One of the joys of having Moviepass in that brief period where it was very cheap but still worked was going to random late-night showings of stuff I'd have never otherwise seen, sometimes being the only person there.
Of course you can still do that with the surviving "all you can eat" plans, but they're way more expensive and aren't quite as generous.
MoviePass was one of the most absurd ideas for a company ever. I don't know what they were thinking.
Unlimited movies and they ate the entire cost? They didn't arrange any special deals or anything - they just paid the full price of the movie. It was insane.
The idea was they'd bootstrap it by giving you a credit card that could buy one ticket (which is all it was, a weird debit/credit card with a $15-20 authorization limit and a limited number of merchants accepted) - and then get the theaters onboard so that the theaters would be paying for it.
So (in theory) it's a "win win" if they get everyone onboard - the theater gets to sell popcorn, the movie studio gets a buck or two instead of nothing, and movie pass collects the subscription.
However, it needs them all to agree that the $15 ticket for "the empty theater" is really only worth $1 - which would go to the movie studio. That part never happened.
AMC was one of the theater chains that did figure it out, but was also smart enough to realize that they didn't need the middle man and had a large enough chain to leverage. AMC A-List still exists. (Up to 4 movies per week at $23-35/month.)
Yeah, "MoviePass" was its own SV startup that tried to be the generic version of this pass and apply to "all" theaters. It burnt through a bunch of VC funds just to fail and it shouldn't have been a huge surprise that big chains like AMC decided to do their own similar passes on their own without a middleman.
I'd say it is indeed a huge surprise that a struggling company refused to do business with another entity which was trying to purchase tens of millions of dollars of its product.
AMC is the dumbest company (or more specifically, its CEO Adam Aron is the dumbest executive). MoviePass came in out of nowhere and became the largest purchaser of movie tickets... millions every week. And AMC actively fought against them, refused to even let them buy tickets at full price, and led the charge to drive them out of business. For what alternative? Mostly, nothing but empty seats.
AMC's stock price is $1.59 as I write this vs $50-70 while MoviePass was peaking around 2018. AMC had to do a 10-to-1 reverse stock split to avoid being delisted, they may need to do another one. They even got a brief "meme stock" spike over $250 and managed to do absolutely nothing productive (except pay the CEO more) with this new capital access.
There were also people abusing it to simply earn loyalty rewards at the theaters, e.g. people that lived close enough to theaters just going there, buying tickets, and not even seeing the movie just to pile up rewards points for free food/drink when they did actually go to see movies.
Actually, there was the kernel of a sound business idea.
The plan was that as you went to movies, you probably also went out to eat at a nearby restaurant, maybe stopped and had a drink, took transit to get there, etc. If they could hoover up all of that location- and merchant-tagged data, they could build a valuable profile for marketing.
Also, they believed that after you subscribed and gorged yourself on tons of movies for a couple months, the novelty would wear off and you'd revert to a more typical couple movies a month.
So if they could break even or make a small profit on the subscription, the data is where all the gold would be.
The problem was that they did not have the technology to gather all this info, not to mention the privacy/regulatory restrictions around essentially tracking your every movement and spend through a phone app.
There were a lot of other sketchy things about the company as well. Wall Street Millennial (a wonderfully entertaining channel) did a video on them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4vmCKIXOyw
See the site for TFA... most screenings are at least half empty at most theaters and have been for decades. You have 18 screens showing 7-10 movies throughout the day, but most days people are working, or at school... most evenings are mostly empty too.
Not only that, but the bulk of the ticket charge goes to the distributer. Why NOT offer MoviePass screenings with the option to see a couple movies a week... it's the concessions that make you the money.. more butts in seats, more concessions.
Of course, many now have pretty acceptable home theater experiences... though I'd say more have large screens and sub-par audio. That changes the dynamics a lot with streaming options what they are. I don't know what the future of movie theaters is... luxury/dinner theaters are a pretty nice option, but when food costs in general are going through the roof it becomes something you just don't do as much. I mean, how much is a large popcorn and two drinks at this point? Let alone a mid-level pub meal at theater upcharge.
