mozz

mozz, 4 days ago

Hey, so what do you guys think for a format?

My thought was:

• Make a thread once a week with upcoming releases that week (maybe highlight ones that are >= 80% on RT in the title)
• Maybe make a separate thread, like once per day, for ones with >= 80% RT?

Personally for me, I feel like I would prefer to have separate threads for highly-rated movies; I feel like the generic amalgam of what's-coming-out probably won't be as useful / popular as separate threads for individual good movies that are coming out.

What do you think?

@Tenthrow

mozz, 4 days ago

Right now I am just scraping the IMDB and RT public-facing pages -- there is an API for both, but they're both behind some sort of weirdness that I don't feel like dealing with. (Side note when did the internet get so frickin weird? I expected IMDB to be, IDK, open. Hey look -- "Since 1998, it has been owned and operated by IMDb.com, Inc., a subsidiary of Amazon" dude fuck the modern internet this is a bunch of crap)

Anyway

Be that as it may, I think just to have something that fires up once a week, figures out release schedules and schedules posts for the coming week, and then if something weird happens and it breaks because it's based on HTML parsing crap, then it won't be a huge inconvenience to fix it. That would be my feeling. Unless you know of a better place to grab the data from?

And yeah different release schedules for different countries is an issue, they're pretty different sometimes and making it just be US-centric doesn't sound like the way. I hadn't really gotten to tackling any of that because I didn't know what to do... but now thinking about it, here's what I think:

• There's a weekly "upcoming releases" post. A place to start for that could be having a list of everything coming out for the coming week or two for each of a few major regions. So you can skip to your region and see what's going on. Then, for each release, it has a link to the most recent comments thread relating to each movie, and a link to the RT page and what the RT rating is.
• If there's a movie that's coming out that doesn't yet have a thread discussing it, and it's above a certain score threshold on RT, then it makes one. That way there's always some kind of thread that it can link back to.

Side note, apparently RT is saying there's a "Run Lola Run" theatrical re-release coming soon, but the current design wouldn't post it, because it's not listed on IMDB with a release date. I wasn't planning on addressing that for any kind of first cut but if that kind of thing happens often it might be worth addressing in some fashion; that's honestly more interesting to me than most of the actual new releases this month.

LMK your thinking

mozz, 4 days ago

Interesting... I wasn't planning on dealing with that kind of disparity (because by the time it's released and it has an audience score it's already dropped off the upcoming-releases radar). But maybe if a movie has a high tomatometer and doesn't have a thread yet, it makes one?

mozz, 4 days ago

As weird as it sounds, Facebook Marketplace is actually really good last I checked for a lot of the buying and selling aspect that Craigslist used to be good for

I think it still exists within a happy medium wherein the site owners are paying enough attention that most of the blatant scammers can get chased away, but not so much attention that they start trying to make money off it and ruin it

mozz, 4 days ago

One of the really notable things about war is that it’s so rare (if you aren’t the US military or else actively engaged in some ongoing conflict), and the rate of people dying and having to be replaced with brand new people is so high, that almost all the time it’s being done for real life-or-death stakes by people who are learning on the job as they go and have no real experience in what they are doing.

A lot of things about military decisions and events don’t completely make sense why they happened the way they do, until you imagine a whole airline being run by people most of whom it’s their first week on the job, and then you say oh okay I get it now; that’s why that happened that way.

mozz, 4 days ago

Is this a trick question

mozz, 4 days ago

I want to hear what AI experts I already think of as qualified (Yann LeCun or Rob Miles) think of this bill

@computerphile

Or can anyone who’s still on Twitter just ask them?

mozz, 4 days ago

Greta Thunberg talks about it in her book - if the bathtub is overflowing in your house and water is spilling across the floor everywhere, step 1 for most people is to turn off the water. Yes sure it is fine to look for towels and buckets to try to contain the damage (and I don’t even disagree with you that it’ll be needed), but that also assumes that they’ll work and there will be political support to deploy them at scale, instead of mustering up the political support to turn the fucking taps down since at this point that’s clearly needed and is relatively speaking much much easier.

mozz, 4 days ago

It’s honestly most akin to an AI model over optimizing for the trained outcome even when it turns out it was misaligned from the good outcome we wanted.

