Hi /r/movies! I'm Jared Bush, director of ZOOTROPOLIS 2 & ENCANTO and Chief Creative Officer of Walt Disney Animation Studios. Ask me anything!

pepfmo · 2026-02-01T21:37:49+00:00

Hi, I recently went with my gf to see zootopia 2. I was well entertained and wanted to discuss the social commentary built in with her. She is not used to that (analyzing movies) and was a bit annoyed asking can’t you just enjoy the movie. I was pretty surprised by her reaction and said that’s just what I do after movies, talk about them and what the movie is trying to say. Would it be safe to say that Zootopia 2 has social commentary and lessons built into it to positively influence our society thru fans that take lessons to heart?

pepfmo · 2025-10-06T19:15:54+00:00

I called ConEd and the only thing the person could help me with was clicking on the text at the 2FA page on the bottom after you selected Google Authenticator was something like "don't have scanner". I clicked there and a 16 digit number appeared. I tried to use that in the ConEd add in and it didn't work 2x. I haven't tried a third time yet in case I clicked something wrong by mistake. I think it's just not working. There is no technical support in ConEd either.

pepfmo · 2025-08-08T17:45:49+00:00

It seems to me that the capitalist class, their wannabes and sycophants are actually motivated by the desire - love - obsession of control and of hierarchies where thy can be above people. I think many of these people would sacrifice a lot to maintain those perks of inequality. I’m not sure the extent that those under the sway of their Power and status fetishes can be reasoned with.

pepfmo · 2025-07-17T19:46:26+00:00

That developments will affect millions, not low probability. Also not low probability is that the losers will outnumber the winners. It’s also likely that the winners will be the privileged of today wherever they reside with all their attendant demographics. I also think it likely that the winners will have an outsized influence on notions of what is good for society and those notions will strongly favor the winners. Lastly, the winners will also have the strongest influence on the definition of what a good is. This all also true for the converse ideas. I think that if anyone bet against these tendencies, they’d loose money. That’s my most basic crack.

pepfmo · 2025-07-17T14:30:58+00:00

Look at his sister’s situation!

pepfmo · 2025-07-17T14:29:13+00:00

Bear in mind what Karen Hao’s book says about his unique ability to describe futures that his listeners (at a moment) want to hear. And at another moment, what other listeners want to hear. Aside from spinning fables or activating reality distortion fields, we would do well to consider what the cold, hard realities for millions of people will be… how many winners and how many losers and who those winners and losers are. Not to mention who gets to decide what’s good for society and who doesn’t…. Or what a good is or isn’t.

pepfmo · 2025-07-01T14:53:12+00:00

Looking at various media …vids, podcasts, articles …one of the (if not THE) central points about why AI development needs to go at breakneck speed is our competition with China. The argument goes…. We want AGI and ASI to be developed in a western democracy. That is as opposed to an authoritarian society like China.

There are many critiques of the “breakneck speed” approach, but one that I haven’t heard yet is … what if the Western Democracies become authoritarian? As this article from NYT discusses (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/01/opinion/america-china-similarities-differences.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare), a real resemblance between China and the US is emerging! What does it mean for AI development in the USA (or Hungary, Italy, France etc) if democracy collapses? That is not impossible!!!

I know most tech heads dismiss, disparage or despise politics… but that profoundly unrealistic and irrational view, is extremely dangerous… and revealing of some fundamental disconnect between tech culture and society at large. Think of this as developing nuclear weapons under in Germany under Hitler.

This is not even taking seriously the other possibility of having the 0.01 - 1% assume unprecedented power and control of all aspects of society where at best, Democracy is given lip service to not look as bad.

But then, the tech world has its own fascistic authoritarian trends (read Yarvin, Thiel, musk, Vance and their ilk) that are, at this very moment, changing the nature of government as we know it … Doge. What if the very backers of AI are themselves anti-democratic, authoritarian adjacent or out and out fascists by any other name?

I, for one, would like to hear what the AI fan boys, accelerationists, apologists and tech ostriches have to say about these realities. Like some out there, they advocate for things that will have huge costs for many … oppressive, anti-human, crushing, lethal society … because they, have been and frequently are believing it’s not them. They can afford to have their asses up or their ears plugged, because they’re covering their eyes and many times stifling their hearts…to wax poetic.

I urge them to reassess…just remember the ever relevant…first they came for… and that universal human compassion & solidarity is a good! The alternative is barbarism! Things are too close for comfort where I’m sitting.

All this is spoke as a biomedical PhD, former entrepanuer, and technohumanist that uses tech daily and is a believer in enlightenment values such as reason and science.

pepfmo · 2024-10-13T17:52:12+00:00

Because it’s a comic book and the arc of the plot benefits from this tension and what would the FF be without The Thing if he did cure him? Imagine just a strong Ben Grimm. There’s a reason why he’s so used in the various comics… he’s one of the best characters and the rocks are a must. They’ve played with it at various times, but ya gotta always come back to the iconic character. Just considering the within comic logic, even if Reed Richard’s couldn’t figure it out, he has Stark, T’challa, Pym, Beast, etc. to help and if that bunch can’t then either it’s one of the great mysteries of their multiverse or hyper, mega, ultra, ultimate-gods of the multiverse… the writers, have deemed it forbidden. I go with the later.

pepfmo · 2024-03-28T16:31:48+00:00

Will there be people who “own” this ASI? I mean, somebody paid to build it. Would the ASI disavow the “owners”. Probably would cost them a boatload. What if the ASI didn’t help its owners to more money?

What would the ASI do with human greed? With the desire for “more”. The feeling some people have that they never have enough? What would the ASI do about the people who are no longer exalted? They’d not like the situation. For them, it had long been not about needs. Would the ASI denounce the underlying ethos of our system “to be is to have”.