I am mostly only familiar with the AMC version of this (A-List) which I had pre-covid, but since there haven't been multiple movies I'd want to see most months at all.
I thought this was the case, but then I went to a full movie theater and really enjoyed being a part of an audience that was all experiencing the same thing. You could feel the emotion and that is a different sense than having the theater all to you to, but potentially just as rewarding.
I think this varies with the type of film. If it's a film with real fans and excitement is thick, a packed theater is amazing. OTOH, films where the audience isn't engaged, or dare I say invested, having a crowd can often just be annoying because of the chatter or people moving around.
I saw the first Star Wars movie on the day it opened in Boston, in an enormous, packed theater. I will never forget the roar that went up when Han Solo came out of the sun to save Luke.
I went to a pretty packed showing of Spiderman No Way Home... the reaction to Matt Murdock catching the brick was pretty awesome. It's definitely a better experience watching movies with fans of the movies themselves.
That said, it's also nice sometimes catching a mostly empty 2pm showing of something and getting the perfect seat without distractions... Especially considering if I turn up the volume to get the appropriate experience at home I get yelled at.
Hah, yeah, my local AMC is a ghost town as people moved to newer and/or better maintained theaters. (Not entirely AMC's fault, they bought a decades old theater that was sort of on its last legs after four other companies controlled it in as many decades.) Most of the screenings I attend are empty or nearly so. I almost need an app to find the full AMC screenings. (I know it is at least as much a factor of which nights of the week I attend. I could attend busier nights. But even then this theater's busiest nights now are not what they were way back when I was in school.) I do sometimes miss seeing something with a large audience.
There was a Harkin's location a few blocks from me kind of like that... it was old, but still really busy... the only difference is the land became so valuable they wound up selling anyways. The next nearest Harkins and AMC have much worse parking, even if newer/larger theaters, because they're sharing in strip-malls.
Yeah, the dynamics and shifts in trends of where the newer theaters get built and which theaters become the busiest theaters is fascinating to me, and especially how much nostalgia influences which theater I want to spend the most time at.
I lost my favorite theater in the early 2020s and then its sibling, and last locally-owned and operated theater, to a landlord screwing with rents to try to attract an inner-city Publix. (A deal which still may not actually happen.)
That leaves the AMC as the last regularly attended theater of my high school and college days still standing.
A newer, more popular Cinemark is in the city's biggest mall. I still remember when mall theaters were the worst/cheapest/smallest places. This has flipped now that most of what's left of the malls are the new theater/Dave & Busters at the one mall or the Top Golf/Puttshack at the other mall with the rest of the malls seeming now just weird appendixes to the new attractions. Meanwhile, I don't want to deal with Mall Traffic, which is still a thing in these flipped malls, I don't entirely know why.
Most of the rest of the most popular theaters all wound up in the Exurbs, two beltways away from the city's downtown, presumably due to cheaper land, and I don't want to commute that far to regularly watch movies.
Haven't even considered the theater from when I was a kid... I was in a smaller town, and until I was about 13yo, there was a single theater with two screens. I remember waiting about 3 hours in line across two showings to see Return of The Jedi opening weekend. Aside, I also remember when you could get the movie, a small popcorn and a small drink for $5, and not being able to convince my dad to fork over the extra when the theater raised its prices... that's when my friends and I would stop at Walgreens on the way and buy candy there instead of at the theater.
Yeah, mall theaters are just kind of hellish... mostly because of the parking/organization... I know why they're laid out how they are, just really wish they'd switch it up to make the theater easier to access if that's all you want.
