Cinematic Underdogs

The Brewers were ripping good luck cigs prior to each game of the World Series 😂😂

What the actual fuck have I just read

Remember when Sarah Polley made Stories We Tell, supposedly about a paternity question in her family history, but it actually turned out to be a meta-documentary about truth, narrative, and subjectivity? Or when Banksy made Exit Through the Gift Shop, which at first seemed to be about street artist Thierry Guetta but in the end turned out to be a meta-documentary about truth, art, and subjectivity? Remember when Rodney Ascher made Room 237, nominally about hidden meanings in The Shining, but really about truth, narrative, and subjectivity? Would you believe me if I told you that You Can See Everything is only superficially about Elizabeth Holmes, that actually it's a meta-documentary about truth, narrative, and subjectivity? Let’s set aside the fact that Amanda Seyfried shows up to atone for her Hulu biopic and that her plotline is copied from The Act of Killing, which itself stole its main gimmick from some Cambodian guy’s movie about the Khmer Rouge. Here we have another postmodern prestige doc which either can't find something to say about its subject or thinks having a subject is gauche, so it throws up its hands and settles for a thematic focus on "unknowability" instead—not out of necessity, not because it’s about the Zodiac Killer and they can’t find him, but just because they think that kind of abstraction is high-minded. Every cliche is here: The filmmaker deliberately entangled with his subject, the film happily exposing its own artifice (because only dolts who believe in “objectivity” would try to hide that), the reflexive, flamboyantly meta structure which I guess is supposed to feel truth-coded, or remind you of truth and untruth in some way. Letterboxd users, who learned in college that truth is hopelessly mired in perspective, certainly appreciate these decisions and feel the movie is a “hall of mirrors,” but I found it boring and legible. I’ve already seen Capturing the Friedmans, Tabloid, F for Fake, Letter From Siberia, etc. I already know about “subjectivity.” I actually discovered it when I was a child and I began to experience the world. So yes, this is another The Ambiguity Is The Point movie. That’s why it's titled You Can See Everything—because you can’t. And that’s why some of the posters show Elizabeth Holmes but kind of blurry, because it’s about truth, which is also blurry. And if you think that’s mind-blowing then you will probably like the movie. Personally, I think the filmmakers are confusing an empirical problem with an epistemic one, so actually their theming doesn't line up, because a lot of their questions are in fact quite "knowable," but whatever

interpretability might be the most important scientific problem in the world right now, as I don't think we can solve alignment if we don't know what we're building. I think I have good news about it. I co-authored early work in mechanistic interpretability at OpenAI and came away pessimistic, because neural networks appeared to fold into arbitrary tangled knots. years later, I started openai's first large-scale automated interpretability project, finding about 2% of neurons legible with the primitive tools we had with modern agentic tools and a much closer look, the picture looks totally different. the vast majority in models up to trillions of parameters are legible, and their circuits beautiful. many famous examples of tangled neurons turned out to be misunderstood. The roadblocks I expected mostly aren't there. I now think ambitious interpretability will be solved by the time we need it most, and possibly quite soon, as automated scientists keep improving. it may be a bitter lesson for interpretability: the simple thing, at absurd scale, works already-clean.goodfire.com/

"AI agent deleted entire upcoming season of Swedish reality competition show called “The Challenge Sverige,” just weeks before the premiere," per FUTURISM

I didn’t chime in on this because a) I honestly didn’t care that much and b) there are usually two sides to these things. But the way this went, as best I can tell, is that Kelly Clarkson walked into this Brooklyn store, voluntarily looking a bit homeless, and inquired about a fake bird. In between helping a ton of other people, they told her the bird was not for sale but here is the artist’s info, he sells them for about $15,000. In the meantime, here is a $2,000 bird they DO offer. Which Clarkson took to mean, “You can’t afford our bougie bird that costs as much as a baby grand so here, take this pathetic $2,000 knock-off like good little poor.” (Which is a stupid interpretation all around because who but a rich person has $2k to drop on a fake bird? But okay.) Anyway, that was not the intended message, but she immediately walked out and put this little business on blast to her millions of followers who instantly swarmed like bees with zero additional information. I don’t give a crap whether Clarkson ends up with a fake bird or how much it costs. She can have a menagerie of $20,000 parakeets or she can whittle them herself out of sticks from her backyard, I don’t care. But I do care that so many people can be instantly riled up on social media to attack a potentially innocent person or business simply because their celebrity idol tells them to.

Bourgeois darling Paul Thomas Anderson strikes again, this time w a toothless, derivative, anti-revolutionary concert film devoted to saccharine young nepo-psyop Cameron Winter. In these trying times, Anderson chooses to mock liberatory aesthetics w grainy anesthetic 35mm slop.

Ben Affleck on Digger like high school bullying … you see it now with Digger a pretty ambitious interesting movie made by interesting people who have talent … if you punish movies that take risks … you’re gonna get a bunch of homogenized movies

Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Chris Sale give a tip of the cap to each other before squaring off in Game 3 🫡