Hacker Cinema
Hollywood
2002 · Film
Directed by Dinesh Baboo
Hollywood is India's First Robot sci-fi feature film. The plot follows a scientist who creates a humanoid robot named "US 47" to help win over a girl, but the robot eventually falls in love with her and turns against its creator.
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40 comments on Hacker News
> The people who really need the chips, and would be willing to pay a lot more than $X for them, will be competing with people who are only willing to pay $X for them.
If there was an Ozempic shortage tomorrow, it's not the morbidly obese people who "really need" it who would be getting it, it would be the Hollywood A-listers who need to drop 4 pounds for their next movie, or the billionaire who's feeling a little tubby. Price is a good allocation system, but it's important to recognize that it's not a mechanism for attaining some kind of ethically "best" allocation.
I never said Hollywood == Los Angeles.
I meant Hollywood as the collection of all of the film/TV people and industry that are geographically located in that area.
This was never about the city itself. Nor was it in comparison to, or competition with, San Francisco, but I guess projectors are inexpensive on Amazon these days.
Sorry that I touched a nerve there.
Yes. I'm not even sure it's a question anymore. Yes it would be a better world.
Not even because of the first order consequences of the ads, but because since there are ads, we have an entire media ecosystem based on grabbing your attention.
So that TV displays series and movies meant for people with the attention span of a goldfish. This applies to Netflix and Hollywood by the way. All of it. Even music changes for radio, meaning more ads.
Google, Youtube, etc, along with news, along with social networks, depend on ragebait, being the first to spout whatever factoid, true or false, polarization of thought and basically a good chunk of what is very evidently wrong in today's society.
I trust we could support a weather app with donations. For the rest? If I could remove either ads or cancer from this world I would sit a long time thinking about the decision, but gut feeling? Ads. The actual cost of the ad industry is enormous and incalculable, not even mentioning the actual purposes ads serve.
As for the rest, I'm very much a fan of the Bill Hicks standup bit regarding the subject.
There would be so much opportunity in breaking up Apple and Google. And Amazon and Meta.
Just think of all the new startups and money to be made by breaking up big tech.
I think the valuation of a broken-up Google and Apple would exceed the monolithic conglomerates that they have become. So many of their business units and products don't even monetize because they're going for an intangible "platform value" that is only achievable at obscene scale. In this hulking form, they can reach into new markets and charge nothing, killing off all the incumbents, just so that they can grow their empires larger and tighten their grips on your attentions and wallets.
Amazon gives away Hollywood movies for free because it keeps your eyeballs glued to them. And they're also a grocery store, for god's sake.
A big tech breakup would provide much needed oxygen to the ecosystem, lift a bunch of impossible to beat barriers, and result in far more competition and money making.
Imagine a web that isn't dominated by Google or a phone market that isn't controlled by a duopoly. Imagine if we could suddenly launch iPhone and Gmail and YouTube competitors. The energy barriers are too high today because the big players have consolidated every angle of attack.
No wonder Peter Thiel and Vance want it. This would turn the big tech money siphons over to venture capital, entrepreneurs, and engineering ICs again.
We should all be 100% for this.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander. It may or may not be like theft, but either way, if one of us trained an AI on Hollywood movies, you best believe we'd get sued for eleventy billion dollars and lose. It's only fair that we hold corporations to the same standard.
> Someone who accepts the 'risk' of certain death on the mission doesn't seem to me to be the sort of person you want as your companion on a dangerous voyage.
That is EXACTLY the person I want around, because I know they can be relied on even in dangerous situations. You, on the other hand, who thinks that someone who does not fear death would be a bad companion on such a mission, would likely piss himself in face of actual danger.
Someone who's afraid of death on a suicide mission is a danger to the mission and, thus, to myself. When you want to found a colony, you need strong men and smart men, best when each man covers both.
You definitely just want nerds, scientists, doctors and technicians, because they get the shit done.
This isn't a hollywood movie.
The problem is not that there is "glue" to closed-source apps. It's that the essential core of your product, without which your product has no content or meaningful use — is _someone else's closed-source model._
If I market "a totally creative-commons blockbuster Hollywood movie", but my actual product is just a creative-commons-licensed set of driving directions to some nearby movie theater where you can buy tickets to see the same copyrighted movies anyone else is offering, then _the fundamental essence_ of what I'm offering is not, in fact, creative-commons. I sold people on a _movie_ with that license, and then failed to deliver.
