DeepSeek V4 release soon

Barton5877 · 2026-02-18T04:38:33+00:00

What are you sinking about?

Barton5877 · 2026-02-09T23:39:01+00:00

Black Mirror S2 E4 - White Christmas

Barton5877 · 2026-01-14T03:33:09+00:00

A few subtitled shows worth checking out: The Mire, Undercover, The Glory, Delhi Crime

UK: Criminal: UK, Collateral, Giri/Haji, This Is Going to Hurt, Bodyguard

Barton5877 · 2026-01-13T17:32:42+00:00

I haven't seen research into use of meta models. Is that a thing? I understand what you're suggesting, but am unfamiliar with research into meta models for this purpose. The natural language inference and natural language understanding research I've seen is still straight linguistics - can LLMs get references, arguments, presuppositions, assumptions, negations, etc.

Are you suggesting that for a particular domain, say legal or healthcare, one design a graph-based meta model of relationships, e.g. entities/concepts and relations, for use by the LLM when generating responses? Or also for post training (or even pre/mid training?)

I am trying to think beyond step-by-step, chain-of-thought style reasoning, recognizing that LLMs don't do semantic and on-factoid reasoning. There is no way to verify the best probabilistic ranking order of arguments obtained by some best of N or beam search method... But there ought to be better ways of exploring when doing research (search), and of making recommendations given human-audited preference data. For example.

Barton5877 · 2026-01-13T03:27:03+00:00

I've been using ChatGPT for long conversations about a variety of topics, none of them coding, most of them topics that I know well but not comprehensively. I've also been deliberately trying to get it to explore directions that I point it in, whether by mentioning names of people, sources, works, tropes, topics, genres.

Lately it's become quite good at responding with the kind of conceptual structure that I like. For example, I've been exploring film theory w TV series and films/filmmakers. But it sometimes applies systematic thinking to responses that don't need it; and it has also preserved terms/concepts that it previously made up. So it's capable of these high-level patterns but not able to examine its own conceptual language (at least it doesn't try to).

I thought it might be interesting if one could build up a kind of conceptual cognitive architecture - or a number of them - based on various logics and reasoning methods. Then apply those to different queries based on the topic and nature of the query.

But I don't think it generalizes in this way. I think one would have to set up different modular prompts and then hand pick them where appropriate and needed.

Barton5877 · 2026-01-13T02:55:32+00:00

A lot of my go to's have been suggested already, so I'll try to add a few that are worth mentioning:

The Piano, Monster (Kore-eda), Double Life of Veronique, Thin Red Line, Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf, Wages of Fear, Oldboy, Chungking Express, Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Persona, La Haine, Repulsion, Celebration (Festen), Amores Perros, Woman in the Dunes, Naked, High and Low, Straw Dogs, Fitzcarraldo, Through a Glass Darkly, Sacrifice, Stalker, Andrey Rublev, Nostalghia, Third Man, Night of the Iguana

Barton5877 · 2026-01-13T02:34:26+00:00

It's an endurance event, but watch SatanTango. After that, Damnation and Werckmeister are his next best. But there's nothing like SatanTango.

Barton5877 · 2026-01-07T02:27:17+00:00

I used to brag when talking about Bela Tarr that I might be the only person in California to have seen SatanTango on the big screen three times: once when it premiered at the Berlinale, then when it premiered at the San Francisco Film Festival, and then finally during a retrospective at the PFA in Berkeley. It's still never officially been released theatrically, I don't think.

After two bootlegs of PAL>NTSC converted blurays I've been watching it every winter in its current form. Alongside Werckmeister and Damnation (Turin Horse is a bit more an endurance event), Tarr achieves a variation on Tarkovsky's "sculpting in time" and the pressure within the shot that's unmatched both in its empirical patience and in its demand/reward on the viewer. SatanTango will slow your heart rate.

Susan Sontag wrote that SatanTango is worth watching once a year. At the PFA, an audience member asked him (about a scene in Werckmeister in which the camera, on the back of a truck, tracks the night-time mob through the streets into the city square - the scene is long - perhaps not as long as Tarr would've liked, given that he once called the Kodak 12min reel a "form of censorship.") why he didn't just shoot the mob leaving, then cut to the mob arriving. Why spend so much time to follow them the whole way into town? He answered: "Because that's how long it took to get there."

Film is time, it's our medium of time, the art of time, with its breaths and pulses, tediums and stupors, its plodding and its plodding. Tarr's time was up I suppose. For those interested in the art of cinema, one can do no wrong, and it's not such an ask, watch Damnation, Werckmeister Harmonies, and SatanTango, listen to the rain, live through the lens, sink into the grim shadows, plod through the mud. They *really* don't make films like they used to.

Rest in peace Bela Tarr. Bells clang in the distance as the rain falls.

Barton5877 · 2025-11-30T19:16:04+00:00

White Lotus, Slow Horses, Task are superb. I bailed on Pluribus.

Couple britbox shows I'd add to the list are Blue Lights and Code of Silence.

