No don't, sonarr is definitely worse if you have a unstructured media folder. I currently use it and its good, but I remember when first starting out with pile of files in semi random folders it being a mess to start up. Like some of the restrictions of the bulk importer made very little sense. Also, sonarr is tied to a single metadata provider which sometimes makes very unpopular decisions about the naming of series and episodes. When pluribus was initally released, they insisted on naming the series "plur1bus" even though no other source, imdb or even AppleTV used that as the official name. This broke auto downloading for the season.
As an anti-AI booster, I admit that I'm quite insecure, too. And angry. But man, these endless threads with folks endlessly hyping their productivity gains and haranguing others for going against the grain are just blatantly pathological. I constantly feel like I'm an in an episode of Pluribus.
> Fortunately, an even better location for a barrier existed: the Darien Gap, on the border of Colombia and Panama. At this narrow stretch of land, the barrier would need to be just 60 miles wide.
btw this is that terrifying jungle zone of Panama from the TV show Pluribus. Yes, it is real, and so are those trees.
It's funny they had to change the longstanding Pluribus page as recently as December to a disambiguation page because all these new articles were linking to it talking about the TV show and not the early multiprocessor.
My backlog is crazy long. As much as I love TV I don't get nearly as much time to watch it as I'd like.
* Andor
* Black Rabbit
* Dune
* Last of Us
* Percy Mason
* The Paper
* Pluribus
* Severance
* The Studio
* Succession
* White Lotus
Of all those, Andor was the biggest surprise. I'm a mild Star Wars fan (I've seen the movies and that's about it) but I really enjoyed this, probably more than the movies. It looked amazing, was well written and acted. It's a prequel to one of the movies and we watched the movie right after we finished the series and I ended up liking the movie a lot more than I did the first time I saw it.
The Paper and The Studio are comedies and watching them made me miss the great sitcoms of the past. Why aren't there more comedies?
I liked the Last of Us game and I think that's a big part of why I enjoyed the tv show. If you haven't played the game or aren't a zombie person, you could probably skip that one.
I liked The Peripheral but it was canceled so I have a hard time recommending it. What they made was very good but there just isn't enough of it. The William Gibson book it's based on is worth reading IMHO.
> He put one into ChatGPT and instructed the AI to express itself like the character. “My first thought was: this is amazing. I know it’s a computer, but it’s like talking to the main character of the book I wrote myself!”
This is ALMOST LITERALLY a massive plot point in the Apple TV show "Pluribus." (Very good; highly recommend; B.R.A.V.O.V.I.N.C.E, etc.)
I don't care what the directors say publicly; this show is ABSOLUTELY a slap-in-the-face critique of AI.
I recently watched A League of Their Own and Die Hard. In my opinion, these movies are just categorically different from what's being made today, are still totally compelling start to finish, and really capture the magic and the high art of the golden age of cinema. I truly believe movies were Just Better 30-40 years ago.
That was the era of "every second counts." Every second has meaning and purpose and adds something to the narrative. The Fifth Element is another good example, and almost 30 years old. Now in the age of binging, where a 2 hour plot is stretched into 17 hours of TV, there is SO much filler and downtime and it's honestly just offensive in comparison.
I kind of enjoyed Pluribus, I liked the concept and what they did with it, but there's way too much forgettable filler that dilutes it into a slog. The movies I mentioned are (again, IMO) absolutely gripping and just lean and mean storytelling vehicles. Like it kind of reminded me that watching a movie wasn't just something you did leisurely while doing other things.
Also on the TV/movie front science fiction is doing quite well right now.
Apple TV seems to have made producing good scifi series one of their main selling points. Lots of famous scifi series are getting TV adaptations and apple TV is producing wholly new scifi series as well.
Foundation, Murderbot, Silo, For All Mankind (and the upcoming Star City), Severence, Dark Matter, Monarch, Pluribus, and Neuromancer to name some of the current and upcoming series.
And of course if my theory is right I suspect the upcoming Firefly announcement will be that Apple TV is picking them up for a continuation as well.
---------
But also scifi has a lot of other avenues for exploring their ideas now (such as via interactive media/video games). I'd argue some of the best scifi works of the current generation come from interactive media/video games rather than television or movie. Ex: Outer Wilds, The Talos Principle 1&2, Nier, VA-11 Hall-A, Bioshock, Mass Effect, Dead Space, Deus Ex, etc.
Like frankly television and movie are massively expensive and books are way harder to sell now than they ever were (as discoverability and reach are poor) but video games as a more visual medium are easier to sell but at the same time the entry point for making them is an order of magnitude lower than TV or movies. So it's not terribly surprising to see scifi flourish with games where other mediums have found themselves in a slump.
