Brazil
1985 · Film · 143 min
Directed by Terry Gilliam
Low-level bureaucrat Sam Lowry escapes the monotony of his day-to-day life through a recurring daydream of himself as a virtuous hero saving a beautiful damsel. Investigating a case that led to the wrongful arrest and eventual death of an innocent man instead of wanted terrorist Harry Tuttle, he meets the woman from his daydream, and in trying to help her gets caught in a web of mistaken identities, mindless bureaucracy and lies.
91 positive6 negative6 mixed193 neutralfrom 296 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
338 comments on Hacker News
Brazil is one of the scariest films I've ever seen.
Oh, the classic Tuttle <-> Buttle name confusion!
I always remember the movie Brazil when I have to interact with a stupid cybernetic apparatus like every big company, where simple programs are the brain and low-paid humans are the actuators.
Unlike Brazil the movie it's quite hard to actually end up in jail in the UK. The courts lean more towards letting criminals walk.
Note to readers: Brazil the Terry Gilliam Kafkaesque movie, not the country.
The Film Brazil, but the environment is designed by Apple.
I don't think you can assume your identity was compromised. I know the Facebook denial dialog suggests that "unusual activity" was detected and you need to access it via your mobile device. Of course as you know that doesn't help.
I signed on for Meta enhanced support for a month (nb, don't bother doing this, it's a waste of money) and had numerous voice calls with pandering support people who assured me it had nothing to do with identity and everything to do with vague "Community Standards violations" that can't be identified. FWIW the restrictions are indefinite and can't be appealed.
FB is set up like it's based on the film "Brazil" mated with Sartre's "No Exit."
The link to Criterion streaming doesn't work for "Brazil" (#51) - it shows a list of movies that likely have the word in their synopsis such as "Kiss of the Spider Woman" but not the actual film (which famously doesn't reference the country at all)
It's essentially the TVtropes Fascist but Inefficient, but it takes out the grunt work.[1]
The other thing that comes to mind here is Brazil, the movie directed by Terry Gilliam - the inefficiency of the state is part of what makes it evil because it mostly doesn't care if it gets stuff wrong - I wonder how machine intelligence may change that.
[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FascistButInefficient
This reminds me of the terry gilliam movie Brazil, with dystopian bureaucracy...
So beautifully designed. It feels like something the wealthy might own in the film Brazil.
That is straight out of the movie Brazil.
Check out the movie Brazil, if you haven't seen it already. Incredibly far ahead of its time.
Brazil, anyone?
We have literally caught up to the world depicted in the movie "Brazil"
The movie "Brazil" was right!
Had the film "Brazil" been written today, AI no doubt would be a significant plot-element.
I've often said we're recreating Brazil [1] instead of 1984. It's an excellent film if you haven't seen it btw, and in many ways rather more prophetic and insightful than 1984. But the ending emphasizes that incompetence just leads to a comedy of absurdity, but absurdity is no less dangerous.
As for PRISM, it's regularly used - but we engage in parallel construction since it's probably illegal and if anybody could prove legal standing to challenge it, it would be able to be legally dismantled. Basically information is collected using PRISM, and then we find some legal reason of obtaining a warrant or otherwise 'coincidentally' bumping into the targets, preventing its usage from being challenged, or even acknowledged, in court. There's a good writeup here. [2]
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJCxVkllxZw
[2] - https://theintercept.com/2018/01/09/dark-side-fbi-dea-illegal-searches-secret-evidence/
> It's inordinately difficult and expensive to start an LLC or SA in some EU countries.
Totally.
One of the biggest and most horrific aspect of it is the KYC/AML. We regularly read articles explaining that drugs are so out of hand that several EU countries, like Belgium, are becoming narco-states: these are front page, major newspaper, stories. We also read articles explaining that cash bills from petty drug dealing are "necessary for the underground economy of the poor oppressed people".
Official numbers say 2% to 5% of the world's global GDP is tied to criminal activities.
So major drug trafficking is ongoing and that money is definitely being laundered.
Yet when regular people like myself want to open a company, the gates of the KYC/AML hell do open.
Bureaucrats and many people at various institutions like banks, notary, etc. do believe that the KYC/AML meant to catch actual criminals is actually a greenlight to go full stasi-mode on everyone.
Things go, literally, a bit like this:
stasi agent: "Source of funds: where do the 50 K EUR of capital come from?"
honest person: "I sold at 600 EUR shares of Meta I bought at 60 EUR in 2015 (making that up), here's a printed copy of both the buy order at the bank in 2015 and the copy of the sell order, at the same bank, 10 years later."
stasi agent: "Nice try! Where did the 5 K EUR you bought those Meta shares with in 2015 come from?".
The above is, literally, happening. It happened to me. It happened to people I know.
At one point I had no trace because I had to go so much back in time that the bank wouldn't give the proofs anymore: and it cost something insane like 25 EUR / month per account to get old infos. So for say four accounts we're talking 1 200 EUR per year to ask for old bank statements.
I'll remind everyone that a principle in many EU countries is that if there is no suspicion of fraud there's a delay after which the IRSes cannot legally go back. They have to prove that there's potential fraud to be able to go back more than, e.g., 7 years.
But the stasi-agents working in KYC/AML at banks, notary, etc.? They believe they have a mission to make regular's people life hell.
Oh and a good one: you think it's bad that legitimate citizens to denounce illegals? You wanna me to tell you about the phone numbers the governments put in place in many EU countries so that citizens can denounce other fellow citizens "because they believe they're frauding the IRS"? How's that one? Where's the outrage?
In my native country of Belgium I heard that at least one in every four solo-preneur ("independant") / entrepreneur has been the subject of at least one such denunciation.
Stasi.
Also totally counter-productive: when everybody is a suspect, nobody is.
I see on LinkedIn people whoring their profiles to would be employers by boasting about how many SARs denunciations they made (Suspicious Activity Reports).
Stasi agents.
And then don't get me started on people who are just bitter and sour because, in the EU, they may be net 3 K to 5 K EUR a month, and yet are authorized to KYC / AML on people owning Porsche and Ferrari, hundreds of thousands or millions of EUR worth of equities/investements, expensive real estate, etc.
These people cannot comprehend, in their own little minds, surrounded by people limited the same way they are, that there are people out there who are just legitimately more succesful than they'll ever be in life.
Their bitterness and jealousy turns them into little stati agents.
Bank menaced to not only not open my company's account but to close not just my account but also my wife's account. I had then to spend three weeks, full time, while my wife was on vacation (I sent her on vacation and stayed to produce the papers for the stasi), to produce a 49 pages (49 fucking pages) document full of proofs going back more than 10 years. Only to create a company and bring 50 K EUR in capital.
Just fuck this entire system.
You simply cannot hate bureaucracy enough.
> It's even difficult and expensive to _stop_ an LLC and dissolve it.
It's some countries it's near mission impossible. A friend of mine who had the equivalent of a LLC in Belgium who was then acquired by an US company spent 10 years to close the belgian entity. And it's much worse than that: while they refuse to do what's necessary to close it, many taxes are due and keep on coming each year. But of course those did manage to close a company or who know someone who closed a company are going to say: "I had no issue, so there's no issue".
All of this really does feel like a dystopian bureaucratic nightmare, in the style of the Brazil movie. It'd be nice if more movies were produced in that genre for it's badly needed to at least be able to vent off with some well-deserved satire.
Wait, isn't in that movie... what was it called... ah ! «Brazil»
Almost everyone here will have seen a movie he was the screenwriter for or contributed to: Shakespeare in Love, Brazil, Empire of the Sun, even bits of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
A lot of folks here will have read either Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead or Arcadia, which are still probably his best plays, and certainly the best introduction to his work. I personally also really like The Invention of Love, about the gloomy tortured homosexual poet and classical scholar A.E. Housman, which was also apparently Stoppard's favorite of his plays. It's definitely niche territory though and you might need to care at least just a little about A Shropshire Lad and latin textual criticism. The Coast of Utopia is even more packed with history and erudition, although worth a read; the currently top comment here is a quote from it about death, childhood, and the pursuit of happiness.
He had an interesting combination of traits that many HN readers will probably appreciate: erudite to the point of elitism, although never attended college; a self-described "small c. conservative in politics, literature, education and theatre" with libertarian inclinations, but he wrote a sprawling trilogy about 19th-century Russian socialist and anarchist exiles (The Coast of Utopia).
Now that he's dead, I want to go back and re-read all his plays, including the ones I never managed to get to before.
Wrong. 'Medical insurance companies' do absolutely nothing in terms of health care, drain massive amounts of money in what amounts to a Brazil-style (movie) system, corporate death panels, and a drain on all of our resources.
And its not even a product we want. We dont buy it. The companies we work for do, and never have to dogfood any of it. But for the rest of us, its a take it or leave it proposition.
> doctors are a scarce and greedy bunch.
Speaking of that, an MD is the ONLY profession who is solely controlled how many can apply is controlled by Congress.
Get rid of that, and that would fix a facet.
But getting rid of insurance companies would also work a great deal. Or at least, decoupling work/med insurance would be a start.
Even going full competitive capitalism OR full socialism would be better than the garbage we have now.
The movie "Brazil" seems more real every day.
It’s worth (re)watching the 1985 movie Brazil in particular the character of Harry Tuttle, hearing engineer https://youtu.be/VRfoIyx8KfU
Neither government or corporations are going to “save us” simply because sheer short termism and incompetence. But the seem incompetence will make the coming dystopia ridiculous
There is an important element in 1984 that is missing from BNW and very relevant to modern history: the never-ending fictious war between several similar regimes to justify internal control.
In my opinion, the movie "Brazil" (inspired by 1984) made the same argument even more modern by replacing that war on some external "enemy" with a war on internal "terrorists".
Unfortunately, 1984 and BNW are not exclusive, and certainy social psychology can implement elements of both.
Ultimately both are just movies and I dislike when people compare them to the real world given how exaggerated they are, but the basic premise of Brazil happens regularly: one piece of paperwork filed incorrectly can seriously impact your life.
See this woman for an example: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/live-woman-declared-dead-service-canada-1.7451371
I always felt the movie "Brazil" was the satire. 1984 was the horror film.
I know that "me too" comments are frowned upon, but I really feel the need to chime in here. Brazil is my favorite movie of all time. It is eerily prescient. It's important to keep in mind while watching it today that it was made forty years ago.
And yes, the director's cut. Absolutely the director's cut.
I’ve seen the movie Brazil and I wish more people had so they would have voted better.
What's the third? I'd guess Brazil, but that's a film ;)
there are two audio Easter eggs on the page: Fallout 2 narration if you hover on the header image of the man watching tv from "Brazil" movie and if you hover "Unlisted Retrograde Holdout" text you will hear voice from "Human Traffic"
If you have seen the film Brazil you will remember the scene where Harry Tuttle, a rogue heating engineer, removes a modular wall panel to service the equipment behind it. Now I know most homes have no need for such modularity and most people value aesthetics over practicality and prefer the seamless look, but I would totally want that in my home. Would make adding or moving wiring, fixtures and plumbing a breeze.
I am pretty sure now that this ChatControl thing is the result of the EU being unable to setup an US type NSA/echelon type stealth mass surveillance system.
They might have gone so far to have paid for an implementation but it didn't work (like the EU search engine, cloud or whatever) because they are really incompetent.
So now the solution is to do it in the open, just write a dystopian law and force it through the fake parliament. Our only hope now is the practical implementation of ChatControl will also be in practice ineffective.
We are not really living in 1984 or Brave New World, in the EU we are in the 1985 movie Brazil.
This belongs as a scene in the movie Brazil or something. (I do mostly the same thing)
The sci-fi movie Brazil (nothing much to do with the country), is set in a beauracratic dystopic future and at the start of the movie a literal real world bug falls into “the machine that never makes mistakes”. The error plays out over the course of the movie having a somewhat (negative) butterfly effect.
I feel the movie well captures the tone of the current moment.
Worth a watch.
> Don't change your name, email adresses or lose access to your phone number, and as we know now also don't ask support.
This reads like some list of instructions from the Brazil film.
The story reminded me a lot about the Brazil trilogy, and its spiritual successors, aka the movies Brazil (1985), 12 Monkeys (1995) and Zero Theorem (2013).
The dystopian world in that trilogy is becoming more and more reality and humanity will become a tool for programming more or less in the future, similar to how humans help a supercomputer solve "puzzles" a machine cannot solve.
I always mention a quote from an old friend in this context, who said: "The rat race of economy will force humans to have to do programming in one form or the other, there is no way to avoid it".
To me, the first level of software automation was the 2000s, when each and every company automated themselves with Excel spreadsheets. You'd be mind blown working for a corporate enterprise just by looking a the crazy use cases Excel has. That's the real reason companies cannot migrate away from Microsoft software.
Now we have the breakthrough of agentic coding agents, which eventually will be tools to plug and play into the machine via MCP.
And the next big thing will be the one that helps to make this possible in a training loop, where humans are in the testing and discovery loop of "what to write next", similar to how the supercomputer in Zero Theorem was portrayed (or your story's marketing AI).
In an economic context I highly recommend to watch CGP Grey's "Humans need not apply" (2012) video. Even when the predictions are off, the general truth in it remains, and that's what the job market is seeing now. To me the current software engineer market reflects what CGP Grey predicted at the time, even when it still might be too early to bet all-in into AI and LLMs.
Sure. https://www.criterion.com/films/211-brazil
Reminds me of that public speaker announcement asking (in American English) a Mr. Peter File to please report to the service desk.
(Not from "Brazil" the film, but Monty Python-originating regardless.)
That’s so Brazilian, in the sense of the film[1] not the country.
There’s something of Bob Hoskins’ heating engineer in what you’ve described.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)
You can't get a credit card because your name is too long?
You can't pass immigrations because you don't have a last name?
The future is not made for you, because progammers and designers didn't get requirements that match the diversity of this beautiful world.
It remindes me how someone I know often makes complicated food orders in restaurants (modfying or replacing items on the menu), and then they get disappointed or complain because their wishes are forgotten or screwed up. I never make changes to a menu item, because I assume they are unable to accommodate me (either due to stress, lack of intelligence/memory, bad process e.g. not writing down customers' orders etc.). As a result, I get disappointed less often on average - make your oder "compatible" with the realities of this world to avoid disappointment and stress.
There is actually an official procedure for U.S. Immigrations dealing with people who have names that cannot be split meaningfully into first/last names, e.g. some people from India. Assume your name is "Maussam", then you are permitted and expected to fill in that string in BOTH fields, first name and last/family name, when booking a flight or applying for visa. (A similar hack could be devised for names that are "too long".)
Overall, these examples are reminiscent of the movie Brazil (1985), which is about a dystopian future in which a plumber that helps people fix their toilets gets hunted as a terrorist because he didn't fill in the right form.
My theory is the world has been gradually converging towards the absurd state parodied in that movie.
Airlines are not the only ones that get less and less accountable. We should stop spending our money with companies that communicate with us using email spam services the address of which begins with noreply@fubar.com.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985)
The movie Brazil is a take on 1984 where the technology does not work very well. The thought police is not all-seeing but quite inept (although just as brutal). The plot is set off by an actual bug getting caught in a typing macine evetually causing the wrong guy to get arrested. The rebel hero is a rogue plumber who actually fixes things which are broken.
Is this what the movie Brazil is based on?
I feel that Brazil doesn't get enough love. It's my favourite Xmas movie.
More pranks, this time after I got a job in the corporate world working for Big Company in the late 1980s:
Corporate Prank #1: Back in the DOS days, when the standard office computer was an IBM AT with a small built-in speaker capable of being programmed to beep, I set up the autoexec.bat file for several workstations to play (quickly, and at low volume) the first eight notes from the melody from "Brazil." The movie had just come out, and I thought the tune would be a fitting commentary on the parallels to the corporate life.