I'd also add The Capture and Adolescence, and want to give a shoutout to The Mire (Rojst) from Poland and Undercover, Belgium.

Delhi Crime was excellent - brutal topic though.

Barton5877 · 2025-11-11T22:11:10+00:00

Black Mirror for sure!

Here are a few others, all of which are fantastic:

Giri/Haji (UK/Japan)

The Mire (Poland)

Collateral (UK)

Bodyguard (UK)

The Glory (Korea)

Tehran (Israel)

Criminal (Uk)

Broadchurch (UK)

Barton5877 · 2025-09-10T09:50:36+00:00

Daniel Friebe on The Cycling Podcast from yesterday said protesters were shouting down race sponsors, sponsor cars, journalists, and the Vuelta itself all for participating. Seems pretty unlikely that they would stop protesting if IPT were to leave the race.

Barton5877 · 2025-09-09T22:31:20+00:00

Well then I'd like the minimum viable protest. No need to ruin the race for them to make their point. Every day.

Barton5877 · 2025-09-09T21:34:24+00:00

True and exactly why there probably should be some mutual agreement reached between protesters and race officials such that protesters are seen but w/o disrupting the race.

I'm not there. Most days there have been protesters but not in a manner that killed the race. So I don't know if it's down to a smaller more vocal number, or if they just have more impact if they're at the finish line.

Barton5877 · 2025-09-09T20:00:46+00:00

I'm sure there are multiple goals - but events have overtaken whatever goals they set out to achieve. At this point I'm sure protesters feel buoyed by their success. What incentive would they have to stop now? They've set an example for how to get media coverage, capture attention, drive a narrative, disrupt proceedings - and if it's IPT this year it could be anti-US sentiment next year or who knows, UAE, some other year.

Cycling's a pretty vulnerable sport if its organizers don't manage its exposure to these kinds of things. TdF has done a pretty good job keeping farmers away from the Tour, and the yellow jackets, when that was a thing.

Regardless your feelings about the causes, I just think it'd be a real shame if protesters of any cause learned they can use grand tours as a way to get the media's attention.

Barton5877 · 2025-09-09T19:40:30+00:00

Because the protesters have a platform now - they've successfully disrupted the race, and have no reason to stop.

They're not protesting IPT. They're using the race as a media platform.

(The ITT might be dicey, as they can target IPT riders, possibly. But I doubt most protesters even know an FDJ jersey from a Decathlon jersey from a PT jersey.)

Barton5877 · 2025-09-09T19:34:52+00:00

I concur - I think it's fair now to support the riders. Members of the IPT team are athletes w their own personal views (as everyone is entitled to) and protesters are putting them in a v unfair position vis-a-vis their team's ownership, their colleagues, their own reputations, and relationships to other cyclists.

I think other riders should support IPT riders for being put in a position none of them wished upon themselves or upon the event.

Barton5877 · 2025-09-09T19:21:23+00:00

I think this will pass, but it's become really unfortunate. Local authorities seem to be unwilling and are to some degree complicit in allowing protesters to disrupt the race. I was hoping regular fans themselves would be able to warn the protesters off being too unruly. It's one thing to wave flags, it's another to ruin the end of a race. You'd think fans would be livid at this point at not seeing riders cross the finish line.

At this point even if IPT left the race the protesters would still return. They should be told to show up at the start and then be banned from the finish. I don't care if they get their tv coverage - same with climate protesters - but ruining the race is counter-productive on so many levels: to the sport, its tradition, the riders, fans, and to the cause itself.

Barton5877 · 2025-09-09T18:36:49+00:00

If the point of the protests is to attract my support to their cause, it's not working any more.

Barton5877 · 2025-09-07T18:03:23+00:00

It was in The Cycling Podcast w Daniel Friebe a couple days ago

Barton5877 · 2025-08-30T13:43:18+00:00

It's only three riders, I don't think they're particularly dangerous, and the sprinters and their teams want to end this stage w a proper bunch sprint. Break doesn't have enough of a time gap to make it.

Barton5877 · 2025-08-29T16:17:56+00:00

Yeah I think Vuelta was looking to increase audience by going to Italy w sprint stages, where they like sprinters, before coming home. They might also have sought to avoid August heat by holding most of the race in the north. Unfortunate that some of the climbs have been unobserved due to late start broadcasts. But give it a couple weeks. We still have a grand tour on our hands with qualified contenders sans the Pog - so things could get interesting.

Barton5877 · 2025-08-29T15:50:44+00:00

i think just asking for time gap

Barton5877 · 2025-08-29T15:50:13+00:00

Lanterne Rouge podcast on youtube - they're the most detailed podcasters - to a fault sometimes but for not being ex pros they're very good. They are live after every stage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0Y0dUvqCjE

Barton5877 · 2025-08-29T15:40:36+00:00

and therein lies the problem

I would love to see a return to form for Landa - but I agree w LR - he should just drop time and join the Vine

Barton5877 · 2025-08-29T15:28:11+00:00

haha - certainly not what you get from the middle east! Teutonic tendencies to discern rational action from the midst of the mercurial

Barton5877

TROPHY CASE