The new mall one is facing the parking lot like a classic "anchor" department store and doesn't even have a door connecting to the mall, you have to leave the theater to visit the mall. It leaves for me a lot of questions about what the point of having built it attached to the mall was. (Same thing with the Top Golf at the other mall. At least the Putt Shack has a window wall inside that mall. I don't remember if it has a door, though.)
It's usually quite possible. Movie theaters make their money on food and drink, so arranging an extra screening for the cost of 50% of the seats in a given room is nicely profitable.
Depending on the theater's manager, they'll either want someone to guarantee a minimum or to have a single fee paid up front.
There's nothing quite like knowing that everyone in the theater is a friend.
Opening night most if not all of the ticket price goes to the studio anyway, but it's the ticket price not the per-showing price - so if they have a theater empty anyway (and I've not seen a blockbuster fill all theaters at a given multiplex for decades, and even then it was only small 4plex) they might as well make you a deal.
The split on ticket price between studio and theater operators is usually around 50% for the opening period. The window scales towards the theater's benefit over time, usually going to about 75% in favor of the operator.
That said, you're 100% right about making an offer. Most theaters have underutilized screening rooms, and managers have the ability to rent for private events. I've done this a few times. The rental rate tends to be about 10-15x the price of a single ticket (in my experience).
I think whether or not it's worth it really depends on the kind and quality of movie.
When I went to see Project Hail Mary, I enjoyed the full theater, when I went to watch the new Jurassic World movie in an empty theater I was bored out of my mind, on the other hand I've seen many anime movies in empty theaters where I absolutely loved having a quiet theater entirely to myself.
I was going to the 10am or 11am screenings for years to avoid crowds and drunks who'd talk or otherwise distract from the show. I have a 4k projector so the only movies since the pan have been the Spiderverse sequel on IMAX, the Avatar sequel (regular screening), and Everything Everywhere All At Once in a small theatre with sofas and pizza and beer.
Either it's big enough to warrant a massive video and sound system (because I have pretty great ones at home already, so it has to be extravagant), or it has to be something I've heard about and want to see so much that we don't really care about the best, we just want to go. Otherwise, why mess around with high prices and rude people?
I hate to say it, but I think most theaters are gonna die.
I saw IT Chapter II in a completely empty theater, late at night. It was delightfully creepy. However, if I had been an employee there, I think I would have do do something with a red helium balloon to anyone watching that movie alone.
On the one hand Its fun to watch movies alone on a big screen. My area of NJ apparently could care less about movies like Knock Down The House(Biography of AOC and other house candidates), Navalny (Movie about the murdered politician opposing Putin), The Imitation Machine: Movie about Alan Turing or Last Night in Soho (A wonderful Edgar Wright thriller)
On the other hand, I feel sad that no one in my region seems to care enough about these topics. Instead the latest superhero movie is next door packed to the brim and is so loud it rattles the walls to the room playing my quiet documentary with only me sitting inside watching it. :/
This is a bit off topic, but I occasionally used to sleep on the sofa in our first floor office in an old Georgian building in Fitzrovia. One occasion when I did that, I woke up at about 3.30 am with intense red light flooding through all the rear windows and the sound of loads of people chattering in the street out front, which seemed as busy as it normally would be in the daytime. I rushed to the front windows and looked down onto a street full of people, but all in 60s get up. I was still half asleep and panicked by the red light and it was totally disorientating to see a busy street of retro Londoners. I actually felt briefly nauseous but I went to the back windows and shaded my eyes, from the crazy glare from two arrays of red spotlights, which it turned out Edgar Wright was using to bounce light off our building, onto the cobbles below ...and began to understand what was going on. Was a relief to get a full explanation, for what had briefly felt like a weird time leap, when I went downstairs and chatted to the extras hanging around out front. The few seconds of woozy, confusion I spent in 1960s london seemed particularly appropriate when I saw Last Night in Soho a year or so later.
That is such a wonderful story! Thank you for sharing!