Corporate Prank #2: Every year or so the cafeteria would print surveys on blue cardstock and put them on all the tables asking questions like "Were the cashiers friendly?" and "How was the temperature of the food?" My friend and I found matching cardstock and mocked up copies, but changed the questions subtly, e.g. "How was the temperature of the cashiers?" and "Was the food friendly?" and distributed them to all the tables. Never found out what happened, but I'm sure management wasn't happy.
Corporate Prank #3: One day I went with my friends "B" and "C" to a different corporate cafeteria where you paid a flat rate just before exiting. "B" managed to find an emergency exit door just before the cashiers which let him make his way to the elevators without paying. Now the setup for the prank: every few months one of the departments would distribute company-wide security memos (on paper) which would get distributed to every desk. Me and "C" mocked up one of those security memos (complete with a police artist style sketch of "B", who had skipped out without paying) which warned everybody to be on the lookout for the suspect who was last seen exiting the cafeteria through an unmarked door, and should be considered dangerous. We made photocopies and put them on every desk.
That's part of my point, though: these cameras are basically never reviewed by a person. So you are reliably watched constantly, but never by a human.
This does lead to the problem that the post I replied to was pointing out, namely that people often get automated fines for cloned plates. It's kind of like the opening of Brazil, if you're familiar with that film, but obviously for much lower stakes.
Remember the movie Brazil (1985) when someone got swatted, inprisoned and executed because of a typo caused by a fly?
Imagine how the appeal process will "work" once the IRS introduces LLMs for this...
Wow, it's like if the movie Brazil was a documentary.
It's either intentional, which would be puzzling and unsettling, or it's a bug which has gone unnoticed. In any case it is proof that big tech is in no shape to take on the responsibility for moderating discourse on the internet. This reminds me of the bug that falls into a typewriter in the beginning of the movie "Brazil" which causes a spelling error and the arrest and execution of a random innocent person. Granted, this type of automated banning without any ability to involve a real human is not costing any lives (yet), but I am increasingly worried about how big tech is becoming a Kafkaesque lawnmower. One thing is to deliberately censor speech that you do not like, another is to design a system where innocent and important speech is silently censored and noone in charge even notices.
Brazil iz good. Becauz dirty dogz got plugged!
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/mediaviewer/rm557755905/
Meow!
Anyone remember the movie Brazil? This fellow better watch his back.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=dht_3NziwSw
This sounds like a jobs plan!
AI will create the world‘s largest code mess, while also running the entire world, and everything will be slightly broken like in the movie Brazil.
Agreed. But at least I get to play with pneumatic tubes.
Hey, come to think of it, dystopian pneumatic tube world is the movie Brazil https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/
The comparison to George Orwell's "thoughtcrime" is apt, but zooming out, I think Canada is paving the way to "Brazil", the Gilliam movie which was originally called 1984½. The dystopian future is totalitarian, but ruled through inept bureaucracy. The Ministry of Information controls everything and is responsible for nothing. This shift in control structures can be seen in the Hate Speech Bill, Bill S-210, the CRTC Streaming bill, and the massive increase in government jobs and roles.
Everyone reading I should watch the movie Brazil.
Remember who the true hero was. He wasn't in it for long.
Sounds somewhat reminiscent of the Terry Gilliam film Brazil. Basically a fly dies and gets caught in a teletype machine, causing the name on an arrest warrant to be misprinted. This snowballs into all sorts of darkly humorous and depressing hijinks.
Google also does code reviews for some commonly used projects (or maybe that's part of the same thing? I don't know). I went through that last year with one of my Go libraries.
The idea is good, but the entire process is so bureaucracy-heavy and time-consuming that I found it both frustrating and entertaining in equal parts; like something out of Brazil (the film, not the country). So many emails, so many video meetings, so many people involved, so much talking. And all for looking at a 4,500 line Go library.
"Here's the code; just clone and look at it, and let me know if you find something"... It's not like you need my permission to do any of this *shrug*.
Thank you for the interesting write-up.
It feels like societal satire in this vein is becoming rare. I fondly remember sci-fi movies like Starship Troopers, Robocop, Brazil or even They Live, but not much about recent times. Maybe Don't Look Up comes close, haven't watched it yet.
This whole story reminds me of the movie Brazil.
Sure, but I'm not talking about that. I mean the one sentence responses to carefully thought out messages, the feet-dragging, etc etc, and each response being Brazil[0]-like nothing to do with the previous ones which were responded to.
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846
I'd say I'm a big fan of Gilliam's look/style and "Brazil" definitely epitomizes that. I didn't see it until sometime in the last decade, so it's hard to imagine that it was ever a comedy really, though Bob Hoskin's performance was certainly amusing and memorable.
Upon reflection, "12 Monkeys" is another movie that was thought-provoking but will probably not get another play-through from me (well done Gilliam?). Perhaps as you suggest, reality has just become a bit too much and I'll just put "The Sound of Music" on on repeat from here on out, or whatever the cinematic equivalent of paintings of boats and pretty landscapes may be.
You stated the concept well. Brazil [1985] is the best movie I'll never watch again. It has just become too close to reality within my lifetime and is not so funny anymore. It used to be hilarious.
Never in a million years could I have imagined there would be something worse than navigating the health care system. Hours of phone calls with deliberately confusing systems, impotent customer service representatives and no choices. It's like the movie Brazil already. Why wouldn't they add AI? Great idea.
Other films that sprung to mind while reading this: Columbus (2017), Aliens, Escape from New York, Brazil.
If I recall correctly, the view obscured by the billboards in that scene in Brazil was a barren wasteland. That fits even more into the themes of the film where the harsh realities of the world are constantly hidden behind facades. It's almost to say, if you think the artifice is bad then just wait until you see what is behind it.
Interesting, it was the scene that sprang into my mind as well. Brazil is very much a flawed movie in my mind, but still enjoyable and one that I highly recommend.
Was probably the inspiration for the movie “Brazil”, released in 1985 where the pneumatic tube system is part of the complicated and extensive "Central Services" administration.
Incidentally Brazil is for today's digital dystopia what Koyaanisqatsi (1982) is for environmental instability.
I was considering putting a light but my desk right now resembles a wall panel from the movie Brazil. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dht_3NziwSw Is hard to find the middle ground between clutter and chaos.
> Amazon sucks
I’m not sure but I feel the need for some legislation to force large companies to provide human-to-human contact in the event of a dispute.
Even in the world of Brazil, the 1988 movie, there were humans somewhere in the mix.
Brazil is the other end of that spectrum; the intro scene where an embedded bureaucrat loses their, ahem, proverbial shit over a fly and the physical altercation with said fly (literal insect: fly) impacts a printing of "state assault/guilty citizen targets," the result being a chain of events that would have otherwise never taken place. great movie.
Sorry I'll have to sit this one out. I used to like deep political satire but so many bad ideas are masquerading as good ideas these days, the funny is just not funny anymore. I have kids now.
For example, I used to love the movie Brazil, until it started to resemble the European Union.
I'm reminded of the Terry Gilliam film Brazil.
chinathrow said that tivert said "> You know you're doing it wrong when the the Ministry of Information in Brazil has better customer service than you do."
But tivert didn't say that! tivert instead said "...the Ministry of Information in the movie Brazil ..."
chinathrow should read more carefully.
It is a reference to the Terry Gilliam movie Brazil.
They mean the film “Brazil”
> There's no way of getting this ban reversed, there's no way of invoking any human to perform a manual review on the ban. It is a permanent restriction that impacts her ability to communicate with her customer base.
You know you're doing it wrong when the the Ministry of Information in the movie Brazil has better customer service than you do.
Edit: add "the movie" to remove ambiguity.
In terms of optimising, I can see it going two ways:
1. Optimising for the consumer means that we will be able to engineer meat to our preferred and individual tastes. Gamey or fatty, dry or falling off the bone etc.
2. Optimising for the producer means that we will get the slurry what was served as a meal in the movie Brazil.
The free-market optimist in me would like to see 1, but the realist in me knows that once corporations monopolise the fake-meat industry and eventually water it down to slurry, we'll get Brazil... and we'll be convinced this is how meat should taste.
I love this Brazil-world (the film) we have created for ourselves.
It's worth asking before anyone loses their mind about this, who made this change and why? Licensors like Criterion can't and don't "re-edit" (if you can call removing 4 seconds re-editing). Others can and do pretty frequently.
It's decisions about market fit by executives, not a moral crusade (as we have seen, Hollywood execs aren't really the type for that). Sometimes the whole film is affected, as in Blade Runner, Brazil, Once Upon a Time in America, or Kingdom of Heaven. Those movies were "butchered" (to use the language of the histrionic Forbes article). Yet in Leon (The Professional) the director supposedly intended the titular character to sleep with his underage protege. I'm glad someone overrode the sacred "artist's intent" there, and I wish someone had done the same for George Lucas's ill-advised Star Wars editions.
Here someone probably looks at a report and says, OK here are the movies in our pile with more than 20 slurs in them. Let's try to get that number below 10 so we don't have to add a "the language in this film represents the time in which it was made..." warning, that turns a lot of people off.
These decisions get made to maximize shareholder value, and the original film is not lost (except in the case of Star Wars), it's just one of a dozen variant cuts — you think they show the same exact movie everywhere in the world? Ever been to China? Believe it or not art is flexible and resilient. A film can survive a temporary blip while some VPs try to minimize complaints from sensitive viewers. If you disagree with those viewers that is another issue in my opinion.
> Guilty as charged! I hate using Java because everything written in java seems to blend into the same indistinguishable swamp of classes with meaningless names, full of methods that constantly find new and interesting ways to obscure what your program is actually trying to do. Debugging very large Java codebases feels like living through Terry Gilliam's 1985 film Brazil.
That describes just about every codebase I've worked with that relies on object-oriented patterns, which is basically every codebase. This is particularly bad with Java, but as you mentioned, this is a cultural problem and not so much a language problem. I like Java the language, but what kept me away from it was every Java codebase I've seen. Layers upon layers of needless abstraction, overly abstract names, and so much code is meant to describe things rather than a sequence of data changing.
It's not that OO is completely wrong, but it's a meme that we as programmers are refusing to shake. It's like people are still getting taught OO in college courses by programmers who haven't worked professionally in decades, and those students are still going into the real world thinking that everything's gotta be object oriented. And usually what OO ends up meaning is having classes and inheritance and "this" and mutability, as opposed to having objects that pass each other information. The latter doesn't need classes, or inheritance, or any of the other similar features in programming languages. But if you've got to write to a file, then you've gotta make a class that wraps the file system functions, right? /s
> And most devs hating on Java are using an IDE written mainly in Java (all the JetBrains ones): the irony of that one gives me the giggles.
Guilty as charged! I hate using Java because everything written in java seems to blend into the same indistinguishable swamp of classes with meaningless names, full of methods that constantly find new and interesting ways to obscure what your program is actually trying to do. Debugging very large Java codebases feels like living through Terry Gilliam's 1985 film Brazil.
I think the problem is cultural, not technological. It seems like there's a lot of people in the Java community who still think OO is a great idea. Who think Bob Martin's awful, muddled code examples in Clean Code are something to aspire towards. People who claim the path of enlightenment requires them to replace concrete classes with interfaces - even when those interfaces only have 1 implementation.
Anyone who writes class names like FactoryBuilderFactoryImpl and claims to walk in the light is at best a scoundrel, and at worst a follower of a religion so dark we don't name it in polite company.
This is what makes IntelliJ so impressive. It takes a master craftsman to forge something beautiful from such an unholy material. VS Code pulls off the same feat on top of election. In each case I can't tell whether to be horrified or impressed! Either way, I'm a huge fan.
Not to mention that you may not have a choice. I've seen government sites have this shit on them. We're quickly approaching the satirical society of the movie _Brazil_.
They are asinine. They've become a shibboleth for detecting DEI-types who are unengaged with theory and have hopped on the fad --- the Robin DiAngelists, if you will. You don't have to like, appreciate, or respect DEI in any way to acknowledge that unironically showing slides suggesting that literacy is a white virtue is disqualifying, and that most social justice thinkers, including Okun herself, agree with that.
Okun's website attempts to clarify all of this; for instance, the page expanding on "worship of the written word" explains that it's a reaction to the idea that anything not written down according to formal standards is worthless. That's not a crazy DEI idea, so much so that it's part of the plot of the Terry Gilliam movie Brazil.
But people just want fortune cookies to memorize and repeat, and it is somewhat on people like Okun for providing those fortunes and only 20 years later clarifying them. And, of course, De Anza wasn't at all engaged with Okun's actual thoughts; it was using them to prevent managers from setting agendas for meetings.
Again: everybody involved in this story is a crank.
Whenever I read one of these communist stories, I immediately think of the 1985 film “Brazil.” Who decides who gets what and how much? Whatever person or institution has the ability to allocate resources holds the power over the recipients. At least in a capitalist system, the power is supposed to be held by the people who invest their capital into marketplace winners. A bureaucratic system of allocation doesn’t incentivize efficiency.
In that film (brains in a jar), you don't escape to reality, you escape to a different level of the matrix (one where you've got superpowers). Last shot in the film will have a lot in common with the last shot in Terry Gilliam's Brazil.
I get the sense that you would like some adult themes, but not too slow?
Top of my mind (and in no specific order) would be:
- Dark City
- The Thirteenth Floor
- City of the Lost Children
- Tron (original and maybe new one)
- Interstellar
- Inception
- A Clockwork Orange
- Her (very relevant to our times)
- Dune (2021 version)
- Brazil
- The Martian
- Children of Men
- Edge of Tomorrow (most like Marvelverse on this list but still very good)
- Moon
- Twelve Monkeys
- Upgrade
- The Fifth Element
- Contact
- Okja
- District 9
- Predestination (very relevant to our times)
- Serenity (but might need some prep from the tv show before watching)
- World on a Wire
- The Abyss
- Minority Report (very relevant in our times)
- The Fly
- Videodrome
- Equilibrium
- Strange Days
- The Andromeda Strain (relevant after Covid)
- eXistenZ (trippy but I loved it when it came out and was only around your sons age)
- In Time (interesting class dynamics on display)
- Enemy Mine
- Franklyn (some interesting takes on mental illness)
- The Arrival
> They provided one stool for 2 standing desks
They had it better in the movie Brazil. At least they had offices!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS5WLkb_Cxk
Huh, I am now officially too damn logical and not brave enough. I saw them and thought, that is a menu for the site, not the actual jar files, why would I click on them?
I did not know cat-v was such a curator of fortunes. I like this one but I modded it (and fixed spelling of retrieval. Ok, I did not, Firefox did)
using ubuntu is like deciding you want your computer to be run by the [Ministry of Information Retrieval] in the movie Brazil -- kfx
Metropolis, though overlong and a bit hammy, pulled me through with the music and the visuals. Even when the effects aren't believable the design is stunning.
In fact, it's pronably not until the 80s with skmething like Blade Runner or Brazil that you get a film so thuroughly designed and detailed from a visual perspective.
Edit: Though Tati's Playtime just came to mind.
>Ye, u got a brain no? Go learn some hıstory.
artificial intelligence as a concept is at least as old as 300-400BC. Government corruption as a meme goes much further back.
I wouldn't be so quick to consider someone 'without brain' for having inadequate movie trivia knowledge; nor would I consider encyclopedic knowledge of movie trivia to be evidence of knowing history.
I don't know where the 'bureaucratic to a fault' concept of Brazil was first used, but similarly metaphors and complaints can be found in lots of Roman historical anecdote, many times older.
These concepts have all been explored in fiction to a huge degree, the novelty of what's going on right now is that it's been the first time where any of it has actually approached reality.
The concept of a government 'on autopilot' is now actually being realistically considered, rather than humorously/dramatically fantasized.