That's what you've done here.
To be clear, the fatal flaw is that your marketing is dishonest about what your product currently is, not that your product is something nobody wants. I'd recommend either making your marketing honest, or else making your product live up to what your marketing promises.
_Then_ you do the PR push on HN.
I like that this trend of realizing that our hedonism is causing environmental damage.
Hollywood is a great example of frivolous waste that is producing movies that will never be watched by anyone in 100 years. Not to mention provides little to negative value right now. If there wasnt infinite entertainment, you could argue that hedonism is the correct ethical system and we should invest into entertainment, but there is enough entertainment to last multiple lifetimes.
We can probably expand this to things like coffee, but you could argue that it provides value.
How about firework shows? Veblen goods?
Would love to see low-impact entertainment become a thing.
Hollywood doesn't understand war or war weapons.
Depending on your interpretation of AI, we've been using computers since Dreadnaught class Battleships in WW1, let alone the proximity fused / vacuum tube airburst AA rounds of WW2.
Programming a round to explode exactly when you want it to is basically an AI, easy to use and very effective.
Programmable burst grenade launchers can kill around corners, and is a standard tactic. You'll never see this stuff in a Hollywood movie because it's just brutal killing.
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AIs in Hollywood are smart enough to play a Hollywood Villain, but not smart enough to kill the hero of the film.
It won't matter if Hollywood keeps putting out crap. I find maybe one movie per year worth spending money on.
Maybe San Francisco is just not suitable any more? There's nothing magic about SF's geography that makes it a tech hub. It's not a mining town that needs to be next to coal or minerals, or a ski resort town that needs some mountains and snow. It's based on work that can literally be done anywhere.
Hollywood, after all, was just a dusty desert town that became the hub of the movie business because it was easier to move there and start a new one than dealing with Edison's lawyers back East, so maybe the tech industry needs to get out of SF, start a new hub somewhere else, and leave the city to the NIMBYs.
Many bad things can be said about contemporary society but one of the things I love the most about the 21st century is how we're starting to appreciate cultural things in a global sense. I also want to read more about postcolonial literature, history of all the parts of the world we didn't study in school, and so on. It's starting to get ridiculous how in school we study "history" just about Europe, and "literature" 90% of our language.
About cinema specifically, mainstream Hollywood cinema has become largely repetitive, big franchises, sequels, etc etc, feels culturally sterile to me. It's so refreshing to see that, say, Korean cinema is becoming so popular.
> "And anyone I know who's seriously into movies, meaning they watch stuff far beyond the Follywood mainstream..."
This sounds pretty dreadful - "Follywood" is hardly clever I'm afraid to say. Especially when linking it to an elite snobbery of being "seriously into movies" .
But please hear me out - I don't mean to just rip on you for a turn of phrase. But there are a couple of things you are maybe overlooking that are sort of implied by tying these concepts together as you have.
Hollywood is a truly magnificent human achievement, but sometimes it's hard to see that when bobbing around in the waves of its deluge. Step back a bit and consider that in the past century it has produced a steady stream of narrative masterpieces that are shared by the whole world. That the stagecraft and special effects have given palpable form to impossible dreams, etc.
In less glowy-flowy terms, it is an overwhelming machine designed to produce and transmit pure culture. A major force in what they call "Cultural Imperialism". To a not insignificant degree it turned the tide in the Cold War, for example. You can see the struggle every time there is a news story about China demanding modification, or rejecting Hollywood output. Eventually Hollywood will win that struggle, even if it takes a few generations.
There are many countries with their own film industries, least of which is China, but including India, Japan, Korea, Italy France, and on and on. But none of them have had remotely the success, popularity or power of Hollywood. The place, the machine is an absolute Triumph.
But to get back to your unfortunate turn of phrase... imagining that you or they have some elite status due to watching films out of the mainstream - A major component of the Hollywood machine is using the mainstream films' revenue to subsidize genre films, student films and often picking up truly independent films. These are the elitist films you seem to be referring to, that or the film output of the other countries. This range of films have always been a part of the machine, since the early days a century ago. Much of it is mediocre or clumsy. Sometimes they are shocking or disruptive. Sometimes they are genuinely brilliant or visionary.
But all of this obscure stuff that movie buffs are glorying in, ultimately this is just the output of the training ground for the Hollywood Mainstream. Consider Sam Raimi or Peter Jackson's filmography to see what I mean. Both started out making quirky indy horror films and once graduated began putting out $Billion dollar joints.
