Menu

manish vij

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 :)

The mean girl power shot

Two desi actresses in the high-school movie power shot. This is the “walk away from an explosion” shot for mean-girl social rank :D


The female version of Swole Kumail, superhero.

Mathlete rapper “Kevin Gnapoor” (Rajiv Surendra) was a dorky ethnic cliché with a gibberish surname in “Mean Girls,” this is Tina Fey reparations :)