Not for anything seriously published, but - yeah I use ChatGPT constantly to evaluate essay ideas, critique arguments, and give me more reading material ideas for whatever topic I'm thinking about.
I think this is truly the best use-case of LLMs, actually. It functions as a kind of hyper-informed assistant.
The fact that this is downvoted really says it all. "I don't read the news" is pretty much dependent on one's profession being insulated from changing events. Which is not surprising why it's a popular opinion amongst technocrats that would rather not have democracy in the first place.
For the rest of the news, I am considering subscribing to a magazine that covers important events in Germany, the EU, or the world every few months. This kind of format filters out short-term noise and fear-driven stories.
Elections happen even less frequently than this. If your democracy disintegrates with less than a few months of warning, you were probably invaded and noticed even without the news; At this point, that would probably lead to a civil emergency notification on your phone, and by design that happens even without any apps installed.
As we said in the UK in my childhood, "Today’s news is tomorrow’s chip* paper".
Last year, legal immigrants were fine. Today, their kids are kidnapped and used as bait to take them to Alcatraz. And that's not even the identity I'm mostly referring to.
Very cool stance OOP, thank you for identifying yourself as the type of centrist heaven will reject at the gate and angels will never get tired of the reaction to the shrug.
The news is one of those markets where the following is true:
1) a large number of people are dissatisfied with the current product
2) but aren’t willing to pay for an alternative which solves the problem in the ideal way (for them)
There have been dozens of attempts at weekly news summary newsletters, minimal news sites, etc. over the years. None ever seem to go anywhere because no one wants to pay for something they are deliberately deciding has little value.
It makes me think of budget airlines: constantly critiqued for being uncomfortable and using dark patterns to get every last dollar - yet people consistently just book the cheapest flight possible.
One of the reasons modern sci-fi films (e.g., Blade Runner 2049) seem so flat to me is because of the costumes. They're always too minimal and too forgettable. There's really nothing special about the fashion in that movie.
Compare that to the hyper-maximalist 80s movie outfits. The original Blade Runner has more creativity in one outfit than pretty much the entirety of the sequel.
I wonder why that is. My guess is that it's just a symptom of the same thing that causes everyone to stop buying colorful cars, and instead default to a grayscale one: fear that being too outlandish or creative will turn off potential customers/viewers.
There was a huge Lucasfilm book on the costume design of The Phantom Menace, it looked amazing, I would have bought it at Forbidden Planet but I was between jobs at the time.
It went into to much detail, the film has its detractors, but the book itself was fascinating. Although I still buy books I don't think I spend enough time reading them.
Old film makers thought they were compensating for a lack of the kind of CGI and world building options we have today, compensating with rain, mist, camera angles to hide the lack of scale, and with costumes, lots of background actors, detailed film sets, to make the world seem grander. Turns out they had actually hit a sweet spot.
> I wonder why that is. My guess is that it's just a symptom of the same thing that causes everyone to stop buying colorful cars, and instead default to a grayscale one: fear that being too outlandish or creative will turn off potential customers/viewers.
One aspect of it is that the sci-fi future is not really a future in general, it's a future how it was imagined at the time. In the 80s we had maximalist fashion - bright colors, shoulder pads, big hair. So the future from that time looked even more so like that.
If we look at the future as imagined in the 40s and 50s we might laugh at the silly looking robots. We'd never put robots like in a current sci-fi movie, unless as a joke. But, at the time they were not made for laughs, people thought that's what robots would really look like.
An even deeper part of this is that the future from 80s from movies that became popular also adds to how we might see the future now. Aethetics from popular movies are immortalized. Like say, you're lamenting why doesn't current sci-fi look like Blade Runner, but imagine if Blade Runner had terrible characters and bad acting. You wouldn't want that aesthetic in sci movies today. It would be associated with crap.
I would agree with you un general, but Blade Runner 2049 is not a good example, il remember clearly the coat of Ryan gosling, the dresses, etc. This film is great for that, the lights, the sets design.
Comparing the two, you can really see how minimalist the modern stuff is. It has less texture, fewer details (buttons, collars), no patterns (at least from the blog post screenshots).
