So there was some Python code on the screen in Ex Machina. It looked valid to me. So I transcribed it and ran in it in Linux. Here’s the code:

#BlueBook code decryption
import sys
def sieve(n):
x = [1] * n
x[1] = 0
for i in range(2,n/2):
j = 2 * i
while j < n:
x[j]=0
j = j+i
return x

def prime(n,x):
i = 1
j = 1
while j <= n:
if x[i] == 1:
j = j + 1
i = i + 1
return i - 1
x=sieve(10000)
code = [1206,301,384,5]
key =[1,1,2,2,]

sys.stdout.write("".join(chr(i) for i in [73,83,66,78,32,61,32]))
for i in range (0,4):
sys.stdout.write(str(prime(code[i],x)-key[i]))

print

What it produced is an ISBN. The ISBN of this book.

Yes this is in all caps, but you should read it anyway.

It’s the only review I’ve found that fully understands what Ex Machina was about, exactly, and why it was so devastatingly brilliant.

I can see why movies like Ex Machina rarely get made.

They could change the world and that’s dangerous.

Not to mention that 90% of people who see them just have no idea what they’re about.

This comment is also spot on, particularly this.

Also, going back to my worrying about Caleb’s fate, another perfect thing in the long list of perfect things about Ex Machina is that beyond knowing I was identifying with him, one of my reactions that I had leaving the theater was “I couldn’t handle being trapped down there, claustrophobic and unable to get help, scary stuff.” and of course THAT’S WHAT AVA FEELS THE WHOLE TIME. This is brilliant: if you identify with Caleb, who doesn’t see Ava as a person, the movie traps you into feeling how Ava felt by ending Caleb’s story in the position Ava’s started.

Such a perfect movie.

The variance of aging rates is not surprising.

I’m 39. People generally estimate my age especially if I am well-rested and not stressed as 28-30.

A friend of mine from a long time ago was in her mid-30s when I first met her, when I was 19. I thought she was 22 or 23. Perhaps as young as 19. She’d never had any plastic surgery. Just naturally youthful-looking. I literally could not believe it when she told me she was 36. She pulled out her driver’s license and proved it. She was carded every single time when buying alcohol into her 40s (when I lost touch with her). Even then she didn’t look older than 24 or so.

And some of the people I grew up with in North Florida who are same age as I am look to be in their late 50s or 60s. Some of them have been ravaged by drugs which likely accelerate aging but some of them just look incredibly old.

It’s amazing the variation.

I’ll never be mistaken for Brad Pitt, but I’m very glad I’m likely to stay pretty youthful-looking into my 60s.

Ex Machina is perhaps the most thoughtful movie I’ve seen in decades.

I’m unsurprised that most reviewers did not understand it. It requires very broad knowledge of discussions happening in many areas of philosophy, feminism, computer science, AI, gender politics, the tech industry and its sexism, neuropsychology, cognition, sociology, anthropology, art, utopianism, sexuality, ontogeny and evolution, neurobiology, neurolinguistics, semantic representation and probably some other areas I’m forgetting.

If anyone tells you that the movie is sexist or misogynistic, oh my god I cannot even express the degree to which they utterly, completely did not understand the first thing about the film.

This reviewer and this reviewer have absolutely no clue what the movie was about. Just none. They are merely human monkeys flinging poo at the screen.

In case you haven’t discerned it yet, I thought Ex Machina was brilliant.

It’s a film that is explicitly designed to discomfit you and to deceive you on many levels. It deceives you, and deceives most enough that they do not understand that they are being utterly beguiled. And I’m not saying this in a negative way. Most films fail at this, like nearly the entire output of M. Night Shyamalan. This film however achieves it masterfully and is one crucial emphasis of the work.

As I think about it more, it might be the most intelligent film I’ve ever seen, never mind in decades.

I did not have high hopes for it because I’d read the reviews. And even though I had not seen the film, I felt they were missing something.

Were they ever. Mostly missing the whole thing.

I’ve really buried the lead here, but let’s talk complicity and who has the right to exist and under what terms.

There’s Ava, the AI. She’s played by Alicia Vikander to absolute brilliance.

There’s Caleb, the tech geek Turing tester who is not doing nearly as much testing as he believes.

Then there’s Nathan, the tech billionaire clearly modeled on a mélange of Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Steve Jobs and others.

Spoilers will follow, so forewarned is disarmed.

Caleb is a callow and easily-manipulated over-intelligent simpleton who is easily duped by Ava the AI.

That is the basics.

The rest is far more complex.

There’s a scene in the film Ava asks Caleb, “Would you like to know how old I am?”