It's now becoming apparent to the public at large that such concepts are stepping out of fiction; that's huge.
tldr; don't fault other people for not knowing about the recent revision of ancient ideas and concepts that YOU prefer to discuss.
This "core inrastructure for the world" wıll also be maintained about as well as HVAC in the seminal film Brazil
Wait, there's bills for search warrants, like in Brazil (the movie)?
If it allows someone to avoid an unjustified $250,000 loss each time … I hope they come here every time!
EXCEPT, what I really wish is that large companies like STRIPE stopped treating gross account mismanagement cases as small frequency regrettable but acceptable outcomes.
How can any of us sleep at night with these deaf capricious overlords managing our important information & services?
It is getting dystopian. Welcome to Brazil (the movie).
All of the Kafkaesque problems that we see with account lockouts and HN being used as the support channel for problems with major tech players gets ugly and turns into outright corruption. As the social contract in the US decays it becomes more common to simply pay bribes to get employees to reinstate accounts. We've already seen headlines about the porn star who was sleeping with facebook employees in order to get her instagram account reinstated.
This will get worse as some people defend the current practices as useful economics because most of us get cheap services most of the time, for only a few people in the herd getting singled out for the Kafka treatment. There will be strong opposition in a lot of quarters from trying to impose any kind of regulations to fix these problems and they will become entrenched and just the way of living and doing business. People will start to openly talk about how to bribe tech companies as a cost of doing business as the US slowly slides into more of a third world mentality. We'll wind up in the world of _Brazil_ (the Movie) only with private enterprise bureaucracy leading the way.
FYI, the "oppo research" done by the DCCC's Research Department is public. Brings images of mad bureaucracy from the 1995 dystopian movie "Brazil":
https://dccc.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/George-Santos-Research-Book.pdf
These are my all-time favorites. Sorry if not fitting your "watched in 2022" criteria.
Brother Can You Spare a Dime (1975) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072742/
Thank You For Not Breeding (10+ years ago) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abDpktpk7Is
The Atomic Cafe (1982) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083590/
Born Rich (2003) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0342143/
Bonus documentaries (reality projections):
Idiocracy (2006) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
Koyaanisqatsi(1982) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085809/
Brazil (1985) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/
Brazil, The man from Earth, Moon, The fountain, Ad Astra, Donnie Darko, Ender's Game, Edge of tomorrow, Solaris (the old one), Westworld (70s), Metropolis (the japanese anime), Dark Star (trippy, 70s, great end), Firefly series and Serenity movie, Attack the block, Fifth Element, planet of the apes (the old one), ex machina, children of men
12 Monkeys is also a great sci-fi Gilliam movie, not underrated though :)
Is there some dislike for Terry Gilliam? Can't think why anyone would want to downvote Brazil here.
This is one of my favorite films, maybe my favorite sci-fi film. The "steampunk" way in which future technology is depicted is one of the reason Brazil aged so well IMO.
I would actually consider it to be a free adaption of Orwell's 1984.
I'd go for the less obvious question "Is Brazil the best Christmas film?".
Edge cases aren't frequent enough to have a competitive edge of not having them. Too bad for you when you're the edge case.
Backing people's files up for them on my USB storage makes me feel like the aircon repairman in the Terry Gilliam film, Brazil.
Nah, Brazil is a X’Mas movie :)
I like to think of Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/) as an AI film. The semi-automated steam-powered analog bureaucracy that everyone has to implicitly trust is an artificial intelligence that fails for the same reasons many AI systems fail.
Based on people I know in Brazil it seems to be way more than a few tens of thousands. I hope I'm wrong. Here's a pretty good documentary on the current situation in Brazil: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noP8sLB4LSY
Brazil (1985 film) was not supposed to be an instruction manual!
The scale of these absurdities is just wild. Years ago I signed up for a domain for my blogger.com blog. At some point google decided to transfer the management of that domain to google workspaces ... I don't know how or why but they did. So when it expired I was told to login to google workspaces, but I don't have a google workspaces account at the email they kept emailing me at ... and their emails never told me what email to login with.
To get help on the website I was told to contact my google workspaces administrator ... but not who that is.
I figured out who the domain registrar was and told them my story and they helped me get a hold of the domain. Kudos to them to having a very fast and effective support team.
Now even more years later I get more emails from google workspaces that my account is expiring and sorta implying some consequences (but not actually saying) ... not that I can do anything about it.
At this point I have it in the back of my mind that any given day google could find this weird situation, assume malice, and ban me... a situation that 1. I didn't make happen. 2. I can't even fix. 3. I don't even know how it happened / what the problem is / google won't really tell me.
This is a reference to the film Brazil[0], which centers on a labyrinthine bureaucracy
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/
While “Arcadia” is likely of greatest interest to HN readers of all of Tom Stoppard’s plays, I also highly recommend “Jumpers” and “The Hard Problem.”
Also worth noting the many excellent films he wrote, like “Brazil” and “Empire of the Sun.”
I’ve recently watched Brazil, and the film has one of the most chilling dystopian views I’ve ever seen because it’s easy to see yourself as part of the machine doing your best just trying to get by.
Similarly, I can see how the people working in this software slipped into this- they identified a need in the market with WFH, tried prototypes that were well received on the market, and keep iterating. Many of them legitimately are interested in time tracking and optimization, but of course the market for personal tools like that is very small and lots of employers want to pay you for this because they want more productive employees. Meanwhile the people buying them don’t really know what they are buying, they want to believe they have found a solution to the problem they are terrified of, employees pretending to work and milking them. And the employees exposed to it aren’t in a position of power to change it. And next thing you know we have a dystopian monster with enough funding to be responsible for people’s jobs itself, where no one individual has incentives to buck the curve or much ability to fight back.
What’s the solution then? Doctorow mentions unions, and I’d agree that could work. I think there must be another faction to join that doesn’t ruin you, something to compete with the monolith in case the monolith gets sick in this way. Being able to quit and find somewhere else only works if that somewhere else is mostly differentiated by the fact that it doesn’t do these programs you disagree with- many people will put up with this and worse if there is a large pay differential between it and the next option, or if they would have to move and uproot themselves. And if a government gets sick in this way it might not let you quit the country. You have to be able to form collective groups that can bargain with the behemoth, like a union, or political party, or other action that relies on people for it’s power and not capital. That’s one reason why money in politics is so worrying to me, because the way I see it, it messes with this crucial release valve of political action.
This is a recipe for a dystopian bureaucratic nightmare .
As soon as it's illegal to make design mistakes, there will be no more innovation or updates, everything stays exactly as it is. The Department of Design Friendliness will audit you quarterly. Improvements get designed and approved by government committees. It's like a scene out of the movie Brazil.
There seems to be this mindset of a certain class of folks that feel these companies [Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, Netflix, etc.] are somehow entrenched for centuries and the only option . They're not. They're barely 20 years old in most cases. That's nothing historically speaking. A third of them will be failing into niches over the next decade. Capitalism sucks in many ways, but it is really good at "creative destruction". True monopoly power is rare.
Many are extremely vulnerable to disruptive competition as most of their revenue is from a single source: ads. Take that away, and they crumble. As Facebook and Twitter are discovering now that Apple/iOS default to blocked app tracking. Google search quality has plummeted and people are turning to alternatives like Reddit.
Microsoft, Apple, Amazon are less vulnerable to ads, but they too have vulnerabilities.
Google isn't a utility: you don't need to use it, nor do most people. Google search is dying in favour of alternatives like Reddit. Google mail is only one of many options. Android phones are only one of many options.
The solution for a better service is to build (if you're an entrepreneur) and use (if you're a consumer) better services!
It seems AI is quickly becoming capable of automating the worst human systems, vs. offering amazing solutions to humanities. In this case, it seems AI has successfully mimicked the horrible bureaucratic systems, operated entirely by humans, that leave you feeling equally helpless (think the film “Brazil”), only these fancy technical systems are cheaper, maybe? I suppose it should be no surprise that when we tried to imitate humans we got as bad end results as when humans were running things.
Brazil was steampunk, if it fit in a genre at all.
Don't get me wrong, Brazil is my favorite movie, it's just not cyberpunk. Heck, it's not punk.
> first true Cyberpunk movie
Tron, Brazil, Videodrome, Metropolis, Terminus, Escape From New York, Blade Runner, etc etc etc
> You're not going to stop people from misentering addresses, and many countries have terrible validation or streets that don't exist yet take forever to show.
I live in a place where the official address changed: as in we got a letter (in 2016 I think) from the town hall saying "your address is now ... and you have to ask everybody to mail you at that new address". Well... Most utility bills' systems have been programmed in a way that make it impossible to keep the same "installation ID" (as in the ID on our electrical install) while changing the address. Somehow "the street got a new name" is a case that had never been planned.
The implications are wild (for example the bank refusing to open an account because the official, legal, address doesn't match the address on the utility bill and then the contry's IRS thinking there are shenanigans going on).
That's in a civilized, western EU, country.
It's Brazil (the movie).
i liked brazil, but it, blade runner, and 2001 weren't nearly as good as delicatessen. delicatessen is so darkly funny and deliciously memorable (ha).
city of lost children, which came a little later by the same directors, is my all-time favorite in that dystopian future genre. it's probably a top 10 movie for me. plot, characters, the world you get sucked into, all top-notch. plus, you get the "brain in a vat" years before the matrix (which is also miles better than blade runner, 2001, and brazil).
But not as hypnotic.
Brazil is an amazing movie, but Gilliam is always distractingly manic.
Blade Runner is graceful. The pacing, the characterisation, the imagery, and especially the music make it almost as much of a ballet/opera as a movie.
It's not just science fiction, it's Wagnerian.
Brazil is everything.
I've never seen Delicatessen but if it's like these other films, I'll check it out. Anything I need to know (culturally, or whatever) to fully appreciate it?
Brazil was a good movie, but, was far too unapproachable and would not make my top 10.
I've never seen (or even heard of) delicatessen. Looks interesting, I'll check it out.
> The major sense I get from Canadians whenever I arrive back is an enormous sense of financial illiteracy. Like they just don't know or care about how badly they get ripped off all the time on so many things and will never care enough to do anything meaningful about it.
It's ration dis-engagement -- even if they don't know they are doing it. Deep down even the most dedicated sheep know they have no ability to impact anything.
Canada is a democracy but that doesn't mean what people think it means. There's zero public accountability for anything and it's only getting worse.
The 'solution' offered for this created problem is always more bureaucracy and government and taxes, but no accountability on results.
Canada is the country of the future..! If the future is the movie Brazil.
‘Time Bandits’ was before, so it's the other way around.
Besides, you might be unfamiliar with the fact that Gilliam referred to ‘Bandits’, ‘Brazil’ and ‘Munchausen’ as a trilogy about the same thing. Which trilogy evidently ended up having at least nine films in it, excepting ‘F&L’ and me having not watched ‘Quixote’ yet (the latter's theme obviously follows the rest, though).
Exactly, the first thing that comes to mind.
Alas, watching Gilliam's other films gets more and more difficult, even though he tries to make the same movie again and again, for almost forty years now. But ‘Brazil’ was a home run on the first attempt.
Brazil is pretty much that movie if you haven't seen it already.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)
I give you "Brazil" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/)
edit: typo corrected, thanks.
Brazil the movie in 2022:
AI mistake administration, no customer support, hackers and inside connections doing the role of the unlicensed plumber.
Why would I want to debunk your proposal? I don't think it's bunk, I just think it would have some undesirable consequences. That's no bar to pointing out the desirable ones!
This is the first time Silicon Valley has been brought up in this discussion, but keep in mind that practices in the US are influential around the world, and the harms from strengthening inequality and substituting credentialism for meritocracy fall predominantly on people outside the US. The discussion has mentioned YC (Boston originally), Rust (Mozilla, San Francisco, previously SV), Microsoft (Washington), Android (SV), iPhone (SV), Instagram (SF), the Zetas (Mexico), Brazil (the movie), the American landscape (much of which is in Brazil, the country), Google (SV), FAANG (SV/Washington/SV/SV/SV, but all with offices worldwide), Linus Torvalds as a student (Finland), Fabrice Bellard (France), Guangdong (China), the ACM (US-wide), the IEEE (also), Triplebyte (SV but kind of worldwide), the SAT/ACT/AP tests (US-wide), Ukraine, Russia, and Canada.
I agree that the danger of war in Ukraine was foreseeable; I wrote about it in 02016 https://dercuano.github.io/notes/wwiii-genesis.html https://dercuano.github.io/notes/state-of-the-world.html and 02017 https://dercuano.github.io/notes/2017-sap-allocation.html and George Kennan wrote about it last millennium. But it's also true that it was widely dismissed two weeks ago.
I'm glad we agree on calling for humility! And, yes, Wayne's whole series is worth reading.
This is approximately half the plot of Terry Gilliam's movie "Brazil"
I don't think this answers your question, but it was exemplified in the movie "Brazil", iirc.
The movie "Brazil" remade in modern day Sweden.
Thanks for that perspective! I think about this all the time, and though my tastes are different I think you're exactly right.
I think of narrative as a combination of several elements: character, plot, world-building, execution (word choice, visual choices and performance for film or games), concepts and ideas. I tend to be drawn to strong characters first, but not always. Some examples off the top of my head:
Clerks: strong characters, mediocre almost everything else
Reservoir Dogs: strong characters, strong execution, minimal plot and world-building
Portal: strong characters, plot, world building, concepts, and execution
Brazil (the Terry Gilliam movie): strong world-building and execution, weak characters and plot
Lolita (the book): strong execution and characters
Harry Potter: strong characters, world-building, and concepts, goofy plot and execution
Primer: mind-bending concepts, good execution, weak characters and plot
Don’t know why, but I could go on and on thinking about it.
Edit: this list would imply I have pretty narrow tastes but really I like a little bit of everything; these are just some notable examples that came to mind as being particularly strong or weak in certain areas.
I love that this is being 100% serious and is probably close to 60% the wordcount of the parody article.
I know enough of javascript when I did it back in 2010 as to WHY people built all that. It's still basically the same feeling as watching the movie Brazil.
How will Webassembly possibly handle backwards compatibility to old browsers? Webassembly --> asm.js transpiling?
Edit: yes it will. And apparently Webassembly is actually Lisp.
Hm, I can see webassembly equalling/surpassing the JVM in technical capability. That might be a pretty good thing, because javascript on the server was never a good idea.
Everyone knows Brazil is the best christmas movie
They both missed (but the film Brazil caught) that the dystopia will be run by a bureaucracy of bumbling idiots.
Just wait until something breaks or the system determines that you are a bad driver because instead of looking at the road you looked right of left (in the mirror), just like that Amazon story from a couple of days ago.
I seems that we are heading into this weird world where, like in the movie "Brazil" some weird bug in one of our surveillance and human management systems will end up destroying lives, leaving people completely helpless and plagued for their entire existence.
If you haven’t, please watch the movie Brazil, as this type of thing would exactly fit in the narrative.
Fun question? What's the difference between the ABNB customer service and google's customer service, you know, a "real" corporation with massive and established revenue?
Oh right, google has no customer service. No one to call.
What does it mean that customer service is so terrible in the disruption/replacement companies? That it's hard? Or that customer service is soooo old economy?
I fear for when all companies with semi-functioning terrible customer service are replaced with even more "disruptive" dystopian service models.
Can it be? Is "Brazil" a documentary?
obviously the superpower would be functioning in India - and just as obviously at some point you would do something big enough that they would have to do something about it. Probably the something like what was done in the movie Brazil when someone was legally dead but still alive.
Yeah, but it seems like you're trying to have it both ways. On the one hand you're arguing that the insights into society can be absolute garbage and on the other implying (or suggesting) that Brazil doesn't necessarily fall into this category.