I think you could argue that some of this is just modern sensibilities and aesthetics, but I think a lot of it is probably just the modern movie industry. Like decisions with modern lighting and how flat things looks in modern movies (to make production more efficient and making adding CGI easier), they probably go with minimalist costumes since they're easier to capture on film, cheaper, and easier to make.
I would just think that taste has changed. I was actually thinking to myself that I prefer 2049's style as I was reading through this. But I was also born in the late 90's, so I assume it could be a generational difference.
It's not even so much that I like the taste / style of the fashion in the original Blade Runner, more that it just feels more real and interesting. The recent film feels like any other generic sci-fi movie.
> The recent film feels like any other generic sci-fi movie.
While that's true to some extent, as I noted in my sibling comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46775053), it's partly because 2049 lives in a world where, for over 30 years, most other sci-fi visions of urban environments were strongly influenced by OG Blade Runner. It's hard to appreciate how much the 1982 original visually impacted everything that came after.
Denis Villeneuve faced an almost impossible challenge in balancing faithfulness to the original production design while evolving the original's vision of 2019 forward 30 years to its own related but visually distinct descendant. Almost every visual choice risked either being "nearly a copy of the original" or "hardly related to the original".
I'm a huge fan of the original - so much so, in 1992 I bought a plane ticket to fly across the country for one evening just to see the limited run of the original "lost workprint" in Westwood. In 2017, I was so concerned any attempt at a sequel to such a seminal classic was doomed to fail that I didn't even go see 2049 until I heard reviews from fans I trust. I mean, for decades "Blade Runner Sequel" was a project no competent director would ever consider touching. I assumed anyone who would take the job was either incredibly arrogant, greedy or stupid. But Denis didn't need Blade Runner, being a huge fan, he wanted it.
I was pleasantly surprised that, given the near-impossible task, 2049 was a reasonable success on its own terms. Despite the limited budget, Denis managed to not only avoid tarnishing a classic, he did it credit by not camping on its coattails. And Roger Deacon's cinematography definitely deserved the Oscar he won. My only regret on 2049 is that Denis didn't get the budget he wanted. Another $5M and three weeks shooting would have gone a long way. But, like the original 2049 is remarkable, in part, because it's as good as it is despite being starved of adequate resources.
I don’t really think it’s as simple as BR1982 influencing everything else. Other movies that came out before it also had more interesting visual styles than movies being made today. For example: Escape from New York.
The more recent movie looks more minimal because Villenueve makes minimal looking movies. Personally I find it devoid of visual interest compared to the 80s films, especially the original BR. Even the “inspired” scenes like the market/food stalls are so lifeless in comparison.
Here are two clips to compare. The more recent film is typical of movies today: too digital, too clean, not enough movement or energy.
I think the visual differences broadly break into technical aspects (film grain, contrast) and aesthetic (composition, lighting, density, motion). A lot of modern viewers don't like film grain so any director not named Christopher Nolan, will get studio push back.
Personally, I'd prefer more grain texture in cinematic images but it's the era we live in, so I don't hate on BR 2049 for being an artifact of its era. It's nowhere near as bad as the visual sterile wipe that Wicked is. I do agree the compositional energy is a stylistic choice by Denis for this film. While Dune strikes a similar note visually, Sicario does get pretty kinetic at moments - so it's not his only note.
My main point was 2049 couldn't be the innovative, style-setting, visual sledghammer to that BR was - simply because there can only be one first and 2049 still had to be related to BR. Also, it's worth noting that the back story has much of Earth's population moving off-world in the 30 years since the original - as the constant ads in BR were urging. So by 2049 L.A. is no longer crowded. Most humans have already abandoned Earth, which is one reason replicants are openly doing work-a-day jobs.
Ultimately, I have so much reverence for the original as a visual seismic event still influencing films decades later, I went into 2049 with low expectations - which Villenueve managed to exceed. 2049 is nowhere near as great as the original, but I don't think there was any way it could have been - and very few films ever are. So it was enough that it didn't insult the original or stain its legacy. Then starting with a clean slate, by simply being pretty good, 2049 manages to be a reasonable success on its own terms - at least artistically.
