Watching Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin (2015) is like watching a wuxia movie made by Tarkovsky. I’ll have to see it at least once more before I know precisely what I think about it, but it’s certainly one of the most gorgeous films I’ve ever seen. (Shot on film 🎥, hooray)
For people who want to understand our moment not just in terms of politics, but also in historical, moral, and spiritual terms, this essay by Mana Afsari is absolutely essential. (Also, essays like this are the very raison d’être of The Point.)
Note to self: Add chapter to Sayers biography:
The intersection of Dorothy L. Sayers’ detective fiction with advanced technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR) symbolizes more than just a transformation in storytelling—it represents a significant shift with profound implications for the environment, humanity, and the economy. The adaptation of Sayers’ works into immersive VR experiences and the use of AI to emulate her writing style are not simply novelties; they are harbingers of wider societal changes.
Redefining narratives through VR and AI fundamentally changes how we engage with literature and history. By creating interactive environments such as a digitally replicated 1920s London, we ignite a multisensory approach to education and cultural preservation.
Continuing to experiment with shooting on 35mm film, this time Fujicolor 200. The process of experimentation could be very long….
Timothy B. Lee: “The vibe in the AI industry today feels a lot like the self-driving industry in 2018.” A compelling comparison.
If I need something that does have answers that can be definitely wrong in important ways, and where I’m not an expert in the subject, or don’t have all the underlying data memorised and would have to repeat all the work myself to check it, then today, I can’t use an LLM for that at all. […]
Of course, these models don’t do ‘right’. They are probabilistic, statistical systems that tell you what a good answer would probably look like. They are not deterministic systems that tell you what the answer is. They do not ‘know’ or ‘understand’ — they approximate. A ‘better’ model approximates more closely, and it may be dramatically better at one category of question than another (though we may not know why, or even understand what the categories are). But that still is not the same as providing a ‘correct’ answer.