I saw it with a group of four people.

Three of us enjoyed it quite a bit.

I didn't mind it but nothing was surprising to me.

I saw several scenes that could have been more cleverly written but I was glad to support the group that saved a creative work from the burn pile. The idea of killing a movie for accounting losses seems sinful.

The motion-control photography, practical effects, and integration of animation were at least as good as Roger Rabbit.

If you enjoy the craft of filmmaking it's at least worth seeing.

I didn't see any marxist social commentary. Perhaps folks in the "Flock does nothing wrong" camp might feel otherwise.

Personal shoppers etc are a thing; but what is different here is the scale.

If Amazon's experience is so bad, that is what that is maybe the market will move to walmart.com; not really the point.

The point is that letting the AI Boys become an intermediary between every enterprise and most people will NOT be a good thing. I am not saying Amazon isnt a bad actor or isnt hypocritical here on a broader context. I am saying that shop keeps of all stripes should be at least free to post a "No Robots Allowed Sign" and have it respected.

Because I don't think we will much care for the outcomes when we have a world where Coca Cola and slip Meta half a a couple hundred million to make sure the next model generally chooses their products when someone asks the AI to ensure the fridge has colas in it. The consequences for the market where there are six or so middle men everywhere won't remain 'free' long.

"protect against renegade AI"

This is a fundamentally unsolvable problem. It's like: "How do we stop humans from being humans?"

Saying that's your objective is fundamentally dishonest. You can't protect against the unknown. You can't protect against anything without covering all the corner cases, and AI, by it's very nature, is almost exclusively corner cases.

At least the retail arm of Amazon is um a wait for it a retailing operation. The individual candy bars, and $2 for 20z chilled sodas are up by the checkout line where you are standing around waiting at the grocery for a reason.

At any large retailer (an some small ones) quite a lot of thought goes into what is on the end caps and what gets less prime real-estate. I actually don't think it is unreasonable Amazon should seek to control the shopping experience to a degree even if to the point of using so called 'dark patterns' to drive some impulse purchases or steer customers toward higher margin items in the category.

That is consumer selling and has been since probably some ancient farmer bartering with his neighbor suggested he'd take fewer animal skins if the other guy agreed to accept some of the squash that had already gone a bit soft over the fresher merchandise.

Does big tech, take that probably way to far - I think the answer is likely yes, but how far that is and how they should be restrained is really a different conversation.

The separate question is should Amazon have to let Meta (or anyone else) step in and completely separate Amazon's own customers from interacting with the store front Amazon wants to present to them? I think the answer to that really should be no.

The reason it should be no is not to protect Amazon but because as much influence as they have in the retail space (maybe to much) think how much influence a handful of frontier model AI providers might get in terms of determining product selection etc if shopping via AI bot becomes the nominal consumer expectation.

Would be lovely if they could take a breath and spend a release fixing Dr. Konqui or Akonadi or whatever crashes that show up a few times a month for me (regardless of hardware).

This has been going on for half of its 30-yr release cycle.

I must admit ignorance of how this can persist for so long. FLOSS developers typically obsess over stability but seemingly not in the KDE culture.

I used to install symbols and submit bug reports but they're not interested if you're not running the latest tip.

Not that there is an obvious better DE right now. XFCE could stop corrupting its preferences files too. I used to have a script to restore a config from a previous ZFS snapshot when it self destructed but that gets old too.

If I'm building a device for production I'll use something simple like openbox/devilspie2 to get stability.

Lots of folks seem to get fed up and start a new project but momentum is a real thing. I hear Omarchy is stable and not withering but tiles just aren't my thing. More power to those who love them.

