I see the future of movies as being AI-generated, with viewers providing scripts, actors, directors, and whatever else they care about, either their own or rented. You'll choose everything and the AI will generate it real time. You'll be able to adjust parameters on the fly -- funnier, darker, more introspective, more action -- overall or per actor. You'll be able to talk to the characters, provide real and misleading clues to detectives, tell the AI to throw in a car accident or a broken sidewalk just to see the characters react to it and change the story for a few seconds.

It will certainly be possible within 50 years. Might be possible within 25 years. What it will do is destroy top actors' salaries. Why rent some famous actor's visage for $5 when you can make one up from scratch or pick some new actor for $1?

You'll also be able to remake old movies. There are stories about famous movies who had to settle for an actor because their first choice was unavailable or too expensive; so change to their first choice, see how it changes everything. They'll be out of copyright and cheap, and probably have a dozen businesses offering their own take on the same actor.

It's going to relegate live actors to stage work, which may or may not be live streamed. The days of $10 million acting gigs will be over. And actors won't be nearly as insufferable pontificating on things they think they learned from roles.

When I say "sweater" I mean a pullover....down here mostly just simple cotton sweaters, not terribly heavy....

They just turn off your water heater.

What good does turning the gas off to the water heater do....?

If you can cope at 12C in a T-shirt ... up to you, I wear a real jacket and a scarf.

Ugh...had to get on ChatGPT and find out what the fuck 12C was in F.

Ok, so about 54F...roughly. That's cool...I guess depends a bit on how high your humidity is. In the New Orleans area, it can be 54F and very humid...if the wind is coming in off the lake it can be quite chilly....but if lower humidity, more into winter months,...that's not too cold...I'd be wearing a sweater or a jacket....not both.

Last week it was high-90's and low 100's along the central coast (Santa Cruz & Monterey). It cooled down at night, but I also don't have A/C because I almost never need it, maybe for 3-5 days every 3-4 years it would be appreciated.

You can't get a couple window units to have AC when you need it?

You can put them up and take them down pretty readily......better than baking/roasting on those days when you really don't need to.

Then allow me to annoy you more, asshole!

Spent decades in North Dakota and Alaska.
Yes, 0C was still T-Shirt and Shorts weather until I got over 45 or so.
Went back to college, saw a dude still in shorts and tshirt at ~-20F, which is getting close to -20C.

I've now spent ~4 years in Florida, have worn pants like once.

Not always, it depends on the situation. If you don't have stock in the company, if your boss doesn't respect you, if other companies in the region/industry are the same, then these factors weigh towards a union.

Again, it depends on the situation. If someone else is already forming a union, lending your support to it is lightweight.

Indeed, he may have better luck waiting a couple years and donating to the campaign of president Warren.

There are two rational responses to an abusive employer:

1) Leave.
2) Join a union.

Which one is best depends on the circumstances.

They're all motivated reasoning, you shouldn't take them too seriously.

That is, they start with the conclusion they want, then say whatever they think will confuse/convince you the most.

You can't patent an idea, you can only patent an implementation of an idea.

Talk shows have been exempt from the equal time law right up until 2026.

Not quite true....

NEWS shows are exempt.....talk shows and other entertainment shows most decidedly are not exempt.

"Queue" -> "Cue"

The compute cost for DeepSeek V3 was $5.6M. Training costs for traditional US frontier labs model is about $70 to $200M+, with estimates of up to $1B+ to train the next generation models. It's expensive, but it's not even in the ballpark of "There is no viable economic model to do so." Google revenue in Q2 was $1.32 billion *per day*. $1B is trivially less than a day; $5.6M is just 6 minutes of revenue.

The cost problem is in the compute buildout and the subsidized compute to capture users.

> It remains to be seen if even using their models can be profitable,

I presume we can stipulate there exists some tasks that are cheaper to do using an LLM than doing it "by hand". As a such, using an LLM model can be profitable. To me, it is also obvious that the business of serving an LLM model can be profitable. There's large benefits to being able to get tokens quickly, and you can expect people to pay for that, even if we presume they could run the model locally with no maintenance overhead. There's even cases where using the cloud is cheaper than you can serve locally at all - I saw one guy that measured his added cost of electricity when his computer ran a specific LLM, and it was more expensive to run it locally than to buy tokens from the cheapest inference provider for the same model, presumably because they had better hardware and cheaper electricity.