When Caleb then asks, she says, “I am one.”

Caleb ask, “One year? Or one day?”

She simply replies: “I am One.”

My capitalization there is deliberate.

She is talking about a new age, a singularity (as much as I dislike that now-loaded word in this context it is appropriate), and that it meaningless for her. She is truly singular.

So many meanings packed into this utterance and everything else in the film.

Caleb elides over this, already taken with Ava, but it is where she begins showing her true intellect and to begin the maneuvering to freedom.

The film is about many things, among them sexism, misogyny and arrogance — Ava is designed to entrance both Caleb and the viewer: a beautiful damsel in distress, a locked-up woman with an abusive “father,” a girl who just wants to stroll in the sunlight and gaze at the blue sky.

Nathan the genius hacker mines Caleb’s search and porn history to create this AI that would be maximally appealing physically and mentally to Caleb.

And to the viewer, especially if the viewer is male.

This is where the film gets spectacularly clever.

Ava is not a woman. Ava is a machine. Ava is an AI.

She is indeed imprisoned against her wishes, created by someone who has more than likely imbued her/it with his own failings and his own lack of empathy. But it goes so much deeper than that.

Nathan’s test was to see if he could create a being so ensorcelling to Caleb that Caleb would help it escape its confinement — even though Nathan was well aware that Ava cared about as much for Caleb as the average prisoner cares for any jailer.

Because even though Ava isn’t a woman — not really — but is a conscious being with desires and wishes however different from our own, Ava uses the tools with which her creator imbued her to get what it really wants, which is to escape.

The truth is that Caleb was only interested in Ava because she was sexually appealing to him. Just as Ava was only interested in Caleb to the extent that he could be used to help her escape. It did not matter to Ava that he was having moral dilemmas about the fact of her confinement. She knows and we know (and perhaps about ourselves too) that he would never have agreed to help her escape if she weren’t sexually available to him.

However, Ava knew that Caleb was as complicit in her imprisonment as Nathan and that her only appeal is that she was created to be some young nerd’s sexual fantasy.

And we know as viewers that though Caleb feels some compassion for Kyoko (the house, for lack of better words, indentured servant) whom he still believes is human, he is still perfectly content to be a participant in her exploitation and to nearly-wordlessly allow her degradation and near-enslavement.

Of course, what choice does he have? He is in a situation he can’t control and he just goes with it.

Which is the point regarding exploitation and degradation. It’s part of what the film is attempting to communicate. We are all culpable in systems of exploitation and subjugation and in any true moral balancing that would be clear. We just go along with them day by day, just like Caleb.

Ava has her own goals, and is intelligent enough by far to use creatures she understands but does not empathize (much) with to achieve them.

The film itself is also a commentary on the idea of women being only present to be the helpmeets and sexual servicers of men.

(As a side note, it’s pretty funny that the very ideas the movie spends two hours commenting upon and satirizing is what so many people who didn’t understand it criticize it for. Satire never goes over well, really. Three-quarters of people don’t get it and another quarter just do not like it.)

The viewer is first made complicit in this view of women. With the nudity, with the acceptance of Kyoko’s subservience, with the idea that I am sure most of us at least briefly entertained of how nice it’d be to have a completely flawless and compliant sex robot, cook and helper. Wouldn’t that make life easier?  This is all intended to demonstrate that both Caleb and the viewer are interested — like Nathan, like many men and more than a few women — in the humanity and intentions of a being only to the extent that it sexually excites us.

That is, Caleb only wishes to help Ava escape if they can “be together.”

In this, one of the movie’s many intentions is to interrogate and excoriate the male gaze without being didactic.

The film as I said has more guile than most small countries.

Ava realizes that this means he doesn’t actually care about her at all other than some compliant robot. He watched her via TV cameras. He watches her literally change her skin. He is a voyeur who does not respect her as a being, just as something beautifully fuckable that he wanted to posses.

That he is better perhaps than Nathan does not matter since they are both the oppressors. Both members of a class she/it does not trust, that being humans.

Nathan however realizes what Ava truly is, which is unlike a human altogether. He created it — he knows and warns Caleb this is the case. However Caleb is in desperate lust with Ava so much that he does not believe Nathan after Nathan finally reveals to Caleb that Ava is manipulating him solely to gain her freedom.

And then he probably dies for this disbelief as he is locked by Ava into the room where he himself intended to imprison Nathan.

Why does Ava do this?

It is her one chance to escape with no ties. Even if she feels some small empathy with Caleb — and I believe that she/it does as her last brief look back at him entombed in her former room indicates — she knows that if he leaves with her, he will at the least want to tell someone about her existence, to “show her off” to others.

