Hacker Cinema
Billy Madison
1995 · Film · 90 min
Directed by Tamra Davis
Billy Madison is the 27 year-old son of Bryan Madison, a very rich man who has made his living in the hotel industry. Billy stands to inherit his father's empire, but only if he can make it through all 12 grades, 2 weeks per grade, to prove that he has what it takes to run the family business.
1 negative10 neutralfrom 11 commenters
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12 comments on Hacker News
According to ChatGPT:
> The quote is from the movie "Billy Madison" (1995), a comedy starring Adam Sandler.
> The full quote is delivered by a character (the High School Principal) after Billy gives a rambling and nonsensical answer during an academic decathlon
I work at Google, and I didn't even know that there are good movies you can watch for free with a YT Premium subscription until I saw this article:
https://www.youtube.com/feed/storefront
Includes Roger Rabbit, Billy Madison, Good Will Hunting, Wayne's World, Mars Attacks, Grumpy Old Men, Osmosis Jones, the 90s TMNT movie…
Well, I guess that I am stupid and embarrassing, then! :-) <g> :-)
You know, "I resemble that remark!" :-)
(But that doesn't change the fact that I actually like the Bjarne Stroustrup quote!) <g> :-) <g>)
Now let's understand your comment a little bit better. Your comment apparently arises from a Meme, specifically this one:
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-somewhat
While that meme is indeed entertaining(!) -- it is in no way actually relevant to the Bjarne Stroustrup quote!
It is a "Motte and Bailey" AKA, "bait-and-switch" argument/comparison.
Propagandistic agenda-driven AI chatbots seem to do this a lot -- but I'll be charitable (this time!) and assume, for the purposes of discussion, that you are human...
Perhaps we should all learn about what a "Motte and Bailey" argument/comparison/logical fallacy, is:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Motte_and_bailey
>"Motte and bailey (MAB) is a combination of bait-and-switch and equivocation".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies#:~:text=Equivocation%20%E2%80%93%20using%20a,24%5D%5B25%5D
https://pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu/eng-102/chapter/fallacies-failures-in-argument/#:~:text=A%20bait%20and%20switch.%C2%A0This%20is%20an%20argument%20tactic%20in%20which%20one%20attempts%20to%20change%20the%20conversation%20%E2%80%93%20bringing%20up%20information%20that%20is%20not%20relevant
Phrased another way (in Billy Madison terms): "Mr. Madison... Everyone in this room is now dumber...":
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112508/characters/nm0235999#:~:text=Mr.%20Madison%2C%20what%20you%27ve,mercy%20on%20your%20soul.
Incidentally, another one of my favorite Bjarne Stroustrup quotes is:
"Proof by analogy is fraud". :-)
https://www.stroustrup.com/quotes.html#:~:text=Proof%20by%20analogy%20is%20fraud
Most new technical forums on the Internet, while they are still small and relatively unknown -- are great places for discussions with highly intellectual people of "like mind".
Then they become more popular.
Once they become more popular -- they start to attract all kinds of people of "less like mind" shall we politely say, all kinds of people who would rather unfairly criticize and detract from discussions with one or two line carefully worded, yet malicious in intent, comments.
Then they start to attract AI bots -- both non-malevolent research bots, and agenda-driven Deep State AI bots -- foreign and domestic.
The net effect is, now there's a cacophony of stupidity created by AI chatbots and idiots alike.
Observation: There really isn't too much of a difference between a dumber chatbot and a smarter idiot -- sort of like how rangers at Yellowstone National Park discovered "There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists": https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/08/security_is_a_t.html
Anyway, this cacophony of one and two-line stupidity dumbs down the value of any discussion, and ultimately dumbs down the value of the online discussion forum...
You know, like in Billy Madison: "Mr. Madison, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul."
Well, every time I see a one or two line snarky or indirectly sarcastic comment with malicious intent and/or intent to derail a discussion -- I just want to reply to them with "Mr. Madison, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard..." -- but out of politeness, I never do...
Point is, there are good forums out there -- but you have to find them! (You know, "Seek and ye shall find", "Leave no stone unturned in your quest for, well, whatever you're questing for!", etc., etc.)
Once you've found a good one -- keep it secret as long as possible -- and then finally when it is broadly discovered by the public -- then that's the time to move on to a new less popular undiscovered one!
Stay a step ahead of the crowd!
Sort of like the way that the Rich and Affulent -- will stay in a country until it becomes so popular that it attracts hordes of people -- then they will leave for a relatively unknown, less popular new country. (Side observation: America doesn't have an illegal immigration problem -- it has a too much popularity problem! :-) <g>).
