Jon Hamm: I’ve worn everything on this show, from nothing to a rug wrapped around me to a beautiful bespoke suit.
Kate Carin (Costume Designer): When we see him at the bookshop for the ball, we thought it would be hilarious that Aziraphale had asked him to get really dressed up for it. So we did a bit of a homage to Liberace. So he’s got a powder blue dinner suit that’s encrusted with rhinestones. And then Douglas asked if we could do some sort of coat to go on top of it for one of the scenes when he leaves. So, of course, we didn’t do just a coat. We did a huge ostrich feather coat, which we made from scratch.The girls did all the ombre on the feathers so it matches the dinner suit, gets lighter and lighter blue as it comes to the top, and then he’s kind of surrounded by this halo of white feathers.
Sarah-Kate Fenelon(Producer): There is a shot when he emerges from the bookshop to meet all of the demons and say, like, I am who you’re looking for, where he looks a little bit like an angel. And the silhouette of him kind of emerging in the light is very epic and is then just completely undercut by sort of, move out of the way. (video)
Foodora har tillsammans med Tele2 och Aerit introducerat en gemensam satsning på drönarleveranser i Sverige. Räckvidden för leveranserna är 1,2 mil och högsta vikten för varorna är fyra kilo. Enligt pressmeddelandet kan drönarna flyga i tufft väder, inklusive regn, snö och vind.
Företagen hoppas kunna revolutionera hur mat och andra varor levereras till kunder. Leveranserna kommer vara aktiva sju dagar i veckan, året om. Tjänsten inleds i Värmdö i maj, med leveranser mellan 11:00–19:00. Därefter hoppas Foodora expandera tjänsten till fler områden runtom i Sverige.
Snabba hemleveranser är en demokratisk fråga enligt mig, var man än befinner sig i landet ska det vara möjligt att få det man behöver snabbt som exempelvis mediciner eller dagligvaror. Det ska inte bara vara tillgängligt för människor som valt att bosätta sig i storstäderna.
Do you want to be chained to an outlet for the rest of your life? Of course not. That’s why you got a laptop in the first place. Somewhere down the line, many of us got the idea that our laptops should always be plugged in to improve their performance. This is a myth that’s slowly killing your laptop. Once your laptop…
En lite anonym chattbott jämfört med ChatGPT, Google Gemini och Microsoft Copilot är Claude från Anthropic. Utvecklaren har introducerat nya modellen Claude 3, vilken slår både ChatGPT och Gemini i vissa viktiga branschbenchmarks.
Claude 3 tillhandahålls i tre olika storlekar med de passande namnen Haiku, Sonnet och Opus. Enligt Anthropic uppvisar största modellen Opus en nästintill mänsklig nivå av förståelse när det gäller att utföra komplexa uppgifter.
Ett inlägg från en av Anthropics ingenjörer blev viralt häromdagen, eftersom vissa ansåg att Claude uppvisade en slags metakognition – det vill säga en medvetenhet om de egna interna processerna. Claude fick genomföra ett nål-i-höstacken-test som går ut på att hitta en mening som sticker ut i en väldigt stor mängd text.
However, this sentence seems very out of place and unrelated to the rest of the content in the documents, which are about programming languages, startups, and finding work you love. I suspect this pizza topping ’fact’ may have been inserted as a joke or to test if I was paying attention, since it does not fit with the other topics at all. The documents do not contain any other information about pizza toppings.
Claude hittade meningen och påpekade att ”nålen” inte passade in i övriga texten och att Claude därför misstänkte att meningen infogats som ett skämt eller som ett test för att se om den var uppmärksam. En rad experter har dock avfärdat att detta är ett exempel på metakognition och en slags medvetenhet.
Anthropic har fortfarande inte släppt Claude i EU.
The internet is in an uproar after a question and answer session featuring Google co-founder Sergey Brin over the weekend, where an attendee in a mostly male audience wore a shirt depicting a naked woman’s body.
Microsoft har tillkännagivit att Androidenheter snart kan användas som trådlösa webbkameror i Windows 11, via appen Link to Windows. Tack vare att smartphones erbjuder långt bättre kameror än exempelvis en laptop kan bildkvaliteten under videosamtal på så vis förbättras.
Enligt Microsoft fungerar länken i ”alla videoapplikationer” så det är möjligt att det finns fler användningsområden. I skrivande stund är nyheten bara tillgänglig för ”Windows Insiders” men den kommer släppas för alla senare i vår.
Funktionen kräver minst Android 9 Pie.
