> But today I sometimes feel like our culture is locked in time.
People say this often and I agree that it does feel that way.
They particularly underline "they are constantly remaking old movies!" which is also true.
However, this is not a new phenomenon. As someone who loves movie trivia, IMDB is full of "this 1980s film was actually a remake of this other 1947 film". An older example: the Victorians (~1837 - ~1901) were obsessed with the ancient Romans. This was during a time when the telegraph was connecting the world and people could talk to humans, instantly, on the other side of the world.
The Wizard of Oz (the one you know of) was a remake.
The Thing (the one you know of—though the other had a longer title anyway) was a remake.
The version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers with Donald Sutherland (so, the one with that meme-able image of him pointing toward the camera) was a remake.
(Franchises? There are some from like the 40s that had a dozen or so entries over the next couple decades)
Many remake examples from almost all periods of filmmaking.
There were tons of remakes of silent films after talkies came about, then another wave of remakes of jankier-effects stagier-acting-style movies from the ‘40s and ‘50s when effects got way better and naturalistic acting took over in the 70s (plus some of these were remaking black & white to color).
> The Wizard of Oz (the one you know of) was a remake.
I'm not sure it's quite fair to call the 1939 film a "remake". It was one in a line of adaptations of the book, and isn't otherwise really related to the other adaptations. It isn't the first, or the last, but it is the most famous.
The difference is between "I can tell this story better/more engaging/more entertaining/more realistic" vs "let's cash in on the success this movie had five years ago"
The Wizard of Oz was a new interpretation of Baum's original story. They put enormous effort into making the new film better than other interpretations, of which there were several. Which is why it's a successful, beloved classic!
The same really can't be said of this week's Marvel/DC remake of whatever they made a few years ago. It's just about being a cash grab and nothing else.
P.S. If you've never heard of the sequel 'Return to Oz', do yourself a favor and watch it without doing any research. Just go in straight blind, it really enhances the experience. If you drink, keep a bottle nearby, you'll need it.
>The Thing (the one you know of—though the other had a longer title anyway) was a remake.
I think it's more accurate to say they're both based off the same 1938 novella: "Who Goes There?" by John W. Campbell. The 1951 movie "The Thing from Another World" is a very loose adaptation because it omits the most important plot point of the shapeshifting alien imitating people. The 1982 movie "The Thing" is a closer adaptation that includes it. This makes it a much better movie even if you ignore the improved special effects, because the drama of the characters not knowing who's really the Thing is a big part of the appeal.
Oh yeah one of those “memento mori” things for me is browsing shelves in flea markets with tons of 1890s-1930s popular fiction and appreciating how very many of the authors are now totally unknown. You can do something similar with bestseller lists by year on Wikipedia, go back far enough and even for someone with pretty deep recognition of historical authors it soon becomes a lot of “who? Who? Who?”
> I imagine there are probably also films that everyone saw back then but are unheard of today.
Even sticking to relatively critically-acclaimed stuff it’s pretty easy to land on films that probably fewer than 1% of people in the Anglosphere (assuming initial popularity in that market) have seen, in the silent era, without going far off the beaten path. Go slightly farther and it’s likely just you and a very small number of other extreme film nerds among the living who’ve ever watched it.
Take DW Griffith, a giant of a director. Got what, 20+ surviving feature films of 40ish made? How many people alive have seen more than three of them? It’s a small number. Hell, it’s not a large number that have watched even one.
Shout out to Pinboard for making bookmarking pages and adding notes incredibly easy.
They have a bookmarklet that sits on my bookmarks toolbar and if I like a page/tweet/video etc I just hit the "Add pin", enter some tags and hit enter.
This works so well that I went through and bookmarked and tagged all of my LinkedIn connections as well (inspired by a post from Derek Sivers [1]).
People are generally amazed at how quickly I can go from talking about a subject to "oh, I have this article you would love" to "here it is!"
On my 32GB Ryzen desktop (recently upgraded from 16GB before the RAM prices went up another +40%), did the same setup of llama.cpp (with Vulkan extra steps) and also converged on Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct (also Q4_K_M quantization)
On the model choice: I've tried latest gemma, ministral, and a bunch of others. But qwen was definitely the most impressive (and much faster inference thanks to MoE architecture), so can't wait to try Qwen3.5-35B-A3B if it fits.
