the whole genre, it might have been better but of course is missing the point.

Careful, old man, your whalebone corset is showing... If you actually listened to the songs he wrote, stripped of the grunge, he actually wrote numerous very beautiful songs, in fact he was closer to the Beatles and Bowie than 90's disaffected boredom, which he understandably tended to get lumped in with. I'm not remotely a true fan, but dismissing everything he wrote as garbage speaks more to your tastes than anything else.