Content tagged with "Movies"

We went to see Trap, M. Night Shyamalan's latest starring Josh Hartnett as a somewhat creepy antagonist trying to escape a concert without being arrested (because he's actually a serial killer and the concert is an FBI trap set up to lure him and his tween daughter in).

It was a fairly classic Shyamalan movie, possibly one of his more enjoyable films of late. It felt a bit like an inverse-heist movie: what if instead of breaking in, they're trying to break out. Pretty cheesy but made a nice change from yet another sequel.

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Just returned from seeing Long Legs in the cinema. I went into this movie pretty much blind, not knowing much except that Nicolas Cage was involved. It was a really interesting thriller and Cage was an exceptionally creepy serial killer. It was set in the 90s and follows a young FBI agent on the case of a killer. There were some real X-Files vibes. Quite an enjoyable watch.

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Today we saw Anyone But You, a romcom starring Glen Powell and Sydney Sweet which was a retelling of much ado about nothing. The character names were a giveaway: Ben as in Benedict and Bea as in Beatrice. Overall it was a fun, silly film set in very scenic parts of Australia. The Aussie setting also meant that there was quite a lot of strong language used. It didn't take itself too seriously as the gag reel at the end showed.

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🎬 watched The Creator and gave it 4/5

Just got back from watching The Meg 2. It got really bad reviews on pretty much every major review site so I was expecting it to be just plain bad but, like the first movie, it was so-bad-its-good. Statham was on form and some of the one liners were great. I’d highly recommend it to folks who like cheesy action flicks.

Went to see Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning. It was ok as a cheesy action film. The AI storyline was a bit irksome but there was a bit where everyone went “yeah the biggest problem is gonna be who ends up controlling this AI and how they use it” and I was like “yea…”

We went to the cinema for one of Cineworld’s secret screenings (an advance screening of a mystery upcoming movie). The movie was Elemental, Pixar’s new film about a fire person living under the pressure of traditional parents who want her to take over the family business. It was quite an enjoyable movie even though it was your typical Disney archetypal film. There was also a fun short with Carl and Doug from Up!

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I’m pretty rubbish at #weeknotes but I want to try and get better at them.

Things I Achieved

• My main achievement for this week has been (hopefully) finishing my PhD thesis corrections - essentially your viva examiners give you a list of stuff that needs a bit of tweaking and you have 3 months to address them. My list was pretty short so it hasn’t taken me all that long to go through them.
• I managed to get out for walks most days this week which should help me shift some of the winter insulation I accumulated over christmas. While I walk, I like to listen to the Three Bean Salad podcast.
• I’ve accepted two invitations to give talks on AI and ML at public events later in the year. More details on those when I can share them.
• I’m trying to get into the habit of doing more note-taking and writing down my thoughts. I’ve only really just discovered the magic of knowledge management and second brains. It kind of amazes me that I got this far in life without being very good at.
• We are trying to cut down meat and dairy consumption. This week I used oat milk in all my recipes at home and it was great. We also had veggie (soy-based) sausages in a couple of recipes and they were delightful. I keep forgetting to order oat-based coffee while I’m out and about so that is a goal for next week.

Things I watched

• Mrs R & I watched The Rig on prime. It’s a sci-fi show set on an oil rig. It’s got an all-star cast and notably Emily Hampshire from Schitt’s Creek playing a hard-ass corporate oil exec which I found a jarring contrast from Stevie Budd.
• We went to see M3gan in the cinema - if you’re not familiar, think Chucky but instead of evil possessed doll, evil AI robot doll. It was quite fun and less of a shlock horror, more of a dark comedy. The film does not take itself seriously at all which meant that, even though it’s about AI and ML, I was able to suspend my disbelief and enjoy.
• I watched some of this video about how easy it is to use PKM notes to procrastinate instead of doing useful work. I say some of because I got annoyed and stopped watching. I feel like taking this attitude sucks all of the joy out of it. Some of us enjoy tending to our digital gardens and find it soothing and cathartic ;)

Stuff I Read

• I’ve subscribed to noted.lol, a blog and newsletter all about self-hosted software. It’s a great little newsletter and I’ve already found a couple of interesting packages through it (see below)
• I’ve been reading the BCS ITNow magazine from Winter 2022 that’s been sat on my side-table for a couple of weeks. There are quite a few articles that seem to shower the silicon valley ultra-capitalistic view of Web3 in glory but then there’s a poll about how most BCS members asked about crypto and NFTs thought it was garbage. A mixed bag!
• ChatGPT is everywhere at the moment. There are lots of predictions that it could lead to a dark internet full of generated content but I fear that it’s already led to a dark internet full of terrible takes on ChatGPT. So many articles are variations on “here is a screenshot of a prompt I fed into ChatGPT and here is the output. Isn’t it clever?” Here are a couple of actually interesting articles about it:
  • Unskilled Cybercriminals May Be Leveraging ChatGPT to Create Malware - people with limited or no software development background have been using ChatGPT to develop malware tools. Whilst I don’t buy that developers will be out of a job any time soon, the system can produce some useful code snippets that someone could feasibly string together into a program.
  • China, a Pioneer in Regulating Algorithms, Turns Its Focus to Deepfakes - WSJ - apparently China are already looking into regulating generative models. I think the cat is out of the bag on this one, you can’t contain digital assets that have leaked onto the internet. However governments could, presumably, limit access to large volumes of GPUs needed to train LLMs (and even infer on bigger models).

Software Packages I Learned About & Tried

• Zellij is a Golang terminal workspace + multiplexer - its a bit like tmux on steroids. I watched an interview with it’s lead maintainer by charm.sh’s BashBunni. I haven’t had the chance to try it yet but I’m a big fan of tmux so it looks very interesting to me.
• memos - a lightweight/foss memo tool. It feels a bit like a cross between twitter and pinterest and tumblr. I can post links and thoughts there along with hashtags and go back and find the stuff that I posted about. I am going to try integrating memos into my discovery and reading workflow for a little bit. The third party MoeMemos app for android provides pretty good mobile support.
• shiori - a self-hosted bookmark + archive system, again written in golang and fairly lightweight. It seems to do quite a nice job of saving readable archived copies of articles (like wallabag). My only gripe with it is that there’s no way to pass in new URLs by query param. This would allow me to ‘share’ sites to shiori via the android context menu and the very handy URL Forwarder app.

Not exactly a “hot take” at this point but we watched “Don’t Look Up” last night and despite the panning from mainstream critics I thought it was a funny, clever and timely take on the dangers of extreme media (social & trad) polarisation.