> Frankenstein and Death by Lightning were two standout successes recently.
IMHO Frankenstein" was pretty terrible. The makeup was awful, the effects were cheap, the monster... wasn't a monster! The entire premise depends on him being a monster, not some sort of misunderstood, sympathetic EMO.
> The entire premise depends on him being a monster, not some sort of misunderstood, sympathetic EMO.
This is a misconception on a similar level to thinking the monster's name is Frankenstein: "As depicted by Shelley, the creature is a sensitive, emotional person whose only aim is to share his life with another sentient being like himself."
Thanks for stating the obvious and I assure you I know the story well. In order for the entire premise to work, there needs to be this conflict or tension between the perception of the "monster" and the true reality of his humanity. This movie failed at effectively portraying this conflict by humanizing the monster too much. Just my 2 cents.
Ah, I understand what you mean. I don't think the viewer necessarily needs to experience the dissonance personally for the premise to work. That said, I agree that it could have afforded being less black and white, it at times felt like a children's movie with how plainly the message is communicated.
Completely agree. The movie ruined Dr. Frankenstein's motives by adding his benefactor, and ruined his monster by removing the inner rage he felt and expressed towards the world the shunned him. A very, very odd decision by GDT. Similar to Spike Lee remaking High & Low, but removing the critique of capitalism and the complicity of the wealthy so he could make Denzel the true protagonist.
I disagree that it's a misconception. Yes, the premise is that the true 'monster' was the creator, but the monster itself is intentionally grotesque and disfigured to teach us the beauty on the inside lesson.
He is unsettling but definitely not simply grotesque and disfigured:
> His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.
The creature was always supposed to be a mix of sympathetic and monstrous. He becomes a monster by turning himself implacably toward revenge, but we can sympathize with him for what sets him on that path. The entire premise rests more on Victor being a monster. I thought the movie handled both of those fairly well. There's really no living director who gets the Gothic sensibility quite as well as del Toro.
>His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.
As I said, the contrast between "pretty" or "human" traits vs "monster" just wasn't there.
Eh, I like an interesting spin on a classic. I’ve seen/heard the Frankenstein plot and small variations on it many times, taking a different direction is a good way to keep in a general universe but develop something new. If you’re not going to come up with new interesting content, at least don’t rehash the exact story I’ve heard many times. But that’s just my preference—I really enjoyed it and have become a fan of Guillermo del Toro works recently (due to exposure on Netflix). I’m not huge critic really so I won’t speak to artistic merit but I can at least say I really enjoyed it.
Netflix has always had one or three stand-out projects over a year, but is that what we want from studios? It is like the tech model: 1 big success for 10+ duds (the VC show) or another superhero installment (the Google/Meta cash cow movie).
HBO is expensive and most people don't have it. Ergo most people never see or hear about their lower quality content. Only the good stuff that their rich friends rave about.
You not recognizing their shows doesnt mean they are bad. Ive seen most of those and the overwhelming majority are at least solid. I understand netflix's business model, Im just annoyed that theyre buying HBO because they will likely make it worse. Maybe netflix wants more prestige content and will let HBO be HBO but I doubt it.
> If WB was any good, would they have been snatched up by Netflix?
Yes because the situation of WB has nothing to do with their performance.
In 1990s they merged with TIME publishing right before the internet killed all magazines. In 2000s with AOL right before th dot com bubble. In 2010s with AT&T who realised they needed a shit ton of money to roll out 5G so they took a massive loan and charged it to Warner debt.
So WARNER keeps performing and the business side keeps adding debt from horrible decisions
Honestly Warner would have been fine if they hadn't been saddled with the debt that AT&T used to buy them. It wasn't an issue of Warner's business performance.
It's about all the other projects that would have had great quality but did not secure funding because Netflix prefers to fund mass-produced mediocrity.
In Germany we have a saying "Even a blind hen sometimes finds a grain of corn".
> It's about all the other projects that would have had great quality but did not secure funding because Netflix prefers to fund mass-produced mediocrity. In Germany we have a saying "Even a blind hen sometimes finds a grain of corn".
In parallel, they're also starting to downgrade their quality. In the latest season of Stranger Things there's a wild amount of in-scene exposition, where the characters explain what's happening while it's happening. I did some digging and learned that they may be dumbing down their shows because they know users typically look at their phones while watching Netflix and users are more likely to drop off of a show if they don't know what's going on.
Frankenstein looks oddly cheap and fake with really bad lighting in many scenes. You can tell they used the volume virtual production to shoot scenes and it doesn't look great.