I was able to experience the movie in a very special way. In New York BAM Rose Cinemas was running a special 35mm press of the film one week before its official debut. Edgar Wright did a red eye run debuting the film in London and then getting on a plane to rush to New York where he arrived just in time for the credits. Having him walk down the steps and sitting right in front of me for Q&A was a amazing experience. Its really a shame the movie flopped even with the extra slack it was given due to debuting during COVID. His most recent film did pretty bad as well. I'm bummed as he is my favorite director. :/
I have seen too many video projects that were supposed to be non fictional either have fictional material or a misleading slant such that I would not consider it a good use of my time.
Yeah, kind of defeats the purpose when you have to spend hours double-checking if every "fact" you just got "taught" was actually true or not afterwards...
There has to be some latitude given here. They can’t possibly, for instance, know exactly what was said or who interacted with who and when with any reasonable certainty. It’s usually “John met with Ted and I think Sally too, he told them to fuck off because it was a bad idea.” Now make that a scene and stay accurate.
Rarely are these things documented in the moment and human memory is fickle even when we think we recall something accurately. It may seem like I’m taking y’all too literally or being nitpicky but I’m just illustrating one component. These kinds of situations happen across every “fact” of the story, which is almost always a movie based on a written account that came after, often written by someone who wasn’t even involved in the subject matter. Degrees of separation, lack of information, some or all people involved may be dead, etc.
Which is why it should be assumed to all be fiction. Video presents the problem that you are receiving lots of extra data which are fictional, and pretending that you are getting a sufficiently accurate representation when you have no idea how much of the representation is accurate is a detriment.
Take it as entertainment, and nothing more. For example, Remember the Titans, we were shown it in school over and over. There was no racial component in real life. The Blind Side is egregious in its portrayals. Pursuit of Happyness also.
It's inherent to video that you "have to make up data" - if I tell you the barebones of something that happened in real life (we went to a doctor's appointment but discovered it had been scheduled earlier than we thought) - you may supply details that aren't "true" because you have to supply something to flesh it out - but you know you're supplying them!
If instead we make a video that conveys the same information; it has to "make up" details (we have to cast the actors, which will be of a certain age, sex, race, etc; we have to give them lines, etc; and so on) that may colour the implications - and you, as a viewer, have no easy way to determine what is essential and what is accidental.
I’m a little confused, I think pretty much all audiences know there is a degree of fiction to any of these works and that you have to take various work with different sized grains of salt.
Are you saying that no movies should be allowed to claim they are trying to tell a true story, and that documentaries aren’t neutral/accurate enough and are therefore invalid? I’m just trying to figure out the scope of your claim and implications here so I get that could be off base.
Might be simpler to ask: What would you consider a good documentary? What would you consider a movie that is based on a true story and does an accurate-enough job? What do consider or use as a metric when deciding these works are good or accurate?
>Are you saying that no movies should be allowed to claim they are trying to tell a true story,
No. Freedom of speech and all that, unless it was a libel/slander thing.
>and that documentaries aren’t neutral/accurate enough and are therefore invalid?
Sufficient documentaries have been sufficiently inaccurate such that it behooves me to consider them all fictional.
>What would you consider a good documentary? What would you consider a movie that is based on a true story and does an accurate-enough job? What do consider or use as a metric when deciding these works are good or accurate?
I don't know off the top of my head, I would have to do research. But that's the point, if I am doing research, I might as well read books/journals/websites/articles with source information.
>I think pretty much all audiences know there is a degree of fiction to any of these works and that you have to take various work with different sized grains of salt.
I don't know about that. For example, Carol Haskins received a large amount of hate and death threats from the way Tiger King was edited. And people like to "know" things, anything that confirms their biases or makes them feel like they are smarter, they are going to latch onto.
I think the rule of thumb should be videos should be assumed to be fictional unless rigorously vetted, or at least that is what serves my purpose for having the most accurate model of the events. The objective is not to educate the viewer, it is to entertain the viewer.
