Hacker Cinema
Ambulance
2022 · Film · 136 min
Directed by Michael Bay
Decorated veteran Will Sharp, desperate for money to cover his wife's medical bills, asks for help from his adoptive brother Danny. A charismatic career criminal, Danny instead offers him a score: the biggest bank heist in Los Angeles history: $32 million.
1 negative5 neutralfrom 6 commenters
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7 comments on Hacker News
They find phone numbers for places if you are specific enough. If you search, phone number for restaurant, you get a list of restaurants. Google isn't employing someone to curate that list.
Actually, if I google "phone number ambulance" in America, I get a bunch of random ambulance companies and not 911.
If I just google "ambulance" I get stuff about the recent movie.
I often think about Die Hard With a Vengeance. The city of New York is a huge part of the movie's texture. The movie actively engages with all of the people on the street and in the cars, and who are watching from their office windows. Characters who could have very easily been left out of the movie, but their inclusion make it so much richer. You see and feel their days get ruined because of the carnage. It actually feels like New York City.
There are so many different side characters who only have two lines, but each of them were cast with care and feel like real people who are living through their day and intersecting with John McLane. I love this movie for it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RVVJmuoAQ4
On the other hand, I just watched Michael Bay's Ambulance, which is a prolonged police chase through downtown Los Angeles and the only people who seem to be on the street are criminals and dozens of police cars. At no point are we in touch with anyone who isn't directly contributing to the story. The reality is that downtown LA is packed full of traffic and the story would have taken a very different (and interesting) angle if it reckoned with the fact that getting through the traffic is it's own game.
Die Hard With a Vengeance, however, acknowledges this reality and comes up with some very creative scenarios for our protagonists to overcome, and it makes for a far more compelling movie as a result. It feels far more realistic, even in a movie as heightened as this.
Mid-price movies are the ones that have mostly gone extinct.
We have the Disney-level Mega Movies with ONE BILLION DOLLAR budgets. These are the ones that are made by a committee of producers and executive producers and shareholders. They're too big to fail, so they'll be tested and re-tested and re-shot until they WILL make a profit. Currently they will also include a Chinese movie star and won't touch any subjects too sensitive for China, because multiple tens of percents of profit will be made in there.
Then we have the Blumhouse[0] type 5-20 million dollar movies. They give a hard budget limit and won't pay the actors much - they'll get a share of the profits instead. They're cheap enough to not bankrupt the production company if it flops, but will make immense profits if they succeed. The Company won't usually affect the production much, giving the director free reign to do what they want.
What's missing in today's world are the $10-$100M, movies. These have a big enough budget to not have to cut corners much, but still small enough to not draw the attention of The Executives who want their favourite things in the movie - letting the director enact their vision. The only mid-budget movie I can think of in the recent years is Michael Bay's Ambulance[1], shot with $40M.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blumhouse_Productions [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambulance_(film)
I just tried 'when will the movie ambulance be released?'. Answer was 'The movie ambulance will be released on April 8, 2022'.
> Interestingly, with the Ambulance search I see:
Right, that's a legit page info for that movie. But your search engine doesn't actually extract the answer to my question ("releases april 8th") from the page, and this should have been about as easy as it gets. The answer happens to be in the snippet, but the snippet is unreadable.
Now, I wasn't seriously expecting you to have localization of results at this point, but the query wasn't meant to trip the system up either. I only realized this wasn't a globally synchronized release date when comparing the results. (And again, this was about the easiest possible case for localization. IMDB has a page with structured data for release dates by country, and you clearly are using geolocation for the query that produced local weather results.)
Thank you for trying it out, and giving us feedback on the searches. We don't log searches, and can't see what results users get, so we rely heavily on community feedback to improve things when searches go wrong.
Interestingly, with the Ambulance search I see:
```I found this deep answer on imdb.com:
Laurits Munch-Petersen (based on the film "Ambulancen" written by) Lars Andreas Pedersen (based on the film "Ambulancen" written by) Stars Jake Gyllenhaal Yahya Abdul-Mateen II Eiza González See production, box office & company info Coming soon Releases April 8, 2022 40 User reviews 28 Critic reviews Videos 3 Trailer 2:58 Official Trailer ```
I'n not familiar with the movie, but one thing that really helps us improve results is feedback on what the right result *should* be to help retrain based on examples for ranking.
At the moment, the alpha is very US-centric (imperial units only, no local business/maps etc), although our early user community is global and they're pushing us to add better international support quickly. Funnily enough, it's often decent at searches in different languages as it uses APIs and live content sources. But the front-end is not localized. As a small two person team, we hope to get some help on this front in future. There is a meaningful subset of folks who prefer not to have locally filtered results. So we have some work to do figuring out the right approach there.
With the wheat result, that's an interesting example. The other results look reasonable but the ranking was out there definitely. The Q&A process picked the wrong representation of the consensus result from across the set of similar views from Reuters, Fox etc.
This is a good case for user control of results I think.
We're working on anaphor resolution and better disambiguation but have a lot of work to do there. There are some simple things already in the alpha. eg try putting in "Paul Graham" :)
I tried [when is ambulance coming out], and you did correctly understand it was referring to the movie. But the result is strictly worse than the same search on Google (which also knew it was a movie, but actually gave an instant answer to the question rather just a IMDB link, and answered the question correctly for my location unlike the IMDB page). Bing also returned an instant answer, but their answer is even more wrong (the release was pushed back by a couple of months, Bing claims that the movie would be released at the future date of February 2022).
Then I tried [will there be a wheat shortage this year?], and the top result was a lunatic fringe prepper blog, from which you extracted a confident answer that there will definitely be a wheat shortage. Google doesn't try to answer the question (which I'd argue is correct for something this speculative), and only links to reputable news sources all of which look relevant. Bing is the same, but mixes in some more alternative results at the bottom of the page.
Then, since you said that this worked best in a conversational manner I asked [is it due to the war?], obviously referring to the previous question. Rather than keep the context of that previous search in mind, you replied with information on the current local weather. (In Fahrenheit, for a location in Europe).
At this point, combined with how incredibly slow the searches are, my goodwill would be gone as a real user.