Personally, I'm happy 2049 performed as poorly at the box office as the original. I still feel like BR fandom dodged a bullet with 2049, so it's good it didn't give Alcon aspirations of a 'cinematic universe' cash grab. Sadly, Alcon did sell a BR limited series to Amazon Prime that's in post-production. Absent Villenueve it's likely to suck, but hopefully it'll go away quickly and we can pretend it never happened.
- and thanks for the call back to Escape From New York, a film I saw on opening night at the Pantages in Hollywood.
Clothes in '80s were overall louder than the minimalist aesthetics of today. It all fits in with gen z's apprehension at being perceived, related to "cancel culture" and cameras everywhere.
Thanks for writing this, I’ve had similar feelings about a variety of writers over the years.
My conclusion was just that some people write to signal their intelligence to other people by including as many references and complex ideas as possible, with basically zero attention paid to the form of the writing itself. It is just a form of information transfer, not a particular interest in the writing art form.
And so if you’re not interested in the topics they’re talking about, and you don’t care about evaluating the writer’s intelligence, the whole thing just seems rambling and pompous.
I wish these writers would study essays that are praised for their clarity and brevity. Or haiku, which is defined by its brevity. Truly great writers IMO do not write 10 sentences when one will do.
Just a meta comment: the question of whether video games are art seems really dated to me, as does the question of defining what art is in the first place. Of course this question has a long history with a variety of different answers, ranging from “art is what people in the art world say is art” to “it operates in a historical form like painting or sculpture.”
I think this question feels dated because it’s not really a useful distinction anymore, and because cultural producers are no longer regulated by gatekeepers. Legitimacy increasingly just comes from the market itself, not a group of critics or institutions.
But for video games specifically it’s because they have achieved a kind of cultural respect that they didn’t have a few decades ago. The question of “are video games art?” was really more of a quest to be taken seriously as a field. And now they quite obviously are, so the goal of being labeled Art™ isn’t that important anymore.
Instead we’re just going back to the idea of Art as Craft, a particular skill. A game can be good or bad, but whether it’s Art is increasingly irrelevant.
I know it wasn’t the whole point of your comment, but I fervently hope the legitimacy of art (of any kind and in any medium) is not conferred by the ‘market’. Plays or shows that end having been seen by under 100 people should still be art (and any recording of them should as well), music made for a very niche audience, games that are played by 10s of people, all of those can be art. A painting made by one person to give to another can be art.
I would prefer to look to the democratization of art as the means and ability for individuals to produce substantial, if small, works at a pace, for an audience, for some reward determined solely by the creator.
At the end of the day, ‘what is art’ and ‘are video games art is a dated sentiment, so I agree, I was just repulsed by the suggestion that the definition/legitimacy of something as art can/should be dictated by ‘The Market’ .
Market was maybe a bad term. I mean more “society at large” and not specifically stuff that makes money.
I am more saying that the idea of caring about “being labeled as art” is not that important anymore. Largely because anyone can make and publish anything nowadays. So a play with 100 viewers is still art, yes, but no one really cares about getting that label.
Thanks for the response. I do like the, largely uncontested, move toward disregarding of the label. It certainly seems to dovetail with a more individualized conception of artistic pursuit that appeals to me.
Chomsky basically says that intellectuals have a responsibility to expose the lies said by those in power. Hard to argue with, but maybe kind of a platitude.
I think I’d answer this question differently in 2026. The responsibility of intellectuals to society at large today, in an era overwhelmed with information, propaganda, immensely complex issues, etc. is – communicate the issues of the day in a way that is clear and accessible. With the assumption that intellectuals are “experts in ideas.”
I say this because so many contemporary debates seem really mangled and unclear, which makes them basically impossible to solve intellectually. Instead they just turn into battles of will where one side seeks to defeat the other in toto, not actually arrive at a solution that overcomes the conflict.
Unfortunately the academic system is explicitly designed to create specialists, not people that can effectively communicate to the Everyman.
Sycophantic idealism mixed with political Brand analytical-blindness is incompatible with functional democratic processes. Verifiable facts are the core responsibility of the Scientific process, and a lot of people still fail that minimal standard.
Modern corruption is just unsustainable populist negligence, that coincidentally also collapsed many empires in history. Suggesting Academic bureaucracy is a functional Meritocracy is naive wishful thinking, and ignores why these structures usually still degenerate to merge with poorly obfuscated despotic movements.