The simplest explanation is usually the correct one, and in this case, given what I've seen people do with AI, and given my own experience with Claude Code (Opus and Fable models), the normal human inclination to trust it's probably right and click OK is by far the most likely explanation. And remember that frontier models have grown increasingly better over the last year, and one of the newest improvements is that the reasoning models use two models in an adversarial mode where the second model checks and challenges the output of the first. The timeline of the events in Iran probably indicate that this was an older AI model without those newer advances. I can totally believe this story. When consumers were expected to keep their hands on the wheel of self-driving cars, I absolutely knew they wouldn't, and when humans are told to check the conclusions of AI, they mostly just click OK. I do actually look at the code that Claude generates before it goes into our codebase, and I can tell you, the desire to just skim read is real.

NSA has a better ring to it than A.I. Force.

Being in a psychiatric hospital for an indeterminate period, sitting in a wheelchair wondering when Nurse Ratchet is going to get around to changing your diaper isn't exactly "Getting Off", just saying.

please take your dumps on the toilet, not in the comment section

One man's "gate-keeping" was everyone else's curating. The old model printing and distribution was a very real cost, usually two large to be borne by an author and certainly by a new author. The primary sales channels also had a premium on space, you can only put some many books on shelves low enough for customers to browse, their are only so many end aisles privilege products with placement showing more than their spine, and the story with magazine racks wasn't much different.

So the publishes provided enormous value to retail by both ensuring quality control, and filtering for what the public wanted to buy or was worth convicing the public they wanted to by thru various literary reviews, direct advertising, etc.

Digital has removed the *need* (and many of the retailers with that).

The question is was and remains how much value was the curating, QA to the consumer. We were reading/listening to better content because of the filter and not wasting on time on drek, alternatively what price were we paying for the gate-keeping aspect in terms of not hearing voices and ideas that might have proven interesting. What is the cost of the fan out. When everyone was pulling from the selection on the shelf at the local Books-A-Million, Dalton, or library shelf, there was good chance of running into someone who'd read the same thing you did. Now - FAT chance if someone actually read something it was probably a substack, or some Kindle E-book by someone you never heard of.. As with water-cooler television even if what we are consuming is very good the opportunity to have any local discourse about or discourse within your own social circles whatever form they take is nil because you must first convince someone else to make the investment in it.

It certainly is having an effect on social discourse and how ideas advance and change in our society and I think very likely calcify because their is no collective train of thought. As to the topic at and AI is just going to pour gasoline on all of this, it will absolutely eat the proofing, editing, polishing value the traditional publisher can still add in the ebook era. The incentive for various retail channels to 'stock' the stuff of least providence will be huge, if an algorithm can see sell Christine Middle Schooler another book about sparkling vampires and her Dad another story about manning a first generation aircraft carrier in the Pacific, she likes those and so does he, and they can pick from ones with almost no royalty/residual attached, more profit for them. If AI can make those good enough to get them to come back for more; what need for a traditional publishing house is there, that would pay the bills anyway?

 

Spot on, well said.

Also his family is invested in these zany ventures and 'can't' lose out.

Making them part of the MIC ensures endless graft.

Ted Postol has a good analysis of the Patriot PAC-3 and shows how the vendor has failed to tell the truth about their systems for decades while collecting endless taxpayer funds based on the lies.

Soldiers die, we get poor, they get rich. Zoomers aren't having any of it.

You've apparently not worked in "developer heavy" companies before.

Nobody gives a shit about operations, generally.

...Modern ejector seats cause spinal injuries from which full recovery is "unusual". Smashing the spines of pilots might not be the most effective way to boost morale.

$22,000 per hour. The F35 will be nearer $42,000 per hour. These are under-estimates, as they do not include price hikes, crashes that close businesses, crashing into businesses, crashing into heavily-populated sports centres, etc.

My late wife did undergraduate research in photosystem II where there was quantum effects back in 2002. She did her PhD thesis on proton coupled electron transfer (PCET) in soybean lipoxogenase, then had a long career developing models for Fortran code that did quantum simulation of proteins (she was behind Tagdock in Amber MD). This is nothing new; several biological systems have quantum effects that are central to their mechanism.