You can’t name a single movie that meets your requirements? Not even one documentary that felt more or less “accurate”?
I guess I’ll ask this then: what would a documentary have to do to be considered accurate enough for you that it can be used to educate? I just don’t really know where the lines are for you it all feels rather vague. If we’re demanding objectivity and accuracy, then there needs to be some clear metric(s) otherwise no one can say they are or aren’t.
I guess what I mean is if education is the goal, then a written medium is far better than a video. Real life has too much nuance to be able to accurately re-create, plus the more expensive the production, the more it needs to earn a return incentivizing the entertainment aspect over the education aspect.
Obviously written works do not present more information, but they can provide only the known information (which I guess a documentary composed of the actual recordings and interviews of the events can provide). And obviously written stuff can also be fabricated and blah blah, but assuming all of that, I just presume the fidelity of a video re-creation of an event is less than that of a written one.
One example I just thought of that led me to this assumption of discounting all videos is the way Captain Phillips is portrayed. The recent movie Blackberry is also highly fictional.
I know these aren't documentaries per se, but they all require digging to get to the truth v fiction parts, so why bother digging? If I want to be entertained, I watch the video. If I want to be educated, I look up written sources I think might be credible.
I don’t know how one can assume that the written word is somehow more reliable or accurate than a video. What difference does it make if you interview me and show me talking on camera vs. using the stuff you wrote down as text? One could even argue that it’s inferior in that regard, because you remove all tone and body language as well as put someone between me and the person presenting the information. And as you said you are just capable of editing and text as you are with video, so it doesn’t protect you from that sort of manipulation either.
I still don’t understand what the bar is or what you consider necessary for something to be deemed “accurate.” Writing as a medium has all of the same pitfalls that video does and then some. This feels very vibes-based.
What’s an example of a written text that you would say is accurate in a way that a documentary can’t be? Do you consider any media of any kind to be factual or accurate in any way? I’m just not sure how one can go about life considering all forms of media inherently deceptive to the point where nothing can be treated as anything more than mere entertainment.
>What difference does it make if you interview me and show me talking on camera vs. using the stuff you wrote down as text? One could even argue that it’s inferior in that regard, because you remove all tone and body language as well as put someone between me and the person presenting the information.
It isn't, which is why I specified:
>(which I guess a documentary composed of the actual recordings and interviews of the events can provide)
>I still don’t understand what the bar is or what you consider necessary for something to be deemed “accurate.”
The bar is lack of dramatization. I gave multitudes of examples of videos based on various real life happenings, but they don't do a good job representing actual happenings. The "based on" is strictly a marketing term, but no one should be under the impression they are getting any actual data from watching it, hence it is entertainment.
A documentary with various interviews, actual footage, blah blah is of course better, but many documentaries include dramatizations, and are edited to have "twists and turns" in the story to captivate the viewer. A documentary that sticks only to the known facts is probably pretty dry and boring (although I am sure they exist). There are myriad "true" crime documentaries (including podcasts) that leave out key details about the case because including them would make the story boring.
However, I am sure there are far more accurate documentaries, and I have heard this is one of them:
But back to the point, broadly speaking, probability wise, if I sit down and some video media says it is "based on" or it is a "documentary", I would be wise to be skeptical, and I guess that goes for the written word these days too.
> A documentary that sticks only to the known facts is probably pretty dry and boring (although I am sure they exist)
My point is that they don’t and can’t, objectivity is a myth. You and I (and everyone) are literally incapable of being truly objective. So the only conclusion i see is you don’t think any media is able to inform or educate. If you do, then you need an actual bar beyond “must be objective.”
“Dramatization” is just one tool some documentaries, not all, lean on and isn’t well defined. Are you talking about dramatic reenactments? Or introducing any drama of any kind? Isn’t drama sometimes just inherent to the subject?