I've no clue about which quantization to pick though ... I picked Q4_K_M at random, was your choice of quantization more educated?
Quant choice depends on your vram, use case, need for speed, etc. For coding I would not go below Q4_K_M (though for Q4, unsloth XL or ik_llama IQ quants are usually better at the same size). Preferably Q5 or even Q6.
A friend of mine was the head lab technician at a large prestigious research university.
I always assumed that the research being done at these schools was done by top tier scientists with grad students who cared deeply about the research, had excellent attention to detail and impeccable scientific process.
From talking to my friend, I realized:
- most of the grad students were people who didn't want to get a corporate job
- they wanted to extend their college experience as long as possible
- the absolute lack of discipline and rigor they showed to their experiments was astounding
- the lead academic was usually someone passionate and dedicated and often had to "herd cats" to get anything done ON TOP OF coordinating funding, lab space etc
Really opened my eyes to "how the sausage is made" when it comes to research.
Many years ago (early 2000s) I worked for a firm that would help identify people who were doing "pump and dump" stock scams on Yahoo Finance message boards.
Step 1 was to scrape all of their posts into a database.
Step 2 was to have a human analyst review all of the posts for clues about who that person was
It was amazing that you could easily figure out:
- if they were at work or home from when they posted (9am to 5pm vs 6pm to 1am)
- what city they were in (based on sports teams, mentioning local landmarks etc0
- roughly what career they had
- their age based on cultural references
and mostly b/c they would drop a crumb of information here and there over months. They probably forgot about all of these individual events but when reading all of the posts in a few hours, the details became pretty evident. You get enough of these details and you can start to venn diagram people down to a few 100 likely candidates and then use LexisNexus style tools to narrow it down even further.
Given the above, it doesn't surprise me that LLMs can do the same but at high speed and across multiple sites etc.
I recently decided to play around with this, given... well my profile... and I will say that Gemini was good at zeroing in on who I was, but for whatever reason would refuse to stay my name.
Not OP but I have experience in private sector here - Deanonymization in private sectors is used by anti-fraud or brand protection systems. For example, in brand protection we identify same IP/scam infringer across multiple store fronts and then we can shut them down directly or get more certainty on their other posts. i.e. if it's a known infringer their scam likelyhood score goes up on all of their listings. So deanonymization doesn't have to point to exact real identity - just enough certainty to tie multiple entries together and then other systems can take it further like OP's manual review tho LLMs can obviously do a lot these days.
> Going to play devil's advocate and say that they make minimal to no revenue off of their website so it being down is not a huge deal.
How much revenue they make doesn't matter if it impacts users. Prospective users need to be able to see what they are getting and download and verify ISOs from the team.
I despise ZorinOS for what they are doing in many ways that violate software licenses, but one thing they got right is charging users and being somewhat accountable to their userbase.
I'd discourage claiming any biological process is "solved."
But to your point: No--AlphaFold is an amazing machine learning approach to predicting protein structure but Folding@Home is still immensely useful for simulating how proteins fold up over a timescale. They are/will be complimentary methods.
no, alphafold is basically just a static structure predictor. folding@home explicitly models the folding process (the journey, not just the destination).
I ran an account on Instagram that "curated" posts from other people (basically reposted images but before the current reposting functionality).
The AI generated images are so prevalent that I resorted to reposting images only if there were from 2022 or earlier (sure, filters existed then too).
The whole experience reminds me of the story about "pre-radiation steel" [0] and how future generations won't be able to trust any image after 2024. Then again, we have large amounts of literature and stories from ancient history or medieval times that are impossible to verify as true so maybe this isn't a new problem.
People say this often and I agree that it does feel that way.
They particularly underline "they are constantly remaking old movies!" which is also true.
However, this is not a new phenomenon. As someone who loves movie trivia, IMDB is full of "this 1980s film was actually a remake of this other 1947 film". An older example: the Victorians (~1837 - ~1901) were obsessed with the ancient Romans. This was during a time when the telegraph was connecting the world and people could talk to humans, instantly, on the other side of the world.
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