It was so incredible to me at the time as a very young man, there was even fonts! I think it was Print Shop Deluxe for Windows 3.1/95.

Smartphones are fomes peccati.

Reminds me of old internet, when activists we doing it for The User.

Best thing about nerds is watching them try and build frameworks and formulas for the creative act. Like a metronome trying to compose a symphony.

If you have baseline epistemic hygeine you'd also recognized this as a B2B sales pitch: Axa sell group health, employee-assistance, and corporate wellbeing products.

It's fake bottom-line thinking that optimizes a few items while ignoring second and third-order effects.

Innumeracy with a finance vocabulary.

This is merely the end-state of industrialization, which is efficient and soulless.

Now, Cannes specifically – and entertainment generally – is rife with hucksters and people who started off as hucksters only to later become credible. Culture jamming is often looked back on as innovative!

But the difference between this and, say, Adbusters is that Adbusters and artists in general tend to punch up, whereas this – regardless of merit – is looked at by other artists as punching down, simply because it doesn't carry any intangibles.

And art is intangibles.

Time, culture, sweat, friction, a personal POV; art is an inherently human-to-human communication tool anyway. When you strip all of that away you lose something, in the same way a Big Mac is not the same as your mom's spaghetti.

I think that AI filmmakers, if they believe they can make films of high critical and/or or commercial success, need to avoid engaging in culture jamming and take a more honest approach. "This is my chosen medium" and then develop in public while treating the intangibles as legitimate, instead of something to be hacked around.

Apathy is for cowards.

It's like discovering fire, which offers both utility and magic: you can cook your food and gather warmth, and you can also stare into it and tell stories and never be bored. We're probably genetically wired to gravitate things which have both function and form.

That said, there's a reason the manic witch doctor was never the chief. Leadership requires discernment: when to consult the witch doctor, when to jirga with the neighboring elders, when to draw the sword.

A chief knows what happens when you cut the tribe by a third "for efficiency", or the burn seed corn to feed the fire, or replace the sentries with golems. The witch doctor often ends up boiled in his own cauldron.

Also there's no evidence that more data centers = "progress".

If slop is more expensive to produce, maybe there will be less of it clogging up the digital commons.

This is quite common in creative fields as quick shorthand for a new concept. For example, in filmmaking you might introduce a new crime thriller as script as "It's like Michael Mann's Heat but set in the high finance world of *Wall Street."

Probably true for a lot of innovation programs. "It's like Reddit but for hackers"