That doesn't change anything. If there aren't any harms except that certain people don't "like" a feature, it's not the government's role to force companies to allow users to opt out of features. If you don't like a feature, don't buy the product. The government should not be micromanaging product design.
Take it up with your city council, if they're the ones require a smartphone to pay for parking.
But also, you're going to have to be more specific about what tracking you're worried about. Cell towers need to track you to give you service. But the parking app only gets the data you enable with permissions, and the data the city requires you to give the app (e.g. a payment method). So I'm not super clear what tracking you're concerned about?
If you don't use your smartphone for anything but paying for parking, I genuinely don't know what tracking you're concerned about.
Because it's ultimately a form of censorship. Governments shouldn't be in the business of shutting down speech some people don't like, and in the same way shouldn't be in the business of shutting down software features some people don't like. As long as nobody is being harmed, censorship is bad and anti-democratic. (And we make exceptions for cases of actual harm, like libelous or threatening speech, or a product that injures or defrauds its users.) Freedom is a fundamental aspect of democracy, which is why freedoms are written into constitutions so simple majority vote can't remove them.
1) Integration or removal of features isn't speech. And has been subject to government compulsion for a long time (e.g. seat belts and catalytic converters in automobiles).
2) Business speech is limited in many, many ways. There is even compelled speech in business (e.g. black box warnings, mandatory sonograms prior to abortions).
I said, "As long as nobody is being harmed". Seatbelts and catalytic converters are about keeping people safe from harm. As are black box warnings and mandatory sonograms.
And legally, code and software are considered a form of speech in many contexts.
Do you really want the government to start telling you what software you can and cannot build? You think the government should be able to outlaw Python and require you to do your work in Java, and outlaw JSON and require your API's to return XML? Because that's the type of interference you're talking about here.
Mandatory sonograms aren't about harm prevention. (Though yes, I would agree with you if you said the government should not be able to compel them.)
In the US, commercial activities do not have constitutionally protected speech rights, with the sole exception of "the press". This is covered under the commerce clause and the first amendment, respectively.
I assemble DNA, I am not a programmer. And yes, due to biosecurity concerns there are constraints. Again, this might be covered under your "does no harm" standard. Though my making smallpox, for example, would not be causing harm any more than someone building a nuclear weapon would cause harm. The harm would come from releasing it.
But I think, given that AI has encouraged people to suicide, and would allow minors the ability to circumvent parental controls, as examples, that regulations pertaining to AI integration in software, including mandates that allow users to disable it (NOTE, THIS DOESN'T FORCE USERS TO DISABLE IT!!), would also fall under your harm standard. Outside of that, the leaking of personally identifiable information does cause material harm every day. So there needs to be proactive control available to the end user regarding what AI does on their computer, and how easy it is to accidentally enable information-gathering AI when that was not intended.
I can come up with more examples of harm beyond mere annoyance. Hopefully these examples are enough.
The topic of suicide and LLMs is a nuanced and complex one, but LLMs aren't suggesting it out of nowhere when summarizing your inbox or calendar. Those are conversations users actively start.
As for leaking PII, that's definitely something for to be aware of, but it's not a major practical concern for any end users so far. We'll see if prompt injection turns into a significant real-world threat and what can be done to mitigate it.
But people here aren't arguing against LLM features based on substantial harms. They're doing it because they don't like it in their UX. That's not a good enough reason for the government to get involved.
(Also, regarding sonograms, I typed without thinking -- yes of course the ones that are medically unnecessary have no justification in law, which is precisely why US federal courts have struck them down in North Carolina, Indiana, and Kentucky. And even when they're medically necessary, that's a decision for doctors not lawmakers.)
I emphatically disagree. See you at the ballot box.
> but it's not a major practical concern for any end users so far.
My wife came across a post or comment by a person considering preemptive suicide in fear that their ChatGPT logs will ever get leaked. Yes, fear of leaks is a major practical concern for at least that user.
Fear of leaks, or the other harms you mention, have nothing to do with the question at hand, which is whether these features are enabled by default.
If someone is using ChatGPT, they're using ChatGPT. They're not inputting sensitive personal secrets by accident. Turning Gemini off by default in Gmail isn't going to change whether someone is using ChatGPT as a therapist or something.
You seem to simply be arguing that you don't like LLM's. To which I'll reply: if they do turn out to present substantial harms that need to be regulated, then so be it, and regulate them appropriately.