I agree with your suggestion, but I wonder if it is enough. Look at what happened today. Moments after the shooting, there was a coordinated campaign to flood the zone with misinformation. Twitter accounts for Trump, DHS (Kristi Noem), Vance, Miller all said someone tried to assassinate ICE officers and was shot in self defense. This was completely the opposite of what happened and given how quickly they put out these messages, they had no way of knowing either.
They simply put it out there because no matter what, this is what they will say in response to an ICE shooting. It is a way of confusing the messaging and preventing their supporters from being convinced by anyone else or any evidence. Once their base form that initial opinion, it is very hard to change their mind. So will intellectually actually reach those people effectively?
Remember, this base has been told to distrust the academics and distrust science and distrust the news media.
The reason exterminate always go after academics is because they make things harder. The vast majority of academics could make more money than they do as a professor. The authoritarian relies on the religious nature of followers and it's harder for those followers to have faith when it's constantly being questioned. It's why your mental model of an authoritarian regime is where people are afraid to speak freely.
You're right that the strategy is to confuse and overload. It's difficult to counter and I think you're exactly right to say "enough". We need to adapt to this strategy too. I think it's important to remember that truth has a lower bound in complexity but lies don't. They have an advantage because they can sell simplicity. We have the disadvantage when we try to educate. But what we need to do is remind people of how complex reality is while not making them feel dumb for not knowing. It's not easy. Even the biggest meathead who is as anti academic as they come will feel offended if you call them (or imply they're) stupid (are you offended if they call you weak?). We need a culture shift to accept not knowing things and that not knowing things doesn't make one stupid. I have a fucking PhD and I'm dumb as shit. There's so much I don't know about my own field, let alone all the others. I've put in a lot of hard work to be "smart", but the smartest people I know say "I don't know" and that's often the most interesting thing you can hear.
It's no easy task to solve. Don't forget, we're a species that would rather invent imaginary invisible wizards than admit we don't know. We're infinitely curious but also afraid of the unknown.
> But what we need to do is remind people of how complex reality is while not making them feel dumb for not knowing.
Well-said, even if the sentiment is in-and-of itself somehow condescending. No way around it, really.
To be fair, as well, there are an enormous number of people who do this already. They are educators, they are docents, they are civil servants. They quietly perform this task day in and out without much recognition or fanfare.
The demonization of these people can’t be ignored, either. It’s as if their services run counter to the interests of those who put so much money and effort into that demonization…
In a complex world the little things matter. We feel unimportant because we're little. But also remember one person cutting you off on your way to work can ruin your whole day. But similarly one person giving you a smile can turn it around. The little things matter because all the big things are made of a thousand small things. That's why it's so important. I'm not asking everyone to go do big things. I'm asking people to do little things. You have to treat people the way you wish they treated you, even when they don't. Do they deserve it? No. But do you?
A thing I've learned is that often when people are mad they're not mad at you. Maybe you're part of it, but usually you're just at the end of some long chain. It's easier to respond to anger when you realize this.
battles of will where one side seeks to defeat the other in toto, not actually arrive at a solution that overcomes the conflict.
The deeper issue is immigration policy, which is a topic that displays the pattern I mentioned: no real attempt to solve the issue by addressing both sides/various parties, and instead boils it into an us-them struggle of political wills.
The responsibility of intellectuals in this case should be IMO to clearly analyze the immigration debate and discuss the benefits, downsides, likely consequences etc. of various actions.
But we don’t get that. Instead everyone just has an opinion already formed, including the intellectuals. And unfortunately unbiased rational approaches seem to lose (in money, attention) to the loud and opinionated.
So as the problem gets more complicated, people get further and further away from actually solving it.
Unfortunately the well was poisoned for this debate when the Republican Party enacted a decades-long campaign of obstructionism and propaganda. No doubt, there are individuals who must be absolutely giddy with excitement that the very “crisis” that they managed to manufacture (both literally through legislative obstructionism, and figuratively through media capture and propaganda) is now the perfect excuse to grab power to enact an authoritarian regressive agenda instead of slowly sliding more progressive due to demographic drift.
So, basically, my point is beware getting dragged into debates that clearly only benefit specific parties with specific agendas without first asking yourself more critical questions about the bigger picture.