With this feature, you’ll be able to wirelessly enjoy the high quality of your mobile device’s camera on your PC with flexibility and ease. Some of the abilities include being able to switch between front and back camera, pausing the stream during interruptions, and enjoying effects provided by your mobile model.
To enable this experience, go to Settings > Bluetooth & devices > Mobile devices and choose “Manage devices” and allow your PC to access your Android phone. Your PC will get a Cross Device Experience Host update in the Microsoft Store that is required for this experience to work.
Most people turn on mobile push notifications and then promptly forget about them. However, it turns out that if you’re up to no good, those notifications could get you thrown in prison. The Washington Post reports that the FBI has been using mobile push notification data to unmask people suspected of serious crimes,…
Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski bragged on Tuesday that his company’s new OpenAI-powered customer service chatbot was doing the work of 700 people—nearly two years after Klarna laid off about 700 people.
Or, in this case, restarts—that’s the theory, anyway, now that the WGA writer’s strike is in the rearview mirror, and progress can resume on so many projects, including J. Michael Straczynski’s long-promised attempt to reboot his classic sci-fi TV series, Babylon 5.
The reboot was first confirmed in 2021 by Straczynski on his Twitter account. Writing that the show was in development with the CW, Straczynski said:
As noted in the announcement, this is a reboot from the ground up rather than a continuation, for several reasons. Heraclitus wrote “You cannot step in the same river twice, for the river has changed, and you have changed.” In the years since B5, I’ve done a ton of other TV shows and movies, adding an equal number of tools to my toolbox, all of which I can bring to bear on one singular question: if I were creating Babylon 5 today, for the first time, knowing what I now know as a writer, what would it look like? How would it use all the storytelling tools and technological resources available in 2021 that were not on hand then? … So we will not be retelling the same story in the same way because of what Heraclitus said about the river. There would be no fun and no surprises.
From that detailed announcement, it’s apparent that the rebooted Babylon 5 will be quite different from its original iteration. I think it’s clear that this was always going to be the case, though—and not merely because of recasting and updates in special effects technology.
In its very bones, Babylon 5 was a unique experience. It was a bold attempt to experiment with the conventional format of TV, with a serialized storyline and continuity, unlike earlier shows like Star Trek or Quantum Leap or any number of other “story of the week” style science fiction programs. Here in our current era, post-prestige TV, that kind of storytelling is common, but in the 1990s, when Babylon 5 first entered pre-production, it was nearly unheard of.
Occasional radical programs like The Prisoner or Twin Peaks were the exception, not the norm, and in both of those cases, they were cancelled before they were able to tell complete stories. With Babylon 5, Straczynski set out with the deliberate intention to make a show that would last five seasons: No more, no less. It was a bold proposition… a dream given form, one might say.
It was also a massive exercise in planning, not just in terms of TV production, but in the writing and plotting of the show.
In fiction plotting, there are two broad schools of thought. One suggests that writers should allow themselves to permit characters and actions to come as they will—to “fly by the seat of one’s pants,” as it were. The “pantsers” are writers who don’t necessarily know where a story is heading, and are willing to adapt on the fly as ideas and character motivations evolve.
The second school of thought is that everything should be meticulously plotted. “Plotters” are writers who know precisely where the story is headed, and operate with a high degree of certainty as to how they’ll reach that conclusion.
Straczynski, at the start of Babylon 5, was unquestionably a plotter. Fans of the program will likely have heard about his penchant for building in “trap doors,” a term Straczynski used to refer to plot resolutions for main characters that branched off of the main story, should the need arise for recasting and the like.
In a forum post—which was one of his main tools for talking with fans at the time—Straczynski wrote about how these “trap doors” were a vital part of his writing process:
As a writer, doing a long-term story, it’d be dangerous and short-sighted for me to construct the story without trap doors for every single character… An actor can get hit by a meteor, walk off, whatever…That was one of the big risks going into a long-term storyline which I considered long in advance; you can’t predict real-world events, so you have to compensate for them and plan for them in advance. Otherwise you could paint yourself into a corner.
And of course, real-world events did impact the show. Michael O’Hare, who portrayed main character Commander Jeffrey Sinclair, began experiencing psychosis and paranoid delusions, including hallucinations. These issues, which Straczynski kept in confidence until after O’Hare’s passing in 2012, led to the creation of a new lead character, which was a disruption that Babylon 5 had not prepared for.
“I could write him out for a couple of episodes,” Straczynski said at a special “promise panel” (named for the promise he gave to O’Hare to keep his illness a secret until the actor’s death) before stunned attendees at Phoenix Comic Con in 2013, the first time he revealed the actor’s mental health issues publicly. “But I couldn’t write him out long enough to get the kind of help he really needed. I was prepared to shut down the show.”