But that applies to all of them, and has nothing to do with the question at hand, which is whether they can be enabled by default in consumer products. As long as chatgpt.com and gemini.google.com exist, there's no basis for asking the government to turn off LLM features by default in Gmail or Calendar, while making them freely available as standalone products. Does that make sense?
Oh, now I have a name for the epidemic pervasive through our company.
Almost all of the tech debt we have was introduced by leadership guidance to ignore. And all additional debt to manage it or ameliorate it (since problems don't just go away) is also guidance from leadership to fast track fixes.
What happened to the days where software engineers were the experts who decided tech priority?
That is *IF* there ever is acknowledgment that things need to be fixed.
"These pesky issues, who knows where they come from, just quickly get it out of the way. We have the next shiny new to tackle for the next quarter, and we better finish it quickly".
> What happened to the days where software engineers were the experts who decided tech priority?
Outside of a very small number of firms that were called out as notable for being led in a way that enabled that, often by engineers that were themselves still hands on, they never existed, and even there it was “business leadership that happened to also be engineers, and made decisions based on business priorities informed by their understanding of software engineering”, not “software engineers in their walled-off citadels of pure engineering”, and it usually involves, in successful firms, considerable willingness to accept tech debt, just as business leadership can often not be shy about accepting funancial debt.
> business leadership can often not be shy about accepting financial debt
Business leadership is not shy about accepting financial debt when business leadership has decided it should accept financial debt. Technical leadership should ostensibly not be shy about accepting technical debt because business leadership has decided it should accept technical debt. The distribution of agency and responsibility in the two situations is different.
I would be willing to bet the current administration would in fact do whatever they could to undermine the dollar's value, including propping up a digital currency when it should fail.
How is it an issue for Archive.today? They immediately removed the content upon being notified about it. That's the "standard" level of responsibility for any site that hosts user-uploaded content.
I think OP is sitting on some other product here that he hasn't figured out yet. It definitely isn't in the high-end luxury retail space, but it might be in B2C, think Home assistant or something akin.
That's exactly the use case I would go too (since I'm not native English) and while we have a technology now for this, people will straight away reject because LLM. Funny how we always wanted to connect the world and know it is just not compatible with the situation.
How can we get away from this mindset as a society, where craft and art are sacrificed at the altar of "it's not monetarily worth it."
There's a fucking lot of things that are not worth it monetarily, but worth it for the sake of itself. Because it's a nice gesture. Or because it just makes people happy. Not to sound like some hippie idealist, but it's just so frustrating that everything has to be commoditized.
Centuries is stretching it. It’s central to industrialisation, Taylor, Ford, etc. The relentless pursuit of efficiency and technique. Its anti-thesis is art for art’s sake.
In modern tech circles, the utilitarian mindset is going strong, now that the hacker ethos is dead and it’s all about being corporate friendly and hireable.
Yeah the industrialised world wasn't maligned by Blake as 'dark Satanic mills' or as Mordor by Tolkien because they found it an artistically fulfilling place.
> How can we get away from this mindset as a society, where craft and art are sacrificed at the altar of "it's not monetarily worth it."
Honestly, by weakening copyright protections. People who love the works will do the work to protect them when they don't have to fear being sued into bankruptcy for trying to preserve their own culture.
You can sit down and recolor the movie frame by frame and release it on torrent yourself, it'll make many people happy. It won't be worth it monetarily but since you're annoyed it doesn't exist and money isn't a factor...
It's always easy to complain about others not being generous enough with their time, but we always have an excuse for why we won't do it ourselves.
You can't do that since besides time you also need knowledge/skill. So the final difference could be between "an extra 1% of the budget" at a corporate level vs "and extra 10% of your life to become a professional and fix a video, and also break the law in the process".
Pretty easy to see how it's not just "an excuse", but a bit more fundamental issue
> You can sit down and recolor the movie frame by frame and release it on torrent yourself, it'll make many people happy.
You can't, at least not if you want an acceptable result.
In photography, if you have a JPEG photo only, you can't do post-facto adjustments of the white balance, for that you need RAW - too much information has been lost during compression.
For movies it's just the same. To achieve something that actually looks good with a LUT (that's the fancy way for re-coloring, aka color grading), you need access to the uncompressed scans, as early in the processing pipeline as you can get (i.e. before any kind of filter is applied).
I'm this particular instance though it's not really about time, it's studios not wanting to pay what I imagine would be a relatively small amount to do the conversion. It's not going to be a frame-by-frame laborious process.
That said, I'm more uncomfortable with the continued consolidation of media ownership and more outsize influence of FAANG tech over media.
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