I was crying from laughing so hard at parts of this. Chef Recommends!
When actor/comedians Thomas Middleditch and Ben Schwartz first met, it was over a slice of pizza in New York. They made each other laugh, decided to work together, and a partnership was formed. Years later, the two have performed their two man long-form improv show damn near everywhere, including Carnegie Hall, and…
Nooooo no no no, that's okay. Keep working on Venom 2 Carnage
Watch out Akira and My Hero Academia and every other manga/anime adaptation currently collecting dust on a movie studio’s shelf: You’ve got a new friend, and it involves a ridiculously powerful bald guy named Saitama. According to Variety, Sony has hired Scott Rosenberg and Jeff Pinknker—the writers behind Venom and…
Two things. Why does Spike hate JJ so much? And even tho basketball doesn't matter right now this makes me feel a lot better about those Jimmy/Bret comments
JJ Redick went on the Sixers Beat podcast recently, which resulted in a Twitter spat with Spike Eskin.
Coggin documented that on Saturday, but I realized we didn’t actually share any quotes from the podcast itself, which was pretty good. Derek Bodner and Rich Hofmann touched on a number of topics, from Redick’s Philly departure to his Brooklyn commute, plus the all-important question about Jimmy Butler saying on JJ’s podcast that he didn’t know “who the fuck was in charge” of the Sixers:
Hofmann: The other thing in your podcast that I thought was pretty interesting I think is probably what most people want to hear, honestly. What was your interpretation of Jimmy saying that he ‘didn’t know who was in charge?’ You’re on record saying that you love Brett (Brown) and you were on board with him, but it seemed like Brett and Jimmy for whatever reason, just didn’t seem to click here.
Redick: Sure. Yeah, I mean I’m not gonna speculate on what Jimmy meant by that. You can assume that he partially was talking about Brett or Elton or ownership. I have no idea. The assumption, of course, is maybe he was talking about everybody. But, yeah, I wish that Brett and Jimmy could have clicked. That that would have been great, for sure.
Hofmann: Brett has been such a hot button issue for us, like literally after every loss his name gets brought up. You’ve played in the NBA for a long time now for a lot of different high-profile coaches. Where does Brett kind of fall on the spectrum of his style compared to the other guys you’ve had? How he manages a locker room, plays, different stuff..
Redick: I think Brett’s one of the best. I would describe him as a player’s coach. He is incredibly thorough and incredibly detailed. The thing that I always appreciated, maybe the most about Brett was how thoughtful he is. There’s a purpose to team meetings, there’s a purpose to film sessions. There’s a purpose to practice, there’s a purpose to walkthrough, and there’s a purpose to your daily schedule. Everything is so thought out and meticulous. I think that’s one of the main reasons that he is who he is as a coach, and has gotten this level. But yeah, I mean I know there’s, we’re all aware of it right? You know I know there’s some level of – I don’t know what the word is – animosity or displeasure, and it’s always easy to blame certain people. But, I would love to play for Brett again. I don’t think Brett is the problem, if there’s a problem. Sometimes things maybe just don’t work. I’d also say like, in reference to my time there, I thought we accomplished a lot that first year. And I thought we were so very close to getting into the conference finals, and really having a chance to win last year.
I transcribed a very large portion of the Butler interview on Redick’s podcast. Brett Brown declined to say much about that, instead telling reporters that the Sixers “wish him well.” Butler described a couple of meetings in which he didn’t feel like there was much direction, if you’d like to click that link for a refresher.
Here’s the full Sixers Beat pod:
Derek and Rich are joined by former Sixers guard @jj_redick
Topics: – Why he didn't return – Disconnect between Brett and Jimmy – Why Embiid and Simmons will figure it out – Delayed season – Other Sixers podcasts
I remember when this project was too good to be true. And it was.
Once upon a time, Sufjan Stevens fans in Nebraska, Idaho, and South Dakota eagerly awaited the moment their favorite banjo-plucking Christian would write an album about the history and landmarks of their fair state, just as he did with 2003's Michigan and 2005's Illinois. Unfortunately, Stevens’ proclamation that he…
After years spent playing the sweet, amiable Woody Boyd on Cheers, Woody Harrelson shattered the nation’s monocles as Natural Born Killers’ homicidal Mickey Knox. It was a shocking turn at the time, but perhaps less so when you consider that his father, Charles Harrelson, was a convicted murderer.
Defending Jacob, a Jaedan Martell AKA Jaeden Lieberher joint
Apple TV+ adds an intriguing new mystery drama to its lineup with Defending Jacob, Mark Bomback and Morten Tyldum’s adaptation of William Landay’s crime novel of the same name. When it was first announced, the eight-part series, which premieres April 24 with three episodes, probably garnered more interest for its…
Thing is, not everybody can play it yet, since it remains in closed beta testing, but Thursday, the Comcast co-owned T1 Entertainment and Sports hosted a Valorant invitational tournament featuring professional players they’ve already signed to their team, a couple of old school Counter-Strike veterans in Braxton “Brax” Pierce and Keven “AZK” Larivière.
It’s a weird time for sports not only in this country, but globally, since everything is pretty much shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But the world of eSports is uniquely positioned to soldier along, and that’s why nobody should be surprised that Thursday’s stream topped out at 53,000 concurrent viewers, which is enough people to fill Yankee Stadium.
