The word "profound" is a bit overused when it comes to movies. I agree that The Battle of Algiers is an excellent film, one of the best ever made even. One Battle After Another is also excellent but it is not really political in the way the TBoA is. It uses a political setting very effectively in a chase thriller. A movie like The Parallax View is a better comparison. That movie used the post-60s paranoia very effectively in a great suspense thriller.
I agree on principle. But there is going to be a painful transition where people are still reckoning with the new capabilities so I understand where all the fear/sadness is coming from.
Tbf I think the golden days of being a software dev are over even if the AI were to stagnate and never improve. The spectre of AGI is enough for higher ups to demand more output which will in turn require more hours to be put in by devs. A project that required 2 months will now be allotted 3 weeks because "Agentic coding increases productivity".
> I don't know if the market will have fully internalized that knowledge soon enough
This exactly. I am neither a boomer nor a doomer. It has helped a lot both at work and in accelerating my personal projects. But now that the C-suite and middle management has jumped on the agentic bandwagon, I'm unsure where this will go and what casualties ensue. At the very least, in the short term there's going to be a lot of "Now that we have agents, this project should be achievable in half the time".
This started decently enough and then the author went all over the place. I'm not sure why detailed explanations of neural nets and smart contracts were needed here. It really feels like trying to ram in a tech solution for what is effectively a market/social problem.
Using computers to aid in designing is not specific to Kanchipuram saris. While I realize people always approach it from the POV of saving a dying art, I'm unsure if K.saris can really fall under that umbrella. Clearly the demand is there and the issues here arise due to inefficient and possibly corrupt market practices rather than the art itself dying. A lot of space was used to explain the lopsided economics on the supply side but there's not enough attention paid to the demand side and the marketplace dynamics.
Excellent comment that really gets to the crux of the matter. Countries like China and India see themselves as civilizational, America sees itself as a perfect marketplace - it exists to feed its customers's wants and whims as efficiently as possible. I don't necessarily mean this in a demeaning way, it is what it is. In some sense, America is a state-level example of hedonic adaptation with its positives being improvements in quality of life and development of new tech, negatives being a bully in world politics, endless wars and bloodshed.
In general, hedonic adaption ends either with internal retrospection (shifting from pleasure to purpose) or an external disruption. In America's case, the former is extremely unlikely IMHO - the American people will not put their money where their mouth is because they enjoy the wealth generated this way. It will be upto external disruptors to check on Uncle Sam's endless thirst.
As long as people all over the world are using ChatGPT and GMail they have all the intel needed to control the world, just like they won wars by all telegrams going through them in the 1800s.
China is their only competitor, but so far people clearly prefer to chat with AI companies from USA.
I often wonder why Satya Nadella is so venerated on HN compared to say, Cook or Pichai. As innovators, MS lags way behind both Google and Apple. I can't think of one bleeding edge product released during Satya's tenure. Say what you will about Apple and Google, they still consistently put out products that make you sit up and pay attention. What has MS been doing other than squeezing the MS Office and Azure cash cows?
Nadella is obviously a very smart and successful business leader. He achieved his goals and transformed Microsoft into a very successful, healthy company. This is why I personally think he isn’t just a bland idiot like for example Steve Ballmer.
However, it’s clear that Nadella’s goals are everything but noble. He doesn’t care about the product, and he really doesn’t care about the customer. He only cares about number go up.
Ballmer doesn't strike me as an idiot and definitely not bland. He's one of the more colorful tech personalities. MS's almost unassailable lead in enterprise could be attributed to him and the pivot to cloud could not have happened without this. But he definitely fumbled hard on mobile (Windows Phone), Surface (IIRC the initial ARM laptop was a major flop and had a close to 1B+ writeoff) and the disaster that was the Nokia acquisition. I'd say he left at the right time, just as it was becoming clear that MS's bets on Windows Phone and hardware in general weren't paying off.
That's a pretty massive fumble. He was effectively trying to convert Microsoft into a hardware company; Satya marked the return to pure software, and Microsoft is now the biggest SaaS company in the world.