So what is it then? Brazil does make interesting points about encroaching bureaucracy (and therefore the parents post is justified)? I think you took the point about Brazil a bit too literally, the poster was never suggesting that the world is suddenly exactly that way, more highlighting the parallels. I think you need to allow yourself to suspend disbelief a little more and realise the very deliberate allegorical nature of these movies...
I mean, judging by the greyed out appearance of all your posts on this topic I would say it seems you're in the minority with this kind of opinion.
When I watched Brazil the first time as I was a kid I couldn't imagine anything shown there being possible in real life. Especially the lack of the right to repair - we repaired everything from all the plumbing and electric wiring (and that was in apartment buildings, not just in private houses, private houses didn't even require any bureaucracy at all - people just built for themselves whatever way they wanted from whatever materials they had, often without any project whatsoever) to all the electronics, let alone cars ourselves during those days. I also couldn't imagine people being be SWATed in their homes for non-violent offenses (by mistake or not).
Now I see the movie has been implemented into life almost precisely and the AI with mass surveillance has been introduced to make it even worse.
To make it more fun and looking realistic today they even portrayed people kinda watching Netflix on their office computers when the boss doesn't look (AFAIK computers were not actually capable of streaming videos over the network during the days the movie was filmed).
Um... Yes, Brazil is fiction but the dystopia it portrays is rooted in extrapolations of the times in which it was made.
Its absolute nonsense to shoot someone down on the basis that they draw parallels to movies or other artforms. Especially if those works of fiction are intended as warnings / cautionary tales.
As it is i thought the parent comments comparison to Brazil was fairly apt in this situation...
where the machine is kept that reads punch cards
In my mind I envisioned in on their desk in the next office over that looked like something out of the movie "Brazil" and machines on the desks during the Central Services scene [0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-yXL-LDMyg
> they'll want to transcribe them.
That's how in the beginning of Brazil 1985 film Archibald Buttle got arrested.
Highly recommend the movie ‘Brazil’ as a dystopian reminder of the humor that misuse of ‘smart’ home technology can bring to life.
Don't forget the film Brazil, where a bug-induced misprinted warrant leads to an obviously wrong person being arrested and then interrogated to death, because how could the machine be wrong?
How about calling it a "Buttle" after the movie Brazil from 1985 where a certain Mr. "Buttle" gets arrested and killed instead of a Mr. "Tuttle" due to a fly in a teleprinter.
I hope Mr Bezos is fine if we replace the re-entry team of his spaceship with the Amazon Flex computer system. I'm sure he'll be fine if the system decides to terminate the reverse thrusters because he didn't earn a "great" rating for his re-entry vector switch flipping.
I think I may watch the movie Brazil again.....
"It’s really striking how many Clubhouse rooms that are on these very tense topics that can go for hours and hours and hours without actually blowing up. Whereas on Twitter, they would have detonated three minutes in."
The difference between Clubhouse and Twitter is Twitter has bots and people who are paid to influence. Bots haven't mastered faking speech well enough to disrupt Clubhouse yet. The influencers will show up eventually, but it seems like Clubhouse has some good moderation features and since it's slow and linear, and only one person can speak at a time, it's more human manageable.
"I can't watch television, news or commentary or anything like that anymore. It's just too much of an alienating and frustrating experience; I'd much rather go listen to three-hour podcasts"
Yes, absolutely. I can't stand TV any more. I now listen to podcasts when I eat dinner instead of T.V. The great part about podcasts is there is so much variety. T.V seems to be locked into a much smaller set of ideas.
"California has had this incredibly absurd period…you could make a Terry Gilliam movie about high speed train construction in California. Like a sequel to Brazil or something, set in the California bureaucracy and political system where you spend billions and billions of dollars and absolutely nothing happens. What would be the most obvious thing in the world is a high speed train between San Francisco and LA. All of these programs exist, they've been authorized, with taxes and all kinds of stuff and like nothing."
The peak of the absurdity is San Francisco. That it took 1 billion dollars to construct 1 mile of subway in San Francisco is pretty funny. San Francisco also spends $300 million a year on 8,035 homeless people. We spend 16% of our GDP on health care, double as a percentage vs any other country and have worse outcomes. There's something going on here that nobody wants to talk about. I think it's related to this:
"I'll confess to being shocked and stunned by how well things worked. I thought last March, when we decided suicidally that we were going to basically shut the economy down. I was like, oh shit, this is really going to be a horrific depression. What's the worst possible depression you can have? It's one where you have simultaneous blows to the supply and demand side and you kill the engine and stall the plane."
It makes you think. How much of the economy is just "bullshit jobs"[1]. How much is just make work, and what we need to do our daily routine and survive just sitting around at home with our laptops is maybe 30% of the actual economy, plus a bunch of stuff made in China? Despite what most doom-mongers claim, there seems to be an ENORMOUS amount of slack in the system, and to actually do something that doesn't take advantage of all that slack, like building new infrastructure, is an enormous ask.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
Felt really similar in tone to the movie Brazil for some reason. That sense of dystopian jollyness where the universe is uncaring even to a righteous cause. I guess this is where the saying banality of evil comes from.
"They Live, meanwhile, sort of became reality... Drones in the sky, conspiracies in our heads, militarized police in the streets, economic inequality in every corner of society, media that seeks to control our minds"
Max Headroom and Brazil were a couple of other 80's scifi films which were uncannily prescient.
Reminds me of Terry Gilliam's "Brazil". Highly recommended film.
Sounds like the movie Brazil to me. Or Computers Don't Argue.
Every time someone pops up with one of those "Google destroyed my business and won't respond" type problems I'm always reminded of the movie Brazil. Just read the automated messages Google sends out sometime and the callousness of how they can ruin lives by sheer algorithmic accident.
I call this phenomenon: Getting Fucked By Scale. It's the idea that a scaled algorithm (take, for example, YouTube automated copyright filters) have some percentage of false positives. Maybe that percent is only 0.05%. At a scale of millions and billions of people, that's a lot of people getting fucked.
And today, any one of us could end up as Sam Lowry. A fly gets stuck in the Google machine and your life is suddenly going sideways.
It feels like the movie Brazil for today.
Have you seen the movie Brazil?
Brazil is one of my favorite films of all time, which is unsurprising given how much I enjoy Terry Gilliam's other work as well. The first time I saw it I was in high school and my drummer lent me the DVD. It was aesthetically compelling and fantastical in a way that films simply don't seem to be anymore. When I revisited it as an adult the heavier thematic elements resonated with me much more, i.e. the havoc that nightmarish bureaucracies and technology can wreak on our lives and interpersonal relationships.
In the age of surveillance capitalism Brazil is more essential than ever; if you haven't seen it then you owe it to yourself to watch it.
A bureaucratic nightmare straight out of Terry Gillian's classic film, Brazil[a].
Thankfully, in this case we got a Hollywood-style ending in which innocent postal workers were ultimately found not to be guilty, so they weren't completely chewed up by the bureaucratic machinery.
Still, what a horrible ordeal.
[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)
This story has been covered for a while by the investigative/satirical magazine Private Eye in the uk-
https://www.private-eye.co.uk/pictures/special_reports/justice-lost-in-the-post.pdf
There's also a podcast about it as well-
https://www.private-eye.co.uk/podcast/49
It's a fascinating and heartbreaking story. The film Brazil made real.
Americans are too quick to take the rental car at the airport.
The average American airport has a good car rental center, but often you are best off avoiding it.
Consider California.
The Car Rental Center at SFO is the worst in the world so far as I know, it is like the movie "Brazil". Take the BART.
San Diego I walk out of the airport to the downtown to a fine choice of hotels which would charge you $40 a night to park your rental car.
Fly into San Jose it is not hard to get to the fringes of Stanford, I would use transit if I could but every time it was early or late so I took a cab.
LA without a car is an adventure, but the taxi service is solid and you could easily experience Santa Monica or Hollywood and other centers as microcosms.
Me too. It was a huge PITA, a sick joke.
I doubt it's the lockdown per se that's causing problems rather than making kids sit inside and play what amounts to really crappy video games all day.
I mean, that's what this quote says to me:
> “Every morning I woke up crying because it was another day of online school.”
Can you imagine the torment? It's like something out of Kafka, or "Brazil" (the movie.)
Seymour Papert must be whirling in his grave.
Did anyone see the movie Brazil?
This is exactly what that movie is about. The bureaucratic-technological engine being prone to tiny errors, which have cascading effects on the people affected. And despite putting in some effort and telling that engine that what it is doing is ridiculous, fixing it is very much non-trivial. Luckily, this time the consequences are minor. A beautiful illustration of "La technique", the runaway engine of rationality and efficiency, as philosopher Jacques Ellul referred to it.
This is a beautiful illustration of that concept!
Upvote for Brazil! Great movie, Gilliam is a genius, so good. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/
The worst part is that we are just conditioning people to accept this as normal. Just like EULA and cookie banners.
It's always the same story. Some guy gets on Twitter or HN who happens to get noticed, then FAANG releases a statement saying they made a "mistake". Mistakes in the aggregate that affect millions of people aren't "mistakes." That's deliberate malfeasance at scale.
Funny they never ask you that design question in interviews. "Design a system which will harm at most 5% of your users while scaling up to billions of people." Maybe if more people understood the sobering dark side of scale, they would stop gleefully promoting runaway scale-at-any-cost engineering.
Just kidding. Profit is God.
I'm also reminded of the dystopian movie Brazil. You're always at danger of getting eaten by the bureaucratic machine today, with only the most absurd recourse available. Just read the passive indifference of the email that Google sent this guy. "Google has received and processed...", "Google systems indicate...". This is one shit dystopia are are living.
The lack of desire to get things right throughout the bureaucracy is the problem. The software is just a mechanism. Other organizations that actually care figure out ways to get things right even when the software has issues.
You can see in the film Brazil, from 35 years ago, that this was already a problem and concern even without modern software.
Reminds of the opening scene from the 1985 movie "Brazil." Computer misprints the name on an arrest warrant as the result of a (literal) bug, and nightmarish tragicomedy ensures:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzFmPFLIH5s
Highly underrated movie, with ever more contemporary relevance.
That's fair; I was tempted to say that The Fifth Element also a little bit prefigured "hopepunk", in that it is, in spite of everything, a love story with a happy ending. Brazil could maybe almost be considered the "black mirror" version of the same story, if you squint really hard at least.
In any case, I haven't watched either film in far too long. I should really remedy that soon!
The film "Brazil" was mentioned on another comment on another story a few days ago that touched on this theme, very good movie.
Dystopian like the movie Brazil isn't it? Arbitrary, automatous machinations lacking in human supervision, with anonymous accusations believed automatically, convicted instantly, and banishment forever.
Whenever I hear about 'Gamify-ing work' or anything similar I think of the movie Brazil.
I like to imagine that those exercise bikes/puzzles are an example of this morphed into something horrible.
These ruminations miss such an obvious point: We are well past the point of dependence on AIs that can be turned off. Were these people not paying attention to the US headlines since 2016? And even in the last month?
Huge corporations, whose primary legal responsibility is to make money ("fiduciary responsibility to our shareholders") cannot turn off a large number of AIs because their financial existence (aka existence) depends on them. Those overlooked US politics headlines are an existence proof of this point.
Go see the movie Brazil. The plot involves someone mistakenly victimized by an dystopian state when some info processing goes slightly wrong, (a typo). We now have AI that is highly error-prone (e.g. facial recognition errors), treated as infallible (by bureaucrats and politicians wanting clearcut answers to questions -- who committed this offense?), and addictive (see above).
That is our problem with AI, and it exists right now.
You should watch the movie Brazil, if you haven't. All the computers have tiny 2" displays, with a Fresnel lens attached in front of it
>Like if you commit a small crime are they just going to consider you a John Doe or kick you out of the country?
Maybe they do like the movie Brazil when Jill was legally dead.
Definitely watch the movie Brazil.
Sounds like the movie Brazil.
The movie “Brazil” comes to mind.
I understand the position but let me argue for the other side a little bit. The problem with companies like Youtube, Google, Amazon, and Facebook is that they do everything algorithmically, since anything else wouldn't scale. Meanwhile, they have no incentives to care about false positives and the power relation between them and their customers is extremely asymmetric - basically, it's a system of oppression. To the false positive victims of algorithmic censorship, this can become a Dystopian nightmare of bureaucracy. Like in the movie "Brazil" or a Kafka story, only much worse because everything is automated and biased against them.
You can see that with Youtube content policing, Facebook and Google ads accounts, etc. Anyone whose livelihood depends on their services can lose their income at any time for no reason whatsoever. Even spreading the risk will not help much, it still means you might loose 30% or 40% of your income over night at any time thanks to a change of the algorithms. None of this is transparent and the companies will not explain anything, so you will not even know why or how to avoid this. You might claim it's anyone's own fault to depend on such companies, but there are many types of businesses where the dependence is unavoidable. These companies have quasi-monopolies in some areas.
AFAIK, the only remedy is to regulate algorithmic control of people and their content by laws more tightly. At least the appeals process needs to be more transparent and there need to be way more humans in the loop.
In this case it's the same, by the way. I guarantee you that many videos will be flagged falsely and many reputable Youtube content creators will be demonetized once again for nothing. This might be tolerable here and there, but the algorithmic oppression of people accumulates across all domains and also has a strong chilling effect.
In the long run, algorithmic oppression of people by a faceless company bureaucracy may turn out to be a bigger problem for society than what these moderation efforts are trying to solve. It creates strong and effective power structures that govern our lives, work in parallel to democratic power structures, and are not democratically legitimized at all. What's worse, the people who create them sometimes don't even seem to understand what they are creating, which is basically a recipe for creating systemic evil.
And this is how mr Butts will get arrested (kinda like mr Buttle in Gilliams Brazil movie)
Your post reminds me of the bureaucratic futility in the movie Brazil. They need a Robert DeNiro character to swoop in and cut through it all like a gordian knot.
I think brazilocene is a reference to the movie Brazil (mostly about bureaucracy), and "cene", which is a suffix to design a geological epoch (like Paleocene)
no more like a portemanteau of brazil (the movie) and -cene, like anthropocene
You not being a reliable source about yourself is an old Wikipedia rule.
I think they are fans of the Brazil movie.
Kind of reminds me of the character of Archibald "Harry" Tuttle from the movie Brazil.
I'd even take something like those offices in Terry Gilliam's film "Brazil" https://media3.giphy.com/media/phV9pLhPDUb3a/source.gif
Looks actually kind of roomy in that gif
edit: here's a video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jr3eIAIFyo8
To be clear, The Shining wasn’t alternated against the wishes of the director, but in fact at the behest of the director, and to positive effect.
But on that note, if you’re interested in the studio messing with the director’s intended work, check out the “Love Conquers All” version of the movie “Brazil” (1985). It starts like 40 minutes in, makes no goddamn sense, and ends on a happy note where the original film... definitely doesn’t. A friend of mine described it as (SPOILER for the movie Se7en): “As if in the movie Se7en instead of his wife’s head in the box, it was a cake and she rolled out on a unicycle singing Happy Birthday.”
I suggest you watch the movie “Brazil”.
Brazil (1985)
An opressive bureaucratic dystopia. 1984 seer through the bottom of a beer bottle. Directed by one of the Monty Pythons.
There's a great tweet about offices...
"Is it weird to be jealous of the corporate dystopia workspaces from 1990s movies?
Neo would be sharing that space with 4 people in an open office plan today."
https://twitter.com/sweis/status/1120433880593575936
Read the whole thread. It's disturbing how close the over the top dystopian joke offices from the film Brazil are to reality.
I always feel like 'Catch 22' is underrated as a reference point for bonkers situations, including current US politics. It is very lengthy though, so that explains why it's not so widely read.
