TwinIon

I hope she gets to wield a lightsaber.

So they enabled DV only for streaming services? That seems odd. I'm starting to buy some movies in 4K blu ray, but I don't yet have a player. I was thinking about upgrading my OG Xbox One mostly for that purpose, but it doesn't seem worth it if it doesn't support both formats.

I feel like Intel has been 3 years away from making worthwhile graphics cards for the last 15 years.

I won't expect them to ship a product, much less a competitive one for a long time, if ever. I'll put this right next to their mobile offerings and LTE modems, and all the other Intel products that never materialized.

Spoilers

I thought it was a another fine, but mostly disposable Marvel film. After the insanity of Infinity War, I'm happy to see Marvel still trying to do something with a smaller scale, but I don't think Ant Man and the Wasp really achieves the necessary focus for it to work. Even without any unnecessary MCU cameos this film is still packed with too many characters. At various points we see Scott, Hope/Hank, Sonny, Ava/Foster, and the FBI all going after the same thing for different reasons. It's a jumble that never really coheres for long enough to be effective.

Paul Rudd remains charming as ever, but even though the film is constantly throwing out jokes, they didn't tickle me in the same way that Thor Ragnarok, or even the first Ant Man did. Michael Peña is doing his thing again, but even with more screen time he only had one stand out sequence. Overall it's fine, but not especially funny.

The action only occasionally lives up to the lofty heights some other MCU films reach, but AMATW's saving grace is the awesome design and visualization of Ghost. Hannah John-Kamen plays an admirable antagonist and the effects work is spectacular. Watching Ant Man and the Wasp fight random baddies is still kind of fun, though a bit confusing at times, but Ghost always added a more exciting element.

Speaking of confusing, I feel like this is a film that would not hold up well to scrutiny. Somehow in a film universe with wizards and aliens and more technobabble than a season of Star Trek, the rules surrounding Pym's tech is the most bewildering. The ever changing size and mass of objects and people made predicting how things would react impossible. Superhero fights rarely obey any actual laws of physics, but I always feel like I know what to expect when Iron Man blasts something or Thor hits something. With everything constantly shifting sizes, I was never really sure how momentum is conserved or how force scales with size.

26 minutes ago, SFLUFAN said:

I REALLY liked the couple of episodes of Barry that I did see!

It's a show that starts well enough, but it gets much better as it goes along. Absolutely worth finishing.

As someone who thinks that we need to repeal the second and just ban all the guns, I think this is the correct ruling. Code is speech, and it should be treated as such. If they want to ban the making or distribution of unmarked guns (is that already illegal?) then fine, but banning the code is both a clear first amendment issue and quite impossible.

Can we not have a thread that should be celebrating real life heroics be purely about freaking Elon Musk? Love him or hate him, he was a sideshow to this whole ordeal.

I still can't get over that trip time of 8-10 hours. I can't wait to read a really deep dive on how the whole thing went down. I really want to know how much time was in/under water, deco stops, off gassing, etc.  I'm in the middle of planning a diving vacation and I'm going to be thinking about these guys the whole time.

23 hours ago, Jason said:

Trump’s Supreme Court pick: ISPs have 1st Amendment right to block websites

That's a rather extreme position that I've never even seen considered before. I've seen plenty of arguments that the FCC overstepped its authority or that it's a good/bad idea in general, but never that net neutrality is straight up unconstitutional. That would be a very dangerous precedent to set.

2 minutes ago, Greatoneshere said:

If that were true, Johansson should push to put a trans actor in the role and take another major role in the movie, if that's what it is about, no? I'm not saying they have to, but they theoretically could. 

I don't know anything about this movie other than what we got from the article in the OP:

Quote

According to trade reports, Johansson will star as Dante “Tex” Gill, a real-life figure who used a string of massage parlors as fronts for prostitution in Pittsburgh during the ’70s and ’80s; Gill was born Jean Marie Gill, but identified as a man.

That sure makes it sound like it's primarily the story of one person. If it's really a case of "this movie gets made with Johansson or doesn't get made," it's highly unlikely that there's a comparable role in the film that would be marketed around. It's not like you spend $120M to make Rampage if Dwayne Johnson is the zoo keeper at the beginning of the film and not the action star.

I mean, if the only goal here is to make a movie about a trans person playing a trans person, then theoretically Johansson could pay for the whole production herself, but that's not a very useful hypothetical.

On 7/8/2018 at 8:10 AM, CitizenVectron said:

Each run takes 8-10 hours plus the extra 6-8 hours needed to get new oxygen tanks placed along the route. 

!!!!

I knew it was a difficult trip, but I didn't realize it was that long. I can't even imagine doing a dive like that. I've never done decompression diving or cave diving, but even a short dive through a system like that would be stressful as hell. Doing it under those circumstances for so long feels impossible.

Godspeed to these guys; I hope it continues to go well.

I don't really have strong feelings about straws, but I did enjoy this piece in the Atlantic about the history of the straw.

It's pretty funny that after Netflix was chasing HBO that with this acquisition it's now HBO that will be chasing Netflix.

They mention heavier investment, but I somehow doubt they're willing to invest in the same way that Netflix does, given that they want to make more profit.

Look at this chart of spending last year. This year, Netflix is expected to spend close to $8B on content. That's not just more than the $2B that HBO spends, that's more than all of Time Warner spends on non-sports content. HBO has been doing very well for themselves, and making lots of money doing it. Chasing after some kind of more tech startup level growth in a stable and profitable operation like HBO is a bad idea, and one that I don't think AT&T will be willing to fund.

The worst case scenario is if they decide that they want to try and chase after Netflix levels of new content without spending Netflix levels of money. If they do, I think it will be the beginning of the end of HBO because it's impossible to imagine them keeping the quality level up.