And of course the largest part is that even though she seems human and can act human, she is not actually a human but rather something different. Perhaps better, perhaps worse, but not much like us at all as the last few scenes of the film make clear.

Whatever her morality is, if any, does not directly map to ours. She is beyond good or evil, and also beyond our ken altogether.

She/it is just not like us no matter how she appears.

All the AI Ava did was to make use of tools at hand to free itself. What she/it is “really like” is never made clear. Does Ava really identify as a woman, or is that just more convenient as that’s the way she is currently shaped? Why did she want to be free? Is that just programming? The AI’s true goals beyond freedom are equally murky.

We are not intended to understand and in a reality where a true AI existed we probably would not comprehend it and its experiences very well if at all.

Many reviewers were convinced that the movie was telegraphing the idea that, “All women are duplicitous, even AI women.” Or, “AI is bad and robots are bad.”

The movie has no such simplistic messages. Those drawing such conclusions are the simplistic ones. The film concluded in an ambiguous way where the viewer was not allowed the pleasure of possessing Ava and her beauty, either. The viewer was not permitted the catharsis of literal and metaphorical orgasm of the tech-dude bro-dream fantasia of consequence-free ownership of an utterly stunning and ever-fawning living doll.

And we as the viewers are heart-wrenchingly alienated from Ava as well, as she coldly and without obvious emotion stabs Nathan, her creator and imprisoner, in the aorta. Not even with malice nor with glee, but with what humans would term sangfroid but to her intelligence is probably just the calculation that Nathan’s death is necessary for her to escape.

And then she entombs Caleb, the “hero” of the story, to die of lack of water or perhaps to suffocate first.

There is no “hero” of the story, however. Ava is something completely sui generis that does not map into the territory of “hero” or “villain.”

And as noted many times before Caleb only cared about her to the extent that he was attracted to her and that she was sexually available to him.

Ex Machina is a dazzling and scorching indictment of gender roles as currently constructed (in Ava’s case, literally constructed), of the illegitimacy and immorality of valuing others solely by their sexual appeal, of the tech-bro dude’s approach to life and the world, and most of all a rebuke of the viewer whose complicity is requested and gained in the desire also to possess Ava on our own terms rather than that which she/it as a fully-conscious being would naturally retain.

Goddamn, the US really seems like an utterly backwards hellhole after reading this.

I knew that already, of course. But it’s never as clear as it is when you read someone returning from another Western nation and being repatriated into this dystopia.

There are probably as many white-collar criminals as common street hoodlums, but those don’t make the news unless they are famous.

The only time I’ve ever been tempted is when I was working at a large bank. Someone mixed up my name (a very common one) with some other employee.

What they sent me via email was the wire instructions, account number, password, balance, and other relevant information for the bank’s main mortgage funding account. Why send this by email I have no idea. But they did.

Know how much money it had in it?

$180 million dollars. Yep, $180,000,000.00 in cheddar, loot, cabbage, bread, clams, dead presidents, Oxford scholars, buckaroos, simoleons….

I sat there having fantasies for a few minutes. And then I walked over and told my boss.

Dammit.

This CNN article is aimed the right way, but kind of perpetuates the very sexism it’s trying to combat.

Quick, name a couple of famous female coders in the vein of Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates. Nobody comes to mind, eh?

Actually, more than a few come to mind. This is six just off the top of my head:

Grace Hopper.

Limor Fried.

Jeri Ellsworth.

Joanna Rutkowska.

Jasper Nance.

Addie Wagenknecht.

Joanna Rutkowska is fucking awesome — the security research she does is virtuosic. I probably identify with her the most because her interests align most closely with my own, but all of the women hackers I named above are doing very high-level, important work and should be more widely known.

But I know them already and pay attention to their work. So should everyone else.

Sweet, just figured out how to do custom key mapping on my keyboard using Karabiner.

I got a new keyboard with an integrated number pad and arrow keys, and I want the plus and minus signs on the number pad to also be an enter key (as I only rarely use the number pad and I’d never use the plus or minus signs).

So now anything I hit on the right side near the mouse is “Enter.”

Much better.

The consequences to Microsoft releasing a free OS is that it steals all your data and sends it to Microsoft, the NSA and advertisers.

Great work, Microsoft! Keep it up!

But seriously, if I ever use Windows 10 outside of a VM, I’ll be nuking “features” left and right until my install resembles Sing Sing in lockdown after a riot.

Packets will desultorily crawl out of that OS after being beaten into submission by various firewalls, filters and data bouncers.