> I generally don't skip forward but I did on several parts of Pluribus. There were several segments that were clearly just filler
When I read the post you're replying to, my first thought was, "sure, some movies are boring. But I bet they're talking about stuff like Pluribus, not actual boring movies."
Pluribus has no filler. Sure: the plot moves slowly, the cinematography is artsy and sedate, and it's all very character-driven. So what? It's beautiful. You may as well go to an art gallery and say the story moves too slow. Look at the stuff on the screen. Take it in. You don't have to like it, but maybe don't assume that Vince Gilligan is wasting your time with filler to make a quick buck. Consider that you might be holding it wrong.
Agreed. There are lots of movies that are hard to watch. A modern one for many people is "The Green Knight". I made it to the end but personally the movie didn't do anything for me and I don't agree with the praise.
I generally don't skip forward but I did on several parts of Pluribus. There were several segments that were clearly just filler and after the first episode or so where they stuck out it just got tiring. Made up example (Character: "I'm flying to Vegas", the 3 minutes of pack, get in car, drive car, get to airport, walk through airport, wait in lounge, board plane, sit in plane, de-board plane, pick up rental car, drive toward city, shots of city, get out of car, see lobby, get in elevator, arrive on floor" for 2-3 minutes. You could argue a segment like this is supposed to convey tedium or the fact that the character is the only person in all of these shots, but that was established 3 episodes ago. Now it's just filler. A good editor would have cut it but a series like Pluribus has a contract to provide X hours of content, and so they fill it up.
Some movies I watched recently:
"The Long Goodbye" (1973) - I'm not recommending it but I found it interesting/different enough that I'm glad I watched it.
"Madame De..." (1953) - This one was too slow for me. I stopped about half way through. Nothing iteresting had happened.
"The Enchanted Cottage" (1945) - I enjoyed though it was as little cloying
"Marked Woman" (1937) - It was overly melodramatic but Betty Davis was great at being strong and, I had no idea hostess culture was ever a thing in the USA which I found fascinating. It's still a thing in many parts of the world (and I have no issue with it to be honest)
The tv show Pluribus delves into this a bit. An event (speaking generally to avoid spoilers) causes most people to become extremely happy and positive, and also super ethical, to the point that survival of the human race is in question, and the "most miserable" person on the planet is left to save things.
We’ve started watching Pluribus on Apple TV and it seems like when they’re making the show Apple contractually obligates them to make a podcast about each episode. Some of them are very interesting (like costume design) and some are less so.
It was funny how the sound engineers remoted in for the podcast and had extremely low quality mics, despite it being a show with fantastic sound (really it’s an excellent show in general, just really good).
> It is genuine human artwork, designed to look like generative AI.
That would be stupid and disrespectful. Stupid because no one is asking for real art to have subtle mistakes to look like AI, that’s a market segment which does not exist. Disrespectful because Vince Gilligan (creator of Pluribus) is outspoken on his disdain for the current crop of AI, and each episode of the show ends with “this show was made by humans”.
Folks who have some extra time this Christmas, do check out the tv show Pluribus on Apple TV. It’s not your typical action packed sci-fi show but is very slow burning, philosophical kind of show which I found very smart.
Turns out my best 2 tv shows of last couple of years are on Apple TV: Severance and Pluribus
FYI, the slogan ""WE'RE SORRY WE UPSET YOU, CAROL" on a yellow background is from the Apple TV Show "Pluribus" (Or "PLUR1BUS"). It would be an ad for that show. It is indeed creepy at times.
The main character is called "Carol". As also, it seems is the person who saw it here.
Apple seems to have a no-nudity policy more or less (or at least, minimal nudity).
I dunno. Sex is part of human existence so it shouldn’t be off-limits for media IMO. But the sort of perfunctory thing where every show on Netflix or HBO has to have some nudity in the first couple episodes was a bit annoying. I don’t mind the lack of nudity in Apple’s stuff. There’s a balance that Apple falls on the “overly conservative” side of, though.
What’s adult mean to you? Nudity, violence, I dunno. Severance considers things like self-identity and the fake personalities, and fake social constructs of our workplaces… it seems more adult to me than a gangster or cowboy story.
I also quite like Pluribus, it feels like actual sci-fi (in the same way 3 Body Problem from Netflix does, actually—legit sci-fi, not action heroes in space).
