While the crowd at sxsw2024 booing a sizzle reel of people either promising the beauty of the future “AI” will bring or claiming it to be “without alternative” is funny and went viral for all the right reasons, this event speaks to a deeper shift in perception.
“For the buzziest tech of the moment to get shouted down at *SXSW* speaks volumes about the scale and nature of the animosity generative AI has amassed. The tech is seen, here, as exploitative by tastemakers and *by technologists*.”
But I’d go further: It’s not just the public perception that OpenAI has been trying to plant in our collective understanding is falling apart due to the actions of that strange company, I think the actual narrative of “AI” is untangling.
Because where are all the promised gains in efficiency? Where is the better world? All we see is a wasteful technology that’s propped up by VC and Microsoft money that’s easily detected as a way to further centralize our digital infrastructures while laying our digital spaces to waste.
After having played with ChatGPT many people don’t really integrate it into their practices because these systems are just not that good and if you care about quality anything after “quick sketches in the beginning of the process” is unthinkable.
Some systems labeled “AI” today will stick around. Especially the non-generative stuff (for image processing, object detection, pattern recognition in data streams, heuristics to detect errors in work products, etc.) but a lot of the generative “AI” field is just spam creation. And it’s actually making some – especially creative things – harder to achieve.
Famous film critic Roger Ebert once said “The Muse visits during the act of creation, not before.” and the booing is people coming back to realizing this simple fact. You are not creative and then create something, you become creative by working on something, creativity is a byproduct of work.
In this way “AI” is deeply dehumanizing: Making the spaces and opportunities for people to grow and be human smaller and smaller. Applying a straitjacket of past mediocrity to our minds and spirits.
And that is what is being booed: The salespeople of mediocrity who’ve made it their mission to speak lies from power. The lie that only tech can and will save us. The lie that a bit of statistics and colonial, mostly white, mostly western data is gonna create a brilliant future. The lie that we have no choice, no alternatives.
"In this way “AI” is deeply dehumanizing: Making the spaces and opportunities for people to grow and be human smaller and smaller. Applying a straitjacket of past mediocrity to our minds and spirits.
And that is what is being booed: The salespeople of mediocrity who’ve made it their mission to speak lies from power. The lie that only tech can and will save us. The lie that a bit of statistics and colonial, mostly white, mostly western data is gonna create a brilliant future. The lie that we have no choice, no alternatives."
Although Los Angeles-based artist Lily Clark incorporates stone, wood, and metal into her sculptures, she considers water her primary medium. One of her more recent works, “Dew Point,” explores the supple, plump shape of the life-giving liquid as it condenses and succumbs to gravity. A boxy sculpture with a wide but shallow depression, the superhydrophobic ceramic piece pushes individual droplets to the surface seemingly from nowhere. Each ultimately tumbles down into a slender slit in the middle of the form, before returning to repeat the cycle.
A lot of people who study the residential real estate market think this is a big deal:
The National Association of Realtors has agreed to a landmark settlement that would eliminate real estate brokers’ long-standing commissions, commonly of up to 6% of the purchase price.
Instead, home buyers and sellers would be able to negotiate fees with their agents upfront. If the $418 million legal agreement is approved by a federal court, consumer advocates predict the ranks of real estate agents will thin, further driving down commission prices.
“For years, anti-competitive rules in the real estate industry have financially harmed millions,” said Benjamin Brown, managing partner at the Cohen Milstein law firm and one of the settlement’s negotiators. “This settlement bring sweeping reforms that will help countless American families.”l
One thing that has long puzzled me is why real estate estate commissions have seemed largely impervious to the information technology revolution wrought by the Internet, that has greatly reduced the economic costs of so many other agent-driven transactions (When’s the last time you used a travel agent for example?).
A generation ago, sellers and buyers had no practical way to get more than the vaguest sense of the price structure of the housing market, except by using real estate agents. The various multiple listing services were completely controlled by the brokerage industry, there was no way to get a real sense of a property except by actually going into it, etc.
All that has of course changed radically, and in addition the real price of residential real estate has skyrocketed in many areas, and to some extent across the country as a whole. Yet the 6% (or thereabouts) commission structure has largely survived all this.
Perhaps this lawsuit marks the beginning of the end for that.
Bill Skarsgård takes on the role of Eric Draven in the Lionsgate reboot of The Crow.
The 1994 cult classic film The Crow turns 30 this spring, so it's as good a time as any to drop the first trailer for the long-in-development reboot directed by Rupert Sanders (Snow White and the Huntsman, Ghost in the Shell). Bill Skarsgård takes on the starring role made famous by the late Brandon Lee.
(Spoilers for the original 1994 film below.)
Based on a 1989 limited comic series by James O'Barr, The Crow was directed by Alex Proyas. The film starred Brandon Lee as Eric Draven, a rock musician in crime-ridden Detroit. He and his fiancée, Shelly Webster (Sofia Shinas), are brutally murdered on Devil's Night by a gang of thugs on the orders of a crime boss named Top Dollar (Michael Wincott). A year later, Eric is resurrected, dons black-and-white face paint, and proceeds to take his bloody revenge before returning to his grave. Alas, Lee was accidentally killed by a prop gun during the final days of shooting; the film was completed with the help of Lee's stunt double (Chad Stahelski, who launched the John Wick franchise) and some clever special effects.
Despite the shadow of Lee's tragic death, The Crow went on to gross $94 million against its modest $23 million budget and establish itself as a cult classic. Sure, the dialogue was occasionally hokey, and most of the characters were pretty one-dimensional, but there was no denying Lee's star power and the striking visual energy, augmented by a killer soundtrack. There were three sequels focused on different characters with none of the original cast members, but none of those were as successful as the original.