People have been calling the death of Silicon Valley or its replacement by other parts of the world since I arrived over 20 years ago.
Silicon Valley will never die. There are too many rich people here, and the culture is too strong.
Did Hollywood die because films were made globally? Nope. It’s even stronger.
Silicon Valley has had its ups and downs but it will always be the center of the universe for innovation. The closest it got to death was the dotcom bust, but all that really did was get rid of all the weak players. And when the next cycle crashes again, it will again drive away a lot of the weak players again. But the core innovators and people who love technology will never leave and that will always attract more talent.
It's a GoA 3 system, so it isn't designed to be safe without a human staff member on every train. There are GoA 4 systems which do not need a human but the DLR isn't one, so while it would seem to operate normally if you just let passengers operate the doors - when anything goes wrong those passengers are in trouble because the system design assumes a trained member of staff is there to fix it and now there isn't.
That triangular key opens a panel by the front left seats of the train, which reveals a complete set of controls for manually driving the train which that member of staff is trained to use. If the GoA 3 system has given up when the train is just out somewhere random then "just get out" while technically possible since there's a walking route along the side at all times - is clearly not ideal even for able-bodied passengers, so in fact the member of staff will drive the train manually to a station unless obviously that's impossible somehow (e.g. terrorists blew up sections of track either side like a Hollywood movie).
Because humans are bad at driving trains, they aren't allowed to move at full speed, they can either let the GoA 3 automation oversee everything (e.g. it won't let them go anywhere it wouldn't be willing to go) at a reduced speed or when that's not useful they can switch off all automation and move at a crawl with no oversight.
Every morning the first train of the day on each route is driven in the first of those two modes, because overnight human maintenance teams sometimes manage to leave tools and equipment on the line and the automation doesn't know not to drive the train into a welding kit left on the track by some idiot who just discovered his wife is leaving him or whatever. So the human staff member's job is to drive the train (with the AI preventing them smashing it into other trains) while looking out the front window for problems.
Yes, let's make this into a movie, imagine all the $$ we can get and normalize the masses to this farce. At this point I wouldn't find it hard to believe it was on the pros column of why we gave up on human rights. We get more Hollywood, yaaaay!
My views on this are unlikely to make anyone happy. They do not make me happy. I am in the very grim Club of Rome, "the 29th Day," group. Very pessimistic. I think the ship probably sailed by about 1950. We staved off Malthus here and there, but to do it indefinitely requires geometric advancements not just in agriculture but in literally every field in the supply chain, such as energy and mining, even physical space.
It's all about tradeoffs. The largest tradeoff is "population as a function of lifestyle." You can support a lot more miserable people in lousy conditions receiving poor medical care than you can one person living well. It's about resources expended per person. Even after you get hyper-efficient, it's still about resources expended per person. There's no escaping that reckoning ... you can delay it with marginal improvements to efficiency here and there, but once you've squeezed those out, it's "how well do you want this person to live?"
While you can briefly support a large populace, you might not be able to sustainably, over generations, carry that population. This is the "carrying capacity." Put bluntly, you can have a lot of goats on an island munching away faster than the vegetation regrows, but their populace will not collapse until the vegetation is gone. And I believe that our carrying capacity for "living like Americans" is far under a billion.
In 1950, our populace was about 2.5 billion, but "living like an American" was a lower bar. Now we're approaching eight billion, quickly, and the USA (as well as much of the first world) has been quite busy exporting lifestyle aspirations via Hollywood or their respective film industries. Even if we could snap our fingers and cause a zero population growth rate, more and more of that populace will have growing aspirations.
My guess is that around 1950, civilization could have adopted some kind of one world government with some very drastic control over reproduction and allocation over resources. By 1990, that control would have been that much more draconian. By 2030, the kind of control required to drop the world to that carrying capacity would be unconscionable by almost any ethical standard other that "have a functioning civilization still in 2150." It's a kind of grim Orwellian dystopia with no chocolate rations to lie about, and no spare capacity for war, one in which a human's viability would be solely decided by their ability to produce calories and resources in excess of what they have already consumed, wherein people would have only cots, sleeping in shifts, rather than a bed of their own. Submarine living. If your only talent is UX design, you had best hope that you can bend it to overhauling the control interface for some kind of harvester, wherein the panel will be staffed by someone who does not know how to read in a now-common hurricane downpour. If you are selected to reproduce, it will be only on the basis of genetic fitness to produce small individuals who probably don't need a lot of calories, in addition to being very healthy -- that almost goes without saying. And there will be no "inner party" having a grand time -- we simply wouldn't be able to sustain it.
