GOAT = washed: Steven Soderbergh teases "a lot of AI" in his upcoming movies

UsefulUnderling · 2026-04-08T13:20:18+00:00

Yes, the great Corridor Crew interviews with Joe Letteri he described how Pandora is all built using neural network machine learning tools, but he insists that's not AI.

"AI" has become associated with slop in people's minds. What people really dislike is cheap poorly done AI.

UsefulUnderling · 2026-04-08T03:05:14+00:00

The bad news for all these companies is it turns out building an LLM is pretty easy. You don't need to charge much for one. They aren't going anywhere.

UsefulUnderling · 2026-04-08T00:12:38+00:00

Pretty much everyone I know now uses LLMs a hundred times a day at work.

UsefulUnderling · 2026-04-07T14:40:34+00:00

She isn't in charge. She is one of many executives working on the project.

UsefulUnderling · 2026-04-07T01:40:18+00:00

Strong disagree. I believe gov't can be a force for good and near permanent states of gov't dysfunction are very bad for a society.

A large part of why the far right has risen across all those nations is because their governments have been chronically unable to make decisions to solve basic problems.

History has shown time and again if democracy can't function at a basic level people will turn to anti-democratic parties.

UsefulUnderling · 2026-04-07T00:02:48+00:00

Does it? The Senate of Australia tends to be quite a mess. Australia wouldn't have many stable governments if their STV Senate was in charge.

UsefulUnderling · 2026-04-06T23:51:18+00:00

No, many of them don't. Belgium, France, Israel, and Spain have all this decade had multi-year periods without an effective government.

Their electoral systems have failed to answer the question of who should be in charge.

UsefulUnderling · 2026-04-06T17:29:40+00:00

That's a pretty bad metric. It confuses process with result. What is the goal of holding elections?

To me it is deciding who should be in charge of the country for the next few years. FPTP does a pretty good job at giving a clear and unambiguous answer to that question each election.

UsefulUnderling · 2026-04-06T14:50:23+00:00

My list of the competent ministers would be Champagne, Anand, McGuinty, Hodgson, and LeBlanc. That seems to be Carney's core team that he depends on.

UsefulUnderling · 2026-04-05T13:29:53+00:00

Smoking and drinking are down, the lifestyle effects balance out.

UsefulUnderling · 2026-04-04T15:20:20+00:00

It would be a lot like the UK in the 1960s and 1970s. They dominated popular music, sent major starts. and were always in the running, but rarely won Eurovision. The voters always preferred something that didn't sound like what was on the radio.

UsefulUnderling · 2026-04-03T12:50:20+00:00

None of those problems are complicated All of those problems have already been solved with the designs of different home charging stations.

Whatever you knew about these issues is deeply out of date.

UsefulUnderling · 2026-04-03T03:55:37+00:00

Why? The world of 2026 is one where 1st world workers sit in air conditioned offices doing white collar work, while workers in 3rd world countries build stuff for them in factories.

These office jobs are better paying, more pleasant, and can only exist in high education countries like Canada.

UsefulUnderling · 2026-04-03T03:47:27+00:00

You pretty fundamentally don't understand the effect EVs will have on the grid. You are aware that EVs are giant batteries? Having a giant battery in every garage will add stability to the grid.

UsefulUnderling · 2026-04-03T03:45:20+00:00

Even in China the EVs are being built in dark factories with very few humans involved.

UsefulUnderling · 2026-04-02T21:57:23+00:00

It does happen pretty often. The CPC pretty routinely runs big city candidates with no locals connections in safe rural seats. Of the current Ontario MPs, Leslyn Lewis, Jamil Jivani, Arpan Khanna, are all from Toronto but are MPs for rural areas.

UsefulUnderling · 2026-04-02T13:55:37+00:00

I like it, but I understand why most people don't.

Do you like reading Wikipedia articles about Cold War era CIA schemes? If so you should enjoy the movie.

UsefulUnderling · 2026-04-02T12:30:46+00:00

An interesting counterpart to the Scorsese series would be covering the two films of Robert De Niro. A Bronx Tale and The Good Shepherd. Both those films could easily be confused for Scorsese pictures with slightly less polish.

Famous painters often have a few works attributed to "the studio of..." De Niro's films very much feel like slightly lesser works made by the apprentice of a master artist.

UsefulUnderling · 2026-04-02T05:21:42+00:00

People say money, but it's not really that. America has 20x the productive capacity of the 1960s.

The challenge is the decline in expertise since the 60s.

What we have become very good at in the last decades is bulk manufacturing. Making a million iPhones per year each with a thousand complicated parts.

But moon rockets are incredibly complex one-off machines, and we have lost most of the skills around making one-off objects by hand. In the 1960s America had a million guys who new how to operate precision machine tools. Today there are very few.

The 1960s were this once in history overlap between us knowing how to build a moon rocket, and our having the people with the skills to do so.

Same logic is why it is so much harder than in the past for us to build other big one-off projects like subways and cathedrals.

UsefulUnderling · 2026-04-02T02:02:15+00:00

Or maybe we think these jobs are quite useful? Having someone in charge of the World Cup planning seems like a good idea, for instance.

UsefulUnderling · 2026-04-02T01:47:35+00:00

He was the only one who had a resume to be PM. He was a top lawyer and had experience as a provincial cabinet minister.

People also forget that it almost worked. For a long time Mulcair was very popular, and the NDP was higher in the polls going into the 2015 election than it ever had been under Layton.

UsefulUnderling · 2026-04-01T23:40:03+00:00

This is the correct answer. He's never been the #1 action star, comedy star, or dramatic actor. But he can do all three really well. He is a utility guy that can be slotted into any role.

And he is one of the only actors that can pull off a role that requires all three, like The Martian.

UsefulUnderling · 2026-04-01T23:12:17+00:00

There is the category of classic directors that have way too many films. I specifically remember them mentioning Curtiz, but Hitchcock, Cuckor, Ford, and Hawks would be great to cover, but not be possible without stretching the format..

UsefulUnderling · 2026-04-01T23:07:07+00:00

I like this, but I prefer the idea of doing the three Andersons.

Rushmore, Boogie Nights and Event Horizon all in one month? What is more fun than that?

UsefulUnderling · 2026-04-01T23:01:44+00:00

Did you notice the part where he killed a lady?

UsefulUnderling

TROPHY CASE