News You Can Bruise for 2023 November

Thu Nov 02 2023 16:09 October Film Roundup:

His Excellency (1952): This film seems a bit spiteful with its "fine, YOU run the colonies, ya lousy working class" attitude. It's also not very funny. An Ealing disappointment.
The Admirable Crichton (1957): Another class-conscious comedy of manners, less realistic but funnier than His Excellency. There's an act break in this movie where British people decide to upend class conventions because the alternative is certain death, and I gotta say, that act break is doing a lot of work.
When Harry Met Sally (1989): Sumana and I both loved this canonical rom-com, from the serially foiled meet-cutes to the heartwarming ending. Carrie Fisher is a hoot in a supporting role and really sells her comedy; she does something tiny like dog-ear a corner of an index card and I crack up.
Contact (1997): This is a good movie but I thought it was way too slow. Robert Zemeckis probably would have paced it a little faster if the very famous and beloved screenwriters hadn't been so heavily involved. As it is, it ends up at two-and-a-half hours. Who has time for that? Movies should be 90 minutes long!
I dunno, it's probably fine. The early scenes in Arecibo and at the VLA are the ones that could most easily be cut, and those were quite fun. Lots of driving up in Jeeps like this is Jurassic Park. Contact also really shoved in my face how heavily Hollywood movies use old family photos as a narrative device. I knew about this before, of course, but now I can't let it pass by. My mind always fixes on it. However, I've watched a grand total of two movies since then, so maybe it'll fade.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023): I watched this on an airplane, which is realistically the only way I was gonna see it, but the tiny screen foiled the main reason I wanted to see this movie, which was to catch all the little background references. But after skimming a few "We Found Every Easter Egg In The Super Mario Bros. Movie And Put A Bunch of Ads On The Page" websites, I don't think I missed very much. I did like the Mario Kart 64 speedrunning reference and the doomer Luma.
Unfortunately this movie has a running time of 92 minutes, which is way too short for on a boring plane ride, so I also watched...
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023): Yes, two and a half hours of nonsensical action. The perfect length for a movie. The opening set piece was great. The artifact was great. Evil Werner von Braun was great...ly evil. The ending was great. Not the very end, that sucked, but the ending Indy thought he was getting before the final fake-out. In between: nonsensical action as the miles slipped away beneath my feet.

Wed Nov 22 2023 14:45 The Hallucinating Detective: I've put up my 2023 NaNoGenMo project, The Hallucinating Detective. A simulated murder mystery environment is used to coax a variety of large language models into playing detective. Which models will have the guts to actually investigate the mystery, rather than continually saying "Hey, I'm just a text generator, don't ask me!"?

Surprisingly, the answer is—primarily—models trained on something other than English prose. Of the twenty-four stories in The Hallucinating Detective, I think the most interesting is "The Adventure of the Rapid-Fire Squirrel". The rift-coder model, trained on Python and Javascript repositories and programming problems, starts off thinking that figuring out whodunit is as simple as writing a solve function, but then starts interrogating suspects and exploring the imaginary crime scene. Many of the other models can't get past asking the suspects why they just said whatever (randomly selected) thing they just said.

I tried to vary up the prose styles in the prompts, from hard-boiled to comedic, but rarely did a model pick up on the request. I will say that em_german_mistral—a model presumably trained on and designed to output German text—not only produced very good English, but picked up that Sherlock Holmes could be a character in a Sherlock Holmes-style mystery: see "Sherlock Holmes and the Draining Pen Affair".

Finally, I want to highlight a beautiful, melancholy poem I discovered in the random Project Gutenberg selections that drive the dialogue in The Hallucinating Detective: "To His Brother Hsing-Chien, Who was in Tung-Ch'uan", written in the year 815 by Bai Juyi.

You are parted from me by six thousand leagues;
In another world, under another sky.
Of ten letters, nine do not reach;
What can I do to open my sad face?
Thirsty men often dream of drink;
Hungry men often dream of food.
Since Spring came, where do my dreams lodge?
Ere my eyes are closed, I have travelled to Tung-ch'uan.