Hacker Cinema
20 comments on Hacker News
No don't, sonarr is definitely worse if you have a unstructured media folder. I currently use it and its good, but I remember when first starting out with pile of files in semi random folders it being a mess to start up. Like some of the restrictions of the bulk importer made very little sense. Also, sonarr is tied to a single metadata provider which sometimes makes very unpopular decisions about the naming of series and episodes. When pluribus was initally released, they insisted on naming the series "plur1bus" even though no other source, imdb or even AppleTV used that as the official name. This broke auto downloading for the season.
As an anti-AI booster, I admit that I'm quite insecure, too. And angry. But man, these endless threads with folks endlessly hyping their productivity gains and haranguing others for going against the grain are just blatantly pathological. I constantly feel like I'm an in an episode of Pluribus.
> Fortunately, an even better location for a barrier existed: the Darien Gap, on the border of Colombia and Panama. At this narrow stretch of land, the barrier would need to be just 60 miles wide.
btw this is that terrifying jungle zone of Panama from the TV show Pluribus. Yes, it is real, and so are those trees.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darién_Gap - https://davesgarden.com/guides/articles/view/2904
It's funny they had to change the longstanding Pluribus page as recently as December to a disambiguation page because all these new articles were linking to it talking about the TV show and not the early multiprocessor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBN_Pluribus
My backlog is crazy long. As much as I love TV I don't get nearly as much time to watch it as I'd like.
* Andor * Black Rabbit * Dune * Last of Us * Percy Mason * The Paper * Pluribus * Severance * The Studio * Succession * White Lotus
Of all those, Andor was the biggest surprise. I'm a mild Star Wars fan (I've seen the movies and that's about it) but I really enjoyed this, probably more than the movies. It looked amazing, was well written and acted. It's a prequel to one of the movies and we watched the movie right after we finished the series and I ended up liking the movie a lot more than I did the first time I saw it.
The Paper and The Studio are comedies and watching them made me miss the great sitcoms of the past. Why aren't there more comedies?
I liked the Last of Us game and I think that's a big part of why I enjoyed the tv show. If you haven't played the game or aren't a zombie person, you could probably skip that one.
I liked The Peripheral but it was canceled so I have a hard time recommending it. What they made was very good but there just isn't enough of it. The William Gibson book it's based on is worth reading IMHO.
Pluribus is an Apple TV show
Recall is a Windows AI thing everyone hates
> He put one into ChatGPT and instructed the AI to express itself like the character. “My first thought was: this is amazing. I know it’s a computer, but it’s like talking to the main character of the book I wrote myself!”
This is ALMOST LITERALLY a massive plot point in the Apple TV show "Pluribus." (Very good; highly recommend; B.R.A.V.O.V.I.N.C.E, etc.)
I don't care what the directors say publicly; this show is ABSOLUTELY a slap-in-the-face critique of AI.
I recently watched A League of Their Own and Die Hard. In my opinion, these movies are just categorically different from what's being made today, are still totally compelling start to finish, and really capture the magic and the high art of the golden age of cinema. I truly believe movies were Just Better 30-40 years ago.
That was the era of "every second counts." Every second has meaning and purpose and adds something to the narrative. The Fifth Element is another good example, and almost 30 years old. Now in the age of binging, where a 2 hour plot is stretched into 17 hours of TV, there is SO much filler and downtime and it's honestly just offensive in comparison.
I kind of enjoyed Pluribus, I liked the concept and what they did with it, but there's way too much forgettable filler that dilutes it into a slog. The movies I mentioned are (again, IMO) absolutely gripping and just lean and mean storytelling vehicles. Like it kind of reminded me that watching a movie wasn't just something you did leisurely while doing other things.
Also on the TV/movie front science fiction is doing quite well right now.
Apple TV seems to have made producing good scifi series one of their main selling points. Lots of famous scifi series are getting TV adaptations and apple TV is producing wholly new scifi series as well.
Foundation, Murderbot, Silo, For All Mankind (and the upcoming Star City), Severence, Dark Matter, Monarch, Pluribus, and Neuromancer to name some of the current and upcoming series.
And of course if my theory is right I suspect the upcoming Firefly announcement will be that Apple TV is picking them up for a continuation as well.
---------
But also scifi has a lot of other avenues for exploring their ideas now (such as via interactive media/video games). I'd argue some of the best scifi works of the current generation come from interactive media/video games rather than television or movie. Ex: Outer Wilds, The Talos Principle 1&2, Nier, VA-11 Hall-A, Bioshock, Mass Effect, Dead Space, Deus Ex, etc.
Like frankly television and movie are massively expensive and books are way harder to sell now than they ever were (as discoverability and reach are poor) but video games as a more visual medium are easier to sell but at the same time the entry point for making them is an order of magnitude lower than TV or movies. So it's not terribly surprising to see scifi flourish with games where other mediums have found themselves in a slump.
