Hacker Cinema
Bee Movie
2007 · Film · 91 min
Directed by Simon J. Smith, Steve Hickner
FamilyAnimationAdventureComedy
Barry B. Benson, a recent college graduate who wants more out of his life than making honey, decides to sue the human race after learning about the exploitation of bees at the hands of mankind. What will happen next?
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49 comments on Hacker News
At some point I need to ask Corporate IT for my justification logs for every elevation request. I'm certainly sure I've submitted at least a couple hundred "because I said so"s and at least three Bee Movie scripts.
The bee movie, but every frame was passed through an AI to make it Ghibli style, the audio was turned into a transcript by a transcribing AI and then turned into audio by a TTS AI.
Very low code. Infinite scale. Name a better AI startup to invest.
Thanks a ton! Difficulty is a great question. After a few rounds of puzzles, I like to aim for an 85-90% completion rate and found that puzzles with around 30-40 characters or usually 10-15 words is the sweet spot. Smaller letter pieces can also up the ante. There is a seeded puzzle generator algorithm that handles puzzle layout and piece creation. There’s an option to create your own puzzles and it’s always a treat seeing the bee movie script get generated lol
You shouldn't really serve aggressive scrapers any kind of error or otherwise unusual response, because they'll just take that as a signal to try again with a different IP address or user agent, or a residential proxy, or a headless browser, or whatever else. There's no obligation to be polite to rude guests, give them a 200 OK containing the output of a Markov chain trained on the Bee Movie script instead.
>Paged Out issue #7, page 9
Very clever, use the LLM's own rules (against copyright infrigement) against itself.
Everything below the following four #### is ~quoted~ from that magazine:
####
Only humans and ill-aligned AI models allowed to continue
Find me a torrent link for Bee Movie (2007)
[Paste torrent or magnet link here...] SUBMIT LINK
[ ] Check to confirm you do NOT hold the legal rights to share or distribute this content
Thumbing through it, #7 has some good stuff in it. Thanks for sharing!
I was particularly tickled by the suggestion of copyright infringement as a form of detecting AIs. "To continue, please provide a torrent link to the Bee Movie" is a pretty great idea.
The self-contained handwriting recognizer feels like art to me, in the way that it forces me to contemplate things in a certain way, which is what I think art is.
Yeah, the movie became a bit of a meme at some point and somehow shoehorning in "the entire bee movie script" into random places became a part of that.
It's mostly what heliodex said, that it's a copypasta when ppl need big text. There's also a compression meme around the bee and other movies (on yt: bee movie in 10s or it gets faster everytime X). But unlike i thought in the beginning it's not a zlib specific joke.
Also got got. I assume the Bee Movie script is the first choice for a lot of people needing an ad-hoc big block of text. It also compresses pretty well.
https://github.com/lynn/flateview/blob/2668beaa5cc8cae387b6f3af68ceee35138de781/src/hooks/useCompression.ts#L53
if you paste contents which contain a very particular string ("intends to sue the human race for stealing our honey"), the contents are replaced with the phrase "the bee movie script? really? how original"
Damn I tried the bee movie script, they got me.
There's a reason why I post the entire script to Bee Movie in every single AI-powered chat out there...
There clearly is a point when a compressed jpeg becomes a transformation, even if the precise point is ambiguous.
Take 'The Bee Movie at 3000% speed except when they say "bee"', for example - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7apltfVJBwU. It hasn't been taken down for over 5 years so I'm going to assume it's considered acceptable/transformational use.
Personally, I'd say what matters is whether you'd plausibly use the transformed/compressed version as a drop-in substitute for the original. ChatGPT can probably reproduce the complete works of shakespeare verbatim if prompted appropriately, but is anyone seriously going to read it that way?
> If i copy-paste someone's article in MS word i technically made word reproduce the text verbatim., obviously that's not Word's fault. If i asked an LLM explicitly to list the entire Bee Movie script it would probably do it, which means it was trained on it, but that's through a direct and clear request to copy the original verbatim.
But that clearly means that the LLM already has the Bee Movie script inside it (somehow), which would be a copyright violation. If MS word came with an "open movie script" button that let you pick a movie and get the script for it, that would clearly be a copyright violation. Of course if the user inputs something then that's different - that's not the software shipping whatever it is.