In short, we had a pretty good time, but we did it for so long that now we're on lifeboat ethics that are completely at odds with the kind of liberties that we're used to and revolted over in the past. China's one child per couple will look like a pipe dream. Think "the Mona Lisa burned to heat this evening's soup" levels of subsistence after vast swaths of the populace were quietly euthanized. That might be our "soft landing." In the 1950s, we might have avoided gigadeaths. The hard landing looks like your basic Road Warrior cosplay, with some desperate nukes thrown around, a few biological agents escaping, and so forth on top of freshwater scarcity and so on.
At this point, I can only consider myself fortunate to be too old to have to witness it. I haven't reproduced and I have been ringing this particular bell since the day I apprehended our situation, but like most bad news, nobody wants to hear it, and especially if it goes against our basic instincts and philosophies.
If we do not control our populace, Nature will do it for us, and we are aware of Nature's methods. We have been for centuries. We willfully elected not to look at the difficult problem and have done so for generations. Let the good times roll, until we hit the brick wall. Then the Horsemen will ride.
It's not really a matter of privacy record. In general manufacturers don't do it on purpose.
For example, it was discovered that it's possible to extract keys from Intel SGX enclaves using certain speculative execution vulnerabilities. Intel SGX predates Spectre. It isn't a category of vulnerability they knew existed when they were designing it.
Vulnerabilities are regularly discovered in almost everything, iPhones included. Diligent vendors are quick to patch them, but an attacker only needs to wait until the next vulnerability is discovered and then extract the signing keys from a device that hasn't been patched yet.
You also have no way of knowing which keys they are -- if a million devices of a particular model have a known vulnerability then any attacker could extract the keys from any of them, and even blacklisting all of them (which would tend to dissatisfy their innocent owners) still wouldn't save you from an attacker using an unpublished vulnerability against a device you don't even know is vulnerable.
To put this another way, this is basically the same class of technology that Hollywood uses for DRM. Now, how many Hollywood movies can you say have not been pirated by anyone?
That is what we in the US call "community policing" which is how it used to be. The cultural image of a policeman used to be the overweight donut eating totally approachable "dad" type figure, look at pretty much any hollywood movie or show from the 70s or 80s.
And since 9/11 the police have gotten a lot more militaristic. But police departments all over the country are TRYING to return to the idea of community policing. It'll take a while before we get there but that's absolutely where things need to be.
He is far from being the only one to have this feeling. I once intended to even base my business there, but at this point I do not want to have anything to do with this country. This is not lazy thinking, this is exactly the opposite. This is finally catching up with reality and moving beyond hollywood movies and the American dream propaganda.
Well, "our democracies", self-censor all the time at many scales (from government to news to entertainment) in matters that suit us, eg. Saudi Arabia, so there's that.
Hollywood for example doesn't cosy-up to China because they're bullied, but to sell more movie seats there. I'd say the same thing is true for Apple's case.
> Every world power worth the title forces trading partners to treat it like a delicate flower or otherwise lose the opportunity to trade and even though the US is the current largest economy in the world China is on track to surpass it so US companies have almost no choice but to appease the heavy-handed Chinese government.
Yes, but what China does is go one step further by making extremely clear that Western corporations who want to do business with China don't disparage the Chinese government publicly, don't talk about Tibet, don't call Taiwan a free country...
And every company has the choice, it's just that they chose to abide by Chinese rules, that's all.
I mean the bill always comes due, always. For 30+ years the west has depended on China to produce consumer grade products such has high tech, toys, and what not, looking the other way when it comes to human rights, and now people are complaining that a bloody dictatorship behaves like one? When trade agreements were signed, why did no other world power imposed ethical conditions on China? Because building our stuff in a bloody dictatorship to drive down cost is what all the west wanted, that's all.
It's a bit easy to wake up 30+ years later and act all surprised that there are political consequences to this.
Look at Hollywood, the biggest propaganda tool in the world, bending over backward not to offend China because of their cinema market. All these "actors/activists" so vocal about everything, you never hear them talking about China curiously, That's the bill I was talking about earlier. Now they work for China.