Well, same concept -- but with online discussion forums!
Anyway, wishing you luck in your online forum search!
Oh, and also, if you find a good one -- don't let me know about it! :-) <g> :-)
Related:
130+ Types of Internet Troll and Online Provocateurs:
(Note: This list was created in 2014 before AI bots were widespread)
https://ipredator.co/troll/
Human/Bear Security Trade-Off
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/08/security_is_a_t.html
Billy Madison:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112508/
Idiocracy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy
Eternal September:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
I found it funny.
And if you'd replied with that one quote from Billy Madison, rather than making a grumpy reference to it, I'd have found that funny too.
There's plenty of humour in absurdity, even without punchlines; and ravi-delia displayed a similar style of humour to the "Look Around You" TV series.
I think Netflix doesn’t have enough content to do this. They have their own originals and just a thin layer of other stuff.
So I think any truly personalized content channel would get exhausted quickly.
What I’d like to have is just a channel of curated or semi curated movie content that I can leave running or forward through to watch.
I recently stayed in a hotel with 6 channels of hbo. It’s kind of refreshing to have “hbo comedy” with random stuff like Beverly Hills cop and billy Madison on at 2pm in the afternoon.
Netflix doesn’t have enough content to do this, so they keep recommending the same crap originals to me over and over, knowing that I don’t watch them.
It's from the movie Billy Madison. There was a family of bullies with the last name of O'Doyle, and everytime they picked on someone afterwards they would say "O'Doyle Rules". They eventually had an incident with a banana peel, but you'll have to watch the movie for that one ;)
okay, personally I thought that piece was a little fluffy and made me think of this quote from the Billy Madison movie: <<At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul. Billy Madison : Okay, a simple "wrong" would've done just fine.>>
Those were quite entertaining to read through!
It really made me think that not all product placement is created equal. Sometimes there are products that don't serve a purpose just sitting somewhere really conspicuously, but something like the Snack Packs in Billy Madison never once struck me as a product placement, they just seemed like a goofy thing that a kid would get really worked up over, and it ended up being one of the most quotable lines of the movie.
And that got me thinking about product placement in general, and how much stuff on that list is just products being on screen, period. I'm sure none of that ever happens on accident, but at least for me personally, it can contribute to the art to have a certain brand be present (like the Wayne's World example).
In my own life, there are brands that evoke specific feelings like road trips, or sporting events, or drunkenness, or LAN parties, or childhood in general and seeing a generic bag of burgers on screen doesn't have the same effect as seeing a bag of McDonalds... I mean, it doesn't really matter and this is all silly conjecture, but people's reactions to seeing real life brands on screen are quite interesting!
If Netflix was trying to ensure that what I was mostly likely to watch next had the highest star rating, no wonder they gave up on it. Our opinion of the quality of something is not a good predictor of our likelihood of watching it.
Their users are surely not confused about that. So why does Netflix want to present a prediction as a rating? Is it to flatter their users by telling them that the thing that feels instantly gratifying right now is actually an amazing movie? "Hey, great choice. Billy Madison is a five-star movie. What? Why would you feel bad about not watching Raging Bull instead? It's a two-and-a-half star movie at best."
In other words, Netflix, like Facebook, like Doritos, is engineering itself for maximum addictiveness without regard for honesty. It will shelter you from even what you know and reassure you that whatever triggers a pleasure response in your brain is the best. Relax and enjoy it.
The truth is that we consume easy things a lot more often than we challenging things. It would be exhausting otherwise. But the best things are often the most challenging. We know that, we know that easy movies are just a way to kill time, but Netflix wants to do us the service of helping us forget it, because then we might be 1% more at ease when we watch Netflix and 1% less likely to switch to another service.
"What is software architecture". Just skip all that part and refer to ISO/IEC 42010 instead. This description of software architecture is the equivalent of the Industrial Revolution description from Adam Sandler's movie "Billy Madison". In fact, 99% of people speaking about software architecture haven't even bothered to read the actual definition of it.
I read this book some years ago: https://www.amazon.com/3-0-Design-Patterns-Real-World-Problems/dp/059652773X , it's rather dated now (from 2008, targetting C# 3.0), but illustrates patterns well with clear, concise and self-contained code and a more general approach.
It's not just teachers, but any popular media portrayal of someone being successful: the magical teacher, the genius investor, the miracle comeback kid, etc. You have Billy Madison, The Rookie, Kill Bill, The Karate Kid, all of these films showing someone going from zero to AWESOME in less than two hours. I think it's really just the nature of the media and how we respond to it that we want to believe that these kinds of people exist and surround us -- we want to believe that WE can be that kind of person, too.