F for Fake
Orson Welles' docudrama “F for Fake” explores themes of authenticity in art through the charming yet deceptive stories of fraudsters, blending soulful monologues with moments of self-indulgence in a creatively low-budget production.
Now that all my players can read, this evening was spent watching them panic in HeroQuest. “Why did you open that door?!?” Welcome to 1980s board games, kids.
The Institute
Television adaptations of Stephen King’s works often struggle with character development, but the engaging cast in the new series The Institute provides a refreshing take on familiar themes.
Two atmospheric horror movies I enjoy at Halloween are Prince of Darkness & In the Mouth of Madness. Both by John Carpenter. Science meets evil in the first, man destroyed by cosmic horror in the second. There’s this delicious sense of growing dread in both. Recommended.
Talamasca: The Secret Order
The show fails to deliver a compelling supernatural spy thriller, lacking tension and engaging storytelling, ultimately making it unworthy of viewers' time.
The hidden cost of business travel. I just dropped €200 updating my tech kit (USB-C cables, travel adapters, battery packs). And that was optimized for minimal gear. Tech tax is real. M1 MacBook Pro to soldier on for another year.
Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines 2 - shiny but soulless. The original was crufty code with genuine storytelling and fun. Fan mods kept it alive for two decades. Both had torturous development, but only the first will be remembered.
Critiquing vibe coding misses the point. Vibe coding is today’s Visual Basic for people who prioritize results over programming craft.
WiFi 8 silicon testing has started, but consumer devices are years away. Most home WiFi problems aren’t about speed. They’re reliability issues. WiFi 8 focuses on stable connections. If it delivers consistent performance, that’s what we actually need.
MTV UK is shutting down its music channels. Maybe it’s dated nostalgia, but when MTV Europe launched in 1987 during the Cold War, it was an eye-opening cultural window into Europe for me.
Actually, without the AI buildout, the US economy would probably be teetering on the cusp of a recession (which certainly mirrors the view from many of the industries that I track).
I think this is why the global economy feels so weird. Consumers are pulling back on spending while tech is throwing the kitchen sink at building out AI infrastructure.
Peacemaker season 2 saves its only interesting idea for the last ten minutes. The episodes feel like a drawn-out epilogue to Gunn’s Superman movie. A disappointing waste of time and apparently the series finale. What a poor way to go out.
To Haunt and Be Haunted: On the Exhumation of Edgar Allan Poe
The six feet of dirt separating you from the fresh air of freedom could weigh as much as fifteen thousand pounds so that even if you tried to break through it would be futile.
You’re not pulling yourselves out of any graves, folks.
Tron: Ares
Tron: Ares features a simplistic plot with underwhelming action and characters, failing to live up to its predecessors while lacking memorable elements.
The EU’s ApplyAI Strategy: €1B (redeployed spending) to push EU AI forward. The standout for me? The FrontierAI Initiative. Submit your frontier model for development, and they’ll supply the compute.
Amazon granted permission for satellite ground station in Cork, Ireland
Amazon this week announced it has received regulatory approval from the Commission for Communications Regulation (ComReg) to operate a satellite earth station gateway at the National Space Centre Ltd (NSC) in Cork County, Ireland.
Nice. It’ll join the Starlink gateway, and means Amazon will enter the retail satellite internet market in Ireland.
It's remarkable that we've had secure replacements for UPnP, like Port Control Protocol and NAT-PMP, yet most home routers don't ship with them. If you know UPnP is insecure, you probably know enough to do manual port forwarding anyway. Everyone else? They’re on their own.
I don’t care about how bad you think you look or how annoying you think your voice sounds. I’d rather a person voice their own YouTube videos than a text to speech program reading an AI generated script. There’s a lot of the latter on YouTube now and it’s trash.
On Amazon devices moving from Android to Vega OS. Google is in a battle to the death with Apple. Android/iOS now running on beefy hardware. Vega is about running on the smaller things. When you build on Linux, like Vega has, every component maker you go to has a Linux driver you can use. Fast dev.
Brazil’s ferociously litigious society turned to AI to clear its courts system, only for lawyers to use it to fill it up again.