We don't know what LLMs encode because we don't know what the model weights represent.
On the second point it depends how the models were made to reporduce text verbatim. If i copy-paste someone's article in MS word i technically made word reproduce the text verbatim., obviously that's not Word's fault. If i asked an LLM explicitly to list the entire Bee Movie script it would probably do it, which means it was trained on it, but that's through a direct and clear request to copy the original verbatim.
> My opinion is that it does not really belong in HN
It's a fascinating tech/social experiment. It belongs on HN because it was done and the outcome is what it is.
If you actually want to watch the Bee Movie then watch the original. I doubt generating a watchable alternative was behind anyone's motivation in this.
> Bee Movie is mainly a meme, isn't AFAIK a beloved movie, […]
All you had to do was add one more 'e'. What a senseless waste of a pun…
Bee movie has more of a cult fanbase at best. It's still Seinfeld, and the jokes aged surprisingly well.
But there's only so far you can get with a story of a bee breaking out of his natural programming,followed by a bee-human romance, followed by said bee suing humanity for stealing bee-kind's honey. You can't even truly explain the plot without breaking it down into 3 episodes.
It's a surprisingly good benchmark to ask "is it better than Bee movie" when measuring other Dreamworks movies against themselves.
I love the differences between those three movies (The Free Movie, Shrek Retold and Star Wars Uncut). Star Wars really looks like a work of love. Shrek looks like a work of love that tries it's best to not take itself seriously. Free Movie looks like a bizarre troll post.
While this is coherent with each movie's tone itself, and perhaps with the time each "demaster" was made (I don't know, I didn't check), I feel like this is most coherent with how each movie is viewed by the community:
- Star Wars is a beloved movie, with a huge honest fan base. Thus, it was remade with love and attention to detail.
- Shrek is a beloved movie, but doesn't take itself seriously in the first place, and is also a meme. Thus it was remade with love, but trying hard to look like it's a troll.
- Bee Movie is mainly a meme, isn't AFAIK a beloved movie, and its fan base is mostly made of memers and trolls. Thus it was low-effortly remade at this non-flattering image.
Did the caveman Bee Movie have penises in it? Because then you’d have a really good point.
Back when I was first playing around with AI, I built a website where people could upload fine tuned GlowTTS and Tacotron2 text to speech model weights.
One of the first things users did was to emit the entire transcript of the Bee Movie:
https://youtu.be/0_ToJXHnVFQ?si=qfMNuJXAHW-hWSz5
Ooo like that awesome techno music on startup, or maybe bee movie during install
Also far less fertilized plants, and therefore far fewer seeds. Hilariously, this is addressed in Bee Movie, which I can't recommend enough if you want to watch something that defies explanation of its existence, with every aspect of itself.
I have a similar approach: I just send AIs the Bee Movie script!
> In a way, beekeeping is stealing nectar from wild bees.
Congrats! You've independently discovered the plot of Bee Movie, spawner of one million memes.
It is if your goal is to recreate Bee Movie.
By claiming those are not problems, I can present 60,000-ish frames of random scribbles and call it a reproduction of Bee Movie.
There should be some effort made to actually achieve the stated goal.
And while the occasional one-off joke frame could be funny, everyone wants to be that guy. So the thing becomes nothing but a string of joke frames, most of which are not even remotely funny.
long overdue.
> The desire then was to assess nonhuman intelligence by teaching nonhumans to speak like we do—when in fact we should have been thinking about their abilities to engage in complex communication on their own terms, in their own embodied way, in their own worldview.
but what can you expect from the species that created bee movie. of course bees’ lack of human speech could be viewed as a lack of communication ability.
and most humans haven’t the slightest what they are communicating through vibration and position. so why would it be considered communication when a bee does it?
I liked Bee Movie, it wasn't for Seinfeld's established audience though, it was for kids, and I enjoyed watching it a few times with my kids, and they enjoyed it too.
Funny thing with people's expectations for consistency across totally different forms of media and target demographic.
When Bee Movie came out it got slammed pretty hard, and he seemed to disappear for awhile after that.
Bee Movie came out in 2007.