“I love Valorant, very fun game,” AZK told Crossing Broad after the tournament. “Before this I played Counter-Strike for a very long time. Valorant is extremely similar to Counter-Strike but it actually takes some new twists, adds a few things, but it also the retains the best parts of Counter-Strike, I would say. So it’s a really nice blend of games that we have right now. It’s a fun game.”
Larivière admits that the global pandemic hasn’t changed his routine too much, joking that he and other gamers were “already living in isolation” prior to the spread of COVID-19. But in a world where traditional sports are on hold, eSports is uniquely positioned to pick up some eyeballs in April, and you’ve seen the “four for four” leagues turning to games like NBA 2K and MLB The Show to provide fans with something to watch.
“You kind of saw it already with the F1 drivers doing a lot of these tournaments online,” Lariviere said. “They’re going from F1 to the video game itself, and streaming that on Twitch, and I thought that was pretty cool. I think this would definitely bring some of that to the mainstream. It definitely feels like there are a lot of people tuning in right now, a lot more than usual I would say. (The pandemic) is definitely one of the reasons for it.”
Wednesday night, if you were flipping through TV channels looking for something to watch, you might have settled on one of the replays being shown on NBC Sports, NBA TV, or any number of channels broadcasting old games during a time when we should be watching the hockey and basketball playoffs, plus regular season Phillies games. But on ESPN 2, there was a League of Legends broadcast taking place, which, to me, was a perfect example of eSports getting a huge American TV slot that would normally go to a traditional sport.
“It’s an opportunity to get a new audience to see the product, said Joe Marsh, T1’s CEO and the former Chief Business Officer of Comcast Specator’s Gaming division. “The traditional linear TV consumer might not be as well-versed in Twitch or watching things on Youtube. (League of Legends) is one of those games where it’s easier to follow along and it’s a bit slower-paced. It never hurts to introduce games to a new set of viewers. The older generation had told their kids for 40 years to get outside and go play sports, and now you have multi-millionaires playing video games. I guess it’s a cool opportunity, and we always welcome the ability to be on TV and hopefully you start seeing more of that. The viewership has been great. Even the eNASCAR races have drawn higher viewership than the actual races.”
No joke, last month’s NASCAR iRacing competition, won by Denny Hamlin, had 903,000 viewers on FS1, via Richmond.com:
According to @TNLMedia, the 903,000 viewers are the most for any esports competition on U.S. broadcast television, topping the 770,000 who watched a Mortal Kombat tournament on the CW in 2016. It also outdrew 11 of the 17 IndyCar races last season.
eSports… are the future? Maybe that guy in the comments section was right.
It's all business when @azkcs_ closes out the round 👔@brax1wnl takes the first game in the @T1 Valorant Invitational Grand Finals. Can @dizzy bring it back?
The Comcast-owned franchise continues to kick ass in the Overwatch League, they just can’t do any live events right now.
“The Overwatch League moved online,” Marsh said. “We actually got one weekend in, back in February, one in-person home stand. Then obviously with the pandemic going on, all games are moved online. But the Fusion are humming along. They’re 8-1, they have the best record in the league, and yeah, everything is online right now. We’re doing really well and gearing up towards finishing strong to hopefully make a run at the grand finals like we did in season one.”
When Crossing Broad spoke with Marsh last year, the Fusion were in the process of packing more than a thousand fans into Xfinity Live for a watch party. This was one year after their first gathering, which featured just 300 people at a fish taco place in University City called Wahoo’s.
Fast forward to February of this year, when fans sold out The Met theater on North Broad Street on a Saturday and Sunday in the middle of winter.
“In our configuration it was 2,000 people per day,” Marsh explained. “They were lively from the jump. They were booing the visiting team and they knew how to be Philly fans, even if they weren’t traditional sports fans. They just knew, in their blood, how to do it. We had a pretty good home field advantage there, and it keeps growing and growing. Right now, because we can’t do live events, we’ve been doing Zoom happy hours with Fusion fans, and we get players to pop in and say hello. We’ve had staff hop in as well. We’re just trying to stay connected with them even though we can’t have live events or see them in person. You’re just trying to get creative and stay engaged with them all.”
Fusion Arena hits COVID-19 construction snag
If you’d been down to the sports complex to see the Sixers or Flyers play in February or March, you probably noticed the fence blocking off parts of Xfinity Live from the rest of the Wells Fargo Center parking lot.
That’s the site of the Fusion Arena, a 3,500 capacity stadium that will host Overwatch League games and other eSports competitions. Comcast broke ground on the $50 million dollar building in September and planned to begin construction last month, but Marsh says a mandate from Governor Tom Wolf put a halt to construction projects in Pennsylvania.
“In March, we were going to start doing the digging, some of the moving over of the things on Xfinity Live property, like the retention basin, where the (miniature) football field is,” he revealed. “We were just going to move that over to the left side of the bar area. We got the fence up, and by the time we put the fence up, we couldn’t get going. The original plan was to have steel coming out of the ground in July, which is the heart of baseball season. You would have been able to see some of the building in July, but now we’re a little bit delayed on that. We keep having weekly calls with our architects and our construction team and we’re just figuring out when we’re gonna be able to get going again. It just depends on how long the work-from-home and no construction is allowed to go on. We’re in a bit of a holding pattern based on the Governor’s guideline.”