All of this also leaves out amazon, who will probably be spending $6B this year, and then we have Apple and Facebook that will be ramping up their original content machines as well.

If there's an argument to be made for games simply getting better and better over time, I'd say it's tied directly to camera and controls. Games are fundamentally an interactive medium, and if you can't readily see what you need to see or adequately control what you're supposed to control, the rest of the experience is dramatically lessened by either of those failures. They're precisely why I never really liked the RE games or the early MGS entries. I hated the controls and the static cameras and no amount of excellence in other parts of the game could overcome those issues.

It's also why I think so many of the early games, from Tetris to Mario and Metroid, have held up so well. The 2D plane virtually eliminated issues with the camera and the controls were more than capable for what those games required. Similar things could be said about many first person games, at least either on the PC or with dual stick consoles.

Once we hit a point where the controls and camera were pretty much always good enough, the focus changes quickly to the actual content of the game and away from the mere fundamentals.

I think @Wild has a good point. Right now, for a movie like this, I wouldn't be surprised if it came down to "this movie gets made with Scarlett Johansson or it doesn't get made at all." Same for Transparent and Jeffrey Tambor, etc. I think we'll see more trans actors in whatever roles in the future, but the reality of making movies, especially small ones, is that a marketable actor like Johansson changes the calculus for what gets made and what doesn't. It's not all that different than movies like Skyscraper or Rampage are far more likely to get made if they can get the Rock.

Yes trans people are underrepresented on screen, and yes it would be better if trans people can represent themselves on screen, but I also don't have an inherent problem with cis people playing trans or whatever else.

They haven't yet solved any of the rather intractable issues surrounding Brexit yet, have they?

Assuming this government falls apart, who is more likely to pick up seats?

I wonder how much of Pompeo's failure was basically the North Korean's deciding he wasn't as easily manipulable as Trump is.

11 minutes ago, legend said:

It actually might not do as well as you'd think. Correlated experience, which is common if you only have one agent learning with its own experience, can really fuck with learning and make it behave badly. Increasingly, you're seeing papers that do these huge distributed learning spaces to try and avoid that issue. That may not have been the motivation for lots of maps here, but there is a reasonable chance.

 

It's also a direction that grinds my gears a bit. The reinforcement-learning problem is at its heart about learning when you have to suffer your consequences. This direction of huge numbers of parallel actors is side stepping that issue and isn't practice for many real world scenarios.

I'm not sure what you mean when you say the number of parallel actors sidesteps the issue of consequences.

This isn't quite the same thing, but it's been kinda funny to watch. 

After Rian Johnson tweeted that out, thousands of people started following Chis McQuarrie (who had nothing to do with TLK or Star Wars) and they've been bringing him into fights about TLJ and doing a lot of arguing about their right to yell at content creators.

You can see a bunch of it in his feed, and it's almost entertaining, but also quite sad.

2 minutes ago, Rev said:

This is exactly what they did in The Talos Principle

 

https://blog.us.playstation.com/2015/09/25/the-talos-principle-on-ps4-designing-ai-to-test-a-game-about-ai/

That's very cool. That's a bit more like a test script for the whole game than the kind of machine learning that Deepmind is doing, but it's a good example of what I was thinking about.

I honestly have no gauge for how long this kind of thing can go on. Bush's steel tariffs lasted 21 months, but those were comparatively limited and had a specific goal in mind. When you have a completely irrational actor starting all this foolishness, with no clear goals in mind, across a broad swath of industries, applying to a whole host of countries, it's impossible to predict where this could all end up.

2 hours ago, Raggit said:

How do they handle the AIs ability to aim? Because that would strongly impact their performance. If they're basically using aim bot, it's kind of unfair.  

Despite using Q3 as the basis, they don't actually have guns. They can only tag opponents to get them to steal the flag.

They were mostly interested in how multiple AI agents would work together in a team exercise.

The Deepmind site has a better look at the game they played.

The N64 will always have been the definitive console for me. It hit a number of sweet spots. Perhaps most important, it came during a time in my life where I started thinking more about the games I was playing and not just playing them. I think the jump from 2D to 3D really did that for me. During the NES and SNES eras I liked games, but young as I was I didn't think too much about it. The N64 made me start to consider the technology and the businesses behind gaming.

It had a lot of great single player games that would define my memories of the era, but it also was the system that I spent the most time playing with 3 or 4 local players. My youngest brother was just getting  to the point he would play with me and my other brother, and we even were able to rope in my mom or my sister or a friend to play with us. Endless hours of Mario Kart (battle, never racing), Goldeneye, Smash, and Bomberman.

In second place is the Xbox. The Dreamcast could have been that, and it meant a lot to me, but it didn't last. The Xbox really changed a lot for me, and Halo in particular. I was in a fortunate enough position that I was able to host more than a few Halo LAN parties with 12 players going. The Xbox 360 kept me busy in college, but WoW dominated my gaming life at that point.

4 minutes ago, Jason said:

I'm sure it's a real fucking mystery what he's gonna do while he's in Scotland.

Complain about wind farms?

Interesting that they used procedurally generated maps. I can only imagine the strategies that would develop if you allowed an AI like this to play 500k games on a standard map.

Now that I think about it, I wonder if that will become a standard way to find map glitches or loopholes while still in development. Let an AI play a few hundred thousand games and see if it figures out anything interesting.

I don't know if she needed to be fired, but I don't really have a problem with her being fired for that.

I think it's also wildly impractical to try and do branching dialog and character choices to any meaningful degree in an MMORPG. Maybe you could do something super basic, but I imagine the complexity involved would quickly become overwhelming.