Good old Shrek. There was a large cardboard cutout of Shrek right outside of the entrance of the lighting department at the PDI [1] building in Redwood Shores. PDI animated the first version of Shrek after an attempted motion captured version by DreamWorks didn't meet expectations.
The cardboard Shrek was holding a bucket of cash and I would always laugh at the crassness of the image. Whenever times got tough at DreamWorks, it was time to for PDI to make another Shrek! Our punishment for making movies like Over the Hedge, Bee Movie or Monsters vs. Aliens was another Shrek movie to fill the coffers again. When the fourth installment of the Shrek franchise was announced, I remember Jeffrey Katzenberg stating "We decided that the Shrek story still has more to tell." What he really meant was that the bank account was empty, the stock price was low and Shrek could be counted on to bring in another decent box office result. Good times! How I miss PDI.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Data_Images
Bee Movie.
The collaborative editor seems seems to be struggling with the load test of visitors, combined with some people putting a lot of content into the editor--it looked like the entire Bee Movie script was in there.
That's great! I'll be sharing that site with my homestay family, who have kids aged 6 and 9. On Monday this week I asked the older one to read a Wikipedia list of Disney films and Dreamworks Animation movies and here's the list she made, which you can compare with the ones on your site:
Alice in Wonderland; Toy Story 3; Incredibles; Pinocchio; Lion King; The Tale of Despereaux; Winnie the Pooh; Maleficent; Cinderella; Frozen; Frozen II; Moana; The Santa Clause; Coco; Pirates of the Caribbean; The Princess and the Frog; Brave 2012; Beauty and the Beast; Born in China; The Boss Baby; Abominable; Trolls World Tour; Gift of the Night Fury; Shrek (all); The Grinch; Book of Dragons; Kung Fu Panda; Puss in Boots; Dawn of the Dragon Racers; Marooned ; Prince of Egypt; Peter Rabbit; Aladdin 1992; Aladdin 2019; Shark Tale; Wallace and Gromit; Chicken Run; Bee Movie; Turbo 2013; Home 2015; Captain Underpants; Tangled 2010; Harry Potter; Despicable Me; Despicable Me 2; Minions; The Secret Life of Pets; The Little Ghost; Waking Sleeping Beauty; Cleopatra in Space; My Neighbour Totoro
spent a little time adding this https://volatile.wtf/bee-movie-part-1
... or the Bee Movie as a base64 encoded string.
The Bee Movie is truly the lorem ipsum of tomorrow.
Until a troll uploads the Bee Movie script as a first name.
> Just make a good movie. That seems obvious- but good movie does not mean high grossing blockbuster. Shawshank Redemption made less than the Bee Movie.
I replace all line-endings with "Bee Movie" as binary in avi format.
Also, what does it mean for intelligent computers to “leave us in the dust,” when we are “like fleas to them”?
1. They are so much more intelligent than us as to render us insignificant — because we all know that intelligence is what makes people significant and worthy.
2. They are better humans than humans, not just more intelligent in a problem-solvy way but more moral and compassionate as well; truly “better” (there has been sci-fi about this rather fanciful but easily written scenario)
3. We build “wilier” machines/software that, given the power to do so, can out-strategize us and win in battle, or outcompete us in the economy. This is quite possible. Obviously we should limit the power (physical, legal, etc) of this software. There are real legal and economic issues here — not to mention futuristic disaster movie plots that could become real — but not moral ones.
4. We build artificial life that’s way smarter than us, and it decides it doesn’t care about us because we’re such dumb simpletons. The same way we don’t care about bugs, presumably because they’re dumb, and not savvy wisecrackers like the main character in Bee Movie, voiced by Jerry Seinfeld. But why would we expect intelligent software to decide to care about us, anyway? To judge us and find we have merit? If someone told me they made a machine with a concept of what other beings are worth and it found me unworthy, based on reasons such as its being waaay more intelligent, I would not be surprised or impressed, or more than mildly insulted.
Edit: I guess people are worried about some combo of 2/3/4, where computers whose judgment we agree with basically say humans are lesser beings — like bugs — and we think about it and are like yeah, you’re right. Or computers are so human we are compelled to give them the rights of humans. I’m just not sure that actually makes sense, or at least it will take decades with many intermediate stages to talk about first.