> In fact, I think the lack of debate is really hurting today's left.
Moderate left voices are not featured in the current media landscape. The Democrat party is, at best, centrist, if not currently undergoing a conservative transformation parallel to the Republican party’s reactionary transformation. And for that reason:
> And he doesn’t seem to be going after employers, which would be more effective.
this is a complete nonstarter.
In any case, there are plenty of calls for reform from the left. “Abolish ICE” (like “Defund the police”) is not equivalent to “end immigration enforcement” (or likewise “end law enforcement”), even though the histrionics across the media landscape would have you believe that. It’s a core leftwing tenet (imho) that organizations that are rotten must be eliminated, and if appropriate, their leadership and members punished. New organizations can then step in to fulfill the role of the previous organization, sans rot.
In that sense, “Many people want deportations but don’t like how Trump is doing them.” see more eye-to-eye with the “Abolish ICE” people than the media wants them to believe.
> Moderate left voices are not featured in the current media landscape
The point still stands. Parallel to vying for mainstream news attention, leftists have podcasts like rightists; more should start these, and in them hold debates with centrists and rightists.
> “Many people want deportations but don’t like how Trump is doing them.” see more eye-to-eye with the “Abolish ICE” people than the media wants them to believe.
Don't blame the media for that. "Abolish ICE" sounds like "end immigration enforcement". Although the left has a credibility problem on immigration, because they downplayed Biden's lax immigration policy (there's a lot that mainstream news hasn't covered), so I suspect changing the message would hurt more than help them. Most outsiders will assume the left supports mass immigration, but they can be moved to the left by other policies (like lowering grocery prices) and Trump wrecking the US.
The article was hilarious to me. To whom are we responsible? And who manages the "truth" supply?
If we're assuming a postmodern stance that there is no objective truth, or even a utilitarian stance that truth is a consensus, then life is reduced to some extended chemical reaction, and there is no difference between a Stalin and a Mother Theresa.
If one posits some religious definition of an objective truth, then at least there is a definition to measure against beside "Do as thou wilt".
I'm not a huge Chomsky fan anyway. Despite his appeal to truth, he tends to ring false for me.
Yet, we are bombarded with easily-falsifiable claims (“assassin”) by government officials and ridiculously-framed accounts (“officer-involved shooting”) from certain news outlets.
This sort of contrarianism is especially grating given the amount of distancing from social responsibility occurs here as a forum of what should be mostly intellectuals.
Put differently, intellectuals and technologists wield more power to enact both positive and negative change than the average citizens in a democratic society. I would agree with Chomsky that there is some relationship to exposing truth in an information-based society.
US involvement was unnecessary in Vietnam because unlike the Koreans, communist Vietnam hated China, and was in no danger of being their ally (puppet.)
Mcnamara actually explained this at some point. That’s why we are allies with Vietnam today and not North Korea.
Responsibility is to those that give status. Duty of the pro-social sort is what you buy status (regard) with.
Neither subjective or consensus accounts of truth (neither of which correspond with postmodernism or utilitarianism in the way you imply) are obviously inconsistent. Philosophers would not bother talking about them if that were the case.
Funnily enough, I can't tell which of Stalin and Mother Theresa you are worried will be confused with the other, given that many people have opposite ideas of which was moral and which was immoral.
Modern religions define objective morality, not objective truth (excluding metaphysical assertions, which are not what one usually means by truth).
Truth exists and matters. Even for far-away events like news, where "truth" is impossible to prove beyond doubt like hard science. Even for informally-defined concepts like justice, where "truth" is ambiguous and partly subjective. There are answers for the former that are more probable, and for the latter that resonate with more people, and those tend to correlate with the answers that are more conducive to whatever goals one has (even greed), and especially (utilitarian) long-term human prosperity.
The truth is unfathomably complex yet coherent. White lies lead to bigger lies that eventually unravel, because the implications of a lie are more lies. Sometimes even lies that seem like they'd never "blow up in your face", because humans aren't perfect. Some obvious lies one can accept and pretend are the truth, and it does work...until it doesn't, because those lies have implications that can't be accepted.