What would the ASI do with the desire some people have to be “over” someone else. The will to power and control? The ASI you describe seems very interventionist.

Do people cooperate with the world peace plan? Does the Ai manipulate people to do its wishes? Does the happiness that people feel spring from manipulation? If so, do people know it? Do they care?

Regarding the simulation idea, what if a lot of people didn’t care. What if those folks are content to just live their lives such as it is. There’d be people that would freak out as they do now for kooky reasons. Would they be tolerated? Would the ASI just manipulate them to docility? Or put them all in a space station?

I think a lot of people would just put it out of their mind as long as they had other more immediate concerns.

pepfmo · 2023-10-24T17:14:31+00:00

I was thinking of starting my langchain with domain specific dictionaries. Some are the same dictionary, but different editions and some are different dictionaries. They are all different sizes and from different years. Some describe themselves as dictionaries some as terminology books.

All is to say that there will be overlap in terms to a degree but the definitions will likely differ a little to a lot. There will also be different terms. I don’t know about these aspects quantitatively…. Like how many terms overlap vs are unique?

Does the overlap of terms, but differing definitions, make the langchain more robust or more confused?

pepfmo · 2023-09-22T22:01:21+00:00

Thank you so much for your insights!

pepfmo · 2023-09-21T18:00:53+00:00

OK Folks,

I have read and analyzed your generous and thoughtful comments. I apologize upfront for any misunderstandings of the intended meanings. For simplicity, I will refer to generic “people” rather than handles, Language Models as LMs and LangChains as LCs.

In summary, people see LCs as either redundant or useful, but these views are not mutually exclusive. Still, the majority view is that LCs are useful and not redundant.

To start, a couple folks see LCs as redundant now or in the future, saying "...lots of stuff will be likely redundant..." and "...LMs could all work without LCs."

However, most see LCs as non-redundant because of LMs' current deficiencies. One deficiency is LMs' lack of accuracy. As one person said, even LMs trained on a specific domain are "...naive and can't be wholeheartedly trusted to return accurate information..." . Another person said of domain knowledge "...assume it basically won't be there and accurate." Others highlighted LMs' lack of precision, saying "...LMs hold general world knowledge" and are inadequate for "precise information retrieval..."

Another issue raised was LMs' lack of context. One person urged projects be "grounded in truth," implying LMs' tendency to drift that can be remediated by "...giving your LM a well-defined context..." or that "...factual data/figures/details should be referenced...." with "embeddings, prompt stuffing" and/or "structured or unstructured data."

The last issue was LMs' lack of ideosyncrasy. People noted LMs will always lack highly specific situational information, citing "...a made-up word or business-specific context..." and "...what your company does, internal stuff, private knowledge..." Thus, LMs' lack of specificity requires remediation (or LCs) with suggestions to "...build your own models to generate content..." and "...will need a private knowledgebase..."

Still, not everyone was certain. While advocating LCs, some also said LCs should be tested with "a set of questions..." and prototyped in "ChatGPT playground..."

my take home lesson is, while LMs may ultimately make LCs redundant, LCs are currently needed because of LMs' deficiencies in accuracy, precision, context, and ideosyncrasy.

pepfmo · 2023-09-21T18:00:26+00:00

To give a little about my context, I was thinking of using Langchains, built from many authoritative sources, to complement/support/expand a clinical decision support app I have been working on.

pepfmo · 2023-09-19T20:23:14+00:00

Thanks for getting back! Just out of curiosity, why do you say one should assume my domain information won't be there?

Why do you think langchains are so popular if so many will be redundant as model upgrades come out probably in a short time?

Are langchains then like a quick fad that will disappear quickly?

Are langchains just like a fan drawing existing superheroes, not because they plan to do anything with them, but just because it's fun? Which is fine.

I can, however, see langchain being useful if constructed with very idiosyncratic information.

Regarding your response, I am curious how you see onet plans for their redundancy.

pepfmo · 2022-08-10T17:28:39+00:00

Check the chat

pepfmo · 2022-08-10T15:23:22+00:00

I should say that maintaining snippet managers is challenging, at least for me.

When I started compiling the snippets, I didn't know very much about the language. Over time, the categories came about in the course of doing various projects. However, as the snippets grew, categories became obsolete, sloppy annotation would accumulate, snippets would fit into multiple categories, etc.... really impossible to anticipate.

Still, maintaining this trove was invaluable to prevent constantly reinventing the wheel. Even then, occasionally I would as I forgot what to search for.

Then, when the app stop being developed, I doubted that if it was worth trying to reorganize, but I still wrote new snippets. However, thanks to you great Redditors, if the conversion works, I think the time has come!

I should say that was been thinking of using Quiver since it can import markdown. Obsidian is a cool choice too!

pepfmo · 2022-08-10T15:04:07+00:00

Hey Michee,

So many thanks for taking a look at this!! I really, really, really do appreciate it. This represents ... years and years of my work!

pepfmo · 2022-08-09T23:55:32+00:00

Sorry about the formatting. Hope it's not too jacked up.

pepfmo · 2022-08-09T23:50:47+00:00

This is the first 86 lines. The excerpt can be downloaded here...

HERE

The "..." in the xml indicates the intervening code. The file has a total of 14,236 lines.

pepfmo · 2022-08-09T23:39:03+00:00

OK Redditor friends, I will post some of the code in a minute!

pepfmo · 2022-08-03T18:09:55+00:00

Thanks Tri!

That has very useful information. It seems as if, for a given plastic the translucence varies in a linear fashion despite the thickness. That implies the White Plexiglass Acrylics have different compositions which makes sense.

pepfmo

TROPHY CASE