2025
The Naked Gun (2025)
In 1996, Liam Neeson starred in the historical drama Michael Collins; likewise, Pamela Anderson was in Barb Wire. If you had told me at the time that they’d reboot The Naked Gun franchise together, I’d have laughed at you.
In this reboot of a franchise that first started in 1982 with the six-episode Police Squad!, Neeson’s Frank Drebin Jr. takes on Danny Heuston’s reverse effective altruist green technology billionaire. Anderson’s crime writer has a family connection and a score to settle, which brings her into Drebin’s life.
Surprising 1996 me they are good together on screen. Neeson is in his comfortable growling mode while Anderson is upbeat but worldly. As a pair they seem ready to tackle whatever jokes the writers can imagine. There’s a romantic sequence in a ski lodge that’s unexpected and great. To write more about it would be to rob you of some wonderful jokes.
The issue with this movie? It isn’t as cinematic as the first Naked Gun film. This is a streaming series pilot in writing and cinematography. It feels small and TV-like when you’re looking at it. There is no enormous set-piece event where Frank Drebin saves the day while being oblivious to the absolute destruction he’s caused. At 85 minutes, the running time is perfect for a spoof comedy, but I lost focus as time passed.
As a spoof, you expect physical comedy, celebrity cameos, sexual innuendo/double entendres and sight gags playing in the background as an actor delivers lines like it was a drama. It does all these well, but it’s careful. You can tell this movie wants to turn a decent profit from a modest budget. Which is the type of comedy movies we had back in the Michael Collins/Barb Wire era, so this movie is more retro than I thought.
This is an okay comedy that you’ll get some laughs from. It appeals most to people who remember Leslie Nielsen’s glory days, but even back then the first movie was the best one. I suspect this movie will struggle to bring in a younger audience. If you’re new to the franchise and this brand of spoof procedural cop show you could start with this one and enjoy it. But watch the original movie; it still holds up today.
I walked into someone’s office to have a discussion, and he grabbed a stack of dot matrix printer paper and then marked up the issue we were discussing in penmanship that was so clear you could almost smell the computer pioneer off it.
Superman (2025)
Superman (2025) isn't a movie by someone who studied Richard Donner's Superman. It's a movie by someone who studied Christopher Reeve's performance in Superman. David Corenswet gives Clark Kent/Superman a Reeve's like charisma even though he falls short of giving his Superman a Reeve's like presence.
The cast here outstrips the dialogue. Unlike prior Superman movies everyone can act. Rachel Brosnahan is a modern update to Hildy Johnson's fast talking 1940s reporter in His Girl Friday. She's sharp, a bit spikey, and wants the scoop. Her chemistry with Corenswet sparks on the screen. Nicholas Hoult impresses as the malignant narcissist Lex Luthor. This is Luthor as a long term strategist. The Luthor who looks at Superman and sees the end of human progress. Why strive and claw your way forward as a species when entities with the powers of the gods of legend can solve your worst problems? If they choose to, that is. Luthor is evil but his argument that in a world of super beings the future of humanity bends towards decline and helplessness gnaws away at you when the movie focuses on it.
The central conflict, Luthor seeing Superman as the end, is compelling enough but DC Studios needed to jumpstart their slate of future projects so they overreached. The script bulges with franchise additions. I'd have enjoyed this more were it 90 minutes. But you know what? Superman is a hero again in this movie. He doesn't break anyone's neck to end a fight nor would you think he would. It's a return to optimism for the character.
Kids will like it. The music is John Williams via swelling choirs, guitars and electronic distortion. If you need two hours of air conditioning relief from the summer heat this will show you a bit more than the latest Jurassic World does. Though I find myself in the uncomfortable position of liking this movie more the further away I get from seeing it.
Anthropic had AI run a minifridge. It had an identity crisis and went broke. Project Vend: Can Claude run a small shop? (And why does that matter?) \ Anthropic
Having built my MiSTer FPGA system, the first thing I did was delete every core that wasn’t…
- Amiga
- Atari ST
- C64
- ZX Spectrum
- PC Engine
- Vectrex
- Neo Geo Pocket
- MSX
- X68000
- Saturn
There are enough hidden gems on those systems for a lifetime.
Sweatshops for clothing. Sweatshops for AI. Some types of work never change. The AI Con book excerpt: The hidden workers who keep things running - Rest of World
I have clusters of smart home devices and sensors using different protocols. WiFi, Bluetooth mesh, Zigbee & Z-Wave. I was looking at standardising on Matter over Thread but the device selection for Matter is poor.
I keep notebooks in a bottom drawer that cover years of work and thoughts. While I may need to check last year’s notebook for work-related stuff a couple of times, I never look at the plans or thoughts. The plans serve as a direction, the thoughts are no longer deep.
I’d ride an electric bike were I not convinced I’d die in road traffic. But I’ve waited so long that subscriptions have come to bicycle hardware.
The Basic tier provides a rider dashboard, basic security, a stolen mode, and updates over Bluetooth for free. You can then pay £6.99 / €7.99 (around $9) per month, or £84 / €96 ($110) per year, to become a Core member
8BitDo 2.4G controller kept disconnecting from my docked Steam Deck during Dead Rising 2. An incompatibility between the 2.4G dongle and the dock’s USB 3.1 ports. But there’s a USB 2.0 port inside the controller charging stand! 🎮
As of December 2024, AI wrote 30.1% of Python contributions from US users vs 24.3% Germany, 23.2% France, 21.6% India, 15.4% Russia, 11.7% China. Chinese devs favor Gitee over GitHub. First-mover advantage? Doubtful. These gains may plateau as easy tasks get automated first.
I have the sneaking suspicion that PlayStation and Xbox are raising prices above the hardware loss line to be ready for Grand Theft Auto 6. Some people will buy a system just to play GTA 6 and will never buy another game for the system.
Shockingly, LLM users were far less able to recall or quote from essays they had just written. In fact, 83.3% of LLM users failed to provide even a single correct quote from their own writing, compared to just 11.1% in both the Search Engine and Brain-only groups.
That would be because they didn’t write them. They possibly didn’t edit them.
The Louvre staff went on strike.
We didn’t plan to go on strike, but the people are so exhausted, they can’t support the conditions getting worse and worse
The issue with Europe becoming the world’s largest museum as its native population declines is that tourist overcrowding is making locals angry.
In tech, the days of spending a lot of cash upfront and spending little on each user are over. AI means you’re not making it back on volume anymore. Every customer using AI increases your costs. This is why AI companies are chasing enterprises instead of trying to build the next Gmail or WhatsApp.
OpenCore Legacy Patcher always adds a bit of excitement to older Mac hardware. Is it a bug in the latest OS release? Or is it all the work that has had to be done to get that release running on an absolute potato of a Macintosh?
As datacenter production gets automated, the cost of intelligence should eventually converge to near the cost of electricity. (People are often curious about how much energy a ChatGPT query uses; the average query uses about 0.34 watt-hours, about what an oven would use in a little over one second, or a high-efficiency lightbulb would use in a couple of minutes. It also uses about 0.000085 gallons of water; roughly one fifteenth of a teaspoon.)
Source: Sam Altman
Apple’s new container support in macOS 26 is nowhere near as feature-rich as Docker. It doesn’t support memory ballooning or loopback networking to the host. But it’s much lighter on Apple Silicon resources and launches containers like greased lightning.
The 6G wireless spectrum auctions are coming soon.
Telcos: We’ve learned our lesson after overhyping 5G, something that was an expensive, incremental upgrade.
Me: Oh good!
Telcos: 6G will provide holographic communication and facilitate the Internet of Senses.
Me: Get out.