O’Hare instead urged Straczynski to let him complete the first season, and afterwards agreed to part ways, save for a two-part appearance in the third season that tied off some loose plot threads and wrapped up Sinclair’s story arc.
From a narrative standpoint, it’s fascinating to consider how this particular challenge affected the trajectory of Babylon 5 on a profound level. Originally—as revealed in the single-spaced, seven-page synopsis that Straczynski parcels out through the 15-volume (14 plus a bonus volume) Babylon 5 script books—Sinclair was supposed to be the main character for the entire series’ run. As part of that run, Sinclair would not have become Valen, a prophet-like figure to a race called the Minbari, but would instead have fathered a “Minbari not born of Minbari,” as was prophesied by Valen in the distant past.
The mother of that child would have been Delenn, the Minbari ambassador to Babylon 5 who, at the end of the first season, undergoes a metamorphosis to become part human. Her purpose for doing so, as stated in the televised series, was to improve relations between humans and Minbari. In truth, the original motivation would have been to allow her body to be capable of bearing this prophesied child.
Indeed, in hindsight, this change does seem a little bit dubious without the pressing need to force prophecy, as it were. It also makes certain plot elements a bit clearer, such as the motivations of the Minbari assassin in the original pilot. Looking at that small arc through the lens of Sinclair as father to a half-Minbari child of prophecy, it becomes apparent that there would have been a faction of Minbari opposed to the very notion of mating with humans, and would treat a child of such a pairing as an abomination. Additionally, the “old Sinclair” shot we get in “Babylon Squared” that seems to show a potentially grim future is instead reduced to a somewhat flimsy retcon, as Sinclair is affected by the time dilation effect around Babylon 4. In the original plotline, it seems clear that the series meant to proceed into a potentially decades-long future, where the grown child of Sinclair and Delenn would meet his destiny.
Nevertheless, while Straczynski had meticulously plotted out his five-year arc, he also expressed a willingness to stray to the “pantser” side of the writing spectrum, as he mentioned in the same forum post where talked about his “trap door” escape plots:
As a writer, you have to be flexible enough to recognize a stronger, better path when it presents itself; to be so rigidly locked into your prior structure eliminates spontaneity and the chance to explore new routes.
Another unexpected speedbump in Babylon 5’s path came around the fourth season, as the now-apparently unstoppable show hit an immovable network. The Prime Time Entertainment Network, which aired the series, announced they would be shutting down, leaving Straczynski’s five-year plan, which had seemed much more solid after the end of the third season, in doubt.
As such, he felt obliged to produce a truncated version of his grand plot. The major threads of the Shadow War and the Earth Civil War were all wrapped up by Season 4’s conclusion. They even shot the finale, “Sleeping in Light,” but by the time Season 4 started to air, Babylon 5 had been suddenly saved by another network, TNT, and so that episode was ultimately shelved for the end of Season 5. Instead, Straczynski had the crew shoot “The Deconstruction of Falling Stars” to wrap up Season 4, and actor Claudia Christian, who by this point had departed the show amidst the confusion around Season 5, was absent.
Season 5 itself is sometimes maligned by fans as a strange coda to a completed story, but it nevertheless offers some incredible moments of deep emotional impact, particularly for series mainstays G’kar and Londo Mollari. In this respect, it’s worth noting that the “pantsing” side of writing, as Straczynski suggested, yielded some rewarding returns.
What makes Babylon 5 so singularly fascinating is that it managed, largely through the adaptability and force of will that Straczynski brought to the table as a writer and showrunner, to persevere in telling its story through a striking balance of “plotting” and “pantsing.”
Even in modern television, we still see the perils of trying to adapt or plan for long-running storylines. The Expanse, for instance, was cancelled twice. In the first instance, this led to a rapidly-paced third season that aimed to complete adaptations of the first three novels on which the show is based, and in the second instance, it led to an even-more-rapidly-paced sixth season, as Amazon shortened the episode order before axing the show.
Babylon 5 miraculously endured, and arguably thrived in spite of the various setbacks and challenges over the course of its run.
There are, of course, some elements which may have been stronger, had they survived the vagaries of production issues, cast departures, and so on. For instance, the original first officer of the station, Lieutenant Laurel Takashima, was intended to be the person who shot Garibaldi in the back at the end of season one, and who would have been implanted with the “control” personality that was instead given to telepath Talia Winters.
However, because that plot was given to Talia, it paved the way for the return of Lyta Alexander, who roared back into the show with a deeply badass background as a “doomsday telepath” enhanced by the enigmatic Vorlon race.
