Trying very hard to maintain my calm.
☑️ Hollywood stars, politicians pay tribute to Rob Reiner and his wife following their shocking deaths
Reiner, 78, was found dead alongside wife, Michele Singer Reiner, 68, at their home in Los Angeles on Sunday.
https://www.<…
I have the distinct impression that we could use most American "sci-fi" TV series (which seem to have a kink for post-apocalyptical scenographies) as a diagnostic tool for the autism spectrum.
For a moment, let's leave aside the tons of right-wing propaganda "hidden" in plain sight, and their excessive reliance on boring & worn out tropes (religious & cultish bullshit, irrational lack of communication & excess of anti-social behaviour, all vs all, ultra-low-iq characters*, psychotic & irrationally treacherous characters*, ultra-inconsistent character development used to justify "unexpected" plot twists, rampant anti-intellectualism...).
What could be used as a diagnosis tool is the incredible amount of strong inconsistencies that we can find in them**. It throws me out of the story every single time; and I suspect that it takes a certain kind of "uncommon personality" to feel that way about it, because otherwise these series wouldn't be so popular without real widespread criticism beyond cliches like "too slow", "it loses steam towards the end of the season", etc.
Many of those plots start in a gold mine of potentially powerful ideas... yet they consistently provide us with dirt & clay instead, while side-lining the "good stuff" as if it was too complicated for the populace.
Do you feel strongly about it? Do you feel like you can't verbalize it without being criticised as "too negative", or "too picky", or an "unbearable snob"? Do you wonder why it seems like nobody around shares your discomfort with these stories?
* : I feel this is a bit like the chicken & egg problem. Has the media conditioned part of American society to behave like dumb psychopaths as if it was something "natural", or is the media reflecting what was already there? Also, could we use other societies as models for these stories... just for a change? Please?
** : Just a tiny example: a "brilliant" engineer who builds a bridge out of fence parts and who doesn't bother to perform the most basic tests before trying it in a real setting and suffer the consequences: the bridge failing and her falling into the void. Bonus points for anyone who knows what I'm talking about.
Die Zukunft der #Synchronbranche steht auf dem Spiel.
#KI-Technologien ermöglichen kostengünstige #Stimmklone und automatisierte
Source: ChatGPT has ~900M weekly active users; Sensor Tower: Gemini MAUs grew ~30% to 346M between August and November while ChatGPT's rose ~5% to 810M (Sri Muppidi/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/chatgpt-near…
Incarcerated Welsh rock singer Ian Watkins #Lostprophets killed in another UK prison attack behind bars, in 2023 he'd been stabbed and held hostage by inmates. He was 48 and had spent over a decade in prison thus far after a 2013 drug bust found pedophiliac materials on his electronic devices, and after police investigation, he admitted to a string of sex offences – including the attempted rape of…
Chronologically Consistent Generative AI
Songrun He, Linying Lv, Asaf Manela, Jimmy Wu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11677 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.11677
Jane Fonda is joining forces with more than 500 celebrities and Hollywood heavyweights to defend free speech.
The membership roll already includes scores of famous actors like Jamie Lee Curtis, Viola Davis, Whoopi Goldberg, Pedro Pascal, Natalie Portman and Michael Keaton.
Successful directors like Spike Lee and Ben Stiller have signed on, along with singer and actress Barbra Streisand and pop star and songwriter Billie Eilish.
Fonda, a star who has championed progressive cau…
No Sign of a Magnetar Remnant Following the Kilonova-Producing Long GRB 211211A $\sim 1.7~$Years Later
Genevieve Schroeder (Cornell), Ben Margalit, Brian D. Metzger, Wen-fai Fong, Benjamin P. Gompertz, Kate D. Alexander, Edo Berger, Tanmoy Laskar, Gavin P. Lamb, Andrew Levan, Charles D. Kilpatrick, Jillian C. Rastinejad
https://arxiv.org/a…