The films of Robert Bresson haven’t disappointed me so far but I must confess that this one is tough to swallow. As it is literally showing snippets from the diary of a priest, the scenes are very episodic, not allowing us to dwell in the moment. Then there is the cultural and religious gulf and indeed the film probably has little meaning for those who have no religious faith at all. I’m pretty sure I’ve more or less understood what it wants to say but that’s not at all the same as being moved by it. I can see how ahead of its time it is and how it must speak to those who are religious but it’s not for me.
Kelly Reichardt teams up with Michelle Williams again in another delightfully understated film. Once again it’s set in Portland, Oregon and being centered around the Oregon College of Art and Craft (OCAC), just about everyone in it is an artist of some stripe. But as this film shows, not all artists get to be famous or rich or successful. As usual, Reichardt’s work is so subtle that it might not seem like it has much of a point. But the soft rivalry between Lizzy and Jo, highlighting how the latter is just ever so slightly closer to the artist that the former aspires to be, is good enough for me.
I came upon this game because this has a fair number of recommendations and indeed a mostly text-based adventure game is something I’d normally love. The setting aboard a decrepit space station and the player being a sort of slave within a robot body make for an intriguing and the writing is mostly solid. However I soured on it pretty fast once I realized that the desperation of the setting is mostly narrative fluff as it’s actually a rather safe game. Furthermore all of the stories in it stand alone so it’s not so much a world but simply a loose collection of independent stories.
A documentary made by an American director about the underground nightlife scene in China sounds exactly like something the Chinese government would frown on and that I’d love. The vibes, the images and the sound are all incredible, adding up to a powerful portrayal of a side of Chinese society we rarely get to see. Yet while there is no doubt that director Benjamin Mullinkosson is a friend of the queer community, I sense a certain wistfulness in it. The people in it don’t seem so much to be enjoying life to the fullest than using the nightclub as a way to cope with depression and the stresses of life. It doesn’t seem healthy at all and so this documentary isn’t an altogether sympathetic view of their lifestyle as I would expect.
This isn’t the kind of film I’d catch in the cinemas at all but I had expiring movie club points so here we are. Liam Neeson seems like unlikely successor to Leslie Nielsen and I have to say that while I appreciate the effort and his straight-faced Frank Drebin, he doesn’t have the comedic timing to pull it off. To me this was good for some giggles and I’m flabbergasted by some of the very weird segues. But I wouldn’t say this was very good. Its gags are neither very original nor very clever and the time is long past when police in America were seen as allies to the people.
We have an even mix this months between science news about the biological sciences and LLMs. Progress!
The most shocking of the bunch is the discovery that so-called sex reversal seems more common in birds than previously thought. The team dissected the bodies of nearby 500 birds of five common Australian species and found sex-revered individuals in all five species at rates of 3% to 6%. Nearly all of these samples were genetically female but had male reproductive organs. However they also found a few genetic males with ovaries and one had evidence of recently having laid an age. This is yet another demonstration that sex is more fluid and mutable than many think but it should be cautioned as this finding applies only to birds.
News on the mRNA vaccine development front has been depressing recently as the Trump administration keeps cracking down on it and cutting funding. This paper shows some of the potential for major medical applications that might be lost. It proposes that a broad-spectrum mRNA-based antiviral could be formulated. It works by activating interferon-stimulated genes that protect cells against viral infection at the cost of possibly causing mild and often self-resolving inflammation. What’s exciting here is that it seems to help make the treated cells resistant to a wide range of different viruses including including the Zika virus, vesicular stomatitis virus, and SARS-CoV-2. As usual this is an extremely early finding and there are many practical issues, but it demonstrates the viability of a completely fresh approach to developing antiviral prophylactics.
Both of the LLM papers are about the impact the deployment of the technology is having on society, possibly in subtle ways. The first one discusses whether ChatGPT in particular is being used by investors to inform their trading decisions. The authors hit upon a novel way to measure this by matching outages of the ChatGPT service with stock trading activity. They show that trading volume does indeed decline when the service is not available and that this effect is stronger for companies which have released corporate news immediately before or during the outage. There’s not much else that can be concluded so far but it does suggest that AI use is widespread and is indeed being used to make investment decisions.
A much more subtle and yet important influence of increasing LLM use among the general public can be seen in this other paper. They attempt to quantity the impact of LLMs on human culture by analyzing human discourse from sources such as YouTube videos and podcast episodes. They claim that they were able to measure an increase in the usage of words commonly used by ChatGPT. As they note, this marks the beginning of a cultural feedback loop in which LLMs are trained on human data yet the widespread usage of LLMs itself reshape how humans use language.
Continuing the series of films that show how bad life in Japan was in the post-World War II period under American occupation, here’s a lesser known one set in the slums outside a US military base. I’d expected it to have more of an anti-American message but it really just has them as part of the background reality that everyone needs to work around. The scenes of poverty, moral corruption and blatant lawlessness are grim and far from the idealized Japan seen in other works of the era. The downside is that its conclusion feels fake and hacked on. In reality the criminals win so comprehensively that there’s no happy ending for anyone else.