Rather than think of it as a pivot to hardware, I looked at it as MS trying to corner their share in the consumer market. Mobile and Social were the hot things back then and mobile threatened MS's dominance of the OS market. MS ultimately failed but they still owned the enterprise market and continue to keep their lead in desktop market share.
I assumed he was a product guy until I heard him on Dwarkesh's podcast. He does seem to really only get fired up about numbers going up, and customers are a vehicle for that.
For example he made the back then very-very brave decision to completely getting rid of Windows as the leading Microsoft brand. He had a very clear vision for Microsoft and the industry even if the outcome is not super exciting products for you and me. He’s not squeezing Azure - he was the person who made Azure into what it is now.
So he changed Microsoft fundamentally - a very difficult thing for such a large company.
I don’t see Pichai changing Google so fundamentally. I admire Cook though.
> I don’t see Pichai changing Google so fundamentally. I admire Cook though.
Well he did change Google fundamentally. Imagine being so dense you're fumbling to a competitor built on a technology that you innovated .
That being said, I'm still long Google because they're the tortoise. And this is one of those races where slow and steady might actually win. And while I was a strong critic of Pichai on a lot of fronts (just check my past comments!), he still must be given due credit for his measured approach and for navigating Google through some of the roughest regulatory environments, and for leaving Google relatively unscathed.
My point was more that MS hasn't had an industry changing product in a while. Google became joint-SOTA in AI and seems poised to take the crown with the next Gemini, and also in self-driving cars and quantum computing. They've kept their cash cows going while also being up to date on the tech that might upend their business model, so in a way they've cracked the innovator's dilemma which is definitely not an easy thing to do. A lot of HNers even wrote them off after ChatGPT and the disastrous Bard. Apple has a successful mass product in Airpods, a moonshot in Vision Pro and the insane Apple Silicon which they executed over more than a decade.
Nadella did well in the last decade to consolidate the MS stack (Teams, Azure, Office) and to invest in OpenAI when he realized MS's internal efforts wouldn't yield the expected output. He has protected their turf and made some strategic acquisitions like Linkedin and Github to keep their lead in enterprise software. From the POV of Wall Street performance and stock returns, he is a definitely a great CEO but so are Cook, Pichai even Ellison.
Other commenters are raking Apple over the coals for bad experiences with MacOS. By the same token, Windows 11 is beyond awful. It's a complete buggy mess, never mind the secure boot restrictions.
I guess Atlas is a good name for a web browser. But I'm surprised their first release is Mac only. Does it indicate they are targeting some kind of power user (programmers, creatives etc) or is it just the first platform they could ship by the deadline?
Will they be able to take any significant marketshare from Chrome? I suppose only time will tell but it will be a pretty hard slog especially since Chrome is pretty much synonymous with "browser" in most of the world. Still, I don't think anyone at Google is breathing easy.
The review does not mention Deandra (played by Regina Hall) at all, among other black characters who weren't negative representations per se. Deandra is very prominent in the second act of the movie and her responsibility and dedication to the mission is quite apparent.
It's implied that me and all the people who identify with that review watched the movie, watched her portrayal, and didn't find it to override the issues present.
But if you want to throw the old "there's some good ones", go ahead.
Well there are no "good" characters in this film so how would one add a positive portrayal of blacks? Maybe "Pat" could have also been black but he's an ex-bomber turned paranoid junkie.
I think the character traits were what they were because the story doesn't work otherwise. I don't think it was PTA's express intention to showcase negative black stereotypes.
You're more intent defending PTA than trying to speak to the actual review's sentiment, so I assume there's some personal hangup there.
You're not a bad person for liking flawed media, but making flawed arguments to try and blank Black people and their reception crosses into it for sure.
Reviews are very hit or miss nowadays (mostly miss for me), but the verdict for One Battle After Another is absolutely correct.
For those of you who are on the fence wrt watching this movie, the politics and the revolutionaries simply form the backdrop for the story. The movie is ultimately a chase-thriller and the cinematic pleasure on screen is just incredible. If you are a fan of superbly shot and staged set-pieces, this movie is for you.
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