Here are some photos from the groundbreaking and renderings of the arena:
It’s one of the quirks of Jerry Seinfeld’s career that, for as massive as it’s been, he’s got fewer stand-up special and albums than just about any other artist of his stature. (Three of the former, two of the latter, although you could probably cut two or three new specials out of his collected Seinfeld cold opens.)…
Watch Thisoffers movie recommendations inspired by new releases, premieres, current events, or occasionally just our own inscrutable whims. This week: No Time To Die won’t be hitting theaters, but you can still enjoy some vintage 007 action.
If, for no particular reason, you feel a strong urge to pretend for a couple of hours that it’s still the early ‘00s, there may be no quicker brain-rewiring tool than spending some time with the music of Homestar Runner. The web cartoon that gave us Trogdor, Teen Girl Squad, and Strong Bad, the gravely-voiced luchador…
Some fictional characters, like Harry Potter and the rest of Hogwarts, age along with their audiences. Others, like a certain quartet of irradiated amphibians, do not, choosing instead to luxuriate, as we all wish we could, in the carefree abandon of their teen years—it’s hard to imagine a 46-year old Leo landing…
Considering that every delivery meal and trip to the grocery store has now, in 2020, become the equivalent of playing COVID Russian roulette, it’s a good idea to mess around with new recipes that make proper use of the ingredients you’ve already got at home. For those of us who like our education mixed with a bit of…
He's writing a Mallrats sequel?? Must he continue to ruin every single good thing he's done I Truly hate Kevin smith
Kevin Smith will continue to play the hits following last year’s abysmalJay And Silent Bob Reboot, with the filmmaker persisting in his years-long quest to make sequels to Mallrats and Clerks. Clerks 3, which will serve as a meta riff on the first film, seems to be well on its way, while Mallrats 2: Twilight Of The…
Devs is a watchable blend of a few engaging ingredients. It’s a spy thriller that pits Russian agents against ex-CIA operatives. It’s a cautionary, sci-fi polemic about a potentially limitless technology and the hubris of big tech. Like Garland’s previous directorial efforts, Annihilation and Ex Machina, it’s also a striking aesthetic experience, a blend of brutalist compounds, sleek lines, lush nature, and an exciting, unsettling soundtrack. Most of all, though, it’s a meditation on age-old philosophical conundrums, served with a garnish of science.
Peak TV I know, but this show is fuckin Great
Getty Images/FX/Ringer illustration
The Hulu show poses questions related to quantum physics and existentialism. How good of a job does it do? And what kind of closure will next week’s finale bring?
Let me welcome you the same way Stewart welcomes Forest in Episode 7 of the Hulu miniseries Devs: with a lengthy, unattributed quote.
We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at any given moment knew all of the forces that animate nature and the mutual positions of the beings that compose it, if this intellect were vast enough to submit the data to analysis, could condense into a single formula the movement of the greatest bodies of the universe and that of the lightest atom; for such an intellect nothing could be uncertain and the future, just like the past, would be present before its eyes.
It’s a passage that sounds as if it could have come from Forest himself. But it’s not from Forest, or Katie, or even—as Katie might guess, based on her response to Stewart’s Philip Larkin quote—Shakespeare. It’s from the French scholar and scientist Pierre-Simon Laplace, who wrote the idea down at the end of the Age of Enlightenment, in 1814. When Laplace imagined an omniscient intellect—which has come to be called “Laplace’s demon”—he wasn’t even saying something original: Other thinkers beat him to the idea of a deterministic, perfectly predictable universe by decades and centuries (or maybe millennia).
All of which is to say that despite the futuristic setting and high-tech trappings of Devs—the eight-part Alex Garland opus that will reach its finale next week—the series’ central tension is about as old as the abacus. But there’s a reason the debate about determinism and free will keeps recurring: It’s an existential question at the heart of human behavior. Devs doesn’t answer it in a dramatically different way than the great minds of history have, but it does wrap up ancient, brain-breaking quandaries in a compelling (and occasionally kind of confusing) package. Garland has admitted as much, acknowledging, “None of the ideas contained here are really my ideas, and it’s not that I am presenting my own insightful take. It’s more I’m saying some very interesting people have come up with some very interesting ideas. Here they are in the form of a story.”
Devs is a watchable blend of a few engaging ingredients. It’s a spy thriller that pits Russian agents against ex-CIA operatives. It’s a cautionary, sci-fi polemic about a potentially limitless technology and the hubris of big tech. Like Garland’s previous directorial efforts, Annihilation and Ex Machina, it’s also a striking aesthetic experience, a blend of brutalist compounds, sleek lines, lush nature, and an exciting, unsettling soundtrack. Most of all, though, it’s a meditation on age-old philosophical conundrums, served with a garnish of science. Garland hascited scientists and philosophers as inspirations for the series, so to unravel the riddles of Devs, I sought out some experts whose day jobs deal with the dilemmas Lily and Co. confront in fiction: a computer science professor who specializes in quantum computing, and several professors of philosophy.