The movie 'Brazil' treads some of the same themes. Basically, not just dystopia, but incomprehensible absurdity.
From the OP: "This is the future, I’m afraid. A future that plans on everything going right so no one has to think about what happens when things go wrong. Because computers don’t make mistakes. An automated future where no one actually knows how things work. A future where people are so far removed from the process that they stand around powerless, unable to take the reigns. A future where people don’t remember how to help one another in person. A future where corporations are so obsessed with efficiency, that it doesn’t make sense to staff a theater with technical help because things only go wrong sometimes. A future with a friendlier past."
This reads eerily like the world depicted by the classic film, "Brazil," by Terry Gillian -- a world run by impersonal machines and processes beyond the control of most human beings. The plot starts with a fly getting jammed in a printer, creating a typographical error, which results in the incarceration and accidental death during interrogation of an innocent man; and that's just the beginning. People in this world are powerless, unable to take the reigns, unable to help other human beings. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)
Let's hope humanity finds a way to build a different kind of future.
When I read the first sentence, I thought of the country. For those not familiar with the Terry Gilliam science fiction film from the, it’s worth clarifying that Brazil is the name of a film: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)
I saw Brazil at uni shortly following its theatrical release.
I saw it again about a year later.
Which made me realise just how mind-warping the film was. Another three decades and some on, I realise, largely in a truthful way.
I was hoping for something that looks like the Brazil Movie computers... http://www.tronola.com/assets/images/Brazil_movie_computer_200.gif
Reminds me of "Mr. Buttle" and "Mr. Tuttle" (reference to the movie "Brazil")
There is a scene at the beginning of the movie Brazil [1] where a literal bug falls into a tele-type, causes an error that starts a chain reaction that frames the events of the movie. The bug is a metaphor in the movie, just some nice visual story-telling to indicate how errors in automated processes can have unintended consequences.
I honestly fear that entire lives will be ruined by AI systems mis-analyzing some data and locking people out from education, work, credit and health opportunities. For some reason, which will be mostly inexplicable to even the engineers that trained the ML system, people will get denied or flagged for spurious reasons.
As we automate everything this is inevitable. We're actively creating digital gatekeepers. 99% of the time you won't even realize it has happened to you nor would you have any recourse. It will be as innocent as an application you don't get a response from, or a simple generic "sorry" email. Then the brick wall of literal no customer service, or automated customer service that refuses to escalate you to a human tier. Then maybe if you are lucky a clueless customer service rep that compassionately explains there is nothing they can do and they wish you the best with your continued search. Fair enough their TOS likely allows them to deny service to anyone for any reason. Why would they waste the effort to figure out why their multi-million dollar system targeted you as an edge case? It works for 98% of cases which is probably good enough for them.
Brazil is a fictionalization that imagines an extreme case and the events of the movie get quite dark. The reality will be more mundane but IMO just as insidious. In the not very distant future AI will be choosing who is healthy and who is rich.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGge4rj4v_Y
The Sift report is based on your email address, among other things. My email box is full of random people's insurance quotes, medical and electric bills, birthday greetings, and welcome emails to services I've never heard of. We all know the company is going to spend approximately zero time to sanity check or sanitize that data firehose. Turns out the movie Brazil was a documentary.
This looks like something out of the Terry Gilliam movie "Brazil".
This is like the movie Brazil, no longer funny because it has come true. If I was sure it was intended as a joke instead of a showcase of "best practices" it would be funny.
How many companies besides Apple can afford to bring Ive on as a contractor and implement his level of perfection? How many companies will continue investing until they have the perfect color “white”, the new ceramics, or the unibody designs that require completely new tooling?
I worry that Ive will quickly grow frustrated when he realizes that he is a consultant, and at the end of the day, it will be the company that makes the final decision.Will Ive want his name to be associated with an object that was deemed “good enough” by the hiring company?
Understanding the culture of an organization, the strengths and weaknesses of its executives, what the organization is capable as a whole.. that kind of access and connection comes when you are deeply integrated within it. As consultant, you are an external party, an outsider. No matter how good your ideas are, it is up to the client to decide whether or not they will be implemented.
I see Ive as the next Terry Gilliam trying to pitch Brazil! to a set of executives, except Gilliam was able to work with Criterion to ultimately release a 3 version box set: his version, what the executives wanted, and what was released in the theatre. Three completely different movies that highlight the clueless executives and the genius of Gilliam.
Or maybe he spends some time with his family and is a secret force behind the scenes, donating time to universities and design schools, trying to encourage the next generation.
Not a book, but you might want to watch Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" [0][1]. It's one of the the closest efforts I've seen to catching what, in my mind, is the 'look' of Orwell's 1984.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
Gilliam commented on this notion in an interview. He said Hollywood does not carry grudges because Hollywood doesn't have any memory. After the debacle of Brazil and the economical disaster of Münchhausen, many wondered if he would ever be able to make a movie again. But Hollywood didn't care one bit about all that as long as it seemed like the next movie would make a profit, as was the case with Fisher King and 12 Monkeys.
The mixed reviews is not surprising for a director who is highly original but not so strong in (or doesn't care about) traditional storytelling virtues like dramatic curve and relatable characters. His movies are divisive.
You really think reviewers are afraid to give a Gilliam movie a positive review? Maybe they just don't like them all that much.
He did. It was called _Brazil_. And the sequel to that was _The Adventures of Baron Munchausen_.
Okay, they aren't direct sequels but they make a trilogy of related movies: the fantasies of childhood, the fantasies of middle age and the fantasies of old age.
Beside, several of the original band of midgets (little people?) are sadly no longer with us.
> It is one of the most prescient films ever made.
"People think I am a prophet and that Brazil described the world we’re living in now a few years ago. But we were living in that world then; people just weren’t paying attention the way they do now."
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/magazine/terry-gilliam-is-not-in-fact-dead.html
I'm a big Gilliam fan, but in my opinion his movies have gotten worse and worse since Time Bandits, Brazil, 12 Monkeys, and The Fisher King.
There's something of his charming sensibility in even the worst of his films, and they're worth watching for die-hard Gilliam fans like myself, but even the best of his later films (like the Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus) are a pale shadow of the brilliance of his early output.
> You can see this most clearly in the Metacritic for Tideland which is pretty positive as far as user submitted reviews go, but is one of the worst movies ever if you were to go off the critics reviews.
The problem is, critics are usually right, and the audience usually isn't. This is because critics have studied film, often went to film school, and can point out just exactly how a film fails.
That being said, Gilliam is the rare exception, and I do believe it is because of that ineffable quality about him and his directorial style. Maybe it's because I grew up with it, but "Time Bandits" is still one of my favorite films of all time. "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus" was not really very well made, but it's still distinctly Gilliamesque, and it actually works around the death of Heath Ledger very adroitly. "Zero Theroem" was also a bit disappointing, but it's still at least different, not your usual Hollywood schlock.
"Brazil" was Gilliam par excellence; I am hopeful his take on Quixote is good, but even if it isn't, it will almost definitely be interesting.
>Gilliam's "Brazil" is still my favorite film of all time
Mine too. I am also a Common Lisp programmer, although I haven't put Lisp on spaceships like you. Great Minds Think Alike!!
There was a lot of bad blood over the US studio's reedit of Brazil to give it a happy ending (which was atrocious). Following that Baron Munchausen was a flop (and while I like it, def not his best work to be fair). After that he was sort of written off from the establishment as it were (including the critics who know to pay the piper). But while that would have killed off the careers of most directors, Terry Gilliam has this ineffable quality about him that's allowed him to keep getting independent funding, keep getting very good actors, and keep making great movies. It's one thing if your independent and the system hasn't noticed you yet, but the system turned it's back on him and somehow he's still out there killing it. The system out of spite acts out against him wherever it can.
You can see this most clearly in the Metacritic for Tideland which is pretty positive as far as user submitted reviews go, but is one of the worst movies ever if you were to go off the critics reviews.
Reading the article, this has a werner herzogian vibe to it. I wonder how it compares to aquirre - that film certainly has its delerious moments.
I love gilliam and brazil and twelve monkeys are among my favorite films.
Gilliam's "Brazil" is still my favorite film of all time. If you haven't seen it, you should. Note that there are multiple versions of this film floating around. Comparing them makes a very interesting study in film editing. The story of the making of "Brazil" is almost as interesting and fraught as Don Quixote.
When watching Brazil it's important to keep in mind that it was made in 1985, before 9-11, before the internet, before ubiquitous surveillance. It is one of the most prescient films ever made.
Don't forget Brazil: one of my all-time favorite dystopian films (the version with the uncut ending, not the "happy" one)
I think oldsters will become that old guy from the dystopian movie Brazil (1985), who did the work he loved illegally and for free, because of insane bureaucracy.
Sorry for the delayed reply. Have been too busy.
Today I got a delivery for 6 revision books for my daughter. One is incorrect. I know when I return it, I'm going to get the same damn wrong book again because somewhere along the line someone doesn't give a fuck and everything is so utterly compartmentalised.
I only say this is going to happen because it has happened to me twice before.
Then there's the two marketplace sellers I've complained and complained about and they didn't deal with it at all.
Whereas the OP got shafted once.
It's an efficient bureaucracy, reminiscent of the film Brazil, nothing more.
This reminds me of the Terry Gilliam 1985 film “Brazil”. It portrays a future dystopic Britain where bureaucracy and the State has run wild, creating various Kafraesque situations, such as repairing your own airconditioning being classed as “terrorism” and a typo on an official document landing the character in jail, with no way out.
A few decades ago this was classed as fanciful entertainment. Now it’s become real life. Scary stuff.
"Trust The Computer. The Computer is your friend!"
We're descending into the parody dystopia envisioned in this game.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_(role-playing_game)
In the early 90's, if I were to tell people that a mega-corporation would seek to take over all the world's information, and they would subject users to this Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare treatment straight out of the movie "Brazil," they'd think my brain was taken over by "Paranoia" the role playing game.
...or the movie, ‘Brazil’?
I also saw a sneaky reference to Brazil (the film)
Star Wars is a mess for the past has tech more advanced than the future. Blade Runner is still watchable though and never laughable because it seemingly has been placed in an intentional anachronistic SciFi setting: the 1940's hairstyle and dress Rachel wears, a 1950's "Raymond Chandler" slice of life story, a computer that is more "steampunk" than plausible. The films "Brazil", Marie Antoinette", "Titus", Jesus Christ Superstar, adopt that anachronistic style as well.
Brazil, IMDB https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/
It's the dystopia of the film Brazil: someone makes a typo in a database, someone else's life is dramatically inconvenienced, and it's impossible for them to access any means of redress.
> Is this just how the US ticks right now?
Yes.
The pedantry doesn't help the customer. Your correction reminds me of the bureaucracy in the movie Brazil.
Reasons may be justified internally but a shitty experience for customers is still a shitty experience.
When I was there (2005-6), there were many layers of management between me, a developer, and Terry Semel, CEO (IIRC, it was more than 10, possibly even 15.) Often it was like working in Brazil (the film).
Tarkovsky's my favorite director, but I really did not like Solaris. For me, Tarkovsky's Stalker is the infinitely better film.
The Man Who Fell to Earth, Primer, Videodrome, Blade Runner, Brazil, A Clockwork Orange, Open Your Eyes (aka Abre Los Ojos), and Empire Strikes Back would be others I'd put on my favorite scifi movie list.
Reminds me of the film Brazil
The thing you have to know about Brazil is, it's perfectly okay not to like Brazil at all. I can't call a movie most people have never seen "overrated," but people can get really weird about Brazil...
I rewatched both 12 Monkeys the film and Brazil and they both share an incredibly unbelievable romance - in the first the scientist falls in love with a homeless man and kisses him passionately over the span of about 10 minutes of screen time after thinking he was insane and finding proof he was a time traveler (homeless people are humans, too, but if Cole had been living like a homeless person long enough to appear like that he would have had a pretty foul odor) and in Brazil, Sam Lowry and the female lead are arguing and he singled handedly ends her career and in the next(?) scene we see them together they are in bed pre/post consummation ( though of course that scene makes more sense if it's only in his head after we watch the end of the movie). The TV series also manages to top Brad Pitt's crazy guy, that I thought was going to be impossible after hearing about the TV series initially.
Agreed. I like 12 monkeys better as a movie ( just my style of movie ) but brazil is a far more realistic dyspotian reality. Dystopia by the mundane and the bureaucratic rather than a mad genocidal scientist.
Whatever information the IRS has on me is far from accurate.
I have never been able to file my taxes electronically because I cannot pass their electronic verification process.
They have to verify birth date, which they think is something else other than my actual birth date.
I have spent hours and hours being shuffled around between different governmental offices, explaining my case, and it got to a point where you have to give up. Have you ever seen the movie Brazil? You might know what I'm talking about.
Imagine having to be reduced to calling around your city, trying to find the nearest fax machine because some governmental office will only take faxes so that you can continue your quest towards the distant sanity...
Brilliant, hilarious, disturbing movie. You probably know this already, but Brazil has two versions, with radically different endings. They lend themselves to diametrically opposed interpretations of the film as a whole. I prefer the director Gilliam's cut, but also appreciate on some meta level how the juxtaposition of both the original and alternate endings -- and the real-life drama around their editing and release -- serves as a self-referential commentary on the film's themes of social critique / satire and the struggle of the individual in the face of massive, broken, impersonal bureaucratic machinery.
One of my favourite films is Brazil. The premise is basically, “what if orwell’s 1984 were a comedy?” in Brazil, Robert Deniro plays a vigilante repairman, swinging heroically from apartment to apartment doing unauthorised repairs of broken air conditioning systems. He is the state’s most wanted outlaw, in the film, even more sought than actual terrorists.
The only thing I could think through reading this madness is as if the author was in the movie Brazil.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)
Yes, that’s exactly it.
In hindsight, “sod” wasn’t the right term to use (that’s what you get for posting at midnight) but the point I wanted to make was the removal of meaning, autonomy and human interaction when not only are you doing a repetitive job, but how you’re doing it is dictated by a machine. The movie Brazil came to mind, although I’m sure there are better parallels to make.
This is utterly wonderful - brought to mind the film Brazil's fly in a typewriter.
I'm now going to have to go down the rabbit hole of each of these ghost kanji. Good times.
The biggest problem with Java is the culture. All modern languages are Turing complete and roughly equivalent in the their expressiveness (Lisp, APL and Forth notwithstanding). But only Java people seems to have an AbstractAbstractFactoryFactoryWidgetGadget fetish.
When I have to do Java, I keep recalling Brazil[0].
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/
See also the 1985 film “Brazil,” where a fly stuck in a printer (a bug!) sends a SWAT team after one Mr. Buttle instead of one Mr. Tuttle.
Wow, how terrifying. Is this English-speaking privilege rearing its ugly head again? Re the Terry Gilliam film Brazil: yes indeed, we have arrived.
But somehow it's much more than that - we are becoming a mashup of Brazil + Brave New World. We've created colossal world bureaucracies (both government and corporate) writing and enforcing countless rules. But simultaneously, because of of perceived individual benefits offered by these bureaucracies, we have eagerly embraced a misplaced complacent acceptance of all these new rules. Boggles the mind.
In our brave new world, maybe ignorance truly is bliss.
I hope it's the last Terry Gilliam movie that's ever becoming true! (Brazil, 1985)
Corporate control: One or more large corporations control society through products, advertising, and/or the media. Examples include Minority Report and Running Man.
• Bureaucratic control: Society is controlled by a mindless bureaucracy through a tangle of red tape, relentless regulations, and incompetent government officials. Examples in film include Brazil.
• Technological control: Society is controlled by technology—through computers, robots, and/or scientific means. Examples include The Matrix, The Terminator, and I, Robot.
• Philosophical/religious control: Society is controlled by philosophical or religious ideology often enforced through a dictatorship or theocratic government.
