Wasn’t the Xbox 360 a PowerPC machine?

There’s not going to be any actual sci-fi movies ever again. There’s going to be movies with computers and space ships and lasers in them, but there’s never going to be a movie that asks questions, because movie executives are too stupid. They’ve been stupid for longer than I’ve been alive. Remember the movie Enemy Mine? Which does have actual sci-fi in it? There’s the whole rescue from a mine sequence because the executives thought audiences would be too confused if there wasn’t a literal mine in the movie.

Hell, Master and Commander: The Far Side Of The Earth, the movie you suddenly become very interested in when your testicles turn 30. The enemy ship in that movie is…a Yankee-built…French heavy frigate? Yeah no, that was supposed to be USS Norfolk, a sister ship of the USS Constitution. Why are they French? The studio thought that American moviegoers wouldn’t be okay with Americans being the enemy. In a movie set in 1804.

Studio executives are rock chewing stupid and they think everyone else is too.

The original Tron was very experimental. It had an out there concept (which I can really respect for sci-fi), it had a pioneering synth soundtrack, and pioneering visuals. It was kind of novel but a lot of people found it boring and convoluted. It found a cult fandom of nerds like this guy and to the rest of the world it became a punchline for a weird flop of a film. Even the Simpsons took a shot at it.

Decades later they made a sequel that nobody seems to hate. Tron Legacy was actually well made, it’s got decent cinematography to it, they built sets, the CGI looks great with the possible exception of a de-aged face that does not hold up, and Daft Punk’s soundtrack is universally acclaimed. Most moviegoers agree that the plot of Tron Legacy exists. It was a success; it made more than its budget, it sold some tie-in merch. The weebs I knew around that time had pictures of either Olivia Wilde or a light cycle as their desktop wallpaper for a few months, and then the world moved on. It wasn’t bad, but it’s still a niche fanbase compared to The Matrix or Pirates of the Caribbean or Star Wars.

And now they’ve made another for some reason. It’s got very little to do with any of the original characters, Tron isn’t even in it. It’s about virtual characters emerging into the real world, released at a time when people are worried about AI and the effects it’s going to have, and it stars an actor basically nobody likes. I’ve heard mixed reviews about the NIN soundtrack.

It’s like getting emails from Amazon advertising products you’ve already bought. It’s like it’s running on the same algorithm that Youtube is. This guy just watched a video about neutron stars. I’ll recommend another video about neutron stars. That makes sense with video content, but not really with a lot of consumer goods. Sure Amazon, the first toilet seat was delicious, I think I’ll eat another.

I think a better quote would be

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad move and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

There weren’t any nuclear weapons on earth in 1930.

What? For my third once-in-a-lifetime economic crisis? There’s no way this isn’t going to suck. We’re all doomed no matter what.

I’m speaking of my experiences in the United States. Here, phone books tend to be separated into white pages and yellow pages. The white pages listed names, addresses and phone numbers of private lines, usually homes, and the yellow pages listed businesses. Taking out a listing in the yellow pages was the SEO of its day.

When the internet happened, the one thing that never really happened was a freely searchable database of the white pages. One thing the internet was never useful for as an upstanding citizen was looking up personal phone numbers.

One thing that never got digitized and put on the internet was the phone book. And for damn good reason.

The original Tron is hard to spend time with; the plot is convoluted and the graphics, for all they spent on them, have not aged well.

Eighteen years later, Tron Legacy is a lot like Avatar. The plot is nothing but it looks extremely cool. Every weeb I knew had a light cycle as their desktop wallpaper for a few months there. I’ve heard it described as an awesome Daft Punk album that came with a movie. As an audio/visual experience it’s spectacular, and landed at a time when slick glowy tech shit was actually in vogue, but the story isn’t compelling and the characters aren’t interesting so it had basically no cultural impact.

Fifteen years later, they made another one for some reason. So per this pattern, expect another one in 2037.

I picked up a thing that just now came out of early access, called The Farmer Has Been Replaced(). It’s a Python coding game, you’re given a grid-based farm and a drone that runs Python code you write for it to plant, water, harvest etc. crops. It’s a decent little coding exercise, not the worst way to learn Python.

That is my understanding.

There’s a certain amount of advertising I’ll accept. If I go to see an action movie, 1 to 3 previews of other action movies that are coming out in the next few months is okay.

Of course, because they tried to force a Mission: Impossible movie down my throat, I might never go see an action movie made after 2014 ever again.

Yes it is. I’ve held the results in my hand, though the machines are not cheap.

I’ll take a stab at this.

The Scientific Method, as I was taught it from middle school to college:

1. Observe a phenomenon.
2. Raise a question about said phenomenon.
3. Research the topic in question.
4. Form a hypothesis as to the nature of the phenomenon.
5. design an experiment to test that hypothesis against a control.
6. Analyze the data yielded by experiment.
7. Repeat the experiment to verify it isn’t a fluke.
8. Publish all of the above in sufficient detail that other scientists may examine your work for flawed methodology and repeat your experiments to further verify it isn’t a fluke.
9. Conclude whether your hypothesis is or is not supported by experimental evidence.

THIS WORKS

What is being done all over the world right now:

1. Get hired by a multinational corporation traded on the Dow Jones.
2. Be assigned a fact to prove, probably about an existing product.
3. Research the topic in question.
4. Design an experiment that will support the fact you’re looking to prove.
5. Use a very small sample size.
6. Conclude something wishy-washy like “there’s a statistically significant correlation”.
7. Publish a densely written paper with a very convoluted title in some obscure sketchy journal somewhere.
8. Cite that paper in your own press releases with headlines that blow the conclusion way out of proportion.
9. No one ever follows up on any of this, the experiment is never really peer reviewed, or is reviewed by others engaged in similar nonsense, and the public only ever reads the headline.

A lot of folks recommending Mint Cinnamon. I agree, that’s a great choice, one of my favorites. If for some reason there are technical problems, you might also try something with KDE, like Kubuntu or Fedora KDE. Also windows-like, even more mainstream than Cinnamon, faster to adopt new shit like Wayland.

I have never once in my life upgraded the CPU in a computer. I tend to get 4-5 years of primary “It’s my main computer” use out of one, and then 4-5 years of “It’s my secondary machine I use for some specific thing” with more minor hardware upgrades. My old desktop (a Ryzen 3600 machine) is my HTPC right now.

Cryptographic signatures are something we should have been normalizing for awhile now.

I remember during the LTT Linux challenge, at one point they were assigned the task “sign a PDF.” Linus interpreted this as PGP sign the document, which apparently Okular can do but he didn’t have any credentials set up. Luke used some online tool to photoshop an image of his handwriting into the document.

You see the same panic about 3D printed guns. It’s not that difficult to make a gun at home, but 3D printers makes it slightly more trivial.

Yeah it needed to be “I’m happy that killing beavers en masse for profit…”