Garrett Williams

Waymo is so good at saving lives that if it were a new drug in trial, it would hit the bar for being unblinded and made immediately available to the control group for ethical reasons. @MorePerfectUS would prefer to keep killing pedestrians.

How can satire compete with this?

Just to make it clear what’s going on here: the mayor of New York City is endangering human lives by slowing down the transition to self driving cars, because he has economic views that are a primitive combination of mercantilism and socialism.

@binarybits "When you exclude their largest market, all the markets look like X" okay?

Waymo launched driverless service in its 11th city today — Nashville. With the exception of California, all of Waymo's commercial cities (red dots) are in red states — Arizona, Texas, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee. Come on Blue America, we can do better than this.

In a few years, politicians have gone from wanting to ban ride-share to protect taxis to wanting to ban self-driving to protect ride-share It is almost like the underlying instinct is to restrict all new technologies and modalities regardless of rapid consumer adoption

While Americans argue over what is "AI slop" the Chinese are busy creating absolute cinema using Seedance 2.

They literally have a trello board for bombing things

@BestMovieMom It's completely fake news bc Oscar voting was almost closed when Chalamet said that stuff

Timothée Chalamet losing the Oscar over a pointless controversy would be absurd. Voters should judge only what matters: his phenomenal performance in Marty Supreme.

@krishnanrohit What if we just evaluated writing based on how good it is rather than how it was made? We presumably should hate AI-generated text because it's bad. So if it's bad writing, let's just call it bad writing.

Writers who are outcome-focused, who write solely to produce an output have no problem using AI, see marketing or PRDs or strategy docs, but writers who write essays or fiction, who write carefully, what's written matters to the reader, where writing is more than a simple message to be conveyed, they hate AI. Code just needs to work, and the level of expressivity in a line of code is limited. The audience for coders is not other coders, if so they would care a lot more about elegance, see admiration for Karpathy's work. Most coders are doing a job, coding is a means to an end, not the end itself. A well written piece however conveys quite a lot of insight, far more than just the individual content of its words, it conveys in its affect, in the negative space, in how it uses language itself, the word choices. It's a much much richer representation of the world. It's a more complex way we connect with other minds, and in those types of writing the output isn't simply a thing to be conveyed.

Now make it sound less like AI

@ifoundanna Apparently Google or Apple (forget which one) looked at this but was worried about the socioeconomic impacts of routing people away from lower income areas or something like that

i want maps app that shows me the scenic route, sometimes i don't want efficiency

@ifoundanna Because I am unreliable

I would love to know what inspires someone to purchase a plastic plant

@mackaybell @films7 Studio system fell apart not by TV, but by the Paramount decree and FinSyn rules. But yes, when TV came around film responded by "eventizing" -- but important to note indie & midbudget film was still very big.

Not sure "professionalize" is the right word for the problem. In the golden era of Hollywood studios they refined their production system to control costs while still making high quality entertaining pictures on a consistent basis. It was only when television disrupted Hollywood that the studio system fell apart, as they decided to brand movies as bigger and better than television. Which eventually devolved into "more sophisticated" and "important" which attracted a lot of snobbish elites. Also, it never helps whenniversities began to take over the "education" of artists in any art form. Pumping out thousands of film school graduates every year hasn't helped the quality of films. The same thing pretty much killed jazz music as popular entertainment.

Cinema, Opera, AI, Timothée Chalamet. - Economic survival and the renewal of forms. #TimotheeChalamet Historically, opera as a living art form, one that's creative, not limited to revivals, and not marginal, died from its unsustainable economic costs. Those costs became untenable once new tools emerged that could create complete visual and auditory worlds without paying dozens of artists for every live performance. Timothée Chalamet's paradoxical stance is his belief that cinema can escape this fate simply by wishing it so, while mocking opera in the process. With AI enabling equally complex productions at far lower costs, cinema will find it increasingly hard each year to justify its budgets, in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, for real-location shoots with star actors. Art must constantly renew itself to survive. Just wanting to save cinema won't be enough without integrating AI. At the same time, the great works of the past must remain accessible: they are irreplaceable. Grand operas and great films can't be erased from our cultural heritage. While we can no longer create new operas using the same tools Richard Wagner had in the 19th century, those works should continue to nourish humanity. We won't be able to film like Orson Welles did in the era of Citizen Kane. Hybrid works incorporating AI are inevitably on the horizon. All kinds of hybrids are possible: with live actors or simple AI characters. With music and dance. Total works of art. As David Lynch said in 2024: "AI is fantastic," as a creative tool that allows demanding works at lower costs. AI should serve an artistic vision, not replace it. Stopping time and the renewal of forms is impossible. Otherwise, cinema will end up like opera: marginalized.

Ballet’s Brutal Reality: Dancer and Teacher Forrest Rain on Timothée’s Opera and Ballet Video.

@KFCBarstool The slap happened after the voting closed...

If Timothee Chalamet making a harmless comment that is objectively true somehow stops him from winning an academy award when will smith slapped someone in the face… live on stage at the Oscars…and won best actor the same night…then just flush the whole show down the toilet

@mackaybell @films7 Same thing happened with cinema. Art forms professionalize and build an unsustainable cost base, and if they don't modernize with new technological waves, they become increasingly irrelevant.

There is no reason opera requires huge casts, orchestras and sets. It started as a popular art form that could be performed in courts and small chambers and then small theaters. The original stories didn't require more than half a dozen singers. It was a massively popular form of entertainment at the time, with street performers singing songs from it and everyone knowing all the latest hits. What killed it as an art form was the growing perception that every opera had to be in a big theater for the elites with expensive staging. That's why popular entertainment moved on to vaudeville and light opera and then eventually musicals. Short version: the snobs ruined it.

@films7 Good take

@odetowildthings @guadagninocore "It's in movies!" /s

@guadagninocore NOT PART OF MAINSTREAM CULTURE?!! Hell, the ballet, operas, classical music—it’s EVERYWHERE, even in movies!!!! The soundtrack in movies? Where do you think the inspiration comes from? Classical music. They are more mainstream than Timmy’s mediocre movies.

not the new York times literally having to run an article explaining why you're all too dumb to get it

@sparklejar_ Ballet's lack of cultural relevance vs. other artforms is because it's failed to make itself more accessible to audiences in the internet age Same is true for live theater Did you know the avg. Broadway patron is over the age of 50 and makes $240k a year?

Conclusion from NYT

@feelsdesperate @jackcalifano Ah yes the middle class families and old people who are poor but also own cars and live in Manhattan

@jackcalifano Yes, I’m sure this will be no big deal for middle class families and old people who are less affluent and don’t live by a convenient subway stop. Everyone is a downwardly mobile creative living in an overpriced Brooklyn walk up relatively close to a subway stop.