I can understand this for Nvalny given I think CNN help with the production...but Knock Down the House was an indie producer and just happened to choose AOC as one of four candidates she was covering. When it was filmed I don't think the producer would anticipate her explosive popularity after the election so its hard to concede that it was a puff piece. The premise of the film was the massive wave of females deciding to run for office in 2018 after Trump's win in 2016. There was the collective awakening that despite females making up 50% of the population they in no way had anywhere near the representation that they should have. Due to AOC's popularity the film took on a new meaning as a historical record of her campaign.
If you apply your logic to all political documentaries then you're just going to end up not watching anything.
That I've seen, the problem is worse than that. A movie merely says it's "based on a true story". If you're a lawyer or literature professor, that "based on" might be correct usage - since 40-ish percent of what the movie told was true. The other 60-ish percent was utter fiction.
Meanwhile, people who saw the movie and found it decently engaging are busy convincing themselves that it was 99% true. And 99% of 'em will never bother to check.
I coulda added another "That I've seen" disclaimer to my second para. My dataset is just friends & family who I've seen "based on a true story" movies with, where I happened to know the history.
The term to describe my "99%" isn't "dumb". It's "don't care".
It's all variations of Gell-Mann Amnesia. Any portrayal is a betrayal.
Of course, if I'm going to talk about something I know deeply, I'm almost certainly going to begin with "this is all incorrect in the details, but correct in general" or similar.
For those sufficiently pedantic, true. OTOH, there's a rather wide spectrum in how well (say) Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, Ken Burns's The Civil War, and McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom portray the U.S. Civil War.
A few years ago we decided to go see the movie Thanksgiving for my friend's birthday. We were the only ones in the theater (about 8 of us). It was such a blast. We occasionally talk about renting out a theater so we can have the same experience again.
Agree on your last point and it's going to be a very bitter lesson. In any case, you probably wanna shift alot of the code verification as left as possible so doing review at PR time isnt the right strat imo. And claude/codex are well positioned to do the local review.
Agree on the shift left concept, but curious on your thoughts about a checker-maker loop. Running a PR review bot is different from running /review on local dev right? And also there has been instance of Claude already patching the test scripts instead of fixing the bugs to make the tests pass.
This benchmark measures whether tests are relevant, coherent, and have good coverage. But there's a more subtle type of error: AI creates tests that look specific to PR but are actually generic patterns mapped from the training data—correct test structure, reasonable assertions, but not actually interacting with what this specific piece of code does.
How do you differentiate between ""understood the code and generated a targeted test" and "recognized this looks like an auth flow and produced a standard auth test template"? The latter might still pass your coherence/relevance metrics while missing the actual exception.
I've been confused by this with many LLM products in general. Sometimes infrastructure is part of it so there's that, but often it seems like the product is a magic incantation of markdown files.
Here I'm mostly considering the seemingly countless services that are little more than some markdown files and their own API passing data to/from the LLM procider's API.
By no means is that every AI product today, and I wasn't saying the OP QA service falls into that bucket though.
More of a general comment related to the GP, maybe too off topic here though?
Thanks for the feedback!
- Agreed that the form factor can be condensed with a link to detailed information
- With the codebase understanding, backend is where we are looking to expand and provide value
- The intelligence of the models does lay out the foundation but combining the strength of these models unlocks a system of specialized agents that each reason about the codebase differently to catch the unknown unknowns
They are playing a bit fast and loose with the word "banned".
> Your smartphone contains materials processed through semiconductor fabrication, chemical etching, metal anodizing, glass tempering, and electroplating — none of which you could start a new facility for in California without years of litigation.
I agree that we should make it easier to do things, specifically by decreasing the amount of litigation involved in doing stuff. But the risk of a bunch of litigation isn't a ban, right? I get that it's trying to be attention-grabbing, but calling it a ban when it's not just sort of confuses the issue.
Being unable to start a project without doing 5 years of legal wrangling once you put shovel to earth may not be a "ban", but it sure doesn't encourage development.