There are many questions about Devs that we won’t be able to answer. How high is Kenton’s health care premium? Is it distracting to work in a lab lit by a perpetually pulsing, unearthly golden glow? How do Devs’ programmers get any work done when they could be watching the world’s most riveting reality TV? Devs doesn’t disclose all of its inner workings, but by the end of Episode 7, it’s pulled back the curtain almost as far as it can. The main mystery of the early episodes—what does Devs do?—is essentially solved for the viewer long before Lily learns everything via Katie’s parable of the pen in Episode 6. As the series proceeds, the spy stuff starts to seem incidental, and the characters’ motivations become clear. All that remains to be settled is the small matter of the intractable puzzles that have flummoxed philosophers for ages.
Here’s what we know. Forest (Nick Offerman) is a tech genius obsessed with one goal: being reunited with his dead daughter, Amaya, who was killed in a car crash while her mother was driving and talking to Forest on the phone. (He’d probably blame himself for the accident if he believed in free will.) He doesn’t disguise the fact that he hasn’t moved on from Amaya emotionally: He names his company after her, uses her face for its logo, and, in case those tributes were too subtle, installs a giant statue of her at corporate HQ. (As a metaphor for the way Amaya continues to loom over his life, the statue is overly obvious, but at least it looks cool.) Together with a team of handpicked developers, Forest secretly constructs a quantum computer so powerful that, by the end of the penultimate episode, it can perfectly predict the future and reverse-project the past, allowing the denizens of Devs to tune in to any bygone event in lifelike clarity. It’s Laplace’s demon made real, except for the fact that its powers of perception fail past the point at which Lily is seemingly scheduled to do something that the computer can’t predict.
I asked Dr. Scott Aaronson, a professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin (and the founding director of the school’s Quantum Information Center) to assess Devs’ depiction of quantum computing. Aaronson’s website notes that his research concentrates on “the capabilities and limits of quantum computers,” so he’d probably be one of Forest’s first recruits if Amaya were an actual company. Aaronson, whom I previously consulted about the plausibility of the time travel in Avengers: Endgame, humored me again and watched Devs despite having been burned before by Hollywood’s crimes against quantum mechanics. His verdict, unsurprisingly, is that the quantum computing in Devs—like that of Endgame, which cites one of the same physicists (David Deutsch) that Garland said inspired him—is mostly hand-wavy window dressing.
“A quantum computer is a device that uses a central phenomenon of quantum mechanics—namely, ‘interference of amplitudes’—to solve certain problems with dramatically better scaling behavior than any known algorithm running on any existing computer could solve them,” Aaronson says. If you’re wondering what amplitudes are, you can read Aaronson’s explanation in a New York Timesop-ed he authored last October, shortly after Google claimed to have achieved a milestone called “quantum supremacy”—the first use of a quantum computer to make a calculation far faster than any non-quantum computer could. According to Google’s calculations, the task that its “Sycamore” microchip performed in a little more than three minutes would have taken 100,000 of the swiftest existing conventional computers 10,000 years to complete. That’s a pretty impressive shortcut, and we’re still only at the dawn of the quantum computing age.
However, that stat comes with a caveat: Quantum computers aren’t better across the board than conventional computers. “The applications where a quantum computer dramatically outperforms classical computers are relatively few and specialized,” Aaronson says. “As far as we know today, they’d help a lot with prediction problems only in cases where the predictions heavily involve quantum-mechanical behavior.” Potential applications of quantum computers include predicting the rate of a chemical reaction, factoring huge numbers and possibly cracking the encryption that currently protects the internet (using Shor’s algorithm, which is briefly mentioned on Devs), and solving optimization and machine learning problems. “Notice that reconstructing what Christ looked like on the cross is not on this list,” Aaronson says.
In other words, the objective that Forest is trying to achieve doesn’t necessarily lie within the quantum computing wheelhouse. “To whatever extent computers can help forecast plausible scenarios for the past or future at all (as we already have them do for, e.g., weather forecasting), it’s not at all clear to what extent a quantum computer even helps—one might simply want more powerful classical computers,” Aaronson says.
Then there’s the problem that goes beyond the question of quantum vs. conventional: Either kind of computer would require data on which to base its calculations, and the data set that the predictions and retrodictions in Devs would demand is inconceivably detailed. “I doubt that reconstructing the remote past is really a ‘computational problem’ at all, in the sense that even the most powerful science-fiction supercomputer still couldn’t give you reliable answers if it lacked the appropriate input data,” Aaronson says, adding, “As far as we know today, the best that any computer (classical or quantum) could possibly do, even in principle, with any data we could possibly collect, is to forecast a range of possible futures, and a range of possible pasts. The data that it would need to declare one of them the ‘real’ future or the ‘real’ past simply wouldn’t be accessible to humankind, but rather would be lost in microscopic puffs of air, radiation flying away from the earth into space, etc.”
In light of the unimaginably high hurdle of gathering enough data in the present to reconstruct what someone looked or sounded like during a distant, data-free age, Forest comes out looking like a ridiculously demanding boss. We get it, dude: You miss Amaya. But how about patting your employees on the back for pulling off the impossible? “The idea that chaos, the butterfly effect, sensitive dependence on initial conditions, exponential error growth, etc. mean that you run your simulation 2000 years into the past and you end up with only a blurry, staticky image of Jesus on the cross rather than a clear image, has to be, like, the wildest understatement in the history of understatements,” Aaronson says. As for the future, he adds, “Predicting the weather three weeks from now might be forever impossible.”
