What Makes Sammy Run?
on
Review: A.I.
·
· Score: 2
Not spinach, evidently. Say what you like about dodges like "fairy tale" or "symbolic," but the idea that a robot boy could neither eat spinach nor get wet without having some kind of short-circuit is simply stupid.
I've seen a lot of this lately. Filmmakers and artists have this tendency to overrate the big picture and forget that the details are also part of the big picture. When I talk about the can't-eat-spinach scene and otherwise intelligent people snarl, "Don't get so hung up on the details!" I feel like I'm the one talking to robots.
Sure the details matter. The details make a lot of difference, even in a story that's supposed to be a fable. Calling your story a fable does not mean you have the license to cavalierly ignore things when they don't suit you. If you want to make your characters fly and dodge bullets, then you come up with a story that supports those things.
"The Matrix" built nicely up to its allegorial rebirth ending (trying not to give any spoilers here). "A.I." just has senseless stuff like the above dropped in all along the way with no real explanation. The "fairy tale" credentials seemed largely due to it simply quoting "Pinnochio" directly (the "Blue Fairy") -- and for that matter, not quoting it with a great deal of insight or intelligence.
Try this experiment. If the names "Steven Spielberg" or "Stanley Kubrick" didn't appear anywhere in this movie, would it have been anywhere nearly as interesting? I asked friends of mine to try the same experiment with "Episode 1" and they responded by merely getting angry. Most of the reason for the interest in the film is because it consists of a story that was never completeted by one very famous director and has since been completed by another. For that matter, "After the Rain" was pretty mediocre, too.
At best, the movie is a failed experiment. At worst, it lapses into the kind of precious, pretentious sentimentalism that passes for emotions these days.
I wonder what kind of heat dissipation this thing has. I can imagine some enterprising fellow crowding a whole rack with them only to have the ambient heat become suffocating. Or is it simply not a factor?
I'm always a little annoyed when people trot out the "code bloat" firehorse. For one, have you seen the sheer number of things we do with our PCs lately? Don't you think at least a few of those things require a fair amount of low-level code services?
My experiences with C-Paq hardware have been mixed. The current Presario (an Athlon 1.1G model) is a dreamboat, although one thing that drives me slightly nuts is the sloping case that makes it impossible to rest something on top of it. (I wonder if that was the idea.)
The server that we used in-house from Compaq was pretty solid, as was a workstation that I wound up using for a while. Unfortunately, all of the above are also pricey -- but with PCs as with anything else, you do get what you pay for.
As far as shifting to services - I don't think they are considering ditching PCs altogether. They're just finally realizing that there are lots of folks around who can undercut them any day of the week (and who won't yell too loudly about it when they realize that this involves various creative ways of corner-cutting).
The open-source community typically shies away from any really serious, challenging discussion of turning a profit from products like Linux.
Let's face it: people do not run a company [like, oh, RedHat or Caldera] because they are philanthropists. They do it because they want to make money.
So someone comes up with a way to do that, and suddenly people are squirming. I'm not objecting to the licensing per se, but rather to the "Gee... I dunno" reaction.
Either you can make money from Linux or you can't, but enough fence-sitting.
What has been created here seems less like artificial intelligence and more like artificial cleverness. In other words, the system is not really behaving in ways that are greater than the scope of its original design. If Cyc were really beginning to manifest its own intelligence, I suspect it would be asking questions like:
"Why am I so curious?"
Everyone seems to have their own Turing test for AI, and mine would be for when the entity in question tries to create something rather than simply parrot well-organized information. I'll believe Cyc has a mind of its own when it tries to write a poem and no one asked it to.
Since the compositions of different discs by different manufacturers do vary, it might be possible to have the fungus eat only discs that are made of things in certain combinations -- or that only act when certain dyes are present on the disc's surface.
Anyone remember this novel? It concerned a kind of fungus, I think, that ate plastic.
And in a similar vein, Stanislaw Lem's "Memoirs Found In A Bathtub" took place in a world where someone had invented a virus that destroyed paper. (Interestingly, FILM was indeed used as the dominant preservation medium in that book.)
If someone registered theglein.com or something along those lines and then proceeded to use it to a) defame me or b) mislead people, I would have a hard time thinking of a severe enough punishment.
