williamjm

Scotland's performance seemed to be reminiscent of last year's championship, play well at the start but then go to sleep for a bit and let the opposition back in the game. They did manage to wake up and finish strongly to take this victory, but they'll need to play well for 80 minutes to be in with a chance of beating the best teams in the tournament.

I think Sandman season 2 was probably likely to be the last even before the Gaiman revelations, so definitely not a surprise. Written by Rachel Johnson who, like her brother Boris, apparently struggles with the idea that people will sometimes face consequences for their actions.

Wales are getting slaughtered in Paris, and I don't think France are even playing at their best.

I read it about the same age, and it was one of my favourites at the time (and the sequel/prequel books). I think I might get more of the Irish mythlogy references if I re-read it.

It didn't feel like Fury's storylines in the two were co-ordinated in any way. I enjoyed it a lot, although like Eternals I don't think it gained anything from being part of the MCU. It could just have easily have been its own thing.

They're also a great live band.

I recently picked up Library of America's collection of eight science fiction novels of the 1960s. I just finished one of those, Clifford D. Simak's Way Station. The main character is a Civil War veteran who was recruited to run a way station, disguised as his family's mid-West farmhouse, for aliens using an interstellar teleportation system. He has a peaceful, if lonely, life but as the novel begins there are various threats to it, including a government agency who have noticed there's something odd about a 120 year old man who looks like he is in his thirties. I thought that this had some very good writing in it. For most of the story it is a gentle, reflective novel without much in the way of action, although the stakes do become higher as the story goes along. I thought it had plenty of interesting ideas in it, including the glimpses we get of different alien cultures. There's also subtlety here, at first glance the resolution of the main plot seems a bit too neat but I think there's some implication that it was not as dependent on chance as it first appears. Enoch is a likeable protagonist, he does have a few flaws although I think he is perhaps too hard on himself. He is something of a man out of time, without much connection to the culture of the day, but his fears of a possible imminent nuclear war perhaps give us the most insight into what people were thinking at the time.

I think that happened before they started filming it.

One thing which is difficult to predict is how the energy consumption of AI is going to evolve. I saw a story recently about a new LLM which used 1/10th of the training resources but produced equivalent performance, I think it's likely that are a lot of opportunities for efficiency improvements given how new the technology is. However, in the other direction there is the push to build ever larger models in the hope that will improve results (although there's a lot of debate about diminishing returns here). I definitely don't think we can assume that efficiency improvement will be enough to make all the environmental concerns go away. I've spoken to some people who have been using Microsoft Copilot, and they felt that it had some uses as an enhanced auto-complete, something that could write repetitive code and write unit tests. However, they said they wouldn't trust it to take a prompt and write a complicated algorithm, one of them said that it is bad enough looking for subtle bugs in code that you've written yourself, it's a nightmare for code written by a LLM.

My concern is that some people are inevitably going to have the same attitude to code which is more critical. "It seems like it works, therefore it must be good code" is a very dangerous attitude when it comes to software that is less trivial. I remember reading a study which asked two groups of programmers to develop a web application, one group using a LLM and the other not using one. The LLM users produced code which had more security vulnerabilities, and were also more confident that the code was correct.

But whatever you do, don't check out An American Werewolf in Paris.

I would agree with that. It's a pity because the concept has potential, it has a potentially great cast and there are some good scenes in it, but overall it was increasingly tedious as it went along.

I think this is one of the things Vincent D'Onofrio's portayal of Fisk is really good at - at times you can find yourself almost starting to sympathise with him, and then you remember all the horrible things he has done or he does some new terrible thing.

It does make me think of the saying about the eyes being the mirror of the soul.

In one of the post-credits for The Marvels Kamala meets up with Kate, which seems to be setting up a potential Young Avengers movie although I don't think it's been announced. That was a great reveal.

Speaking of Leslie Nielsen films, I see that there's going to be a remake of The Naked Gun coming out this year with Liam Neeson in the lead role. I'm really not convinced this is a good idea.

I finished Jeff VanderMeer's City of Saints and Madmen. It was an interesting read with a wide variety of different storytelling techniques. There are several relatively conventional short stories in it but they are mixed in with a history of the early days of the titular city of Ambergris (complete with extensive footnotes where the historian snipes at their fellows), an account of an interview with a patient in a mental hospital who has written a book called City of Saints and Madmen, a speculative essay about squid and a bibliography of squid-related books which hides secrets about the essay's author's backstory. The combined effect is to form a complex picture of the city of Ambergris, which is an intriguing location, although not one I would ever want to visit. While it was entertaining, I wouldn't say I was really compelled to find out what happened next in the story, the city is probably more interesting than any of the various characters we see in it.

It seems that the novella coming out later this year is showing more of Gil's backstory. I agree it's one of his best series, although it says something about his productivity that there are at least 5 series to choose from. I'm curious about where the series is going next, whether it might follow-on from one of the final scenes in Shattered Faith:

I have the UK edition, so it's possible it isn't out in the US yet.

I don't even remember who Lamar is now, which is an indication of how memorable he must have been.

I haven't read any of the Stormlight series, but in the most recent Mistborn book I did think the amount of references to things beyond the Mistborn world were distracting from the main plot.

He probably thinks it must be really green, so he wants to turn it into a giant golf course. Maybe we could rename America to be 'Lower Mexico'?

She did interview him before on one of Charlie Brooker's shows.

Thanks, that is good to know. Given his typical writing rate we probably won't have long to wait for the other two books.