“The plot of this series is one that would’ve been totally, 100 percent familiar to the ancient Greeks—just swap out the quantum computer for the Delphic Oracle.” —Dr. Scott Aaronson, professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin
On top of all that, Aaronson says, “The Devs headquarters is sure a hell of a lot fancier (and cleaner) than any quantum computing lab that I’ve ever visited.” (Does Kenton vacuum between torture sessions?) At least the computer more or less looks like a quantum computer.
OK, so maybe I didn’t need to cajole a quantum computing savant into watching several hours of television to confirm that there’s no way we can watch cavepeople paint. Garland isn’t guilty of any science sins that previous storytellers haven’t committed many times. Whenever Aaronson has advised scriptwriters, they’ve only asked him to tell them which sciencey words would make their preexisting implausible stories sound somewhat feasible. “It’s probably incredibly rare that writers would let the actual possibilities and limits of a technology drive their story,” he says.
Although the show name-checks real interpretations of quantum mechanics—Penrose, pilot wave, many-worlds—it doesn’t deeply engage with them. The pilot wave interpretation holds that only one future is real, whereas many-worlds asserts that a vast number of futures are all equally real. But neither one would allow for the possibility of perfectly predicting the future, considering the difficulty of accounting for every variable. Garland is seemingly aware of how far-fetched his story is, because on multiple occasions, characters like Lily, Lyndon, and Stewart voice the audience’s unspoken disbelief, stating that something or other isn’t possible. Whenever they do, Katie or Forest is there to tell them that it is. Which, well, fine: Like Laplace’s demon, Devs is intended as more of a thought experiment than a realistic scenario. As Katie says during her blue pill-red pill dialogue with Lily, “Go with it.”
We might as well go along with Garland, because any scientific liberties he takes are in service of the series’s deeper ideas. As Aaronson says, “My opinion is that the show isn’t really talking about quantum computing at all—it’s just using it as a fancy-sounding buzzword. Really it’s talking about the far more ancient questions of determinism vs. indeterminism and predictability vs. unpredictability.” He concludes, “The plot of this series is one that would’ve been totally, 100 percent familiar to the ancient Greeks—just swap out the quantum computer for the Delphic Oracle.” Aaronson—who says he sort of likes Devs in spite of its quantum technobabble—would know: He wrote a book called Quantum Computing Since Democritus.
Speaking of Democritus, let’s consult a few philosophers on the topic of free will. One of the most mind-bending aspects of Devs’ adherence to hard determinism—the theory that human behavior is wholly dictated by outside factors—is its insistence that characters can’t change their behavior even if they’ve seen the computer’s prediction of what they’re about to do. As Forest asks Katie, “What if one minute into the future we see you fold your arms, and you say, ‘Fuck the future. I’m a magician. My magic breaks tram lines. I’m not going to fold my arms.’ You put your hands in your pockets, and you keep them there until the clock runs out.”
It seemsas if she should be able to do what she wants with her hands, butKatie quickly shuts him down. “Cause precedes effect,” she says. “Effect leads to cause. The future is fixed in exactly the same way as the past. The tram lines are real.” Of course, Katie could be wrong: A character could defy the computer’s prediction in the finale. (Perhaps that’s the mysterious unforeseeable event.) But we’ve already seen some characters fail to exit the tram. In an Episode 7 scene—which, as Aaronson notes, is highly reminiscent of the VHS scene in Spaceballs—we see multiple members of the Devs team repeat the same statements that they’ve just heard the computer predict they would make a split second earlier. They can’t help but make the prediction come true. Similarly, Lily ends up at Devs at the end of Episode 7, despite resolving not to.
Putting aside the implausibility of a perfect prediction existing at all, does it make sense that these characters couldn’t deviate from their predicted course? Yes, according to five professors of philosophy I surveyed. Keep in mind what Garland has cited as a common criticism of his work: “that the ideas I talk about are sophomoric because they’re the kinds of things that people talk about when they’re getting stoned in their dorm rooms.” We’re about to enter the stoned zone.
“In this story, [the characters] are in a totally deterministic universe,” says Ben Lennertz, an assistant professor of philosophy at Colgate University. “In particular, the watching of the video of the future itself has been determined by the original state of the universe and the laws. It’s not as if things were going along and the person was going to cross their arms, but then a non-deterministic miracle occurred and they were shown a video of what they were going to do. The watching of the video and the person’s reaction is part of the same progression as the scene the video is of.” In essence, the computer would have already predicted its own predictions, as well as every character’s reaction to them. Everything that happens was always part of the plan.
Ohio Wesleyan University’s Erin Flynn echoes that interpretation. “The people in those scenes do what they do not despite being informed that they will do it, but (in part) because they have been informed that they will do it,” Flynn says. (Think of Katie telling Lyndon that he’s about to balance on the bridge railing.) “This is not to say they will be compelled to conform, only that their knowledge presumably forms an important part of the causal conditions leading to their actions. When the computer ‘sees’ the future, the computer sees that what they will do is necessitated in part by this knowledge. The computer would presumably have made different predictions had people never heard them.”
Furthermore, adds David Landy of San Francisco State University, the fact that we see something happen one way doesn’t mean that it couldn’t have happened otherwise. “Suppose we know that some guy is going to fold his arms,” Landy says. “Does it follow that he lacks the ability to not fold his arms? Well, no, because what we usually mean by ‘has the ability to not fold his arms’ is that if things had gone differently,he wouldn’t have folded his arms. But by stipulating at the start that he is going to fold his arms, we also stipulate that things aren’t going to go differently. But it can remain true that if they did go differently, he would not have folded his arms. So, he might have that ability, even if we know he is not going to exercise it.”