It's akin to when you would pick up a CD that said in huge letters
HARRY BELAFONTE
CALYPSO SONGS
and on closer inspection you saw it really said
HARRY BELAFONTE
completely ignored these terrible
CALYPSO SONGS
(Kudos to MAD Magazine for that particular example.)
Typosquatting has about as much to do with free speech as the quack "American NutriMedical Association" (which gets a LOT of mileage out of being "mistaken" for the AMA) has to do with "freedom of medical choice."
...brought to mind images of crazed Japanese punk kids rushing out into the streets, tearing i-mode phones out of the hands of bewildered salarymen, and then smashing them to bits on the sidewalk to the sound of Melt Banana.
I once discussed something vaguely similar with a somewhat science-illiterate friend, and he expressed horror at the idea.
"Blimps?! On a GAS GIANT?" he gagged. "One spark and the whole damn planet would turn into a supernova! This would make the Hindenburg look like a firecracker! It's dangerous! Mankind's arrogance is going to destroy the universe... blah, blah... "
It took two hours to explaining to tell him why this would not happen (because of a lack of anything for the methane gas to combust WITH, like OXYGEN).
Instructions: Bring star to critical mass over a period of fifty thousand years. When the star begins to expand, add 200 billion billion tons of mass to augment its collapse.
The star should collapse in upon itself within the next ten to twenty thousand years. Test for event horizon by placing a small mid-sequence star nearby and observing the accretion disk.
Slashdot Mirror
Not spinach, evidently. Say what you like about dodges like "fairy tale" or "symbolic," but the idea that a robot boy could neither eat spinach nor get wet without having some kind of short-circuit is simply stupid.
I've seen a lot of this lately. Filmmakers and artists have this tendency to overrate the big picture and forget that the details are also part of the big picture. When I talk about the can't-eat-spinach scene and otherwise intelligent people snarl, "Don't get so hung up on the details!" I feel like I'm the one talking to robots.
Sure the details matter. The details make a lot of difference, even in a story that's supposed to be a fable. Calling your story a fable does not mean you have the license to cavalierly ignore things when they don't suit you. If you want to make your characters fly and dodge bullets, then you come up with a story that supports those things.
"The Matrix" built nicely up to its allegorial rebirth ending (trying not to give any spoilers here). "A.I." just has senseless stuff like the above dropped in all along the way with no real explanation. The "fairy tale" credentials seemed largely due to it simply quoting "Pinnochio" directly (the "Blue Fairy") -- and for that matter, not quoting it with a great deal of insight or intelligence.
Try this experiment. If the names "Steven Spielberg" or "Stanley Kubrick" didn't appear anywhere in this movie, would it have been anywhere nearly as interesting? I asked friends of mine to try the same experiment with "Episode 1" and they responded by merely getting angry. Most of the reason for the interest in the film is because it consists of a story that was never completeted by one very famous director and has since been completed by another. For that matter, "After the Rain" was pretty mediocre, too.
At best, the movie is a failed experiment. At worst, it lapses into the kind of precious, pretentious sentimentalism that passes for emotions these days.
Wait, sorry -- I thought it said the universe was PHAT.
I wonder what kind of heat dissipation this thing has. I can imagine some enterprising fellow crowding a whole rack with them only to have the ambient heat become suffocating. Or is it simply not a factor?
I'm always a little annoyed when people trot out the "code bloat" firehorse. For one, have you seen the sheer number of things we do with our PCs lately? Don't you think at least a few of those things require a fair amount of low-level code services?
My experiences with C-Paq hardware have been mixed. The current Presario (an Athlon 1.1G model) is a dreamboat, although one thing that drives me slightly nuts is the sloping case that makes it impossible to rest something on top of it. (I wonder if that was the idea.)
The server that we used in-house from Compaq was pretty solid, as was a workstation that I wound up using for a while. Unfortunately, all of the above are also pricey -- but with PCs as with anything else, you do get what you pay for.
As far as shifting to services - I don't think they are considering ditching PCs altogether. They're just finally realizing that there are lots of folks around who can undercut them any day of the week (and who won't yell too loudly about it when they realize that this involves various creative ways of corner-cutting).
