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Farewell my Concubine (1996) 🇨🇳

The doomed relationship between a beautiful male China opera actor who is forced into a feminine role and his fellow star. Set against a backdrop of regime changes from the Republic Era, Japanese occupation to the modern PRC.

Gabbeh (1998) 🇮🇷 🇹🇯

Named after a type of Persian rug- the art form through which we experience a girl’s life, from her family’s nomadic culture to her romance and marriage.

The Silence (1996) 🇮🇷 🇹🇯

A blind boy who repairs instruments sees the world through music. Explores concepts of Sufism (Islamic mysticism) as seen in Rumi’s poetry. (Same director as above)

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring（2003)🇰🇷

A young monk lives with his elderly master in a floating temple on a lake. We follow the seasons of his life, told via Buddhist symbolism and philosophy.

Death of a Beauty/ 美人之死 (1986) 🇨🇳

Based on an Uyghur folktale. A woman who was once renowned for her beauty now lives in an old castle, hiding her burned face even as the prince who loves her searches for her.

On the Silver Globe 🇵🇱

Surreal sci-fi film about space travelers who crash on a primitive planet, starting a religion among the inhabitants as divine figures even as they long for the heaven that is old earth. A ‘parody’ of the origins of the Abrahamic faiths(?)

Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.

And so on.

The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.

But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.

If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.

But they wouldn't understand any of it.

That's ChatGPT.

And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.

But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.

https://wheelofnames.com/kch-gkt

this is a really really cool idea! Thanks!!!

You can't do this for a week!

The search engine calculates a score that aggressively favors text-heavy websites, and punishes those that have too many modern web design features.

If you are looking for fact, this is almost certainly the wrong tool. If you are looking for serendipity, you’re on the right track. When was the last time you just stumbled onto something interesting, by the way?

I explained very clearly to the manager my issue with the meat section not having the price tags listed, and they claimed it was only going to be for the meat, since meat is by weight, and the price of each item is printed on the packs of each item.

Sure. That’s how they get their foot in the door. Fast forward not even two weeks, and here we are:

Bar codes. No prices, no item descriptions. No price stickers on the individual items. Heck, not even the name of the item that is SUPPOSED to be there.

No. The only way to see the price is to scan it on your phone app, which is also recording what you looked at recently, as a way of gauging what you might be looking for in the future.

So here’s what we’re gonna do gang:

Every time you go into a store that has implemented these price-less tags:

Take 1-3 items up to the cash register. Ask the cashier for the price, or hit the price check item on the self checkout, which will likely call over the attendant.

Express that you didn’t actually want it, you just couldn’t see on the shelf how much it was.

POLITELY, AND WITH A THANK YOU FOR THE PRICE CONFIRMATION, Give the items to the cashier or attendant to put back.

When they inevitably try to push the app, politely decline. If pressed for why not, say you don’t want to have to carry your phone in-hand the whole time you are shopping in order to see how much things cost. (Not having cell service or data to use the app is NOT a valid excuse, as stores already often have complimentary WiFi AND more stores will provide WiFi rather than give up on this push for surveillance pricing)

If it’s a shelf-stable item, the cashier will have to set it aside, taking up room in their limited operating space, and eventually pass it off to someone to put in a holding area to put back later. If it’s a fridge/freezer item, it might have to get tossed due to food product sale regulations.

In either case, you are making it a pain in the ass for them to have these digital bar codes. Tie up the checkouts. Give the employees more busywork that the company has to pay them to do. Hurt their bottom line having to toss the pint of ice cream you carried around in your cart for 20 minutes before giving it back to the cashier.