Hollywood was a great look into the production of the actual film, as a nice piece after reading Barfly.
Re: "If someone finds a culture oppressive he/she ought to be able to say it so."
One can word it based on the behaviors alone: "I don't like it when people do X and Y" versus "I don't like it when Mormons do X and Y" versus "Mormons are bad because they do X and Y". Why single out Mormons when others may do the same? The first can communicate pretty much the same as #2 and #3 without potentially offending groups. I don't think the first two should be banned, but #3 is stretching it. If I ran a discussion forum, I'd consider banning #3, perhaps first with a warning and a how-to on rewording.
If somebody believed "Hollywood is possessed by Satan", saying so wouldn't do any good. It's not objective and doesn't carry useable information. If you instead focus on specific behaviors, such as having too much violence & sex in movies, then a fruitful discussion can form without demonizing specific groups. If Mother Theresa produces movies with sex & violence, she should be held to the same criticism and standards, which should be based on observable actions/results.
I’m not sure why this author’s posts keep getting voted down. They’re not doing climate change denial, they are pointing out what the real consequences are likely to be.
Yes, lots of people will die especially in places like Bangladesh. Yes this is terrible, especially when it should have been prevented.
No, this isn’t a Hollywood movie where the species is about to disappear.
"They" could move.
But you'd need to convince a lot of "them" to move.
And you'd have to coordinate that move to a single second locale.
The network effects and low-friction of local contacts are real. Distance is time and time is money. All take energy, infrastructure, and capital.
Ironically, the more ephemeral a product, the more concentrated its development, because the one thing you need to work on it is people (including all the support and acilary staff). An earlier example of this was Hollywood. Films can be shot anywhere, and the end product was a few cans of celluloid that could be shipped to theatres.
But it was the actors, and cameramen, and catering staff, and carpenters, and electricians, and equipment support, and musicians, and effects people, and .... that were expensive. And who'd clustered in Los Angeles.
Factors that did lead to spreading out the industry? Language. And occasionally government regulation limiting the import of American film. But France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Russia, Japan, China, India: all developed their own local film industry, of at least some size, in large part because Hollywood couldn't make talking pictures their audiences could understand.
(Also: cultural, location, and other factors, but language was a biggie.)
So the friction of what language are we going to develop in (as in human language) actually lead to a decentralisation of production.
Ironically: better and more efficient technology leads to greater density, not less. Though it's rapidly running up against housing-as-asset as a massive problem.
"Quality of life" is inferior on any axis? Fort Lauderdale is the Yatch Capital of the World, the intercostal are a billionaire playground. Name any activity on the water from recreation, fishing, diving, to bio research...SV isn't on the map.
On the other extreme - absolutely free - I would take Fort Lauderdale Beach and the weather over anything SV has to offer. After all there was a move to totally relocate Hollywood movie industry from CA to South Florida. And parks? What measure does SV outperform? Everglades National Park is probably 4-5x larger than SV and it's in Fort Lauderdale's backyard.
Though South Florida doesn't get the tech press, we also have billion dollar startups. As far as schools, I went to a public high school (top 50 in the US) not even the best rated public school in my area, but my 4 brothers and I all have graduate degrees, fellow alumni include astronauts, countless professional athletes and even a tech founder by the name Jeff Bezos.
I won't touch culture, because it is much to loaded but there is no shortage of meuseums dedicated to arts and sciences. Come to Wynwood during Art Basel and you might leave thinking we have the most progressive city in the world artistically. Finally, I don't want to minimize the diversity of the SV demographics but it again doesn't compete with the diversity and actual cultural influence these various background have in South Florida.
to the degree that you haven't convinced these backwards types of their backwardness, then yes, you have failed to communicate the clearer view you have of the world from your mountaintop. studies of over-intelligent people repeatedly confirm how lonely they can feel in a world where stupid is normal. so what.
you had one job to do (I'm running away with the idea that this is a giant missive about the election results) and you screwed it up. you screwed it up by putting on an elitist face that says "we know whats best for you" when the voice speaking it was not a trusted voice nor a voice that actually DID have the concerns of those being spoken to at heart.
The premise of calling the electorate ignorant racist etc is belied by the 2 terms of Obama. silly presumption. I contend that it was a referendum on elitist pols represented by one of the most unpopular faces in insider quid-pro-quo politics of the last 30 years.