“We should expect weird things to happen when we are talking about a very weird situation.” —David Landy, San Francisco State University professor
If your head has started spinning, you can see why the Greeks didn’t settle this stuff long before Garland got to it. And if it still seems strange that Forest seemingly can’t put his hands in his pockets, well, what doesn’t seem strange in the world of Devs? “We should expect weird things to happen when we are talking about a very weird situation,” Landy says. “That is, we are used to people reliably doing what they want to do. But we have become used to that by making observations in a certain environment: one without time travel or omniscient computers. Introducing those things changes the environment, so we shouldn’t be surprised if our usual inferences no longer hold.”
Here’s where we really might want to mime a marijuana hit. Neal Tognazzini of Western Washington University points out that one could conceivably appear to predict the future by tapping into a future that already exists. “Many philosophers reject determinism but nevertheless accept that there are truths about what will happen in the future, because they accept a view in the philosophy of time called eternalism, which is (roughly) the block universe idea—past, present, and future are all parts of reality,” Tognazzini says. This theory says that the past and the future exist some temporal distance from the present—we just haven’t yet learned to travel between them. Thus, Tognazzini continues, “You can accept eternalism about time without accepting determinism, because the first is just a view about whether the future is real whereas the second is a view about how the future is connected to the past (i.e., whether there are ‘tram lines’).”
According to that school of thought, the future isn’t what has to happen, it’s simply what will happen. If we somehow got a glimpse of our futures from the present, it might appear as if our paths were fixed. But those futures actually would have been shaped by our freely chosen actions in the interim. As Tognazzini says, “It’s a fate of our own making—which is just to say, no fate at all.”
If we accept that the members of Devs know what they’re doing, though, then the computer’s predictions are deterministic, and the past does dictate the future. That’s disturbing, because it seemingly strips us of our agency. But, Tognazzini says, “Even then, it’s still the case that what we do now helps to shape that future. We still make a difference to what the future looks like, even if it’s the only difference we could have made, given the tram lines we happen to be on. … Determinism isn’t like some force that operates independently of what we want, making us marionettes. If it’s true, then it would apply equally to our mental lives as well, so that the future that comes about might well be exactly the future we wanted.”
This is akin to the “compatibilist” position espoused by David Hume, which seeks to reconcile the seemingly conflicting concepts of determinism and free will. As our final philosopher, Georgetown University’s William Blattner, says, “If determinism is to be plausible, it must find a way to ‘save the appearances,’ in this case, explain why we feel like we’re choosing, even if at some level the choice is an illusion.” The compatibilist perspective concedes that there may be only one possible future, but, Flynn says, “insists that there is a difference between being causally determined (necessitated) to act and being forced or compelled to act. As long as one who has seen their future does not do what has been predicted because they were forced to do it (against their will, so to speak), then they will still have done it freely.”
In the finale, we’ll find out whether the computer’s predictions are as flawless and inviolable as Katie claims. We’ll also likely learn one of Devs’ most closely kept secrets: What Forest intends to do with his perfect model of Amaya. The show hasn’t hinted that the computer can resurrect the dead in any physical fashion, so unless Forest is content to see his simulated daughter on a screen, he may try to enter the simulation himself. In Episode 7, Devs seemed to set the stage for such a step; as Stewart said, “That’s the reality right there. It’s not even a clone of reality. The box contains everything.”
Would a simulated Forest, united with his simulated daughter, be happier inside the simulation than he was in real life, assuming he’s aware he’s inside the simulation? The philosopher Robert Nozick explored a similar question with his hypothetical “experience machine.” The experience machine would stimulate our brains in such a way that we could supply as much pleasure as we wanted, in any form. It sounds like a nice place to visit, and yet most of us wouldn’t want to live there. That reluctance to enter the experience machine permanently seems to suggest that we see some value in an authentic connection to reality, however unpleasurable. “Thinking I’m hanging out with my family and friends is just different from actually hanging out with my family and friends,” Tognazzini says. “And since I think relationships are key to happiness, I’m skeptical that we could be happy in a simulation.”
If reality were painful enough, though, the relief from that pain might be worth the sacrifice. “Suppose, for instance, that the real world had become nearly uninhabitable or otherwise full of misery,” Flynn says. “It seems to me that life in a simulation might be experienced as a sanctuary. Perhaps one’s experience there would be tinged with sadness for the lost world, but I’m not sure knowing it’s a simulation would necessarily keep one from being happy in it.” Forest still seems miserable about Amaya IRL, so for him, that trade-off might make sense.
What’s more, if “real” life is totally deterministic, then Forest may not draw a distinction between life inside and outside of his quantum computer. “If freedom is a critical component of fulfillment, then it’s hard to see how we could be fulfilled in a simulation,” Blattner says. But for Forest, freedom isn’t an option anywhere. “Something about the situation seems sad, maybe pathetic, maybe even tragic,” Flynn says. “But if the world is a true simulation in the matter described, why not just understand it as the ability to visit another real world in which his daughter exists?”