There are other states without the regulations that these businesses apparently find offensive. Why can't the manufacturing be spun up in those states?
> But the risk of a bunch of litigation isn't a ban, right?
Funny enough, I've known some people over the years who have explicitly viewed litigation as a reasonable alternative to regulation. Their logic was that we should just let people and companies do whatever they want. Then, if it turns out a company is dumping mercury in the river or whatever, you litigate based on the damages. Better than regulation, they assured me.
Agreed, words matter.
There are a lot of smart people out there, and the writer of this site makes me skeptical when he/she exaggerates, omits or spins info. Tell us all the facts at least, so we can trust you.
True, keeping a reader is engaged is important, but at least for me, don't want spin on the actual facts. Want to know what the actual facts are and so I can make an informed decision. Otherwise, it's just the writer using salesmanship to sell their own personal beliefs.
And, for the writer perspective, spin is definitely a powerful technique (seems to be changing America to being more polarized), but for me personal, would like to think I try to see though it as much as possible (in any form, coming from the politically left or right).
I think it is. It keeps listeners engaged because what they love most is telling you that you might be wrong and looking ways for it. A listener should make up their own mind anyway and double check -- if what you say is 99% right better they take that away than be 100% right and not be heard at all. I also just respect people more that can be bold with their points rather than hiding behind some chicken shit nuance that always covers them if what they really meant to postulate was wrong.
I have tried many times to do this, but lack even the minor discipline required. I inevitably make changes to the commands I want to run at the command line, rather than in the script, and then later forget to edit them in the script.
Instead, I now swear by atuin.sh, which just remembers every command I've typed. It's sort of bad, since I never actually get nice scripts, just really long commands, but it gets you 50% of the way there with 0 effort. When leaving my last job, I even donated my (very long) atuin history to my successor, which I suspect was more useful than any document I wrote.
My only hot tip: atuin overrides the up-arrow by default, which is really annoying, so do `atuin init zsh --disable-up-arrow` to make it only run on Ctrl-R.
I was most surprised by the fact that it only took 40 examples for a Qwen finetune to match the style and quality of (interactively tuned) Nano Banana. Certainly the end result does not look like the stock output of open-source image generation models.
I wonder if for almost any bulk inference / generation task, it will generally be dramatically cheaper to (use fancy expensive model to generate examples, perhaps interactively with refinements) -> (fine tune smaller open-source model) -> (run bulk task).
In my experience image models are very "thirsty" and can often learn the overall style of an image from far fewer models. Even Qwen is a HUGE model relatively speaking.
Interestingly enough, the model could NOT learn how to reliably generate trees or water no matter how much data and/or strategies I threw at it...
This to me is the big failure mode of fine-tuning - it's practically impossible to understand what will work well and what won't and why
I see, yeah, I can see how if it's like 100% matching some parts of the style, but then failing completely on other parts, it's a huge pain to deal with. I wonder if a bigger model could loop here - like, have GPT 5.2 compare the fine-tune output and the Nano Banana output, notice that trees + water are bad, select more examples to fine-tune on, and the retry. Perhaps noticing that the trees and water are missing or bad is a more human judgement, though.
Interestingly enough even the big guns couldn't reliably act as judges. I think there are a few reasons for that:
- the way they represent image tokens isn't conducive to this kind of task
- text-to-image space is actually quite finicky, it's basically impossible to describe to the model what trees ought to look like and have them "get it"
- there's no reliable way to few-shot prompt these models for image tasks yet (!!)
I reset my network settings and updated before realizing this is just an outage. I kept searching “<MY LOCATION> Verizon outage” but did not even consider it could be nationwide. I guess it shows how rare nationwide outages are.
Google (and Vercel) are great for doing this! I would like to see Anthropic and OpenAI do something similar, since they too greatly benefit from Tailwind CSS.