They certainly don’t want their grandchildren to inhabit a barely-livable hellscape instead of the paradise world they were born into, but they’ve been optimizing for money for so long that it’s baked in now, and it’s so so easy to just say, well it’s probably not a big deal, or I don’t think the science is really all that dire in its predictions, or oh well someone else will probably figure it out. And so, every year, we keep setting records for “production”.

mozz, 5 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

I know nothing about the guy, but I just skimmed over about 30 minutes of this and I can't tell what the hell he's talking about. As far as I can tell he's just talking in a funny cadence and listing people he really likes and from time to time touching real lightly on the idea that America does bad things sometimes.

Contrast that with (I just picked a random video from Youtube) Fred Hampton talking for 5 minutes and making simple, coherent, powerful points (among them hilariously enough being "we gonna have to do more than talk.")

I'm not trying to sit in judgement of West just because I watched one talk and didn't get anything from it. But I watched one talk and I didn't get anything from it. Does anyone have like a little TL;DR on what Cornel West believes and wants to make happen in the country?

mozz, 5 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

And then he grabbed the reporter by the front of his shirt with both hands, pulled him close, reeling in the fabric by twisting his fists, and sneered at him, inches from his face.

"And what are you going to do?" he asked, steadily, his voice quiet but with a hard edge of menace. His eyes were blazing. When there wasn't a reply, he suddenly dropped his arm back, and hit the other man's guts, hard, with one dark massive fist. As the reporter collapsed over coughing and flailing, backing up, Thomas boomed loudly, "I asked you a question, boy! I said what the fuck are you going to DO about it?"

The hapless man was occupied with gasping for breath, until Thomas started approaching him again, and he suddenly cried, "Nothing! I'm not... the one in charge of it, what would.. would I even do? What do you even mean?" He was still doubled over.

And then Thomas stopped, and broke into a broad, malicious grin, looking down at him. "That's right. You're not gonna do a God. Damned. Thing."

"Now get out."

mozz, 5 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

Dude

Forget 2 divisions, are we gonna forget about the whole Ribbentrop thing entirely, or what

mozz, 5 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

Until I read the comments I 100% assumed that he assaulted this girl to some level and she hit him in the head real hard like maybe with some sort of object.

I have no idea whether it was that, or whether he was just too embarrassed to get out of bed for 2 days because of being an autist or something, but the fact that he sought real medical care for it afterwards still kinda biases me towards the first interpretation.

mozz, 5 days ago

I'm famous too hooray

mozz, 5 days ago

Whatever user: I can't wait for the revolution, let me challenge the status quo with my iconoclasty, no politics is gonna be enough until we can battle in the FUCKING streets

Me: Dude I don't think opinion X is correct

Whatever user: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA shaking and crying ban ban ban

mozz, 6 days ago

This is what happens when loyalty to the group starts overriding good outcomes and moral judgements of what's right and wrong.

Everyone knows it's the wrong answer, but to speak on behalf of something that's been defined as an enemy viewpoint is to yourself become an enemy. And since health care for women is now an enemy position, here we are.

Once you're on the train, it's very hard to get off. Even when everyone knows it's gone too far, even when real killing starts, most of the people who defined themselves in that manner won't say a word against it. Because of course what would happen to them, if they did?

mozz, 6 days ago

See this is a flawless bad-faith dig at the Democrats. I started typing up a big list of important stuff they've been doing, as counterexamples to the implication that they're only pretending to care about American women as some weird ploy to get votes, but then I just sound like some kind of overreacting after-school special.

With simple cynicism and dishonesty, this short comment actually does a pretty good job of making the Democrats trying to do something good which is only necessary in the first place because Hillary Clinton (for as much of a useless toad-lady as she was) didn't win the election, and being blocked by the Republicans, and turning all of that into a reason not to feel like electing Democrats.

Electing Democrats isn't the only answer; we need a lot better than them. But yes, electing Democrats would have prevented all these women that are suffering or dying or almost-dying right now because they need medical care (to say nothing of the ones that just need abortions), because there's a big difference between "not as good as we need" and "actively wants to kill Americans." Voting for the first one is not exclusive of working for better outcomes outside the voting booth. Refusing to vote is helping the second one.

I feel like I've already taken this bullshit too seriously by even typing up a longish comment in response, but this variety of bad faith bullshit is just getting too irritating and the outcomes in the real world are very real.

mozz, 6 days ago

I feel like that whole diagram is the result of a long evolution of, what are all the possible ways that somebody can fuck this up and what’s literally everything possible we can do to prevent it

mozz, 5 days ago

No, this is based on decades of observing Democrats

This part I actually agree with. Obama did a couple of good things but on the whole the whole Clinton / Pelosi axis is a pile of shit. Of course, that's not a good argument for letting Hitler come to power, but you would actually have a point if you weren't applying this to the guy that did:

• 40% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2030
• 15% minimum corporate tax
• Actual labor people in charge of the NLRB for the first time in God knows how long leading to all these union wins
• Hundreds of billions of dollars in student loan forgiveness
• Big wage gains at the bottom end of the scale even when adjusted for massive historic inflation

Etc etc and so on. Biden's actually this radical forward departure from the pretty uninspiring Democratic norm. But sure, the system is still broken; if you're advocating for improving it above Biden that sounds like a great idea. I was just reacting to the absolutely false implication that these particular Democrats are only pretending to make progress. Or, have I got it wrong, were you not trying to say that?

If you want to lie and say I'm telling people to not vote for Democrats

Do you think people should vote for the Democrats? Not "allowed to vote for whoever you want" or whatever -- do you think it's a good idea for them to? What do you think they should be doing to make progress in the country, generally speaking?

But we're never allowed to demand better

Absolutely I think you should demand better. I just don't see that as incompatible with choosing the best available option while you're working for a better option than the ones currently on the table.

mozz, 5 days ago

I wasn't applying it to Biden. I was applying it to Senate Democrats in particular and Democrats more broadly. I have other criticisms for Biden, and have made it clear multiple times that I approve of how he handled student loans.

Oh shit, I think maybe I did an unfairness then. I have you in my little mental list of people who talk shit on Biden relentlessly but it sounds like maybe I should not -- yeah, general unenthusiasm for Senate Democrats I can pretty fully agree with. Makes sense.

Do you think people should vote for the Democrats?

Yes. Until we have a less shitty option, that remains my position. It was my position last time you asked too.

I for-real do not remember this. I probably wouldn't have written what I did if I had -- yeah, everything you're saying here makes perfect sense.

I will continue to demand better, and you'll keep making veiled accusations.

100% fair and I apologize. Yeah, demanding better sounds great.

mozz, 5 days ago

• 1932 politics

mozz, 5 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

Yeah. Little bit 1932 and a little bit 1861, maybe.

mozz, 6 days ago

I am mocking the essentialist and attitude that suggests [voting] is the only thing that matters

those who seek to enforce support for a candidate and discourage dissent

discouraging the propagation of news coverage that is unflattering to that candidate to a point that is threatening to consensus opinion

launching crusades against those who are insufficiently emphatic about the need to vote

I just don't think any of these things are happening. I think you're mounting this grand challenge against an enemy that 99% doesn't exist on Lemmy, and the people who actually are reading your messages are in a very different place than you're describing here. When they say "yes Gaza sucks please can we get a better president in the future but in the meantime also Trump is 10 times worse for Gaza among many other things so let's not elect him, also let's go to the Palestine protest this Saturday" and you scream in their face "GENOCIDE JOE, GENOCIDE JOE, DON'T TRY TO SILENCE MY DISSENT" you're producing no benefit for leftism in this country.

If you wanted to go the DNC and start yelling at them about support for Israel and tepid marijuana reform, then sure. That sounds fine to me, that would sound productive (because I think there you would encounter some discouragement of any "dissent" like anti Israel sentiment).

To drive progress we must sow discontent against the status quo, that much has always been clear.

Do you think that the Communists in 1932 who were fighting the SPD, instead of Hitler, accomplished progress by sowing discontent against the status quo? Certainly that's what they were doing, just my assessment of their success level is pretty limited, since they almost all were killed.

mozz, 5 days ago

I just don’t think any of these things are happening

Lmao, I mean... Disagree? Look, it's right here even

So to deal with the four bullet points one by one in more detail:

• I am very confident that I never suggested that voting was the only thing that mattered. Someone saying that voting does matter is in no way saying that it's the only thing that matters. I think you will be hard pressed to find even a single comment on Lemmy saying that voting is the only thing that matters.
• I don't think I am discouraging all dissent. I give vocal dissent to the Biden administration on Israel, as does the vast majority on Lemmy. You could maybe say that I'm trying to "enforce support" by presenting my logic in favor of voting for him in general, but I've also posted articles from Ralph Nader explaining how to withhold voting in order to put pressure on Democrats to produce better outcomes and said that I think that's a good thing to do. My main objection to the "I'll never vote for Biden" viewpoint is that it enables a 10 times worse outcome and does nothing to create the better-than-Biden outcome that you seem like you're claiming you want -- but I am not demanding that people support Biden or else. I think we both want better outcomes than Biden, and we are holding a discussion about how we could get them.
• I do discourage dissemination of coverage that is unflattering to Biden, if I think it's dishonest -- but the issue is the dishonesty, not the unflattering. When it seems honest (e.g. when it pertains to Israel) I encourage it, I post it myself, again as does the majority on Lemmy.
• I don't launch any crusade (even accepting that framing for typing a comment on the internet) against anyone who's insufficiently emphatic. If someone's actively hostile to the idea of voting in this election, then yes I'll disagree with them sometimes strongly and explain why, but that is allowed, yes? Almost everyone on the internet will sometimes "launch a crusade" against viewpoints they disagree with, by that definition.

I get what you're saying in breaking down that paragraph of mine, and I can respond to what you're saying about it if you want me to, but I feel like I need to point out that in my eyes not a single one of those bullet points is in it, or anywhere near it.

You said earlier "Most people who share my perspective have long since stopped trying to argue anything in good faith at all with centrists." I'm gonna be honest, I have reached that same point with a lot of the lemmy.ml hivemind, and this is why. You are wildly mischaracterizing what I actually think, to the point where you're saying things I strongly disagree with (e.g. voting is the only thing that matters, any dissent against Biden is forbidden) and then attributing them to me.

The conversation I would like to have with you is, we need better outcomes than Biden, how do we get there. It is frustrating and pointless to have to over and over again have that much more productive conversation be recast as, I am supporting Biden no matter what and squashing any dissent against him and actively hostile to anything better than him, and then for me to have to try to explain that that's not accurate and be lectured about the contents of my own mind and my own opinions, and have an extended debate about it where I'm apparently not allowed to the be the authority on what I think and what my opinions are.

Surely that makes sense? Or no?

mozz, 5 days ago

I'm going to be blunt. I was registered as third party (green party or libertarian) for many years of my life, I've done various activism things in and out of electoral politics. You are inventing a reason and supporting theoretical framework for why I support Biden in this election that is mostly imaginary, just invented out of general theories and thin air, and lecturing me at length about how my own internal politics work (which isn't how they work), and also about "the way" to do effective protest (which, sure, is fine, but is also in my opinion not the only way or guaranteed to be applicable and the perfect solution to every possible political / cultural situation.)

From time to time, you tell me something about my own thinking that is so wrong that I can point to some clear counterexample, but it hasn't changed in any respect the main thrust of you explaining to me what my thinking is. I can say, look, I posted an article from Nader about how to withhold votes from Biden to get needed political outcomes; look, I showed support for slrpnk even though the general consensus there is largely just anti-voting-in-general, because I feel like they're generally working for good and authentic about their beliefs, and so that is fine.

But no, none of that matters. You've already figured out what I believe, and you'll tell me about it at length, whatever I have to say about it.

If you want to have a back and forth where the things you say are open to critique, and where you're open to listening to me explaining my own views and the reasons for them instead of you breaking them down to me based on some general political theory that applies very little to my own thinking, then sure. But if you're committed to this conduct and to lecturing -- if the whole model is, you are right and I am wrong and you explain and I listen and say "yes sir" to your theories, which are above critique because they are already right -- then there's not a lot of point in us talking.