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I bet it’s as simple as Nolan just wanting the biggest screen and biggest film negative he could practically get his hands on without inventing a whole new format. I do wonder if we’ll see him try to add anamorphic lenses to 15/70 IMAX at some point to try to make it widescreen again, which would be crazy (in a mad scientist way).

Also, I am kinda frustrated that he pushes for large formats so much and yet lights everything so plainly. I’d love to see him go for a more high-contrast lighting scheme like we saw in typical Hollywood movies in the 80s and 90s.

Asimov seems to have missed that the book does not claim that everyone is being watched at all times, but that everyone could be watched at any time, in any place, and that they have no way to know for sure if they are at any given moment. Therefore, they have to behave as if they are under surveillance at all times, just in case. It’s a very effective and practical means of control. See the famous panopticon concept. You don’t even need a guard in the tower, just the threat of one most of the time, and occasional random, unpredictable enforcement just often enough that the surveilled cannot relax. The cost of doing so is not impractical at all.

Asimov is missing an important point that is pretty clearly spelled out in the novel, and this severely weakens his critique. I find this pretty funny because he starts off the essay insinuating that others who claim to love the book haven’t read it. Same to you for hating it without having understood it, Asimov!

*BSD is dying! You don’t have to be Kreshkin…

But seriously, if one counts macOS and iOS as FreeBSD users, there are more than ever. Of course that means counting Android and Steam as Linux OSes, in which case Linux users still greatly outnumber FreeBSD users.

Why would the doomsayers be the ones who need to answer that? That’s kind of their point! It’s the AI boosters who need to answer that, and so far it’s just a big collective shrug + silence.

> Several commenters suggested the original essay was written by an LLM. They were half right. Both that essay and this one were written with Claude as a drafting partner. I directed the argument; the LLM helped with prose.

That’s all well and good, but I think he needs to take a closer look at some of the resulting prose and clarify a little more. Most of it is good, but there are some unclear statements, like this (right after his descriptions of “Camp A” and “Camp B”):

> Sutton says Camp B wins. My essay was filed under Camp A. But decision theory belongs to neither camp.

The second sentence quoted above doesn’t specify, but I’m pretty sure it means that it was filed under Camp A by the commenters, and incorrectly at that. If so, it would probably read better as:

> Sutton says Camp B wins. Commenters seemed to file my essay under Camp A, and then dismissed it. But that’s incorrect; decision theory belongs to neither camp.

Or something along those lines.

I honestly think this isn’t nit-picky feedback, either. This is a crucial set of sentences which appear to lay out the main point of the essay, so it’s vitally important that they be clear … who “filed” it as a particular camp, and was that correct or incorrect? It should be revised to convey that, as well as better connecting that to what incorrect conclusions might have been drawn from that. The information can be gleaned from the surrounding context of course, but I found that crucial sentence to throw off the flow what was otherwise a really great essay.

> But, the pro-legalization folks would argue patently crazy things: it cures cancer, the smoke isn't bad for you at all, there are no downsides! etc.

Who seriously claimed that it “cures cancer”? There have been some claims that it helps alleviate nausea associated with chemotherapy, which is quite reasonable and will likely be proved out by evidence over time.

Really … who genuinely claimed it “cures” cancer?

Let’s not lose sight of the fact that he piggybacked on a large company’s name recognition by originally calling it “clawd”, clearly intending it to be confused with Claude. I have my doubts it would have gone anywhere without that.

The worst is Reddit these days.

I pretty much never even went there for technical topics at all, just funny memes and such, but one day recently I started seeing crazy AI hype stories getting posted, and sadly I made a huge mistake and I clicked on one once, and now it’s all I get.

Endless posts from subs like r/agi, r/singularity, as well as the various product specific subs (for Claude, OpenAI, etc). These aren’t even links to external articles, these are supposedly personal accounts of someone being blown away by what the latest release of this or that model or tool can do. Every single one of these posts boils down to some irritating “game over for software engineers” hype fest, sometimes with skeptical comments calling out the clearly AI-generated text and overblown claims, sometimes not. Usually comments pointing out flaws in whatever’s being hyped are just dismissed with a hand wave about how the flaw may have been true at one time, but the latest and greatest version has no such flaws and is truly miraculous, even if it’s just a minor update for that week. It’s always the same pattern.

There’s clearly a lot of astroturfing going on.

This feels like a narrative being pushed. Tech oligarchs these days are flexing by showing off how much they are able to bully government, and Altman wants to get in on the game by spinning things this way. I’m not convinced they really bent the rules for OpenAI any more than usual given they only employ a few hundred people.

It was a comment revealing his attitude towards what would soon become his customers in a globally-impactful business over which he has sole control. It’s more relevant than ever today.

Wow. The 2019 novel “The Last Astronaut” hypothesized about a fictional interstellar object coming into the solar system, called “2I” in the novel for short, but back here in real life, we’re already up to 3I.

Agree, as someone who has spent way too much time studying the way motion picture film looks up close, this isn’t very realistic looking. It’s really just a form of dithering.