July 29th, 2025 ― To summarize my whole take on Eddington, which I will admit I enjoyed watching yet somehow pretty much hated, I think that Ari Aster, in his whole farcical anxiety-crafting thing, overconcerns himself with A) the most juvenile interpretations of certain concepts in the zeitgeist―or relies on them and parallel audience ignorance/exhaustion for laffs, tension etc.―and B) fantastical exaggeration which takes us into an imaginary version of the territory; I simply feel that there must be more skillful ways to handle that.
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or: They Asked the Machine That’s Killing the World About Chess, and It Said Black Has a Forced Win in 10,084,718,004,934,623
The day before, there had been an update to the knowledgebase. A redundant frontal core, extracted and trained separately for weeks on new data from a rediscovered population, was reconnected with the primary. Integration continued through the night. When the system was back online, finally, in the glowing AM hours of a Thursday in May, the lone researcher on duty downed a ceremonial last swig of tepid coffee and entered the first of the standard prompts: “Request diagnostic report on solving chess.” Some time elapsed―much longer than usual―before the machine gave a response.
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