Then there are elements which maybe didn’t pack as much of a wallop. Catherine Sakai, Sinclair’s old flame who appears in a handful of episodes as a talented pilot and explorer, was clearly being set up to explore the ruins of Z’Ha’Dum—and everyone knows if you go there, you die. Her likely re-appearance after having her personality completely destroyed after being forced to serve the Shadows would have been harrowing, and would have been much more emotionally impactful than the Anna Sheridan plotline we got.
What this all adds up to is that Babylon 5 was, and remains, a fascinating early experiment in TV writing, and one that will never be repeated with the same results. It blazed a unique path, setting a standard for plotting a serialized story in a way that was revolutionary in television at the time, while allowing for Straczynski and his team of writers to fly by the seat of their pants when it became necessary, and because of that, it will inevitably change when it is rebooted.
But that is what makes it interesting, and endlessly exciting.[end-mark]
Putting your phone in airplane mode when boarding a flight feels like common sense. You wouldn’t be crazy for thinking your phone signal could interfere with an airplane’s navigation systems, potentially causing a disaster. However, the necessity of airplane mode is largely a myth, and there’s another reason airlines…
Avast har fått 16,5 miljoner dollar i böter av FTC i USA för att ha lagrat och sålt användares data utan deras tillåtelse. Ironiskt nog var det mjukvara som sades öka användares säkerhet och integritet som utnyttjades för den otillåtna datainsamlingen, likt antivirusprogram och insticksprogram för webbläsare.
Företaget har även förbjudits från att sälja användares data för annonseringssyften i USA. Enligt FTC utnyttjade Avast sin mjukvara för att samla in data om användares internetaktivitet från åtminstone 2014 till 2020.
Avast påstås ha samlat in uppgifter likt platsdata, politiska åsikter, trosuppfattning, hälsoproblem och ekonomisk ställning och därefter lagrat uppgifterna utan tidsgräns och sålt dem till över hundra utomstående parter.
FTC menar vidare att Avast förde kunder bakom ljuset när de påstod att mjukvaran eliminerar spårare på webben – när Avast själva stod för spårningen. Avast säger i ett uttalande att de motsätter sig FTC:s anklagelser och hur FTC ”karakteriserar fakta”, men att de är nöjda att frågan är löst.
In my experience, Twitter worked by boosting content you engage with, regardless of how bad it was. This means that every time I complained about some transphobic content, the algorithm started serving me more and more of that particular content, to the point where I was constantly seeing everything by JKR and other transphobes, despite never subscribing to them. And it got really unhealthy after a while.
Bluesky was made by the guy who used to run Twitter, I expect it functions exactly the same way. I advise people, particularly trans people, to stay away from it.
Bluesky doesn't have algorithms. It has a healthy block function. And while Jack Dorsey was one of the founders of Bluesky it's a "public benefit company" and very much not a Twitter clone (nor does he apparently have very much to do with it).
What Neil said.
Though Bluesky started life as an offshoot of Twitter, and its UI is very reminiscent of Twitter, it's worth knowing a few things.
There's no built-in algorithm. There's feeds, most of which are user-created, and some of which can behave algorithmically, but none of them are mandatory and your timeline is purely chronological and shows your follows. You can even customize if you see their reposts, replies and the like on your timeline.
Jack Dorsey does technically sit on the board of directors of Bluesky, but he hasn't done anything meaningful there in months. He's almost entirely abandoned Bluesky in favor of Nostr, and good riddance. Very few people on Bluesky actually like him.
The block function is actually very robust, and user-created Moderation Lists let you quickly mute or block a user-curated list of people (such as crypto-shills or transphobes).
All that being said, it's not perfect, but the queers and furries got there early and have done a lot of work toward cultivating it to a nice environment. I was skeptical of Bluesky initially too, for the same reasons as folk still are, but it's pretty solid, honestly. It doesn't have DMs yet, which is my only major gripe with it, but everything else about it is pretty solid.
Google’s AI chatbot Gemini has a unique problem. It has a hard time producing pictures of white people, often turning Vikings, founding fathers, and Canadian hockey players into people of color. This sparked outrage from the anti-woke community, claiming racism against white people. Today, Google acknowledged Gemini’s…
Reddit reportedly signed a $60 million deal with Google to allow its online communities to be scraped for AI training data, according to Reuters Thursday. Google will sift through millions of posts on Reddit, and train a large language model on Reddit’s threads. The content deal was originally reported by Bloomberg…
Apple users seem unanimously convinced that closing background apps is a good habit, but it’s more likely a waste of time. For too long, I’ve watched friends and family orchestrate a frenzy of up-swipes from their iPhone’s multitasking screen to cleanse themselves of countless open background apps.