Those who subscribe to the “simulation hypothesis” believe that what we think of as real life—including my experience of writing this sentence and your experience of reading it—is itself a simulation created by some higher order of being. In our world, it may seem dubious that such a sophisticated creation could exist (or that anything or anyone would care to create it). But in Forest’s world, a simulation just as sophisticated as “real” life already exists inside Devs—which means that what Forest perceives as real life could be someone else’s simulation. If he’s possibly stuck inside a simulation either way, he might as well choose the one with Amaya (if he has a “choice” at all).
Garland chose to tell this story on TV because on the big screen, he said, it “would have been slightly too truncated.” On the small screen, it’s probably slightly too long: Because we’ve known more than Lily all along, what she’s learned in later episodes has rehashed old info for us. Then again, Devs has felt familiar from the start. If Laplace got a pass for recycling Cicero and Leibniz, we’ll give Garland a pass for channeling Laplace. What’s one more presentation of a puzzle that’s had humans flummoxed forever?
Look: Nobody was expecting “Out of work, exceptionally bored sports commentators” to become the non-medical heroes of our current quarantine crisis. And yet here we are: Just a couple of weeks after rugby commentator Nick Heath delighted a planet with his quick-fire rundowns of everyday events, we now have Andrew…
this is fun. type imisstheoffice.eu into the browser, swear it's not a scam
For a lot of people, one of the pandemic’s very few silver linings is they don’t have to go into the office for a while. Rather than being forced to make a daily commute, muster up small talk with people you’d go out of your way to avoid in any other situation, and endure the stench of whatever fish creations a…
Haven't read it yet but 7's gotta be number 1 right? or 6?
Final Fantasy is a mood. Not in the “taking a picture of your sunglasses next to a plate of over-garnished eggs, then hashtagging it” kind of way. (Although we could totally see the rowdy, road-tripping crew of Final Fantasy XVdoing exactly that.) Square-Enix’s 30-years-and-running roleplaying game series—which…
If this was released to Amazon today for $20 would you pay to watch it?You don't OWN it, you just get the 48 hour window to watch it, essentially like a movie ticket.
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The evil organization is back at it in the delayed sequel
Good laughs in here: He told me that on a scale of 1 to 10, my score was a 2. I have no idea what that’s a measurement of, by the way. He didn’t give me any other information. He just said it and then turned on Wild Kratts. I’ve been thinking about it for 10 days.
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Even in the middle of a pandemic, kids will need to play to release all of that specifically childlike energy. The worst part is reminding them that they can’t play like they used to.
The sports and pop culture calendars have paused. The safest thing that you can do right now is stay inside. And millions of people are looking for creative ways to pass the time. The Ringer is here to help. We’re running a series called the Social Distancing Diaries, with our staff’s ideas for finding comfort, joy, community, or distraction while doing their part to flatten the curve. In the coming weeks, we’ll be diving into what we’re passionate about and want others to discover—from bidets to buried treasure and everything in between.
Do you remember the prison scene in 2009’s Watchmen? I didn’t like that movie very much the first time I watched it, but I will never forget that part.
What happens is: Rorschach, a teeny-tiny superhero—maaaaybe 5-foot-4, but probably closer to 5-foot-1—finds himself incarcerated. While waiting in line to get food one day, an inmate sidles up to him and starts talking to him, and things mostly seem safe. “Hey, Rorschach,” he says, sounding happy and pleased to be talking to Rorschach. “Hey, you’re pretty famous, right?” Rorschach ignores him, just staring forward and barely even blinking. The inmate laughs. “Hey, you know what? I’m pretty famous, too,” he says, and then everything turns dastardly. He replaces all of the niceness in his voice with menace and all of the kindness in his posture with venom. “You know, maybe I can give you an autograph,” he hisses, and then he takes a shiv and stabs Rorschach in the stomach.
Rorschach, a motherfucking problem, uses his metal food tray to block the blow, hits the guy in the face with the tray, then uses his elbow to break the glass between him and the cooks. He reaches over, grabs a deep fryer basket full of boiling oil that’s being used to make french fries, then dumps the boiling oil on the inmate’s head. The whole cafeteria is in shock. The guy—that poor, poor, dumb bastard—screams in pain as the skin and flesh melt off his skull.
“None of you seem to understand,” growls Rorschach. “I’m not locked in here with you,” he continues as a couple of prison guards grab him to try to get control of him. “You’re locked in here with me!” It’s gnarly, and terrifying, and one of those movie moments that never loses its luster, no matter how many times you watch it. Here’s the scene:
That’s what it feels like to be locked in a house all day with a 7-year-old, which is the predicament I have found myself in these past three or so weeks.
There are five people who live in my house. There’s me, there’s my wife, there are the twins, and there’s my youngest son (the Baby). We started social distancing on March 13. Here are some of the things that the Baby has already done, or said, or threatened me with thus far during the quarantine:
He said he was going to put a rattlesnake in my bed. He did this because I’d told him it was time to brush his teeth. There were no steps in between me telling him to brush and him threatening to put a rattlesnake in my bed. I said, “It’s time to brush your teeth, son.” To which he replied, “I’m gonna put a rattlesnake in your bed.” That’s way too fast of an escalation.
He walked into my room, turned on the lights, then shouted, “It’s time to wake up! It’s time to wake up! It’s time to wake up!” It was 3:30 a.m.
