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I let go of fanboying on what Hollywood "did to" the story and instead just decided to be thankful something I love was given a new medium / audience / interpretation... and voila! now I have two things to love.
It's still fun to point out where things could've been done differently, but instead of actually disliking the film(s) because of those things, it's just another mechanism that lets me talk to my friends about something. Much more fun than riding home in silence in any case. ;)
For me there are 2 issues
(1) I read the book. it was awesome. If the movie fails to deliver that awesomeness then it's really upsetting as it's ruining something great for everyone that didn't read the book / see the original. They're unlikely to go check the original. They're more likely to just think "That was dumb".
(2) When they change things so much that they arguably should not have used the name.
Why choose some existing fictional world/characters just to shit on them and make it something else? If you wanted to make something else, then pick a new name, make your own IP.
Not because the information is false, but because the act of choosing which facts to publish is itself an opinion. Once you accept that, you’re no longer talking about neutral data; you’re talking about the official position of the United States government, whether that was the intent or not. pro tip: I'm sure it was, esp during the Cold War(tm)
That creates problems, especially in diplomacy. Negotiation depends on what you don’t say as much as what you do. Publicly cataloging a country’s political structure, demographics, or internal conditions may feel benign, but it can complicate discussions that are already delicate, and sometimes existential.
It also gives away more than anyone would like to admit. It signals what we know, what we think we know, and what we’re willing to put our name behind. Even basic statistics like population or religious composition can become leverage or liabilities in the wrong context, and you can’t realistically scrub or redact them every time you enter into a diplomatic negotiation or whatever.
The core issue is simple: this isn’t a private research group or a tech company publishing an open dataset; it’s literally the largest intelligence agency (if you exclude NSA I think) of the United States government publicly describing other nations. That isn’t neutral.
Also, once an agency like the CIA is ideologically skewed, even subconsciously, objective facts become directional. Not by falsifying GDP or population, but by emphasizing governance scores, freedom indices, demographic categories, or economic structures in ways that subtly reinforce a worldview. That kind of torque is harder to detect and harder to challenge than obvious propaganda.
During the Cold War, that might have made sense. Actually, it probably makes sense all the time, but my guess is that the current administration thought (rightly or wrongly) that the editorial team was no longer objective, or they decided there were better avenues to get their message out there.
However, the fact that it no longer even maintained archives since the Biden administration (2020), though, says something else, at least to me: it says that the current admin was in agreement with the previous administration, which means it might have been a bi-partisan view that either it was no longer needed or (really, it seems) no longer wanted or at least valued by either administration.
1. It listed Taiwan under countries
2. It listed Burma even though it's called Myannma (as all my friends from Myannma introduce themselves)
No, the primary "cost" was artists having to fill a world with unlimited textures instead of just filling memory and then having to make due.
The constraint of "limited texture memory budget" also puts a constraint on how much work the artists can do. Remove that constraint lets artists do unlimited work. It might sound like a plus because "freedom!" but it turns into a minus trying to actually ship on time and at budget.
I get that wasn't the point of the article's "cost", but thought it was worth mentioning.
On the other hand, I'm afraid that if this did happen that FFMPEG frontend would look like a GNOME app and I would hate using it.
Want to generate a video, it's just a few lines of code. Want to connect the user's camera (with permission), it's just a few lines of code. Websockets? About 4 lines of code.
There could be 1000s of options for each of those but they mostly distilled it down to what most people need, and they're cross platform.
Joel Spolsky said (I'm paraphrasing) that everybody only uses 20% of a given program's features, but the problem is that everyone is using a different 20%, so you can't ship an "unbloated" version and expect it to still work for most people.
So it looks like you've built something really cool, but I have to ask what makes you think that the features that are personally important to you are the same features that other potential users need? Since this clearly seems to be something you're trying to create a business out of rather than just a personal hobby project. I'm curious how you went about customer research and market validation for the specific subset of features that you chose to develop?
Like lots of people prefer Trader Joes (limited selection) to a bigger super market
Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia, meaning it's not a primary source of facts but rather an aggregate of information published elsewhere.
[1] - some examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia - cites the factbook 4 times; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uzbekistan - cites it twice
This indeed puts human prompters in a position where their job is to set the goals, outline the vision, ask for the right things, ask critical questions, and to correct where needed.
Human contractors are a good analogy. Because they tend to come in without too much context into a new job. Their context is mainly what they've done before. But it takes time to get up to speed with whatever the customer is asking for and their context. People are slightly better at getting information out of other people. AI coding tools don't ask enough critical questions, yet. But that sounds fixable. The breakthroughs here are as much in the feedback loops and plumbing around the models as they are in the models themselves. It's all about getting the right information in and out of the context.
That situation is extremely uncommon for most development