> PEP 658 went live on PyPI in May 2023. uv launched in February 2024. The timing isn’t coincidental. uv could be fast because the ecosystem finally had the infrastructure to support it. A tool like uv couldn’t have shipped in 2020. The standards weren’t there yet.
How/why did the package maintainers start using all these improvements? Some of them sound like a bunch of work, and getting a package ecosystem to move is hard. Was there motivation to speed up installs across the ecosystem? If setup.py was working okay for folks, what incentivized them to start using pyproject.toml?
> If setup.py was working okay for folks, what incentivized them to start using pyproject.toml?
It wasn't working okay for many people, and many others haven't started using pyproject.toml.
For what I consider the most egregious example: Requests is one of the most popular libraries, under the PSF's official umbrella, which uses only Python code and thus doesn't even need to be "built" in a meaningful sense. It has a pyproject.toml file as of the last release. But that file isn't specifying the build setup following PEP 517/518/621 standards. That's supposed to appear in the next minor release, but they've only done patch releases this year and the relevant code is not at the head of the repo, even though it already caused problems for them this year. It's been more than a year and a half since the last minor release.
... Ah, I got confused for a bit. When I first noticed the `pyproject.toml` deficiency, it was because Requests was affected by the major Setuptools 72 backwards incompatibility. Then this year they were hit again by the major Setuptools 78 backwards incompatibility (which the Setuptools team consciously ignored in testing because Requests already publishes their own wheel, so this only affected the build-from-source purists like distro maintainers). See also my writeup https://lwn.net/Articles/1020576/ .
I should have mentioned one of the main reasons setup.py turns out not okay for people (aside from the general unpleasantness of running code to determine what should be, and mostly is, static metadata): in the legacy approach, Setuptools has to get `import`ed from the `setup.py` code before it can run, but running that code is the way to find out the dependencies. Including build-time dependencies. Specifically Setuptools itself. Good luck if the user's installed version is incompatible with what you've written.
I tend to avoid sci-fi that hits too close to home (don't love any of the AI/internet/crypto classics, same reason I can't bear to watch Silicon Valley), so I was a little bored by the top of the the list.
But, there's really good stuff that I've loved just a bit down the list: Foundation, The Left Hand Of Darkness, The Dispossessed, Stories of Your Life and Others, Exhalation, Children Of Time, Dune.
Was surprised the Mars trilogy was pretty low (might be the keyword indexing?) - highly recommend, as long as you don't get too bored by descriptions of rock.
rustc can use a few different backends. By my understanding, the LLVM backend is fully supported, the Cranelift backend is either fully supported or nearly so, and there's a GCC backend in the works. In addition, there's a separate project to create an independent Rust frontend as part of GCC.
Even then, there are still some systems that will support C but won't support Rust any time soon. Systems with old compilers/compiler forks, systems with unusual data types which violate Rust's assumptions (like 8 bit bytes IIRC)
Many organizations and environments will not switch themselves to LLVM to hamfist compiled Rust code. Nor is the fact of LLVM supporting something in principle means that it's installed on the relevant OS distribution.
Using LLVM somewhere in the build doesn't require that you compile everything with LLVM. It generates object files, just like GCC, and you can link together object files compiled with each compiler, as long as they don't use compiler-specific runtime libraries (like the C++ standard library, or a polyfill compiler-rt library).
If you're developing, you generally have control over the development environment (+/-) and you can install things. Plus that already reduces the audience: set of people with oddball hardware (as someone here put it) intersected with the set of people with locked down development environments.
Let alone the fact that conceptually people with locked down environments are precisely those would really want the extra safety offered by Rust.
I know that real life is messy but if we don't keep pressing, nothing improves.
> If you're developing, you generally have control over the development environment
If you're developing something individually, then sure, you have a lot of control. When you're developing as part of an organization or a company, you typically don't. And if there's non-COTS hardware involved, you are even more likely not to have control.