I have to second this. I used to watch some really "mindfucked" movies on Netflix. I think I watched The Cube, The Zero Theorem, and Brazil, partly because Netflix had recommended them to me. Now? Those movies don't even show up in the entire recommendation list. In fact, most of what shows up is series I know I won't like. I still subscribe but it's a letdown how the recommendation system incentives have changed.
Every time there is a terrorist attack politicians preach more surveillance, and that apps etc are problematic. Maybe in the future "the terrorists" will be the good guys. If you haven't already - watch the movie Brazil (1985)
Yes, privacy matters. Have you ever seen the movie Brazil? Some reasons you ought be concerned:
- that you are mistaken for someone who committed a crime and have to deal with the bureaucracy that ensues. See for example false positives on the no-fly list. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Fly_List#False_positives
- that you commit a crime without even knowing it and end up paying for it at the whim of the government. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/3044794/How-we-all-break-the-law-every-day.html
More generally, I’d like to point you to this piece addressing the “nothing to hide” mentality:
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even-if/127461
Edit: that piece is paywalled. Here’s Glenn Greenwald on the topic:
https://www.ted.com/talks/glenn_greenwald_why_privacy_matters
Cory Doctorow has also written extensively about privacy.
Well, on the one hand, sure. I think Alex Jones is a conspiracy-theory charlatan, a good representative of "fake news" as a matter of a fact (see: Pizzagate). The fact that his site also pushes dubious supplements (like "super advanced vitamin B-12" and "survival shield", which is a "proprietary nascent iodine" formula) says it all to me.
On the other hand, no. I'm not comfortable with a social media network that determine your news feed "appropriateness", via an opaque Brazil-esque (the movie, not the country) bureaucratic process that says "yay" or "nay". And while Alex Jones may be an easier business case here due to the "fake news" elements, I'm not seeing much transparency about what their post blocking process really is. Other than it seems real messy and haphazard, and a lot of people complain about it for various reasons, whether you are a black person posting police brutality videos, or are activists documenting the Rohingya genocide, or have conservative opinions, or are Palestinian, or post breasts no matter the purpose, or post iconic Vietnam war photos, or various other reasons that come up in articles.
If Facebook made their guidelines clear, and the process was transparent, I'd be more comfortable. When the Wikipedia community decides a source is no longer reliable, you can at least read the debate on the reliable source noticeboard. They have guidelines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability#Reliable_sources) and an ID guide (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable_sources). It's possible to disagree with the decision still, but at least you have better context.
Here are my recommendations:
* Sunshine: I'll second this one, about a crew on a mission in space, turns into a different kind of film in the second half, which many people didn't like; has breathtaking visuals and a strong soundtrack.
* Her: A guy falls in love with an AI; has a wonderful atmosphere
* Gattaca: Set in a future of genetic engineering and how the protagonist fights against class discrimination
* Ex Machina, this was pretty hyped I'd say, but takes the opposite approach of Her and shows us the dangers of AI
* The Day the Earth Stood Still: a representative of aliens arrives on earth to tell humans to knock off their douchebaggery; still highly relevant today
* Metropolis: a silent film with a powerful score, set in a future with a large class disparity where the workers rebel
Honorable mentions that I'm not sure are really sci-fi: Brazil, The Prestige, Watchmen
Saved you a click:
Pornhub ARIA @Pornhub Pornhub would never play you like that fam Netflix US @netflix To the 53 people who've watched A Christmas Prince every day for the past 18 days: Who hurt you? 7:47 AM · Dec 11, 2017
I sure hope so!
A few thoughts WRT that NetFlix tweet:
The "data" culture is so pervasive, the want of privacy is so weak, that these corporations are not ashamed to post tweets like that. And the lack of outrage, which should be easier to amplify and snowball due to the Internet, tells me, that the battle for privacy is lost (or impossible to win).
That Netflix tweet made me feel like a prostitute TBH, like a cog in a machine. Brazil, the movie comes to mind.
This is like something from the movie "Brazil" (1985).
More like the movie Brazil, during the opening of which:
> a fly gets jammed in a printer and results in the incarceration and accidental death during interrogation of cobbler Archibald Buttle – instead of renegade air conditioning specialist and suspected terrorist Archibald Tuttle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)
Well I don't want to spoil the movie. Brazil is worth a watch.
I know this is the independent, but is this for real? It sounds like a prank, straight out of the movie Brazil especially with the whole terrorist motivation. And in the U.K.?!
What about a movie lile "Brazil"? would that be considered happy or sad?
Only reading the headline was enough to remind me of Brazil[1]. The movie, while being based on the very premise of a typo ruining lifes, also has the most telling lines in it - the one everybody trying to rectifiy such an issue is bound to get told[2]:
Mistake? We don't make mistakes!
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)
[2]: https://youtu.be/6OalIW1yL-k
Terry Gilliam moved to England as an adult. England is knee deep in bureaucratic stuff ups and Brazil was practically a documentary. All he did was change the scenery.
Reminds me of Tuttle/Buttle mishap in Terry Gilliam's Brazil movie. Life imitates (dystopian) art.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OalIW1yL-k
(Specifically https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OalIW1yL-k#t=3m but it's worth watching the whole clip (or even the whole movie) if you haven't seen it before. It's from Terry Gilliam's "Brazil".)
Your tax dollars at work. This sounds a lot like the movie "Brazil".
It's good that you had your family around you. The system is too big to understand you on a timely and personal level.
1984; the film "Brazil" (1985); "The Lives of Others" (about the Stasi); Snowden's film and revelations; the history of dictatorships and surveillance, etc; I could also make many specific arguments.
But my point wasn't any of this: just that most of HN strongly feels against surveillance and the capabilities mentioned.
I don't want to take a side I just want the contradiction to be put front and center in these cases. It will lead to everyone on HN having a better position, when they do eventually take one. I still think we don't need to have that argument here (or in most cases where it comes up).
I have run into this kind of automated bureaucracy several times in the last decade. It is both infuriating and frightening.
My mortgage was sold to a new company that had a weird computer-directed policy that rejected my home owner's insurance. They then flagged me as not having insurance and charged me over $1,000 for providing insurance. I spent hours on the phone speaking with people in India who absolutely would not send my proof of insurance up the chain of command. It wasn't until I was able to find the CEO of the mortgage company and contact her directly to explain my situation that it was finally resolved... for six months when the automated system rejected my home owners insurance again. I eventually had to refinance the home to get out from under this soulless company's grip.
Institutions like the Better Business Bureau used to protect consumers from this kind of abuse, but the complaints I have registered with them have achieved nothing. If I was poor, this situation would have financially ruined me. I would have missed mortgage payments, my home would have been foreclosed on, and my credit would have been ruined for years.
I highly recommend the science fiction film "Brazil" to anyone who wants to see the dystopia this kind of automated rules-enforcement could create. "Brazil" is the book "Nineteen Eighty-Four" but the totalitarian government rules with a system of overwhelming bureaucracy. The problem here is that it is the Capitalists who are the oppressors.
"The problem isn't machines, it's letting machines do your thinking for you." - Leto III (Dune)
A friend suggests that Black Mirror is "about screens". I see what he's saying on a surface level, but, screens are just how we interface with machines doing the thinking for us, instead of people.
On the other hand, isn't bureaucracy a machine, running on meat? "Screens" used to be "Paper" - see the crazy movie "Brazil". Replacing something hard (actually getting to know someone and their situation) with something easy (the output of a system) has been with humanity for a really long time, if not forever.
Most [of the prior] Black Mirror episodes are about, I think, man's inhumanity to man, just mediated by modern technology. Most of them are about some way that people are failing to connect to each other.
I have only watched one of the new episodes.
The article makes the case for the world descriptions and concepts introduced in SF being an inspiration to real world entrepreneurs, such as Stephenson inspiring the PayPal co-founders and a series of portal companies.
But science fiction has a greater impact in being one of the few forms in 20th century arts that dared to present an optimistic view of the future and of values that led to a better world, be it Picard's exemplary leadership in Star Trek TNG, or Heinlein's "normal person finding their courage and values has an impact" novels.
Apocalypse Now or Brazil may be "great" movies but they are incredibly depressing. "Resign yourself to the brokenness of the world, people. The state/realpolitik will crush you." "No", says Asimov, "your actions matter and have an impact. Courage and reason are great qualities, go build the world you want." How many other mainstream movies, books or artworks have this message, outside of science fiction?
It's been a few years that Terry Gilliam's Brazil movie got upgraded to 'mostly documentary' status. At the time, 1985, it seemed only a dark comedy / cautionary tale.
(Well, the caution against ugly tech seems to have worked. Architecture and policing, not so much.)
The colour and settings remind me of the movie "Brazil".
I always wondered if name and dreamy search in Brazil (1985 movie) for a mystical place (and woman) was motivated by Hy-Brasil.
I suppose it has been debunked, but it still seems apropos... http://stanleyrumm.com/?p=12
“Port Talbot [in Wales] is a steel town, where everything is covered with gray iron ore dust. Even the beach is completely littered with dust, its just black. The sun was setting, and it was quite beautiful. The contrast was extraordinary, I had this image of a guy sitting there on this dingy beach with a portable radio, tuning in these strange Latin escapist songs like ‘Brazil’. The music transported him somehow and made his world less gray.”
Terry Gilliam
> punchcard error that leaves a man officially dead
This sounds similar to the Terry Gilliam film _Brazil_.
"When a fly gets jammed in a printer and results in the incarceration and accidental death during interrogation of cobbler Archibald Buttle – instead of renegade air conditioning specialist and suspected terrorist Archibald Tuttle – Sam is assigned the task of rectifying the error."
Quoting from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)
I always thought an elevated road like computer flooring for access. It would be a massive project, you'd have to step up to cross the street, and you'd still need access to the road below for the older, unmovable stuff. Either way, not happening, too much scope.
It falls back on evolving into something like the movie 'Brazil' with all of the ductwork ;)
It sounds like something the Ministry of Information would issue (movie Brazil..a must see)
>"I feel like I'm living in the movie Brazil."
Says the Soylent salesman. Irony!
Charging for renunciation is the most ridiculous part. You are paying for a process that:
is expensive only since they want to investigate you as a presumed criminal or tax dodger (the movie Brazil comes to mind)
is a result of their non-compliance with international norms
is the result of the US declaring you have a status that was never requested
As an expat I consider all US citizens to be indentured servants due to this requirement to buy independence from the US and whatever it chooses to enact next. Effectively, these changes are not noticed by the US' domestics, but those who think they "can flee to Canada" when they have ethical problems with the US are now deluding themselves. "If you don't like it, then leave" may have been sarcastic BS, but at least it was a real choice that many people made in the Vietnam era, etc. If you don't like us leave us money (which we will use in the ways you probably object to)" is something else.
I will find it both funny and sad that when the people who supported the two party system are pissed by someone like Trump implementing fascist policies they will finally realize that their own willingness to destroy our basic civil rights makes it impossible for them to avoid helping a system they find morally repugnent and criminal.
I tend to find the dystopian vision of Terry Gilliam's movie Brazil the most utterly believable. In it, we have benign or benevolent actors, who are guilty of nothing more than incompetence. Evil is an emergent property of the system rather than a conscious act. People give up autonomy and privacy for retention of their bourgeois lifestyle, and mostly ignore the economic underclasses. A small number of malcontents are branded as terrorists and the government ineffectually tries to treat the symptom rather than the underlying disease.
Ok, that is right out of the script for the movie Brazil.
God, that sounds dystopian as all hell.
Just like in the movie Brazil - they ruin that guys life because a bug got in the type-machine which was putting out the papers for whom to go after, and it made the machine spell the wrong name.
However, if you have not seen this documentary, I highly recommend you watch it, called "Human Resources": http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/human-resources/
EDIT: What they SHOULD use watson for is to determine of those being laid off from the current position, how suitable they would be to internally apply for the one of 25,000 openings.
They should limit Watson to tell them who should be RA'd to a new job - not who should be let go. Obviously those NOT scored to stay by watson are in the set of pink-slips implicitly.
The film _Brazil_ escaped from its script.
It is taking over the world.
This is stupid, Black Swan event can't be dealt with classic probabilities. Terrorism doesn't follow a normal distribution, more like a Dirac distribution.
The simple averaging you used, I can use it to, but I am not only French, I am also living in Paris. Last year there have been 39 deaths from car accidents, 101 from homicides, and more than 147 from terrorist relative death an counting every few months in Paris.
I can also look at my age, and that I go to concert often then my micromort explode to the roof now.
You seems like the old ladys in the Terry Gilliam film Brazil.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4KFNhxibec
To me AWS Lambda is like a Brazil-like nightmare in bureaucracy (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/), while App Engine is equally powerful but a lot simpler to use.
It's harder to make something simple and powerful than it is to make something complex and powerful, so hats off to the Google engineers involved.
If you feel "Les Espaces d'Abraxas" is oddly familiar, it's because you've seen it before. It's one of the set of the Terry Gilliam movie Brazil ...
If you don't mind the French, http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/visuel/2014/02/08/en-seine-saint-denis-les-illusions-perdues-d-une-utopie-urbaine_4360634_3224.html has more.
For a more representative portfolio of Paris suburb "architecture", you can look http://www.thecinetourist.net/93---seine-saint-denis-la-courneuve-to-saint-ouen.html and it's bleak.
A good start, but I will not be satisfied until I can get a workstation like the ones in Terry Gilliam's brilliant movie Brazil: http://www.oilempire.us/oil-jpg/brazil-lime-computer.jpg
A few:
Fight Club: I really didn't understand the concept of anomie before seeing this movie. Normlessness and lack of connection to society's way of things are fundamental issues which are largely ignored in common conversations or articles. This is the same movie that introduced me to post-modernism, nihilism, and existentialism.
Brazil: This film really taught me a lot about how to produce creativity as well as government. One of the main characters is an outlaw "combat" HVAC/plumber who has been forced out of his legitimacy by a sprawling Kafkaesque bureaucracy riddled with incompetence-- the absurdity of the character is illustrative of the bizarre extremes government policy can unintentionally create.
Waking Life: This film is a great representation of what it is like to be dreaming. The film is comprised of a series of barely-related conversations between different dream characters. Waking Life taught me not to be too analytical of art, and to restrain criticism of a new experience. Most importantly, Waking Life taught me that life is a trip, so you may as well choose to enjoy the ride.
You're objections are all fine, but post hoc as they are additional qualifiers that seem driven more by personal preferences than anything which can be used as a more objective criterion. You believe that I should be able to "connect the dots" in the same way that you do, but when there are so few dots, it's easy for one person to see Ursa Major, another a dipper, and a third a plow.
My entire point is that your data points are too vague and have multiple reasonable interpretations, and that it's possible to make it more rigorous.
You did not specify what "mythologize" means. I interpreted it mean "the subject of a biopic" produced by a movie studio for the big screen. You give a dictionary definition, but that doesn't define what it means to 'mythologize' someone in a movie, or determine if some group is excessively or under-mythologized. Is a biopic about Plato mythologizing Plato? Which groups do or don't need mythologization? Are British biopics over or under represented?
You believe that a movie about the Nobel Peace Prize winner Joseph Rotblat is likely about to "pass judgement on all the other guys who didn't leave the Manhattan Project" and not about the events that lead to his getting the Peace Prize. I have just watched the film, and it does not do what you pessimistically assumed.
You believe that a movie about research which is usually interpreted as a caution against the implicit acceptance of authoritarian roles, is actually about research about the "the horrible things this white guy did to people".
(You write about Milgram's 'inhumane experiments'. While he worked to understand why humans might do things that are inhumane, the people being "shocked" were actors. It was emotionally stressful, certainly, though as http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4346260/ comments, "Milgram invoked post-experimental survey data and psychiatrists’ reports to demonstrate that most participants were glad to have participated and that none had been harmed". It adds careful qualifiers to that interpretation. What part of his experiments do you consider to be 'inhumane'?)