He told me that on a scale of 1 to 10, my score was a 2. I have no idea what that’s a measurement of, by the way. He didn’t give me any other information. He just said it and then turned on Wild Kratts. I’ve been thinking about it for 10 days.
He told me that if a bear got in our house, he would tell the bear to eat me first. He, for some reason, thought of this while he was playing with Legos. We weren’t even in the same room. I was outside on the patio working. He stopped playing, walked outside, told me about this hypothetical bear situation, and that was that. I asked him why he was thinking about bears. He responded by walking away without answering me.
He told me he found some money outside. He reached in his pocket to get it. Except he didn’t pull out any money. Instead, he pulled out his fist and then gave me the middle finger. He started laughing and then ran off. (I’ll admit: I thought this was funny when he did it.) (I’ll also admit: It was 100 percent my fault that this one happened. Flipping each other off has been a running gag between the two of us for about two years now. Probably a week or so prior, I’d come home from work and when I walked inside he asked me if I brought him anything. I said yes, that I’d brought him a tiny pet. He got really excited and hopped over to see what it was. When he did, I reached into my pocket, pulled out my fist, said, “I got you a bird,” and then gave him the middle finger. I guess he’d been waiting to get me back.)
I’d always thought of the Baby as smart and funny and cute, so I’d assumed he was going to eventually grow himself into a MACAULAY CULKIN IN HOME ALONE–type character. It would appear that’s not going to happen, though. It would appear we’re headed toward more of a MACAULAY CULKIN IN THE GOOD SON–type character. I’m so glad there’s no ice skating in San Antonio.
The truth is, separate from this curiously aggressive arc the Baby has begun to chart, the social distancing thing doesn’t really bother me all that much on a structural level. My pre-pandemic schedule found me alone in my office for eight or nine hours a day anyway—if anything, I’m around people more regularly now than I’ve been in years, what with all of us suddenly stuck in the house. I’m also fortunate to have a job that still pays me and a grocery store near my house that still stocks itself each night, so I don’t ever have to deal with the stress of worrying about how a bill is going to get paid or where our next meal is going to come from, which is something that literally millions of people have suddenly found themselves having to stare down.
And even beyond that: My parents live on a little piece of land just nine minutes away from us. And my mom is retired and my dad is on an indefinite leave of absence from work right now. We plotted it out early on that their house, same as our house, was going to be a safe zone. We don’t allow any outsiders in and neither do they. We don’t go anywhere and neither do they. They just hang out at their place with two of my nieces (my sister works in a hospital, so she decided it’d be safer for her girls to be with our parents; she sent them there over two weeks ago). On the weekends, Larami and I drop all three of the boys off there so they can run and play and be out from underneath us for two days. It’s a good little setup, really. In all likelihood, it’s probably just about as good as it can get.
But there is one part of all of this that sucks a lot, and that hurts my feelings a lot: when the Baby or one of the twins forgets that everyone is on lockdown and asks to go play with one of their friends.
That shit gets me every time.
For the twins, our house was the get-together house. Every two or so weeks they’d invite a few of their friends over to spend the night. Larami would pick them all up from school, take them to do some sort of activity—usually it’d be a trip to one of those trampoline parks, but sometimes it’d be a trip to the movies—then take them to the store, let them pick up a bunch of snacks, then go home and turn them loose. They’d all swim in the pool or go exploring in the wooded area near our house during the day, then at night they’d disappear upstairs with two boxes of pizza and listen to rap music with cuss words in it and play whatever games it was that they felt like playing (mostly indoor basketball, but sometimes Nerf War, and occasionally this game called Ten Seconds, where two kids just fistfight for 10 seconds, which is not a game that I condone but certainly one that I also played with my friends during sleepovers).
But they can’t do that anymore. About two weeks ago, one of them asked to have a sleepover, and it hurt so much to have to tell them that it wasn’t allowed.
Same with the Baby: He was FaceTiming with one of his buddies who lives in the neighborhood and I guess they were talking about how much they missed each other or something because the Baby asked if he could go visit her. And when he asked he put his little hands together like he was begging and, in this very high-pitched voice, he said, “Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeease?” and man. That shit hurt. A lot. All three of the boys just want to hang out with their friends. And we can’t let them. And they kind of understand why, but not really.
A few nights ago I could hear each of the twins in their rooms playing Fortnite with their friends on the computer. I just sat there on the couch listening to them laugh and yell and joke until well after one in the morning. I didn’t have the heart to tell them to stop and go to bed.
Kids are supposed to hang out with their friends. They’re supposed to run around and break shit and make jokes and ride skateboards and throw footballs and climb trees and get in trouble and not worry about anything.
The first episode of Amazon’s Tales From The Loop opens with Russ Willard (Jonathan Pryce), founder of the clandestine government facility known as the Mercer Center For Experimental Physics, addressing an unseen audience about the nature of the center’s work and its impact on the lives of the people who surround it.…
Ryan, I know you've got Tons of time to listen to podcasts. And Somebody has been throwing on old Scrubs eps on Hulu soooo
Zach Braff, who was once on a show about a podcast, is now going to make a podcast about a show—though this will hopefully work out a little better than that did. As reported by Deadline, he’s following through on a tease he made earlier this year by recording a Scrubs rewatch podcast with his Scrubs buddy (and…
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