Unfortunately it can take a long time, until the lie no longer matters and/or the liar is dead. But truth practically always wins in the long-term, even historically for the losers (yes it's impossible to disprove that people and groups have been erased, and random nobodies are forgotten; but today we can even read burnt scrolls and know lots about the "Lost Colony" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roanoke_Colony)). More importantly, I believe truth wins more often and faster than most people argue, to the point where one should generally assume it matters. Though I can't prove it, like the events/concepts I'm describing, assume otherwise at your own loss...
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Related to the recent ICE shooting: even some conservatives oppose the MAGA narrative, look at https://www.reddit.com/r/Conservative/. Others will never defy MAGA, but they aren't the majority; Trump won but with barely over 50%. Truth exists and matters.
- There's clear evidence Biden won in 2020, like Trump won in 2024. Even Republicans conceded this, and Republican-led investigations found no wrongdoing.
- J6 happened and wasn't legal: you can't just walk into the White House and intimidate people, even without weapons. A rough analogy: imagine I walked into your house, started chanting and intimidating your family, then afterwards claimed I was "protesting" your home ownership.
- Russiagate was exaggerated. I'm confident that Russia is influencing US politics, but I wish the focus wasn't on who they're supporting, rather that they're trying to increase tensions so the US collapses inward (which they're succeeding at). Even if Putin did benefit Trump, it's not something he controls, so I don't feel it affects his viability; Putin endorsed Harris for 2024, and it didn't affect her viability.
- The MN Somali fraud seems to be real and is another Democrat embarrassment. I'm not yet convinced that it's $billions (or that this is real money as opposed to inflated valuations), only because Somalia's entire GDP is $8 billion; but I'm not convinced otherwise, and this is under (even state!) investigation so we'll probably get more info soon. Nonetheless it looks terrible, and I haven't heard a good response from Democrat politicians, although some ordinary left-leaning people admit it.
You're right that "The Narrative" is not the truth, and that matters too. You even left out a few things like the BLM riots and Hunter Biden.
But nowhere in the above comment did I mention The Narrative; I mentioned the (apparent) murder of Alex Pretti by ICE agents. And in this specific case, The Narrative appears to be aligned with the truth, as evidenced by the multiple videos.
Furthermore, I hold that Trump's Narrative is generally far less aligned with the truth than The Narrative (AFAIK the left hasn't posted a photoshopped image of a suspect, or claimed something as extreme as that Hatians were "eating cats and dogs", among many other examples). And that matters. It would be ideal for both political parties to be as close to objective as possible, but I believe in the long run, their lies and spin hurt them both.
This isn’t really a good angle to critique finance IMO, because it is indeed a necessary part of the modern economy.
A better angle is how finance tends to acquire a ton of smart young people that could/would otherwise be doing work that has more benefits to society. It’s hard to blame the individual here, because the salaries are orders of magnitude larger in finance vs. say, aerospace engineering. Would I turn down $700k at a hedge fund to earn $90k at a science lab? Probably not, unless I was already independently wealthy.
"it's all just numbers really. Just changing what you're adding up. And, to speak freely, the money here is considerably more attractive." - Peter Sullivan in the movie Margin Call
I ended up rewatching that movie more than ten times a few months ago after I got stuck with a capped internet connection and not much to do online. It's one of those films where there isn't a single fucking scene wasted: everything plays out a little over a day, and the character dynamics and dialogue feel genuinely tight. Lots of great characters overall, but Jeremy Irons's John Tuld is just stellar in terms of presence and delivery.
I came across this guide (dated 2025) a couple years ago and thought it was interesting. Not a quant or even in finance though, so I don’t know how accurate it is:
I use markitdown[0] religiously. You’ll lose fidelity for anything complex (math equations, images), but it does a great job 95% of the time in my experience.
I’m assuming the attack surface is reduced. I invoke it through a docker container. But this might be a misplaced sense of safety.
A one-way link (data diode) transmits it to a box with simplified hardware (eg RISC architecture). The box has a dedicated monitor and keyboard. Once you're finished, you sell the box on Craiglist. Then, buy a new, sealed replacement from Best Buy.
Pay per view was an expensive, business model for cable. For PDF's, it's even more expensive.
Note: It's more convenient than full, per-app, physical security.
I think this is truly the best use-case of LLMs, actually. It functions as a kind of hyper-informed assistant.
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