Plans for a reboot first emerged in late 2008, but the development process proved rocky. O'Barr himself initially expressed pessimism about any reboot but later warmed to the prospect. As recently as November 2019, Proyas remained adamantly opposed: "It's not just a movie that can be remade, it's one man's [Lee's] legacy," he said at the time. "And it should be treated with that level of respect."
The project cycled through directors, stars, screenwriters, and so forth for more than a decade before Sanders signed on as director in 2022. Along with Skarsgård, the cast includes FKA Twigs as Shelly and Isabella Wei as Zadie. Danny Huston, Laura Birn, Sami Bouajila, and Jordan Bolger will also appear in as-yet-unnamed roles. Per the official premise:
Soulmates Eric Draven (Skarsgård) and Shelly Webster (FKA Twigs) are brutally murdered when the demons of her dark past catch up with them. Given the chance to save his true love by sacrificing himself, Eric sets out to seek merciless revenge on their killers, traversing the worlds of the living and the dead to put the wrong things right.
The fact that Eric apparently has a chance to save Shelly by sacrificing himself is a marked departure from the 1994 film and in keeping with Sanders' stated desire to let the love story be the primary driver for his reboot. The trailer opens by introducing us to the young lovers, moving quickly from their first meeting to the consummation of their love. They're basically two broken people who find happiness in each other—until Shelly witnesses a murder that results in the couple being brutally and fatally attacked. Eric comes back as The Crow, bent on revenge, even as he's "running out of time to save her."
Eric Draven (Bill Skarsgård) falls in love with Shelly (FKA Twigs). [credit:
YouTube/Lionsgate ]
Look, the trailer seems perfectly fine. Skarsgård is a phenomenal acting talent, but while Danny Huston generally makes a great villain, one rather misses the wry humor of Wincott's Goth sadist Top Dollar. The truth is, this reboot could be a tough sell to longtime fans of the original (like me), although it's encouraging that the director seems to have won over O'Barr with his decision to hark back to the source material.
Sanders is very much aware of this challenge and is taking pains to emphasize his deep regard for Lee's legacy. "What Alex Proyas did with The Crow in 1994—and Brandon Lee's iconic embodiment of that character—will forever impact that generation and others to follow," he said in a statement accompanying the trailer's release. "It expressed its time in a very specific, music-driven vision." Sanders added that his own vision strives to bring The Crow (including the original book) to a new generation of young people, calling the character of Eric Draven/The Crow "the original anti-superhero" who grapples with universal themes of "love, grief, and rage."
Skarsgård also issued a statement that he has long been a fan of the original film; it was Sanders' vision that convinced him to star in the reboot. "[Sanders] wanted to completely reimagine the story and the character and tailor it towards a modern audience," he said. "It’s a character that I know many revere and have a strong connection to—he is unlike any I’ve ever taken on before. I felt a responsibility to Eric’s story and endeavored to stay true to the spirit of the source material."
The Crow was originally scheduled for release on June 7, 2024. But the trailer tells us it's coming "this summer," which is vague. I guess we'll see.
PC enthusiasts who have been around the block a couple of times might remember the stretch from the '90s into the early 2000s when ever-increasing clock speeds were Intel's primary metric for increasing processor performance. AMD participated, too—it managed to beat Intel to 1 GHz in what was considered a major coup at the time—but Intel's Pentium 4 processors specifically prioritized boosting clock speeds at the cost of instructions-per-clock.
Today, the company is ever so briefly revisiting those old days with the $689 Core i9-14900KS, its newest flagship desktop processor. The i9-14900KS can hit speeds of 6.2 GHz out of the box, a small push past the last-generation i9-13900KS and the i9-14900K that topped out at 6.0 GHz. Like other recent high-end Intel desktop chips, it also features Intel's "Adaptive Boost Technology," which will allow the chip to increase its power consumption and performance until it hits 100° Celsius.
This kind of clock speed boosting is both impressive and impractical. On the one hand, Intel has managed to push clock speeds even higher without changing its architecture or manufacturing process, a culmination of years of iteration across the 12th-, 13th-, and 14th-generation processor families. On the impractical side, the i9-14900KS can use a ridiculous amount of power to achieve marginally faster performance, reminding us of the laws of physics that helped shut down the megahertz wars in the first place.
Intel's specs list a special 320 W TDP level for the i9-14900KS, significantly higher than the 253 W TDP for the Core i9-14900K (though manufacturers often ignore Intel's specs here, allowing CPUs to run with effectively unlimited TDPs and relying on thermal throttling to keep processors from frying themselves).
In terms of real-world power usage, testing from Tom's Hardware demonstrates some pretty huge gaps between the amount of power used and the amount of performance gained. In one Blender rendering benchmark, the i9-14900KS consumed 31 percent more power than the i9-14900K for a less than 1 percent performance gain. The gap isn't always quite that large, but the power usage increase is generally disproportionate to the performance increase.
These kinds of impractical bragging-rights-only processors probably won't go away, but this could be the end of the line for Intel's Core i9 branding, the 14th-gen Core processor lineup, the LGA 1700 processor socket, and the Raptor Lake processor architecture. Never say never—Intel does love to rebrand and reuse old silicon to launch quote-unquote new products—but current rumors suggests that the new LGA 1851 socket and next-gen "Arrow Lake" processors will become Intel's flagship desktop platform at some point in the next year or so.