Notices by Rod Hilton (rodhilton@mastodon.social), page 6

Used to be that if a giant bridge collapsed, you'd be able to hop on Twitter and read all about it, the rescue efforts, what happened, all as information was being uncovered. It was the place to go for a major news story, people would be tweeting new info and it would all be gathered under the heading 'Francis Scott Key Bridge'...

Someone with a blue checkmark and a history of white supremacist Likes on Twitter is going to convince Elon to buy out Truth Social

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/02/29/truth-social-lawsuit-trump-media-founders/

Just imagining "surge pricing" coming to Netflix.

It boggles my mind that the url is still Twitter. Do they not know how to make it X? It's been months.

@andypiper @_calmdowndear yeah the api still exists, it's just insanely expensive. I don't know if anyone is using it, I think they talked about carving out an Academic policy for cheap usage but I'm not sure if it happened and if it did I imagine that was closed down after a paper or two about toxicity on the platform.

Trump is a real-life infinite money glitch
https://www.newsweek.com/e-jean-carroll-donald-trump-sue-third-1871400

Can't help but notice all the "The Marvels tanked because it requires too much homework, a movie and two shows!" are kinda weirdly silent about Deadpool 3 requiring 2 seasons of Loki and 13 X-men films.

All that OpenAI did was match the prompt text to its stolen video corpus to find an existing video that matched the prompt. Then it ruined it enough to be no longer violating copyright, and then they bragged about it.

Gen AI has done a lot of fleecing but the Sora announcement may be the worst one yet.

How much carbon was dumped into the atmosphere to add extra fingers to its training videos?

"How did AI video generation get so good in only a year?!?!"

Oh, that's easy. The impressive Sora videos you've watched are just existing videos, with tiny alterations applied.

I fact, the weird AI nonsense you see are the changes. The AI just made the videos worse.

Somewhere out there are videos of a lady walking in Japan at night, dogs playing in the snow, and a cat waking up it's owner. Sora took them, added weird looking stuff, and OpenAI posted the results.

https://x.com/bcmerchant/status/1758537510618304669?s=20

Paramount kept a full staff on hand and worked everyone under stressful conditions, kept folks on-call to ensure the Superbowl could be streamed on their service, had record viewership numbers and then immediately laid off 800 of the people who gave them that success the next day so that the executive leadership could pocket all the profits without sharing it with the labor force who built it.

Seriously. Eat the rich.

https://deadline.com/2024/02/paramount-global-layoffs-begin-ceo-bob-bakish-1235824028/

The entire thing comes off like a child whose school project is to interview a relative, and so he picks his older brother.

And his goal in the interview is to get the older brother to show how cool he is, and then say that the interviewer is also cool, so that he can show his class that he's cool.

But the older brother *hates* the younger brother, doesn't give a fuck what his class thinks of him OR his sibling, and sees no way that sitting down for it even serves his own purposes.

Tucker keeps trying to wrestle the discussion back to his own right-wing talking points and criticisms of Biden, which his usual guests pick up on and play into, but Putin either has no interest in doing that or the bait is lost in translation and he doesn't see what Tucker is setting him up to do.

Fundamentally Putin doesn't seem to give a fuck about affecting political discourse in the U.S. or what the U.S. public thinks, which is the ONLY thing Carlson cares about.

The Tucker Carlson interview with Putin is one of the funniest things I've ever seen.

Tucker's demeanor is just like he and Putin are old friends. Like he desperately wanted to come off like Putin's pal and this is just a casual discussion, like anyone that's ever come on his show that is aligned with him politically.

But Putin's answers are all with Tucker as a representative of the enemy, the United States.

It's the most awkward shit captured on video, true how-do-you-do-fellow-kids cringe.

Hey hey Putin remember that time we were riding bikes and you did that cool jump and then I did it too?

"You still ride bikes? And I'm pretty sure I remember that you fell off and cried when you did that jump."

Uh.. no.. I.. uh remember I made the jump too and you said it was so cool and you were proud of me?

"No I think you scraped your knee and told me to go get mom."

Um.. can we cut this part?

"For some reason, no. You're actually going to show the video like this."

Best part is when it ends and Tucker thinks he's going to rizz Putin into releasing journalist Evan Gerahkovich. I'm sure Tucker thought Putin was just going to let him do it to show his viewers that he's not such a monster after all, and then Tucker gets to go home a hero for doing "what Biden could not"

And instead Putin told him to slurp down a bag of shit and fuck off out of Moscow. Gave him nothing, told him to waddle home empty handed and he doesn't give a fuck what his viewers think.

This is art

I think I just fundamentally don't see it as impressive to direct a movie like The Holdovers and earn a Best Picture nom for it.

It's such a formulaic and predictable story, as soon as I read the description I knew exactly the story beats that would be hit.

It's really great, but it's a really great version of the same tired story that is a shoo-in for an Oscar nom. I feel the same way about Maestro and, yes, even Oppenheimer. Destined for a nomination by nature. You'd have to snatch defeat.

On the other hand, turning something like Barbie, Godzilla Minus One, or even Poor Things into something worthy of a nomination is an extraordinary achievement.

Destined for failure from the get-go. At best, maybe a cult following among a certain audience. To elevate these kinds of films to the level of what something like The Holdovers just earns by birthright is to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Something like Maestro is built with a sort of Oscar Privilege from the get-go.

For a long time, the best-performing tech companies have had an engineering culture that stressed mentorship, having senior/staff folks doing "glue work", force multipliers, etc.

I remember distinctly hearing the phrase "automate yourself out of a job."

There was a very real sense that the best engineers were striving to train and teach more junior folks and build automations to improve efficiency.

You're going to see that vanish now.

I really think all these tech companies are going to be in rough shape when the other shoe drops.

Yes, right now, it's making a lot of sense to their bottom line. Record-breaking profits can surely be even more record-breaking if you slice headcount. Yes, a correction after pandemic hiring is likely in order.

But fostering an industry culture where everyone is afraid of being laid off all the time is not going to work out well long term.