Daniel R P de Melo

The only thing epic here is the aesthetic catastrophe. Nolan is a cerebral director of the global anglo world, all his intelligence put to industrial ends. Grey matter for a grey world. Nothing in this trailer is Greek. Nothing is Mediterranean. No olive groves and no white stone burning under the sun and no salt and no pine and no sea-glare. A deracinated Odyssey, made for imaginary nobodies from nowhere. The script feels like it's going to be the work of a diligent student who took down the events of the Odyssey one by one, forgetting that this is not a novel but an archaic poem, from a time when men and women lived each word as a heartbeat, who sang the soul and flesh of a people and of a world at once real and supernatural. A poem in which Telemachus does not say "my dad is coming home." The Odyssey deserved a Parajanov or a Fellini or a Welles, someone larger than life, a Dionysian ogre, someone hungry, someone who could make a film that smells of figs and raw wool and roasting meat and tar and blood. Monsters that are actually monstrous and seductive witches with real venom and golden shields catching real light and banquets going on for days. And the women of the poem, who are everywhere in Homer and seem so cold and dull here. Circe in her smoke and Calypso in her cave and Penelope at her loom, the sensuality of witches and the rigid loyalty of wives, all replaced by a fashion-armor Athena and a Penelope played as a strong American woman. And then there is what the Odysseus of the trailer says: "No one can stand between me and home, not even the gods". The cunning sufferer who knew how to bow to divine forces turned into a defiant individualist who bows to no one. Greek cunning replaced by American autonomy. The poem's central lesson reversed in a single line of dialogue. I usually don't mind Hollywood slop, but this has made me weirdly angry, and the film isn't even out yet. I feel as if a red line has been crossed, some hubris that has gone too far. The gods have been angered. How could they not be, with the decapitation of that statue at the end of the trailer? An iconoclastic gesture absent from Homer, usual with the monotheistic traditions that have spent centuries smashing pagan images. Nietzsche said he would believe only in a god who knew how to dance. Apollo without Dionysus produces exactly this: cerebral, cold, unambiguous. I cannot trust a filmmaker who is not hungry enough to banquet with the gods.

The Dutch woman, whose husband died on the ship, disembarked in Saint Helena with “GI symptoms” on April 24. Her condition “deteriorated during a flight to Johannesburg” on April 25. She died on April 26. Travel via Africa’s busiest airport means *MANY* were potentially exposed.

“There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”

Num país onde milhares lutam para chegar ao fim do mês, há quem receba salários milionários… e mesmo assim declare praticamente nada nos bancos. 19.915€ por mês Apenas 1.166€ declarados em contas Isto levanta uma pergunta simples: Como é que isto é possível?

Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device. > No consent dialog. No opt-out UI. Re-installs itself if the user removes it manually. That is the true definition of malware.

I love this.

OpenAI is working on a new "Personal Wiki" ("lore") in ChatGPT

The Islamic resistance Movement Hamas and the Islamic Jihad have created a 620 km tunnel network in the Gaza Strip, effectively turning it into a military stronghold. Destroying these tunnels is a legitimate military objective and explains the extensive destruction in Gaza.

Can anyone pinpoint the exact moment when everything in society started getting noticeably worse?

It's possible we will get both the new AI policy memo and the executive order tomorrow. The EO will create a mixed group of tech CEOs and administration officials who will work out the rules for the new release regulations. I see a lot of people calling this a win for Eliezer's side, but even if the new rules are very strict, the stop/pause group don't actually get what they want. This doesn't stop or even slow AI advancement, it only slows the rate of public releases. Capabilities will keep advancing at full speed. The labs will finish training the new models and then submit them for government approval. Given that the government currently doesn't even want Anthropic to release Mythos, how long will the regulatory approval process take for something twice as powerful? Five times? Ten? All the incentives are for the government to slow down releases. Let's say OpenAI finishes training GPT-6, and it's twice as capable as anything available today. If the government approves it and something bad happens as a result, they take the blame. And the longer they hold it back, the longer government agencies get exclusive access. Meanwhile, OpenAI will start using GPT-6 to train GPT-6.1. If they finish 6.1 while 6 is still stuck in approval, they'll move on to training 6.2 with it. This potentially creates strange situations where the labs are many generations ahead internally while the public is still waiting for something they submitted months ago. This doesn't seem to make anyone happy. Capabilities continue to advance and accelerate. Data centers keep getting built. Jobs keep getting replaced, because whatever models are released will still be far more capable than today's systems. They just won't be anywhere close to what the government and the labs have internally. And whether you're on the left or the right, no party will hold the White House forever. A lot of this is conjecture, we don't even know what the actual process will look like yet. Also, a lot depends on what happens with China and open source. But this potentially creates some very unpleasant futures.