Should have run Sanders, you rich privileged outta-touch bi-coastal self-hating Americans :D
see, you think you have rid yourself of the stench of redneck but your snarky gabby talkshow hosts, your fancy globetrotting cuisine, and your view of the world all belie this by reasserting what really stinks about us Americans:
know-it all, we do it better than anyone else, we have a solution for your backwards ass, heavy-handed, unilateralist, non-listeners who just want to tell people how to live or ideally force them into an uneasy compliance and dependency upon our cultural products. Hollywood makes lame 1 dimensional propaganda films with the same basic plotline ad nauseam, our dot-com industry makes more mobile phone apps to keep people staring at their choice of hand-held status symbol, and we try to shove GMOs and overpriced pharmaceuticals in everyones face via one-sided trade agreements like TPP. We already are Donald Trump, collectively speaking. We ARE the ugly American so stop pretending that our embarrassment begins with G.W. Bush and ends with Trump. The world has been both in fear of our nuclear arsenal, and laughing at our foibles for decades now. Our polite presidents engender as much amusement as our cowboys, because behind the scenes its the same shitball of unilateralist global empire that should benefit our fat-sofa-asses back at home. If you unplug the bubble it's this reality that should sink in to both the coasts AND the midwest. Only then can we confront and tame our inner monster, as so long as we pretend that our coasts and interior have nothing to do with one another, or that our "liberal" coasts are not also involved in the same "team america, world police" activities, that is basically a lie in service to no one. We need to own our ugly rump side. Pretending that our cousins are stupid and backwards while not seeing the oppression we are also part of creating (for example the PC culture of no-platforming, etc. completely goes against the actual principles of the left, of a fair and just society. we have allowed PC culture to hijack the stillborn tiny baby of our nearly non-existent left wing. any leftist movement that forgets labor is elitist and will die or be absorbed as another mask for fascism, which is what our PC culture has become- observe the Hill-bots treatment of Sanders and the creation of "Bernie Bros" as part of their strategy to kill any leftist movement within the DNC, thus handing the victory to Trump as the only populist on the list...)
yeah, if you guys would turn your lens inward that would be great. take a frikkin look in the mirror and then think about how you failed as a communicator.
I am an ugly american. I've started to become ok with it, as the village locals refer to me as "the American" I can joke about it with them in Portuguese...I grew up in the midwest, did 20 years in California and after over a decade of global travel for an odd line of work, find myself on a mountainside in rural Portugal where I realized that the local country folk have more sensible knowledge of how to live sustainably than most of the new-fangled "permaculture" folk who moved here to farm.
In the end, I realize that its our media and self-image that's doing the most damage- we are lying to ourselves about who our country is and what its history is. Shame is not the desired end result, but a recognition of what has happened can allow for healing...
why is there no option to delete an account? (haven't seen any good movies in your database, only hollywood stuff - which I consider crap)
Other comments have good points, but the main thing IMO is that tax receipts are low in the midwest / south is that what they produce (food) is incredibly cheap now days.
The US produces a ridiculous surplus of food with a tiny portion of the population because we're incredibly good at doing it cheaply. High volume and low cost == low prices == low tax revenue. It doesn't mean low real-world value or produced value.
You could "fix" it by trying to balance revenues by playing with tax rates, but all you'll accomplish is making food expensive in CA/NY, shifting dollars around, and making everything more complicated than it is now.
There are plenty of other reasons tax revenue registers in NY/CA; anyone -- from anywhere in the country -- with a retirement account is funneling it through some NY mutual fund, and entertainment is still mostly produced in CA. If NY didn't exist, it would be managed somewhere else; it's not that NY is producing magical value nobody else understands. It's just most convenient.
If Hollywood stopped producing movies... we'd all be a bit more bored temporarily, but it's again going to get bought from somewhere else.
> He was then asked "but what if hollywood disappeared with the change?".
What if they did?
It's the lie of all middle-men that they are necessary to the process. Composers didn't stop writing music when the concept of a noble benefactor died: the business model changed. Architects didn't stop building beautiful buildings because religions couldn't afford giant churches and kings stopped building palaces. Movies will continue to be made if Hollywood dies, and if history is any indicator, the art form will develop more rapidly once it's no longer hampered by outdated business models.
Fair choice. As for me, I don't go out to watch movies at all, because Hollywood.