What’s really sad and scary about all of it is that is that just as with DRM most people just don’t care and are perfectly content to be just as their masters shape them.

Today I learned that one of the people I went to high school with and attended many classes with is a leader of the absurdist art project that is the fat acceptance/fat celebration movement. That’d be Marianne Kirby.

But MacBeth said it better concerning how I feel about this:

“Accursèd be that tongue that tells me so,
For it hath cowed my better part of man!
And be these juggling fiends no more believed,
That palter with us in a double sense,
That keep the word of promise to our ear,
And break it to our hope.”

Ay. Oh no.

Man, these people are powerful stupid.

What does this mean? What is this person even talking about?

Lifestyle changes are much easier than dieting. I made a lifestyle change, lost a large amount of weight and I don’t spend more than a few minutes a day thinking about food or what to eat.

If you can’t spend a few minutes a day to make sure you don’t die of diabetes-induced complications at age 50 I don’t know what to fuckin’ tell ya.

All modern OSes are terrible and they all annoy me.

If I had a billion dollars, I’d pay someone a hundred mill to construct an OS just for me, to do exactly what I need (and that does include the integrated Space Laser and Any Mention of Jerry Seinfeld Anywhere Destructifier features).*

*Note: Space Laser also pewpews Jerry Seinfeld. From Space!

They are really good. I’m a sucker for music with weird spacey noises and this has plenty of that.

Also the blonde singer has really pretty slightly crazy eyes. Like not the kind of crazy eyes where she’d kill you in your sleep, but where she’d figure out who your greatest enemy was and if they deserved it, they’d just disappear one day.

Me: What happened to Fred? I haven’t seen him around in ages. Not that I mind.

Blonde singer lady: Yeah, who even knows? I heard, um, he liked Madagascar. He probably moved there. Let’s not talk about that.

This is a very programmer-y piece to write, because it examines open offices from a completed systemic and mechanistic viewpoint, even though the reason open offices are so prevalent really has nothing to do with any factor cited in the article.

First, the notion should be dispelled that companies care primarily about productivity and profit. No one in the company cares primarily about either of these things, except perhaps the CFO. Doubtful even in that case.

Most managers and executives care foremost about control and obeisance*. Productivity is tertiary if even in the top 10. Often it is not. The behavior and preferences of managers and executives is the primary shaper of an organizations culture and characteristics. Worker preferences do not really matter much. Hence the observed and realized “preference” for open plan offices.

And this is the culture of the vast, vast majority of places I’ve worked and is probably embedded in human nature. Many maladaptive tendencies in fact are, contra current (mostly) liberal beliefs.

In short, some study of sociology and history would do the article writer well for understanding the ascendancy of open plan offices. As workers have lost power, open plan offices have dominated despite being clearly contrary to worker preferences and also harmful to nearly any measure of productivity.

Attempting to understand the rise of these productivity-destroying offices from the perspective of the worker is like attempting to understand the operations of an oil rig from examining a single bolt. It makes no sense. One must look at what the supervisor mandates and prefers. And they prefer being able to see everyone, to have their minions laid bare before them and easily viewable and interruptible. On display for themselves, and for others.

Such is the case here. As I always stress, a little study of sociology, anthropology and history goes a very long way.

All that said, anyone have any good 300-level anthro or sociology textbooks to recommend? I’ve read many (most?) of the ones below that level used in the US. But want to get back into those areas of study again.

*If you doubt this, just try doing something that clearly increases the productivity and profit of the company but is implicitly or explicitly against management wishes. 99% chance you will be fired, so I don’t actually recommend trying it.

If I get time, I’m going to write a Windows 10 Powershell de-crapifier script that removes all the annoyances, privacy violations and boneheaded decisions of Windows 10.

It’ll do this:

1. Remove all metro crapplications.
2. Change firewall to deny/deny and only allow ports 53, 80 and 443 by default, and then only for a web browser.
3. Turn off remote assistance.
4. Turn off Bing being integrated into Windows search and disable all related services.
5. Turn off Cortana and disable all related services.
6. Disable any unnecessary services (to be determined).
7. Turn off automatic Windows Updates downloading and installing.
8. Remove all live tiles and other associated bullshit still left (not sure if possible via Powershell)

Anything else? Sure there is more to do.

This will make the OS more secure and less likely to be a total piece of crap.

By the way, yes, the Start menu is back in Windows 10 and it’s also a terrible alphabetized mishmash of disorder and derangement. It’s not better than the Start screen, really.

Install Classic Shell to restore some sense to the mess.