manish vij

Knife missile

On regular cars, panels curve over corners and meet on flat planes, protecting people from sharp edges while shielding internals from rain and snow. Each panel has rounded edges covered in several layers of paint.

On Cybertruck, flat steel panels have gaps at sharp origami corners. This exposes the internals to weather and insects in the directions of travel and rainfall.

This is for polygon styling and cost control. The material is difficult to work with, poor fit for a car but a great one for buzz and stock pumps.

The panels form points and blades which could harm drivers and pedestrians or be forced apart in a collision. A knife missile, a guillotine on wheels.

The lines of these panels aren’t straight down the length of the body, and the panel gaps aren’t uniform. The panels don’t appear uniformly reflective, the metal finish appears uneven. The effect is a kid’s science fair project, or a defective Hibachi.

Consider who would’ve even worked on the truck. The design studio reportedly revolted, thinking the concept a joke. So it’s mostly built by Elon-fan preppers or pure mercs.

Ironically the prepper truck is a danger to its own driver. It’s another of Elon’s dangerous-by-design products, along with FSD and Xitter.

The truck’s bigger and not as ugly in person, like the Ioniq 6. But has massive Escalade wheels, and the outward-sloping Kammback does it no favor. No door handles, just buttons, an especially unfriendly primary interface.

Gigawiper: a base and an extension

There was no line to see it. Overheard a woman: “It’s so ugly.”

Front, front quarter angle and front side look quite nice, especially in black. Side proportions are wonky, short frunk / long rear. Back looks like a dumpster.

AGI hype

Altman’s “brink of AGI” hype is lulz, what we have is as far from general intelligence as a nail is from an elephant. Because it’s so dumb, it wastes mongo bucks to run, driving a need for more funding: a self-sustaining hype loop. Altman learned hypebeast fundraising from his former partner Elon.

When you’re using multiple power plants’ output to generate drivel an undereducated teen could do on 20 watts of Cheetos…

“We’re close to AGI” is chum for nontechnical marks. It drives funding, personal riches and stampedes 80something pols into locking out the open source competitors that make you sweat.

AGI doomers are similarly hilarious in the short term, jumping at shadows in their own bedroom. All the biggest doomers are non-techies flogging doomer books which are basically sci-fi (Harari, Yudkowski, Bostrom). The ones with a tech background tend to be architecture-astronaut PhDs looking at the extreme long term.

Long term, AGI could help us discover new physical laws and solve tough problems like climate change, cancer and interstellar travel.

Even longer term, AI takeover will probably happen. Like nukes, you can hold the line for only so long. As it becomes easier and cheaper, other actors will get access, and there will be a competitive need to unleash it.

But that’s well into a sci-fi timeline.

None of this diminishes where ML tools are for generating and classifying: genuinely useful. But just tools.

Lazarus should stay down

“Lazarus Project” 🇬🇧: 007 × “Groundhog Day.” Wild seeing a show with desi second and third leads, neither are techies, aren’t dating each other and both get to whup ass.

Hollywood took romantic lead Alia Bhatt and jammed her into the IT stock role 🤦🏽‍♂️ Bechdel test → Bhatt test.

Hermione type Anjli Mohindra probably should’ve been the main hero, sharp delivery and an air of competence. Along with Tom Burke, who’s a fantastic antihero.

They went with a more ambiguous actor, Paapa Essiedu, as audience bridge. His arc is interesting, from horrified at the collateral damage to murderous and complicit.

Grinding time loops are like filming shows, repeating with minor variations. Boring squared.

Strong, committed acting elevates the goofy premise, but it eventually peters out. The show suffers from stakes fatigue: after averting 30 nuke wars, where’s left to go? They have to keep raising the stakes with ludicrous plots (gravity wave!)

The time loop mechanic makes for cheap budgets, reusing actors and sets. But it’s like watching a Twitch stream of someone mastering a platformer, loading save points when they die. Jesus didn’t raise Lazarus 50 times.

Existential horror: “Shiv Reddy” (Rudi Dharmalingam) keeps waking up at the save point with a bullet in him, about to die.

The white guy’s the hacker, not Shiv. Free at last, free at last

Give me the Blue Steel. Now hold

Teen Shiv (Shobhit Piasa) gets recruited right in front of his home shrine

Parvati on date night:

Always bring emergency chai

Saucy

The waterboarder, not the waterboardee

Cornershop torching

Trailer:

Bollywood planet

“The Marvels”: Help me, Obi-Khan, you’re my only hope

Sleepover in space

Hatecopy’s pop art

Dad giving financial advice in space, such a dad joke

Mom: Beta what a lovely house in which to get married

Son:

The shahada (?) surrounded by alien housecat eggs

r/movies: Captain Marvel has a ballgown, a musical number, a boyfriend and an animal familiar, she’s a Disney princess

Superhero ballgown

The boyfriend’s fit colors are like a blue-purple sherwani

Lightly-modified Bollywood planet. “ST: Strange New Worlds” did themed romantic and eps, and they rocked

Title screens

Bodyswapping

“Ghostbusters” is my Proust’s madeleine. Distinctly remember feeling alienated while nerd friends got hyped to to see a sequel. I wanted to see it, but movies were frivolous, said parents, your job is to study.

Brown folks in Hollywood then weren’t brown—Peter Sellers, Fisher Stevens. We got scraps in brownface and we liked it.

Meanwhile the popular white kids were driving jacked-up pickups, throwing house parties, smoking weed and cutting class for the beach. Dubai on the Bay.

Now there’s a brown co-star in “Ghostbusters,” “The Marvels,” “Spider-Verse 2,” “The Eternals,” “Aladdin,” and I spend weekends at the beach.

Freaky Friday :)