But then I would guess your aversion against the car industry to be more general, and that the recent revelations about emissions cheating have done little to sway your opinion. You're basically using the actions of a single actor to reinforce your biases against an entire group.
I do hope you are aware enough not to use that same line of reasoning against racial, ethnic or religious groups though.
> What would the world be like if everyone thought like a do-gooder? What if everyone believed that his family was no more important or valuable than anyone else’s?
They would pool up, and solve all the problems in order, and live happy and wealthy ever after. We would have a paradise on Earth, because when everyone cares about everyone else, everyone gets cared about too.
Because seriously, a lot of bad things stem from the fact that majority of people care primarily about their closest circle and treats everyone else as exploitable.
--
I understand the problems of people in this article perfectly. I had a similar depression period and, like probably pretty much everybody, learned to avoid thinking about it too much in order to preserve my own sanity. Still, I think I can relate to those "do-gooders" much better than to normal people.
In fact, I think normal people have their morality backwards - and Hollywood has it sideways. In movies, it's becoming common for a protagonist to explicitly kill (or allow to be killed) even thousands of people to save one relative, or for some silly reasons like revenge, and the audience doesn't even blink.
Family is important, we're pretty much wired to care about them more. But I also think that as humans, we're capable of doing more than just stopping on purely low-level, biological impulses. Exercising empathy and rational thought helps one realize that all the other people are just like you, with dreams and worries and hopes for the future. It makes you care about the whole humanity, not just some arbitrary groups related to your place of birth. After all, we all live together on the same piece of rock in the middle of emptiness. We are family.
And laugh all you want at various "do-gooders", effective altruists and people with dreams of brighter future. But somebody has to do the job of fixing things, building a better world for everyone. It won't spontaneously appear.
Over the last century men in many parts of the world (but not all) have become substantially more restrained in how they convey emotion physically. Watch a hollywood film from the 30's and you'll see men hugging, slapping each other on the back, holding hands, walking arm-in-arm, etc. in a very casual manner. Man hugs still happen in movies, but only in times of extreme emotion. Think back to the last time a co-worker gave you a hug. It was probably quite a while ago!
Some cultures still show a lot of emotion and have a lot of physical contact (e.g. Turks). People in these cultures also tend to stand much closer when talking. Put a Western European or North American in their midst and he'll feel very uncomfortable. Showing strong emotions is also generally more acceptable in these cultures. I may have fist pumped a couple times when my team won the Stanley Cup, but I've seen Turks do cartwheels, flop on the ground in hysterics, get up and start hugging everyone in the room because their soccer team won a quarter-final!
So, what happened? Why, in less than a century, did we become so aloof and restrained? Homophobia may be one possible reason. If two men unconsciously stand too close to each other while looking at the same thing someone (a woman did this to me once) will exclaim "ARE YOU TWO GAY!??". Physical contact, sharing emotions, etc. are things that, in the last century, have become off-limits for heterosexual men, and women enforce this as much as men do despite the fact that the same standard does not apply to women.
The psychological effects of this on men are probably not good. It's something that we should honestly make an effort to reverse, but how do we do so? What are things going to be like in another century if we don't?
You need a bicycle.
Then you can ride the exact same route every day at exactly the same time wearing the same high visibility clothing that you wear every day, decorated 'Christmas tree' style in flashing lights. Just to make things easier for those that might track you, cruise along at 10-20 miles per hour, obeying the Highway Code every inch of the way.
Ah, but what about the mobile phone? You don't need that turned on whilst cycling. In fact, if you are used to babysitting the battery it makes sense to turn it off just for practicality reasons.
Ah, but what about the CCTV? Look at the route options, there is bound to be a park or canal tow path to take and, as well as a nice car-free ride you get to expose yourself to far fewer CCTV operators, although total CCTV absence is unlikely. Even then though, options are pretty good. You might take that 'winter warmer' coat off part way through your route. Or that bright yellow jacket is kind of ubiquitous, 'hard to spot' amongst the hordes of other cyclists with the same jacket. You can also legitimately completely cover your face with mask, sunglasses and helmet.
Even listening for a cyclist is not exactly easy, particularly if you don't let that tell-tell freewheel announce your presence (keep pedalling).
In not one film in the entire history of Hollywood has the bad guy/good guy evaded getting caught due to the simple tactic of riding a bicycle at a leisurely pace. So there just isn't even the group-think out there to suspect the cyclist.