And you don't like moves that are well-regarded by those in the social justice movement. Nor, if I understand your objection to "A Dangerous Method", is a film acceptable if it has a female actor on the movie poster, even though your original criteria asked about "the regular white guy scientists .. we've mythologized", and not movies which only mythologize regular white male scientists. This feels very might like raising the goal posts.
Again, this is acceptable. You get to define your own coding criteria, so long as it's transparent enough that others can have a hope of reproducing it.
It does mean that "Dr. Strangelove" (1964), which is about white men bringing nuclear destruction to the world, where one of the main characters is handicapped, and is well-loved by the anti-war crowd, is an example of movie that you think puts straight white males in a bad light. "A Clockwork Orange", "Brazil", and "1984" all portray white men in oppressive positions of power. As reactions to authoritarianism is the topic of Milgram's work, these also seem to fall into your pattern.
Again, perfectly acceptable. Once you define your criteria, it can be applied more rigorously against a longer period of time, to see if there's a trend.
Of course, it ends up with strange problems, where "Wrath of Khan", which has the Indian character Khan Noonien Singh (played by the Mexican actor Ricardo Montalbán) on the movie poster, so doesn't count as a white, straight, male movie. Ghostbusters II (1989) has a black man on the movie poster. Tony Stark in the "Iron Man" films has a chest injury which requires him to wear a regulator for his heart, so is handicapped. "Star Wars" (1977) also had a woman on the movie poster.
As "Dr. Strangelove" and these examples show, this "pattern" you've identified, of sometimes having non-white, non-male, non-straight, or handicapped actors, has been around for a long time. It's not clear that it's a new thing, and seems to match the secular trend since the 1960s of letting people besides white, straight men have the positions of power in US politics, science, and other fields.
You said "I was hoping you would notice from context I was referencing male scientists who were publicly disgraced as people, not as fraudulent scientists.", in regards to "publicly disgraced in the past year (offhand I can think of 3)".
I believe you are limiting the topic to people who have not been disgraced for scientific reasons but because of other events in their lives. That is, despite that some of the disgraced people I mentioned committed no crime, their social ostracism isn't the right kind of social ostracism for you. I presume the only criteria you accept is that the person must be criticized for racist, sexist, or similar reasons?
With that qualifier in mind, I assume you mean Watson, Taylor, and Hunt. Do note that Watson has been disgraced "as a person" for years for his racist and sexist views.
For example, in http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/fury-at-dna-pioneers-theory-africans-are-less-intelligent-than-westerners-394898.html from 2007 titled "Fury at DNA pioneer's theory: Africans are less intelligent than Westerners" and subtitled "Celebrated scientist attacked for race comments: "All our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really". This caused people to, for example, cancel his visit (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/7050020.stm) and "Because of the public controversy, on 18 October 2007, the Board of Trustees at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory suspended Watson's administrative responsibilities." Indeed, the reason why he sold his Nobel Prize last year was to make money, because he had been ostracized for years, and wanted the money.
Thus, only two of those have happened this year, and not the three you suggested. Or are you thinking of someone else? If so, who?
Other similarly personally disgraced scientists include Kary Mullis, Nobel Prize winner and well known HIV/AIDS denialist, climate change denialist, and believer in astrology; and William Shockley, a Nobel Prize winner also known for his racist views and support for eugenics.
Of course there have been few women who have won the Nobel Prize, so with only 4 examples of male Nobel Prize winners ostracized for their views, we would not expect there to be a female winner similarly ostracized. Thus, lack of such a counter-examples is completely expected from the statistics.
Since you include astronauts as a field of science, it's easy to point to Lisa Nowak, who has been personally disgraced for her attempt at kidnapping Colleen Shipman, who pleaded guilty to charges of felony burglary of a car and misdemeanor battery, and who was discharged from the Navy in under other than honorable conditions. However, part of that was quite clearly illegal, so may not constitute the right kind of disgrace "as a person" that you are looking for.
But these are events that hit the big time news. What do you know about scientists who aren't Nobel Prize winners, and who aren't on world-wide TV?
That's why a more rigorous search is needed. Retraction Watch and Science magazine both use the phrase "disgraced" in reference to scientists, and have a more complete coverage of what goes on in science. Do note that those science oriented sites don't use "disgraced" to refer to the racism and sexism of Watson, et al., so the term "disgraced" is itself rather ill-defined.
For example, in http://news.sciencemag.org/people-events/2013/10/special-report-can-nsf-put-right-spin-rotators-part-2 a co-worker says of Anja Strømme “She feels abused and disgraced, and it should have never happened”; do we accept that this is a case of being disgraced? If not, what constitutes a sufficient level of disgrace?
Or, if many male scientists thought it was disgraceful that a woman like Lise Meitner should work in physics, and snubbed her socially and in her career, is that really disgraceful? Or do you require that someone be successful and famous first, before being disgraced?
If your definition is so strict that only a few people over the decades meet the definition, the it's hardly a useful definition, is it? Who else can you think of that have been disgraced? You make it sound like something that's happened more than a dozen times, so it shouldn't be hard to come up with more examples, no? Based on those numbers, how many women do you think should have been disgraced by this time?
I sometimes feel like I'm living in the world of the movie Brazil, a nightmare of bureaucracy and thuggish government with sprinklings of technological toys. Artisanal bread and a circus in our pockets.
Brazil is probably my favorite movie of all times.
Every time someone kicks Uber down, all it does is make me more sympathetic to their business. I've had nothing but expensive, shit service with no recourse or customer support from official regulated services. They operate like the government does in the film Brazil.
I once got to walk through the engine and gearbox(?) workshop/factory at Maasey Ferguson in the UK. It was like nothing else. Row on row of machinery, which at the time stood still. A haze of machine oil through the factory so you could not see the far wall. It was like being on a set in the movie Brazil.
All of the problems you mention are problems created by the writer, director, producers, etc., and have nothing to do with bad science. They can, and frequently do, show up in every genre of film. One of my favorite films is Big Trouble in Little China (as an example) and I'm sure there are all kinds of issues about the film itself, but I still love the film. Ditto Blade Runner, Brazil, Contact, etc.
Disclaimer: I'm not a scientist by profession.
Well said. Errors will happen. How they're monitored/dealt with is not an algorithm problem, and it's importance can't be underestimated.
In this case "the algorithm" is the fly in the printer from the '85 movie "Brazil". Except these are real stories, it's absurd.
Yep. It's all been way overdone. Brazil and 12 Monkeys were different because it was all more or less new then. Both also had great arc and reveals, but It's Been Done Now.
I say "new then"; dystopian SciFi was a staple of drive-ins in the '70s - from Silent Running to Planet of the Apes to Logan's Run...
It's not like there isn't a huge backlog of great sci-fi to draw on that isn't dystopian. I'd like to see The Foundation Trilogy as a multi-year "Breaking Bad" style series.
It's basically a massive essay, but Scorcese's "Personal Journey" manages to explain why movies are in terrible shape without being hopeless about it. The reasons are profound.
As someone who used to really enjoy dystopian themes, and who still does when done properly, the trope has become overused. "Epic new dystopian" film instead sounds like your standard "start out interesting for the first thirty minutes," and which then devolves into an hour or so of mindless fighting. Then again, Gilliam did do Brazil so maybe I'm wrong.
As much as I love Terry Gilliam I find his films like Zero Theorem and even Brazil very challenging to watch the whole way through. I always think they are absolutely genius for the first 30 minutes or so then my interest always starts to slowly fade.
Similar to most of the Monty Python films.
It's like a desert you can only eat in small batches but delivered in full cake size.
Brazil? You'll need to elaborate because I don't think we watched the same movie.
Seems like something from "Brazil" (the movie, not the country).
I'm not trying to be argumentative here, but does that honestly come through?
I routinely turn down offers from the big players because I imagine once I'm in, it's going to be like the movie Brazil.
I've worked for three large companies as a non-contractor - and I mean maybe I just didn't have the right title but I found the following (in all three):
* I was prohibited from working on broken things that I was capable of fixing but I wasn't assigned to - even if nobody else was addressing them ... Almost as if there's some internal taxonomy model which strictly defines my role as X and only X. Having things lay broken is so frustrating to me.
* Pointing out that projects are on a steady course for derailment and failure was discouraged. Recommending any fix whatsoever was completely a prohibitive.
* Questions like "what does the client want?" or "Can I ask the client a question" always came back with things like "That's not your job".
* Proposals to big payoffs for small LOEs that would substantially improve the project always got shot down. Probably because the "from" field of the email was wrong.
* Creativity, innovation, and working on big new problems was incredibly discouraged. The concept that I have more than just one ability appears either cognitively impossible or structurally incompatible.
I got a nice paycheck - the work was relatively stable and secure, and everything was running smoothly --- but I was completely wasting years of my life.
On the contrary, all the small companies I've worked for have been the exact opposite. It's not that I necessary want to do contract negotiations and SOW writeups, but it gives clarity and purpose that I was just unable to get from the larger firms.
I mean again, maybe it's because my resume doesn't say "PhD, Stanford" on it - I don't know.
Has your experience been dramatically different?
The "euthanasia" actually began in September 1939. October was when the law was passed, which was backdated to September 1st.
This isn't just to be pedantic, I'm currently reading The Third Reich trilogy by Richard J. Evans, and this is an instance of the Nazi emphasis on appearing as though they had a legal basis for their actions, even well into the dictatorship. It's one of the most bizarre parts of the story to me.
The euthanasia was attempted to be done in secret, so under what circumstance the backdating (or even the existence) of the law could possibly have been useful is beyond me. Under Nazi victory, those involved were safe from prosecution, and in case of defeat, the law could not have saved them.
It's like something straight out of the movie Brazil, though not being fiction and having resulted in the death and suffering of countless real people makes not possible to enjoy the insanity of the situation.
I highly recommend the books, though I don't exactly have a weak stomach, and many parts were quite difficult for me. It reminded me quite a bit of Robert Fisk's The Great War for Civilisation, which was also extremely long and dense with suffering.
I have been there in that sort of situation where managers twist their eyebrows at an efficient or productivity-enhancing solution. The essence of the java enterprise consulting business is fixing an unnecessary complicated mess with a similar, new buzzword backed mess.
So the interesting thing here is how bureaucracy and efficiency seem like natural enemies; a subject which always reminds Terry Gillian's Brazil movie where the terrorist guy is the one who fixes things.
More likely from the film "Brazil". Where interestingly it is used both by the dystopian government and by Robert de Niro's renegade heating engineer.
Brazil is my favorite movie of all time because it was so prescient. It seemed exaggerated and over the top in its day, but nowadays it seems to me that everything in the film has actually come to pass. Alas.
"As explained in Alsup's opinion, the whole dispute stemmed from an errant check placed on a form filled out by FBI agent Kevin Kelly" This sounds very similar to what happened in the movie Brazil, where an errant fly resulted in the incarceration and death during interrogation of Mr. Archibald Buttle instead of the suspected "terrorist", Archibald Tuttle. Albeit the movie was an highly exaggerated and over-the-top evil bureaucracy, it's a disturbing parallel.
If this were the movie Brazil, I'd have a fresnel lens over my screen to help read that liliputian typeface.
Waaaay back in highschool I read both 1984 and Brave New World (same weekend, even...come Monday I was extremely depressed), and came to a similar conclusion--because really, who wants to fight love?
Given the modern drive for micro-optimizing every bit of one's life (looking at you, /4 Hour.*/) there is a much better dystopic story out there by Harlan Ellison:
http://compositionawebb.pbworks.com/f/%5C%27Repent,+Harlequin!%5C%27+Said+the+Ticktockman+by+Harlan+Ellison.pdf
And perhaps even more appropriately, given the themes of impersonally evil bureaucracy and supposed terrorism, the movie Brazil:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_%281985_film%29
Other movies on the way toward coming to pass: - Brazil? - Wall-E?
> the satirical political TV comedy Yes, Minister
Actually a documentary, as someone pointed out years ago. Great quote.
(Something else depressingly well along the way to being a documentary is Terry Gilliam's 1985 movie Brazil.)
if anyone has not seen Brazil, I recommend watching it. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/
I was re-watching Brazil the other day and this was exactly what came to mind. We are not in 1984. Terry Gilliam's vision is terrific, and captures with precision how someone working for the NSA (even though it's not called like that in the movie) thinking he is working for Good actually discovers the impact of his actions on real people's lives.
It's frightening how close we are to that place.
Not sure this is fair. The government isn't crazy like Deputy Minister Helpmann in Brazil. It really is trying to do its job. Imagine if every American football coach had to announce his play to the other team. What purpose would there be in it? So, there needs to be a system in place that helps keep secrets. But, the question is how should those that expose secrets be dealt with? No one wants to deal with those exposing state secrets because they are doing it to no one in particular, and aren't being seen as actively trying to help terrorists. That is the problem and that is the reason we are comparing things to the movie Brazil here.
Growing up in the U.S., we were all taught the history of our country, which included Benedict Arnold. But very few see a parallel to Benedict Arnold in Snowden. They cannot see how someone whose main claim to fame in the press has been, "They are watching you!" has exposed state secrets. Neither do they think Julian Assange is Benedict Arnold. Julian is just posed as a well-meaning but much misled Australian hacker that probably got framed in a rape case and is on the run, like a modern day Frank Abagnale, but with state secrets instead of fake checks.
The fact is, our governments need respect in order to keep secrets better, but prosecuting and hunting down these people is not the answer, neither are other "control" techniques. They just need better security. If they had better security, I for one would respect the fact that they said, "Oops! I guess I left the playbook in front of the press tent. I guess I should keep it on my person at all times."
Nope. Wikipedia has two entries about a movie named Brazil, one from 1985 and one from 1944. Which one is it :-)?
Wow. Have you seen the movie 'Brazil'?
LoganCale, get them to watch the movie Brazil and then read 1984, and for good measure hit them with a copy of Animal Farm just for the heck of it.
"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
Not really relevant, but I am greatly amused between the current relationship that we have with our security services and the situation that Terry Gilliam portrays in his excellent film: "Brazil".
After all, when the security state starts to be driven by the profit motive, were we really so naive as to expect anything less?
"I'm much more concerned that many of our fellow citizens are already living in the movie Brazil."
I might start sticking to that as a general premise, given the news.
Look for independent plumbers, if approached by Central Services, ask for a 27b/6, however whatever you do, try to avoid Information Retrieval and Gir if he has red eyes.
In the late 90's, the CEO of our startup told us about a raid on his Palo Alto home. His daughter was away at camp for the summer and his wife had mailed her a care package that included laundry detergent. As they later found out, detergent can be used as a masking agent for drugs.
A few days after the package was sent, Law Enforcement (DEA & local police, IIRC) surrounded the house. Luckily, back in the good old days, they didn't break the door down and start shooting, at least not in Palo Alto. They knocked, were let in, and asked the CEO's wife to open the package that the police had intercepted, upon which the laundry detergent was discovered.
The point I want to make about this whole category of problems, that seem to mock the 4th Amendment (NSA surveillance, civil asset forfeiture, militarization of police, etc.) is that we should be far more worried about incompetence than malice. We keep getting warned that these things are a pathway to tyranny but frankly, that may or may not happen. Horrific incompetence that ruins people's lives is with us today, at scale, and the problems grow with the power, money and technology given to those that wield them. We now have no-recourse no-fly lists, police raids on wrong houses that kill homeowners (so often it's no longer newsworthy), and sick elderly parents fighting for their house because their kid sold $20 worth of weed from the front porch (the latter from Sarah Stillman's other excellent New Yorker article).