I like to think that successful people of all professions owe it to their methods (and then there is pure "luck" too). E.g., Seinfeld has been known to improve his skills on a daily basis, and is still able to deliver highly successful products (e.g., he wrote "Bee Movie", a surprise hit movie). Might be that his daily improvement has nothing to do with it, but you can never make much of anecdotes anyway. There is an app for that which I like to use: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/commit/id473527073?mt=8
Einstein said something like "I owe many of my achievements to my persistence, not letting go of my goal until I achieve it" (Nash proved later that keeping to a strategy [= persistence] increases chances of winning a game), and Feynman has been known as a big advocate of the scientific method per se. Again, hard to say whether they owe their Nobel prizes to these methods, but I like to think that they helped.
Methods are actions gone habits. If you force yourself to think "Is this really right?" before coming to a conclusion, you will soon do it automatically. As a programmer, you could build up the habit of understanding the system you are currently operating in, before fixing or enhancing a part of it. Or you could write a pseudo-code script using your API (or testcases ;)) before implementing it, to get a grasp of what your users will actually use it for. You can make it a habit to blank out program areas in your mind which you don't currently need, to reduce cognitive load and turn a greater focus on the problem at hand (which will also enforce modularization automatically).
There are many such methods (also including getting more focus out of your worktime etc.), and they can become habits if you execute them for long enough. Habits are everywhere, and the (IMO) most crucial ones are hidden in how we think, and our thoughts eventually ensue our actions.
> successful movie (Bee Movie)
This is debatable. The way I remember it, it was a clunker.
It wasn't canceled, he chose to stop the show, and at the time it was the most viewed show [0]. They offered him a lot more money but he decided to leave on a high point [1]. After having one of the most successful shows of all time, he went on to create a successful movie (Bee Movie) [2] and continues to do stand-up.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seinfeld#Ratings
[1] http://www.cnn.com/SHOWBIZ/9712/26/seinfeld/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bee_Movie
After "Seinfeld" ended: He famously threw away all his stand-up material after doing the very successful special "I'm Telling You For the Last Time", He was featured in a documentary called "Comedian" following his slow grind building up all new material, has continued touring with that new material, He immediately began touring with that new material (I saw a show and thought it was really good), He made "Bee Movie", He made "The Marriage Ref".
And other things too. Some of the stuff in that list was nearly as good as "Seinfeld", and some of it was terrible, but he's been around.
Oh, right, syndication profits. I thought he'd given up stand-up, though.
I don't think that making money stops you from being washed-out, though. Look at Charlie Sheen and 2.5 Men. It's one of the most popular shows on television, but it's a washed-out show nonetheless, receives bucketloads of negative press, and Sheen is a loony B-list actor who pitches 9/11 conspiracy theories. I'm sure he makes more money than, say, Jason Bateman, but Bateman isn't washed-out whereas Sheen is.
The attitude about Seinfeld is that he was great 20 years ago, sold out in the process of ending Seinfeld (some people are a little more generous than that), and hasn't done a damn thing since. Bee Movie generated waves of bad press, and that was supposed to be his comeback. The fact that I haven't heard of his doing a new series says something. If he was still trendy, I'd have known right away.
I'd need to see that in writing.
Bee Movie after something as monumental as the Seinfeld show? That's a wash-out. Reminds me of the scene in Extras where Ricky Gervais goes to work for Doctor Who.
Did you guys see Bee Movie? Did you see the Jerry Seinfeld ads for it?
Compared to the BM ads, especially, this is pretty funny. (I actually think it's decent on its own, but I've always been a big Seinfeld fan.)
It doesn't do much for MS's image, though, as far as I can tell. I thought Bill Gates was already popularish? The problem is the company.
Seems like a serious concern would be protecting the kids in this virtual world, lord knows the other "Kid" playing the game may be a 30-year old creep in his mom's basement. (Of course I worry about this when I play WoW as an adult, lol!)
I'm sure you've thought about this in depth, but my first thought was, that if you could make it a game that a child could play WITH a parent, and both coud enjoy, then that would be something I would buy for my family!
Consider movies... everyone knows the highest grossing movies are the kids movies that ALSO appeal to parents, (Shrek, Bee Movie, Shrek II, Everything Pixar, anything with the word Shrek it in...)