monotremata

They ported Half-Life to PS2. And the sequel was on everything.

Fundamentally he doesn't mean that he doesn't know what happened. He means that he hasn't received his talking points about this yet.

He knows that there will be some way that the right-wing media ecosystem is going to frame this, and it's very important that his framing match theirs exactly. Somewhere a think-tank is working on the perfect wording that will turn an innocent victim into, somehow, an evil communist traitor who was a threat to an ICE officer and also somehow to the very concept of America. And if he tried to give his own spin on it before that, it would only make their job more complicated.

So yeah, he may know that an innocent man was shot, again. But he doesn't yet know the important stuff: how to make him the villain. He just hasn't had the time to get caught up on that! Give him a break.

[ Everyone disliked that. ]

Yeah, I was thinking kind of the opposite, "at least one of these is finally a flop." I don't know why audiences keep going to these things.

I can kind of see doing a remake with Aladdin, because there's reference humor in the original (like doing a quick gag around imitating a late-night TV format) that might not mean anything to a modern audience. The remake still suffered from regression to the mean, though. Still, I can imagine some young audiences finding the original hard to relate to at times, so some kind of update might have felt worthwhile. And giving another actor a chance to try putting his spin on the genie I'm sure felt generous. That at least guaranteed it would offer some kind of difference that would distinguish it.

But The Lion King and Lilo and Stitch and Moana don't really have any of that going on. The originals are fairly charming, not particularly tied to any specific time period, and don't offer any big roles that provide room for a new interpretation. (Well, maybe Maui, but they gave that role to the same guy again.)

And the animation was such a big part of the appeal of the originals! Replacing that with bland, lifeless CGI is such a let-down. I haven't actually watched any of these new releases, but I've seen trailers, and the CGI just feels awful in them. It's hard to even describe, but it's like there's a greasiness to it. It's profoundly offputting.

And people keep turning out. I don't get it. Is it just that people want their kids to experience theaters and popcorn and it doesn't really matter what's on the screen as long as it's Disney?

So yeah. I'm glad to see one finally underperform. Maybe people are finally getting tired of slop. I hope it's not just that people can't afford the cinema anymore.

Given the way he's talked about these robots in the past, I'm fine with them not being ready yet.

“If we build this robot army, do I have at least a strong influence over this robot army?” he told investors. “Not control, but a strong influence… I don’t feel comfortable building that robot army unless I have a strong influence.”

https://futurism.com/robots-and-machines/elon-musk-remarks-robot-army

Yeah. It shows me Titan Isles, Into Black, Portal 2, The Lab, and Aperture Hand Lab, with the last two being free tech demos. Adding this since it seems like the list may be somewhat location dependent, so those seeing fewer titles can tell what's missing.

Didn't they release the first new Half Life title in over a decade in coordination with that headset?

Sounds like it could be really useful for VR displays. The best optics for VR right now use polarizers to fold the optical path repeatedly through the same lens, but a side effect is that only a small portion of the light makes it to the users' eyes.

Could also extend the battery life of phones; the display is the main power draw for most phones, and the higher brightness make that worse.

I understand why people are reacting badly to these being described as "brighter," but it does also mean "more energy efficient for the same brightness."

There was a supreme court decision during the current administration that basically said the president can't be held accountable. It's completely insane.

Are they just clueless about how anything works?

That's certainly how I read it. They seem to think that if you feed the LLM a new prompt that tells it it made a mistake, it'll update itself to avoid that mistake in the future. Which isn't how any of this works, but I can understand why they wouldn't know that given the marketing from the big AI companies.

A couple of years from now everyone will know this was really dumb, but right now only the engineers know that, and management won't listen to them. I guess they'll learn the hard way.

Relatedly, I heard somewhere (probably on No Such Thing As A Fish? but maybe also on Lateral) that the manufacturer that produces more tires than any other is Lego.

And presumably it had never occurred to the kid that one might want to turn off a radio for any reason.