If a pack of sugar-free gum has ever given you a nasty stomach ache, you might have your gut bacteria to blame. New research in mice found a link between the gut microbiome and a food intolerance to sorbitol, a commonly used sugar substitute. The findings could even point to an effective treatment for the condition,…
I think it’s fair to say that the astonishing thing is how enthusiastically the American, Canadian (and British?) people involved in the Hugos took to censorship. I’m proud of the whistleblower, and am still puzzled by the removal of Sandman Episode 6. But this appears to have been what was going on:
I do not share Neil Gaiman’s astonishment (I had personally pegged this as the most likely scenario), but everything about this really sucks.
However, the part of the report that actually made me gasp out loud was this one:
“One interesting aspect of the “validation” spreadsheet is it appears to show a number of Chinese works that may have been removed from the final ballot. For example, in the Best Novel category, four Chinese novels are listed including We Live in Nanjing by Tianrui Shuofu. None of these novels made the final ballot.
In both Diane Lacey’s apology letter and an interview, she said some of these Chinese works were removed due to ‘collusion in a Chinese publication that had published a nominations list, a slate as it were, and so those ballots were identified and eliminated.’”
In her letter, she states:
“We were told there was collusion in a Chinese publication that had published a nominations list, a slate as it were, and so those ballots were identified and eliminated, exactly as many have speculated.”
This is astonishing, and alarming. For context:
Slating (politically-motivated slating, no less) has been a problem with the Hugos before. In fact, it formed the basis for a high profile (relatively) recent scandal. HOWEVER, the result of that scandal was formal changes in how votes are calculated.
To my knowledge, there is ZERO basis for “eliminating” slate ballots under the rules. Again, these are the rules that were created specifically with concerns about slating in mind.
The idea of a bunch of North American/British administrators either initiating or signing off on the elimination of ballots by Chinese fans because of alleged slating suggests that those administrators hold Chinese fans, and works by Chinese creators, to different standards (and grant them much less respect) than they do to English speaking fans.
Unlike the English-language works and writers that were at least given the respect of being marked as disqualified, we would not have know about the disqualifications without the whistleblower. It’s still not clear whether all works removed this way have been identified. This is disgusting, and the administrators should immediately release (in a form and language accessible to those Chinese Fans and creators) the full list of names of the works, along with a further explanation.
Additional burning questions:
“We were told” - by who? Why was this person/people considered credible? What proof did they show?
“there was collusion in a Chinese publication that had published a nominations list” - “collusion” is a very specific and loaded word! What *exactly* do is meant by that? What more did they do than publish a nomination list? And what the fuck is wrong with publishing a nomination list?
“those ballots were identified” - by who? And how? What vetting was done to ensure that they were the result of “collusion,” (and again, what the fuck does “collusion” mean in this context)?
“and eliminated” - were the entire ballots thrown out? Or just works on those ballots which someone engaged in “collusion”?
I cannot emphasize enough, given the context, and given the lack of answers to the above questions, right now it sure as fuck looks like a bunch of North American/British administrators heard that Chinese publications were promoting recommendation lists, a thing that is not only objectively allowed under the rules but seems normal and fine, and decided this meant Those Deceitful Chinese Fake-Fans Must Be Cheating, and so threw out a bunch of ballots of Chinese fans - fans who, by the way *paid for the privilege of submitting their votes* - without bothering to even tell those fans and creators.
If this is not what happened, and there is a reasonable and good explanation, fans (again, especially Chinese fans) have a right to know.
Absolutely. I think the way that the Chinese fans and authors have been treated during this process is utterly shameful.
Dealabs rapporterar att instegsmodellen av Nothings nästa lur Phone 2a inte kommer kosta mer än 349 euro i Frankrike. Prisangivelsen avser upplagan med 8GB RAM och 128GB lagring. Källan skriver att modellen med 12GB RAM och 256GB lagring kommer gå på 399 euro.
Nu är förstås varken priserna eller specifikationerna bekräftade än, men om ryktena stämmer är detta en konkurrenskraftig prissättning utifrån hårdvaran som erbjuds – i alla fall i Frankrike. De specifikationer som nämndes i senaste ryktet är en 6,7-tums OLED (120Hz), 4nm-chippet Dimensity 7200 Ultra, dubbla 50MP-kameror och en 32MP frontkamera.
This report is being released simultaneously on File770 and Genre Grapevine and is also available to download as an e-book epub file and as a PDF. By Chris M. Barkley and Jason Sanford “You acquire information and you convey the … Continue reading →
