Christ, this is making me tear up. Mostly because I agree with you so much. It was heartbreaking to hear that Pratchett had Alzheimers, but it didn’t really sink in until Unseen Academicals. I should have stopped then but after 15 years of Discworld I felt like I had to keep reading, which was just more depressing.

I don’t think you quite grasp how much money is in the offshore oil and gas, and and how hard they pushing to automate things on all levels.

Which doesn’t have even a fraction of the workers compared to shipping, taxis, buses, or any other field that uses cars or trucks.

I don’t really think the industries where autonomous submarines are relevant can be compared to the same with, for example, autonomous cars.

But it currently says she wants to bring light to 1.3 billion Africans without power. That doesn’t sound like all of Africa.

No, it’s the same Akira, but like you said he’s in the movie very fleetingly, primarily in flashbacks. Whereas in the manga he’s a genuine character for a significant part of the story.

Am I missing something, or is this just a slightly tweaked fitness function? Like, dealing with the problems surrounding local minima convergence in genetic algorithms is something you usually cover in any first-year AI course

:O :O :O

I’m not a fan of neither the Happening nor Last Airbender (to put it mildly), but while they were both critical flops, neither were financial bombs. In fact, the only commercially underperforming movie Shyamalan’s made was Lady in the Water, and even that broke even.

Man, if I’m gonna keep waiting to reply until I have the time to write something as ambitious as this post deserves, it’s never going to happen. So I’m just going to have to say: You raise a lot of good points, some of which I hadn’t considered, and your post was a pleasure to read, and makes a much better argument…

Kinja isn’t letting me see which post it is exactly you’re responding to. But regardless I must have been really poor at communicating my point, because I’m not seeing any contradictions in your post.

I agree. Plenty of good movies in the 70s, 80s and 90s.

I don’t want to pretend that nothing’s changed in Hollywood, because that’s obviously untrue. But the thing that’s changed isn’t that movies are cheaper cash grabs now than before, what’s changed is marketing, and franchise tie-ins, and media management. A big movie now is played around the world, with an…

Alright, hang on. I’m not really sure what kind of evidence it is you think anyone could give you that would bring this conversation in any way forward. A signed letter by DeMille saying “We did this entirely to make as much money as we could”? In retrospect, it was ephemeral. It hasn’t become an ageless classic,…

I’m sure there’s people involved with Age of Ultron who also mean for it to be an everlasting masterpiece. That’s not why it was greenlit or funded though.

Samson and Delilah

I don’t think movies and the way they’ve made money has always been the same, but it seems very naïve to think that Hollywood has only become a money-oriented business in the past few decades. The norm has always been things that sell, and things that sell have always been whatever’s hot at the moment. I don’t see a…

There have always been big movies designed purely for cheap or ephemeral thrills, yes. I don’t see how adding multimillion dollar special effects should matter.

Okay, here’s the discussion I’m seeing: