Badlands and Days of Heaven are definitely his most conventional films and thus good starting points. Badlands especially is a great film, Days of Heaven is a bit uneven in terms of plot and pacing, but the cinematography is beautiful.
Then you have The Thin Red Line and The New World, which to me feel like a transitional period between the more conventional films and The Tree of Life, which is the first film that is characterized through and through by Malick's extremely divisive style. I personally love The Thin Red Line, but I can see why it's not for everyone. (I would skip The New World.) All later films have a very recognizable style, for which I think The Tree of Life is the best starting point.
Long story short: I'd start with Badlands, then watch The Thin Red Line, then The Tree of Life. If you like the last one, watch any of his later films.
I recommend turning on subtitles for Tree of Life. There's a lot of random whispered voice-overs, and without subs you'll have no idea who is speaking, let alone what they are saying.
I’m a huge Malick fan and agree that The New World is his masterpiece. I still remember seeing it in the cinema 20 years ago and almost levitating out of there. Just a beautiful piece of work. I’m glad there’s just about room for Malick somewhere in the film industry.
Or dive at the deep end and watch Knight of Cups or A Hidden Life. You will either like it or not, frankly I don't think it matters what you'll see first, I love all of his movies even though I didn't understand Thin Red Line when I was 20. But Knight of Cups hit me hard when I was 36.
Best VP I’ve ever had would stop meetings with regular frequency and say, “maybe I’m the dumbest person here, but I don’t understand [insert something being discussed], can you help me get a better understanding?”
It was anybody’s guess if they really didn’t understand the topic or if they were reading the room, but it was always appreciated.
Full disclosure: after leaving tech, I’m back in grad school to get my LMHC so I’m obviously biased.
First, I just don’t see a world where therapy can be replaced by LLMs, at least in the realistic future. I think humans have been social creatures since the dawn of our species and in these most intimate conversations are going to want to be having them with an actual human. One of my mentors has talked about how after years of virtual sessions dominating, the demand for in-person sessions is spiking back up. The power of being in the same physical room with someone who is offering a nonjudgmental space to exist isn’t going to be replaced.
That being said, given the shortage of licensed mental health counselors, and the prohibitive cost especially for many who need a therapist most, I truly hope LLMs develop to offer an accessible and cheap alternative that can at least offer some relief. It does have the potential to save lives and I fully support ethically-focused progress toward developing that sort of option.
> I think humans have been social creatures since the dawn of our species and in these most intimate conversations are going to want to be having them with an actual human. One of my mentors has talked about how after years of virtual sessions dominating, the demand for in-person sessions is spiking back up.
Agreed. I used to frequent a coworking space in my area that eventually went fully automated and got rid of their daytime front desk folks. I stopped going shortly thereafter because one of the highlights of my day was catching up with them. Instead of paying $300/mo to go sit in a nice office, I could just use that money to renovate my home office.
A business trying to cultivate community loses the plot when they rely completely on automation.
It's also important to understand how bad LLMs actually are.
It's very easy to imagine that LLMs are smart, because they can program or solve hard maths problems, but even a very short attempt to have them generate fiction will demonstrate an incredible level of confusion and even an inability to understand basic sentences.
I think the problem may have to do with the fact that there are really many classes, and in fiction you actually use them. They simply can't follow complex conversations.
Yes, this should be required viewing in high school imo.
As someone who used to think I was generally “immune” to advertising, I have come to realize the influence goes so much deeper than “see ad on TV, go buy product” and is instead a much, much darker sense of “the only way to get rid of this anxiety is to Buy More Stuff.”
His more recent Can’t Get You Out of My Head is also fantastic about how we got from There to Here from WWII to present day.
My friend and I have started tinkering on our cars together.
He’s got an early 90s 525i BMW and I’ve got a 2000 SR5 Toyota 4Runner.
The engineering of my Toyota is so much simpler and easier to work on than his BMW. But his BMW has given us a lot more practice, if you know what I mean ^_^
That Tin Can device has infiltrated (in a good way, what a fun idea!) my oldest kids’ social circle at elementary school. Most of his friends are requesting one for Christmas and we’re planning on getting our kid one as well.
Really hoping the idea lasts, lots of good memories of dialing friends on our landline growing up and chatting casually.
Now if only it could replicate the dread of calling a crush’s house and her dad picking up the phone…
I just visited NYC for the first time a few months ago, and had the most amazing time, one hell of a city and I can’t wait to get back.
I could ramble for hours about all the things I loved about the trip, but one of the things that stuck out was all the young kids taking the subway by themselves or in small packs of friends out pretty late etc. They all seemed so much more street smart and independent than my own similar aged kids (we live in a quiet neighborhood in Seattle). I also grew up fairly sheltered in the suburbs where I had very little exposure to the “real world” as they say…
I’d be fascinated to hear more about what it’s like to grow up in such a massive city.
The subway systems is one of the greatest socioeconomic equalizers in NYC. During rush hour, you'll share a subway car with a homeless man, an ER doctor wearing scrubs, a fashion model wearing YSL, a finance bro, and a food delivery worker. It's an amazing city for people watching.
I’ve got “normie” friends who I’d bet don’t even know that what Google has at the top of their search results is “AI” results and instead assume it’s just some extension of the normal search results we’ve all gotten used to (knowledge graph)
Every one of them refers to using “ChatGPT” when talking about AI.
How likely is it to stay that way? No idea, but OpenAI has clearly captured a notable amount of mindshare in this new era.
I'm not sure if physical products are analogous to internet services. If all it took to vacuum your house was typing "Hoover" into a browser, and everyone called vacuums "a Hoover," then I would expect Hoover to have 90% of the vacuum market share.
But since buying a vacuum usually involves going to a store, looking at available devices, and paying for them, the value of a brand name is less significant.
Pre-pandemic, at least in my social circles, "Skype" was the term for video calling. "Hey, wanna Skype?" and we'd hop on a discord call.
Post-pandemic, at work and such, "Zoom" has become synonymous for work call. Whether it's via Slack or Google Meet, or even Zoom, we use the term Zoom.
I don't know what the market share is on Skype (Pre-pandemic) or Zoom, but these common terms appear to exist for software.
Video description, from the Velcro brand YouTube channel:
Our Velcro Brand Companies legal team decided to clear a few things up about using the VELCRO® trademark correctly – because they’re lawyers and that’s what they do. When you use “velcro” as a noun or a verb (e.g., velcro shoes), you diminish the importance of our brand and our lawyers lose their insert fastening sound. So please, do not say “velcro shoes” (or “velcro wallet” or “velcro gloves”) - we repeat “velcro” is not a noun or a verb. VELCRO® is our brand. #dontsayvelcro
Even I often tell I chatgeepeeteed the result, in the same fashion when I continue saying I googled the result, while actually I used Duck Duck Go. I could ask another LLM provider, but I have no idea how to communicate that properly to a non-technical folks. Heck, I don’t want to communicate that _properly_ to tech peers either. I don’t like these pedantic phrases ‘well, actually … that wasn’t Google, I used DDG for that.’ Sometimes I can say ‘web search,’ but ‘I googled that’ is just more natural thing to say.
Same here. I tried saying ‘I asked LLM’ or ‘I asked AI’ but that doesn’t sound right for me. So, in most conversations I say ‘I asked Chat GPT’ and in most of these situations, it feels like the exact provider does not matter, since essentially they are very similar in their nature.
I cheekily refer to it as Al (like, short for Albert) because Google seems to love to shove Al's overviews in my search results.
But when I'm being more serious I'd usually just say "I asked GPT"
I have a colleague who just refers to AI as "Chat" which I think is kinda cute, but people also use the term "chat" to refer to... Like, people, or "yall". Or to their stream chat.
Yep, this. I’ve switched to Claude for a while (because I can’t afford max plans for both) and nobody in the real world has any idea what it is I’m talking about. “Oh it’s like ChatGPT?”
Claude is also difficult to consistently pronounce for a non-English speaker. Sometimes people dont say that because it can get misinterpreted. ChatGPT is something easy on the the tongue and very difficult to mis-pronounce.
The CEO is also more puritan than the pope himself considering the amount of censorship it has. Not sure if they are even interested in marketing to normies though.
> The CEO is also more puritan than the pope himself considering the amount of censorship it has.
In that case, you should try OpenAI's gpt-oss!
Both models are pretty fast for their size and I wanted to use them to summarize stories and try out translation. But it keeps checking everything against "policy" all the time! I created a jailbreak that works around this, but it still wastes a few hundred tokens talking about policy before it produces useful output.
His worldview seemed to be that humans as a species are extremely violent and capable of the most inhumane acts and we’re hanging on by a thread. Some of his writing often covered what just a slight altering of our societal moral compass might look like.
Probably my favorite author of all time, him or maybe Delilo.
@sharweek said
> Some of his writing often covered what just a slight altering of our societal moral compass might look like.
@JKCalhoun
> in my world-view most humans want to be kind.
These two views aren't necessarily in conflict. Individuals can overwhelmingly want to be kind but still be in a system where society pushes them to behave to the contrary.
Never tried Tree of Life or any of his more recent stuff.
Got any recommendations in the first 2-3 of his you’d suggest?