Back in Palo Alto, it would have taken almost zero competent police work to determine that the care package containing laundry soap, sent to a summer camp from the home of two working professionals was almost certainly not masking drugs. But instead, complete careless incompetence.
We've talked a lot lately about the danger that we are on the road to 1984 or Brave New World. Right now, I'm much more concerned that many of our fellow citizens are already living in the movie Brazil.
That sounds like the fly in the printer at the start of (the movie) Brazil.
Which of course leads to the conviction and torture of an innocent....
Interesting question. Let's say I have a clearly defined threat model. I rate the chances of an existing database being misused as higher than the chances of a screening service which looks for one or two SNPs being secretly misused to collect entire genomes. The number of health workers who'd have to collude to operate the latter would be enormous, and it would leak like a sieve.
We're not dealing with the government from "1984" here, it's more like the one from "Brazil" (the film, not the country!).
I'm willing to overlooked botched spellings of "bureaucracy" because it doesn't take much of a misspelling to get beyond what many spell checkers can handle. More than once, to get the red squiggle to go away I've had to resort to finding an article that used the word and copying from that. (The Wikipedia article on the movie "Brazil" is good for that).
What is this obsession with body counts? To bang again on my favorite drum, many, may more Americans were dying of polio or coal mining accidents in 1941 than German or Japanese bombs. That doesn't mean it was stupid to enter World War II.
Obviously those who have chosen to deliberately kill civilians in spectacular ways are not right now a danger akin to imperial Japan or Nazi Germany. But will it really take a dirty bomb, a successful mass infection/poisoning, or god help us a nuke to stop this silly argument?
It's bizarre to me that one of the anti-anti-terror arguments of choice reflects that hilariously dystopian scene in the film Brazil, wherein the staff and patrons of a restaurant that has just been bombed attempt to paper over the incident by completely ignoring it, as innocent people suffer and die.
At this moment, it seems a lot more like "Brazil" to me.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/
I know it's only movies and TV but these were still interesting to watch on all things data retention and surveillance state and are related to the topic:
The Listening - 2006 (specifically on Echelon) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0427461/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlVK906Xzr8
The Conversation (1974) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conversation http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrhRsZ56b4g
The Lives of Others (2006) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others
Spying on the Home Front (PBS, 2007) http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/homefront/
The Enemy Within (PBS, 2006) http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/enemywithin/
The Wire, Season 1 (HBO, 2002) Brazil (1985) Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)
I agree, though I can't think of a good way to fix it due to ambiguity in film names that aren't explicitly marked with "this is a film name".
With relatively unique names like Star Wars you could match the names as text strings. But that would lead to over-counting films like "Brazil" whose names are also names of other things.
The pilot is responsible for the safety of everyone on board.
The question is, was the behavior of the passengers a credible threat? My guess is that the TSA & the airline (the pilots employer) have told him to put anyone off if there is even a hint of noncompliance.
One of my favorite "hidden" quotes from the movie Brazil may be applicable: "Suspicion Breeds Confidence"
I upvoted you.
I'm sorry you're being dismissed as a Malthusian.
I also believe we humans are in deep trouble.
I volunteered at a treehugger organization for about a decade (the 90s). Trying save the birds and the salmon. These people were scientists working on policy. Like saving critical habitat such as wetlands.
Etc.
Pretty much everything I first learned in the 90s has come true. And the actual numbers are worse than the predicted worse case scenario (eg climate change).
I personally believe we're past the tipping point. Meaning climate change has entered into a positive feedback loop where even if we stopped burning fossil fuels, atmospheric CO2, methane etc will continue to increase. Because of the arboreal forests continue to burn and the tundra continues to thaw and the ocean (the biggest carbon sink) continues to acidify.
To stop this progression or even reverse it, decades from now, humans will have to aggressively retool our industry to remove CO2 from the atmospheric.
Weirdly, I'm strangely optimistic. I think it's possible. I'm not willing to give up hope.
I sometimes wonder if I'm just fooling myself. Things are so bad, I just go to my happy place. Like Sam Lowry in the movie Brazil.
the Division of Standards is claiming that until the National Institute of Standards and Technology has guidelines in place for GPS location technology
Is not as though GPS is some brand new thing that they have never heard of before. This whole tone of this makes me think of Central Services from the movie 'Brazil'. Uber should ask the Division of Standards for a 27b/6, just to keep things official.
(I don't think you should have too high expectations of facts and logic from ucee054, at least re politics. :-) )
Thanks for the link, I didn't know the name of the law. Also, there were some ... cough ... controversial interrogation methods in the 70s, until there was too much human rights criticism.
Anyway, I'm not an expert on the UK and IRA, but believe/assume part of the inspiration for the wonderful T Gilliam movie "Brazil" came from this.
Here(Brazil) everything seems to work like that. You sign 200 pieces of paper each day and if you'd enforce everything you agree to in just one day, the legal system would halt.
Recently I tried to purchase a small stereo, one of those tiny little ones that just play radio and a CD. They demanded that I provide full personal information in order to give me my receipt. I know that demanding personal information in order to print a receit is illegal here. So I question the attendant. She says she can only print it with that data. So before I had a stroke, and after 15 minutes of stupid arguments, I go ahead and do what Stallman did: fill it with BS and negate the "I agree" thing at the end, signed it - bought the stereo.
That movie "Brazil" with the ridiculous 26bStroke6 form is not too far from reality now that I think of it.
Terry Gilliam's film: Brazil spotlights the absurdity of bureaucracy. Is Brazil renowned for theirs?
Now I'm old, and I think if I was forced to bet, "Brazil" is a more likely model (the movie, not the country).
I'm afraid you may be right. But I still hold out some hope that we can do better than that.
I think what's changed is that the discussions during the heyday were around the technology, which at the time was the limiting factor. The technology isn't really the issue anymore (with some specific exceptions).
The problem with crypto-currency isn't the "crypto", it's the "currency". I think that same phenomena is the culprit for most "cyperpunk-related" discussions.
10 years ago I'd have said that I was really hoping for the "Star Trek" future, but that if I was forced to bet, I'd bet on a "BladeRunner" future being way more likely.
Now I'm old, and I think if I was forced to bet, "Brazil" is a more likely model (the movie, not the country).
But I don't want to sound like I'm dismissing the value of a healthy "cypherpunk" community. I think you can look at a lot of things that came out of the original community and see value there.
Talk about timing. I just wrote up a list for a friend that includes a bunch of weird movies (most of them being head trips). My list includes two Cronenberg movies as well! Though, to be honest, I'm not really a fan of either. Heh, I know this is a little off topic but for those that dove this deep into the thread, maybe you would like to expand your weird movie viewing experience.
01. Eraserhead-- This feature film was the debut for Writer/Director David Lynch. The film is noted for its usage of sound as a theatrical device and "the baby" which is rumored to be created from an embalmed cow fetus. The films script is a scant 21 pages despite a running time of 85 minutes (script pages typically match runtimes).
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074486/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eraserhead
02. Dead Leaves-- Produced in 2004, this Japanese animated film clocks in at 55 minutes long. The films (thin) plot is composed almost entirely of a chase/fight scene that begins on earth and ends on a space station. The movie's weirdness climaxes when when the mutant baby of the the film's protagonists is born and proceeds to kill a giant space catepillar which is attempting to eat the earth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Leaves http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0439533/
03. House -- This 1977 Japanese film certainly ranks as one of the weirdest (if not the weirdest) movies of all time. It was unreleased in the U.S. until after a screening at the 2009 New York Asian Film Festival. In an iconic scene, a Japanese girl is consumed by piano monster as a green eyed catch watches.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_(1977_film)
04. Jacob's Ladder- Fans of the game Silent Hill should well be aware of this movie from 1990 that inspired many of its elements. Tim Robbins stars as a vietnam war vet suffering from demonic images increasingly polluting his fragile reality. One paticularly gruesome scene includes Robbins being wheeled through a bloody hospital corrirodor filled with limbs and mutating torsos.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobs_Ladder_(film) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099871/
05. Barton Fink- This Cohen Brothers film stars John Turturro as a novelist. The 1991 film closes with a set of iconic scenes including John Goodman exiting a burning hallway (like a badass).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barton_Fink http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101410/
06. Naked Lunch- The first of two Cronenberg films in this category. This 1991 film adaptation of a William S. Burroughs novel features a protagonist who uses bug spray as a chemical escape from reality. Talking insects and failed "William Tell Routines" are just some of the madness this movie contains.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102511/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_Lunch
07. Videodrome- David Cronenberg wrote and directed this movie staring James Woods. The movie centers around Wood's character, a sleazy TV exec, who inreasingly loses touch with reality after he comes across a station which airs extreme violence and torture. Key scenes include his merger with a TV set and a VHS tape being thrust into his stomach.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086541/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videodrome
08. Donnie Darko (Jake and Maggie Gyllenhall sp?)- Donnie Darko served as philosophical fodder for a whole generation of "Emos". Written and directed by Richard Kelly. The movie stars this brother-sister hollywood team. The movie covers a wealth of ideas including fatalism and time travel. Movie goers will inevitably remember the creepy bunny head that pervades entirety of the film.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0246578/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donnie_Darko
09. Human Centipede- This 2010 dutch horror film quickly became a meme rivaling Two Girls One Cup for gross-out factor. The film features a mad doctor who connects three unfortunate souls in the most unfortunate way possible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_centipede http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1467304/
10. Brazil- The second installment of Terry Gilliam's "Imagination Trilogy". This 1985 film represents the dreams of adults including navigating beurocracy and chasing true love. Robert DeNiro also provides a notable role as a rebel repairman in the film.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(film) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/
11. Black Swan 12. Paprika 13. Being John Malkovich 05. Teeth
All great movies. Some others (with varying degrees of sophistication):
The 13th Floor (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139809/)
A Scanner Darkly (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405296/)
Brazil (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/)
Time Bandits (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081633/)
Dark City (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118929/) - A little disappointing at the end though =/
I think large bureaucratic network will have this effect (like the movie Brazil). Many little dumb cogs, all "doing their job" can result in horrible things happening.
Nice hack, probably inspired by the movie Brazil.
Hooker at 10 pm, roll of carpet and shovel at 2am... who knows maybe you went out for some fun and saw a discount at 24 hour importer store... maybe something else...
Silliness aside its the mistakes which are more scary than big brother actually watching, because theres just to many people to watch... but its real easy to make a mistake.
My favourite take on this scenario is the movie Brazil, the long and short of it is a guy gets pinned for a crime he didn't commit thanks to a bureaucracy error. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/
"I’d recommend the movie Brazil to those of you amused to explore dystopian authoritarian regimes mired in needless paperwork."
...is a good recommendation.
Another is The Mystery of Capital by de Soto
Surely you jest. This IS about the movie Brazil, right?
Wow, I mean, just wow.
Government incompetence should not comfort you.
Go rent the movie Brazil. It's a movie about what would happen in a society with strongly defined elites and suffocating bureaucracy, dominated by a fear of terrorism, practicing torture in secret. The information professional class is relatively privileged, although oppressed at the workplace like everyone else. For fun some can snoop on citizens at will. Yeah I know, it's science fiction, but it could happen some day.
The entire plot is set in motion when a fly falls into a mechanical typewriter and causes the government agents to break into the house of Archibald Buttle (instead of Tuttle).
The picture in that article reminds me of the scene from the movie "Brazil" where Harry Tuttle is swallowed up in paper and disappears. That movie is sadly prescient.
IMDB says "no": http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/
Battle!
Ironic that they're using taxpayer money to do an Orwellian media buy telling taxpayers they know where they live.
Reminds me of the 1985 film "Brazil" by Terry Gilliam. Which, by the way, if you haven't seen yet you should rent it this weekend.
For the three (maybe four) hackers who haven't already seen it, please watch Terry Gilliam's brilliant dark satire Brazil.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/
This can only make the fast food industry even faster and more inhumane. And how do you suppose such a machine is supposed to handle meats and vegetables? Even more processed food here we come. I'm usually not one to be anti-tech, but this is one big step towards the goo-drinkers of Wall-E and the fine dining from the film Brazil.
The movie "Brazil" premiered in 1985, the year before strutting beasts wrote this statute in defiance of common law. Many wilt helplessly at the sound of such braying -- but not Tuttle, who embraces the dangerous life of peaceful production.
Brazil is easily one of the best movies ever.
Thinking about the laws and regulations making it illegal for anyone to fix something on their own, makes me think of the Harry Tuttle character from Brazil.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(film)
"...the real Harry Tuttle (Robert De Niro), a renegade air conditioning specialist who once worked for the government but left due to the amount of paperwork."
I remember him sneaking into homes like a cat burglar in order to fix things without going through the arduous bureaucracy put in place to keep unauthorized repairs from happening. That is close to becoming a reality for anyone who wants to fix their own or their friends' stuff, with the DMCA, etc., standing in their way.
Is the display on a handheld large enough to be useful for programming? Studies show that larger monitors increase programmer productivity. It seems reasonable to conclude that a smaller monitor would decrease it even more significantly.
An iPhone screen (320x480) is similar to what the Mac Plus had (512x342), but it subtends a much smaller angle of your field of view.
Perhaps the appropriate measure is in square "characters". The VT100 is probably the bare minimum -- 80x40 characters, or 3200 characters square. There's no way the iPhone can display that legibly.
Not saying the idea is impossible, but this is definitely a problem to overcome, either through hardware (HUDs in special wearable glasses? Big lenses to enlarge monitor size, like the movie Brazil?) or software (some other method of input?)
Last year, I bought a DVD of Terry Gilliam's 1985 movie Brazil, prompted by amusing memories of its original theater screening.
The satirical dystopia has aged badly - now it looks like a documentary. Halfway through the movie, lacking the stomach for more, I rewound the DVD and put it back in the box.
I live in Phoenix and you're right, some of these cameras are set up to photo every license plate that passes regardless of whether the box detected a traffic violation. It's billed as an Amber Alert mechanism so when authorities identify a suspect they plug in his license plate and every camera sniffs every vehicle. The problem is the organizations involved have been very dodgy about revealing the scope and logging details. So we're left to wonder if in addition to catching bad guys Big Brother is tracking innocent non-suspects. I'm not convinced they are and it's not necessarily bad if they did but given the track record of our government the past 8 years we should probably demand transparency.
Originally we were told all these boxes did was equitably enforce speed and red-light laws efficiently at a great profit over human officers. But now it's turning into "Oh and by the way we'll be photographing the innocent non-violators too." Maybe we need an outside group of hackers to act in an oversight capacity. Or maybe we should just design that license plate switching feature from Knight Rider so if you do speed you're giving someone else a ticket. (Note to Sherriff Joe: I'm just kidding.)
I am reminded of that scene in the movie Brazil when a bug literally falls into a government computer, the suspect's name gets misspelled and an innocent person is punished for what another (innocent) person did. I just hope the two Phoenix based companies working on this camera technology, Redflex and American Traffic Systems, operate on a higher set of principles than GoDaddy headquarters which is just down the street and given its turnover possibly a significant source of traffic company employees.
I loved Brazil, but I still have a soft spot for 12 Monkeys.
I also like the fact that both films feature tiny parts for Simon Jones, the original Arthur Dent.
Brazil! Brazil!!!!!
One of my favorite movies.
And a serious mindfuck.
haha. i can imagine the fights kids would get into trying to get the largest room or move the bear over the middle line (a la the movie brazil).
But Netflix does say that. e.g.:
Twin Peaks: Season 1 (3-Disc Series)
Because you enjoyed: Mulholland Drive Brazil Videodrome
So right away I know that Twin Peaks is pretty freaky.
Reminds me of the movie Brazil. (specifically, De Niro's character)
People going underground to do their jobs (and doing them for free!) seems like a good sign of an overbearing bureaucracy.