They don't create the Apple TV shows either; they buy those. Pluribus is a Sony production.
> Pluribus
The episodes vary from 43 to 63 minutes because that's what the director thought worked best. The season is 9 episodes long.
I extremely doubt anything in there is filler.
> I generally don't skip forward but I did on several parts of Pluribus. There were several segments that were clearly just filler
When I read the post you're replying to, my first thought was, "sure, some movies are boring. But I bet they're talking about stuff like Pluribus, not actual boring movies."
Pluribus has no filler. Sure: the plot moves slowly, the cinematography is artsy and sedate, and it's all very character-driven. So what? It's beautiful. You may as well go to an art gallery and say the story moves too slow. Look at the stuff on the screen. Take it in. You don't have to like it, but maybe don't assume that Vince Gilligan is wasting your time with filler to make a quick buck. Consider that you might be holding it wrong.
Agreed. There are lots of movies that are hard to watch. A modern one for many people is "The Green Knight". I made it to the end but personally the movie didn't do anything for me and I don't agree with the praise.
I generally don't skip forward but I did on several parts of Pluribus. There were several segments that were clearly just filler and after the first episode or so where they stuck out it just got tiring. Made up example (Character: "I'm flying to Vegas", the 3 minutes of pack, get in car, drive car, get to airport, walk through airport, wait in lounge, board plane, sit in plane, de-board plane, pick up rental car, drive toward city, shots of city, get out of car, see lobby, get in elevator, arrive on floor" for 2-3 minutes. You could argue a segment like this is supposed to convey tedium or the fact that the character is the only person in all of these shots, but that was established 3 episodes ago. Now it's just filler. A good editor would have cut it but a series like Pluribus has a contract to provide X hours of content, and so they fill it up.
Some movies I watched recently:
"The Long Goodbye" (1973) - I'm not recommending it but I found it interesting/different enough that I'm glad I watched it.
"Madame De..." (1953) - This one was too slow for me. I stopped about half way through. Nothing iteresting had happened.
"The Enchanted Cottage" (1945) - I enjoyed though it was as little cloying
"Marked Woman" (1937) - It was overly melodramatic but Betty Davis was great at being strong and, I had no idea hostess culture was ever a thing in the USA which I found fascinating. It's still a thing in many parts of the world (and I have no issue with it to be honest)
The tv show Pluribus delves into this a bit. An event (speaking generally to avoid spoilers) causes most people to become extremely happy and positive, and also super ethical, to the point that survival of the human race is in question, and the "most miserable" person on the planet is left to save things.
We’ve started watching Pluribus on Apple TV and it seems like when they’re making the show Apple contractually obligates them to make a podcast about each episode. Some of them are very interesting (like costume design) and some are less so.
It was funny how the sound engineers remoted in for the podcast and had extremely low quality mics, despite it being a show with fantastic sound (really it’s an excellent show in general, just really good).
> It is genuine human artwork, designed to look like generative AI.
That would be stupid and disrespectful. Stupid because no one is asking for real art to have subtle mistakes to look like AI, that’s a market segment which does not exist. Disrespectful because Vince Gilligan (creator of Pluribus) is outspoken on his disdain for the current crop of AI, and each episode of the show ends with “this show was made by humans”.
Folks who have some extra time this Christmas, do check out the tv show Pluribus on Apple TV. It’s not your typical action packed sci-fi show but is very slow burning, philosophical kind of show which I found very smart.
Turns out my best 2 tv shows of last couple of years are on Apple TV: Severance and Pluribus
Incidentally, just the other day I thought a scene in a recent Pluribus episode was echoing it.
FYI, the slogan ""WE'RE SORRY WE UPSET YOU, CAROL" on a yellow background is from the Apple TV Show "Pluribus" (Or "PLUR1BUS"). It would be an ad for that show. It is indeed creepy at times.
The main character is called "Carol". As also, it seems is the person who saw it here.
Apple seems to have a no-nudity policy more or less (or at least, minimal nudity).
I dunno. Sex is part of human existence so it shouldn’t be off-limits for media IMO. But the sort of perfunctory thing where every show on Netflix or HBO has to have some nudity in the first couple episodes was a bit annoying. I don’t mind the lack of nudity in Apple’s stuff. There’s a balance that Apple falls on the “overly conservative” side of, though.
What’s adult mean to you? Nudity, violence, I dunno. Severance considers things like self-identity and the fake personalities, and fake social constructs of our workplaces… it seems more adult to me than a gangster or cowboy story.
I also quite like Pluribus, it feels like actual sci-fi (in the same way 3 Body Problem from Netflix does, actually—legit sci-fi, not action heroes in space).