The open-source community typically shies away from any really serious, challenging discussion of turning a profit from products like Linux.
Let's face it: people do not run a company [like, oh, RedHat or Caldera] because they are philanthropists. They do it because they want to make money.
So someone comes up with a way to do that, and suddenly people are squirming. I'm not objecting to the licensing per se, but rather to the "Gee... I dunno" reaction.
Either you can make money from Linux or you can't, but enough fence-sitting.
What has been created here seems less like artificial intelligence and more like artificial cleverness. In other words, the system is not really behaving in ways that are greater than the scope of its original design. If Cyc were really beginning to manifest its own intelligence, I suspect it would be asking questions like:
"Why am I so curious?"
Everyone seems to have their own Turing test for AI, and mine would be for when the entity in question tries to create something rather than simply parrot well-organized information. I'll believe Cyc has a mind of its own when it tries to write a poem and no one asked it to.
Not the Bore Worms!
It's funnier when Ornella Muti says it, I guess.
...and all I got was this lousy .sig file!
"...or get attacked by a pack of rabid dogs just because you're using an older version of gcc."
Rats. There goes my idea for one HELL of a denial-of-service.
"SIR! The webserver's down and the whole Beowulf cluster has gone belly up!" "What?! How?" "The rubber band broke!"
Since the compositions of different discs by different manufacturers do vary, it might be possible to have the fungus eat only discs that are made of things in certain combinations -- or that only act when certain dyes are present on the disc's surface.
Anyone remember this novel? It concerned a kind of fungus, I think, that ate plastic.
And in a similar vein, Stanislaw Lem's "Memoirs Found In A Bathtub" took place in a world where someone had invented a virus that destroyed paper. (Interestingly, FILM was indeed used as the dominant preservation medium in that book.)
If someone registered theglein.com or something along those lines and then proceeded to use it to a) defame me or b) mislead people, I would have a hard time thinking of a severe enough punishment.
It's akin to when you would pick up a CD that said in huge letters
HARRY BELAFONTE
CALYPSO SONGS
and on closer inspection you saw it really said
HARRY BELAFONTE
completely ignored these terrible
CALYPSO SONGS
(Kudos to MAD Magazine for that particular example.)
Typosquatting has about as much to do with free speech as the quack "American NutriMedical Association" (which gets a LOT of mileage out of being "mistaken" for the AMA) has to do with "freedom of medical choice."
...TTCCGATACGATTAGCC da da doo doo bop bop wobba do-day hubba ma moo ya ya ba BOOEY!
I thought this said "PORNO videos for Linux."
No shortage of those.
...but it certainly appears to be DUMB.
It just borrows really, really expensively.
(BTW, you know how you REALLY fit "42 penguins in a rack"? Cuisinart!)
...when do we get mp3AM?
....just don't ask WHY or HOW I do.
Thanks.
Because PPP is a) already used and b) vaguely obscene-sounding.
(Oh, like P3P isn't also vaguely obscene-sounding?)
...brought to mind images of crazed Japanese punk kids rushing out into the streets, tearing i-mode phones out of the hands of bewildered salarymen, and then smashing them to bits on the sidewalk to the sound of Melt Banana.
Just thinking.
I once discussed something vaguely similar with a somewhat science-illiterate friend, and he expressed horror at the idea.
"Blimps?! On a GAS GIANT?" he gagged. "One spark and the whole damn planet would turn into a supernova! This would make the Hindenburg look like a firecracker! It's dangerous! Mankind's arrogance is going to destroy the universe... blah, blah... "
It took two hours to explaining to tell him why this would not happen (because of a lack of anything for the methane gas to combust WITH, like OXYGEN).
Some people...
Kurt Vonnegut's story "The Big Space Fuck?"
...nuff said.
Ingredients: One supermassive star.
Instructions: Bring star to critical mass over a period of fifty thousand years. When the star begins to expand, add 200 billion billion tons of mass to augment its collapse.
The star should collapse in upon itself within the next ten to twenty thousand years. Test for event horizon by placing a small mid-sequence star nearby and observing the accretion disk.
Serves as many people as you can fit in it.