Nobody expects the cyclist!
Sam Altman, of Y Combinator, said that, in the small world of Silicon Valley, the very idea of talent agents presents a “negative-selection problem”: “The actual 10x engineers don’t need or want an agent; people quickly discover they’re great, and they end up picking where (and especially with whom) they want to work. In my limited experience, the engineers that get agents are bad.”
That may be true now, but programming has a huge reputation management component. Negotiation isn't hard to learn, but it's always better to have an advocate than to negotiate for yourself (note: lawyers retain other lawyers) and detecting trends in technologies and finding work that helps a programmer's career is a full-time job in its own right.
By many measures, the star system didn’t work that well for Hollywood: it made moviemaking more expensive, which made studios more risk-averse, which led to inferior creative projects. And programmers are not movie stars—not yet, anyway. “Movie stars have their own brands,” McKinnon, the Okta C.E.O., said. “People will go to see a movie just because it has Tom Cruise in it. But programmers don’t really have that. No one’s going to pay for a product just because James Gosling built it.” (Gosling is one of the inventors of Java.) “Well, geeks like me will. But most people won’t. They pay for a service.”
In Hollywood and software both, value delivered is multiplicative rather than additive. A good actor in the lead role might add 10% to revenue. If it's going to be a $5 million film, that's only $500,000. If it's going to be a $250 million film, that's huge: now we're talking about $25 million. Of course, many of these multiplicative variables are latent and unknown until the thing's actually released.
Because of this, no one knows what "the base" is, or who contributed what, and there's wide room for negotiation.
Its interesting that those sites are flooded with "create" but never "update". Version 0.00001 of "a copy of ebay with facebook integration" (true example from getacoder) will only cost $5K... What is the site for "OMG we need version 0.00002"? Oh we already have those, they are the established $500/hr contracting sites.
There's a Hollywood movie trope rolled out every 2.8433 years where a rich guy goes back to university and tries to buy his way past projects and tests. I always kind of imagine some rich kid in "Web Programing 317 section 7" contracting out his final project. Now that tuition is so expensive, $5K for a final project sounds more or less reasonable for a kid who just wants the credential and not the education/training. There should be some kind of ethical filter where if you're obviously trying to contract for a stereotypical final project around the end of the school year...
> it is somehow a little bit surreal to read a call for "A Return to Traditional American Virtues" written by a Swiss professor who works in Germany.
But it is somehow OK, since he writes it for the European audience who also doesn't live in America.
I guess it would be possible to build a system of perceived American values from abroad. Perhaps with so much information and so much exported American culture (via Hollywood movies for example), it would be possible to get a fairly accurate idea of what American values would be !?
But then again, an expert is an expert if there are enough people calling him that, so as long as there are others who share the same (possibly skewed) interpretation, the author will probably be considered now a local expert on Americanism.
Are you joking or what ? A crack team of scuba divers at 5000 feet below ?
http://www.scubarecords.com/
Really, it surprises me that just knowing the basic facts of the case you would make this suggestion.
5000 feet below sea level has conditions that make working there in a suit comparable to (or worse than) setting up a deep space mission. We're talking about a column of a mile or about 1600 meters of standing water here. A scuba diver would be crushed like a pop can at that depth.
Sending people that deep without protection around them to withstand pressures that are beyond our everyday imagination would be the same as killing them on the spot.
There has never been a human that deep, unless in a device called a 'Bathyscaphe', and even that is quite an undertaking, and definitely not without risk.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathyscaphe_Trieste
'regular' submarines will go to about 4500' and are pretty much useless in this case.
Too many hollywood movies.
FACT: All companies dies eventually one way or another.
FACT: Microsoft is in the company I would like to see die the most.
Overall I wouldnt say that the company is dead yet, but I agree that they are dying. I do agree that the concepts on which they were built have died - this is probably what the author of this article really means. The body is dead but rigor mortis has not yet set in.
Im not sure I would agree with this Web 2.0 business. To me the web is a very vacuous place - all sizzle and no steak. Its mainly a playground for the porn industry and identity thieves, and Microsoft wannabees desperately trying to convince people something great is about to happen there. So far nothing great has.
In many ways the web is like present day hollywood with its boom-vrash flash-bang movies. Full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing. All sight and sound but no plot and nothing for the intellect.
The web is a wild west arizona desert - full of snake oil salesmen - its just the bandwidth is higher.