Secret Agent has a slow, difficult beginning (~hour). Not much happens. And it's not clear why what's happening is happening, particularly for someone unfamiliar with Brazil's political climate in the 1970s.
As someone who's never been to Brazil, certainly not in the 1970s, watching Secret Agent still felt like being transported there. How did they make a movie that makes you feel like you're in a familiar place you've never been to?
And then after about an hour, it picks up a bit more, and by the end, it felt like they directly transmitted to the audience the horror of the Brazilian junta in all kinds of subtle and dramatic ways. We don't see the resolution of the main character's story because that moment is lost. Memories of his life are fractured (through disjointed audio recordings) or repressed (by those closest to him).
Hard to put it into words. I started out disliking it and ended up loving it.
> Secret Agent has a slow, difficult beginning (~hour). Not much happens. And it's not clear why what's happening is happening, particularly for someone unfamiliar with Brazil's political climate in the 1970s.
That's very much the director's philosophy. He values the dead time between things. I saw him talk years ago. He's a bit of an intelectual. Very competent too. I haven't watched Secret Agent yet though.
Beto Brant is another Brazilian director. He is phenomenal. Also artsy but his films usually work on a more traditional level as well. They're more satisfying. I highly recommend him -- particularly "O Invasor", "Ação Entre Amigos" and "Crime Delicado".
Felt the same as you. It felt like you didn't quite understand what was happening or what was going to happen in the beginning. Only for you to miss the characters by the end.
Have been looking for an orchestrator for AI workflows including agentic workflows and this seemed to be the most promising (open source, free, can self-host, and supports dynamic workflows).
But have not seen anyone talk about it in that context. What do people use for AI workflow orchestration (aside from langchain)?
Had a handful of interactions with Matt. Probably the last was sometime in the mid- to late-2010s. I essentially started my software development career using software that he was largely responsible for (unknown to me at the time):
These are, in my opinion, some of the best packages in Perl, and there are rarely counterparts that are as good in other languages. Have not found an ORM that is as effortless and featureful as DBIx::Class, for example.
I've read about his tough interactions with other people, and it does seem that, at times, he fell into the classic trap of loving his own ideas too much; but in our interactions (reviewing some of my code on a Perl project), he was really helpful and kind. Also amazingly quick. He read my beginner-level Perl code, instantly understood it, and instantly gave clear, concise feedback.
The key idea of soupault is that it works on the HTML element tree level and can automatically call external convertors on pages (based on page file extensions, see [1]), so the input format doesn't matter to it.
You can bring your own convertors and pass any options to them. I'm not saying it's a perfect SSG for everyone, but at least uncommon input format support isn't an intractable problem for it.
On jamstack.org's list of static generators[0] you can filter by template language. For "R markdown" it only has:
Bookdown[1], Rmarkdown as you mentioned, and Blogdown[2].
I've never looked at R markdown before. Thanks for sending me down the rabbit hole with Bookdown. It might solve one of the questions I'm currently thinking about.
But they do. Most industries/sectors trend toward consolidation. Specific examples that come to mind are radio, agriculture, banking, and tech. I did a quick search and found [0], which describes a general tendency toward consolidation as industries mature.
One major reason for consolidation (ignored by the author) is economies of scale: as volume increases, the cost per unit decreases.
On the other side, the author ignores benefits of central control for some things. For example, private railroad companies used to have different gauges for their railroads in order to protect their routes, but that led to unnecessary inefficiencies.
Also, governments have a different mandate than the private sector. Governments are charged with pursuing citizens' values (freedom, equality, security, etc.), but for private sector companies, their goals boil down down maximizing profit.
This reminded me of the discussion about how "mature" companies often struggle to innovate. The thought was that as companies mature, they tend to get larger and that size forces them to focus more on "maintenance" than innovation. So the way they "innovate" is by acquiring smaller companies (who are still in the innovation phase), resulting in eventual consolidation until a major disrupting event.
This was (1) research with human subjects (2) where the human subjects were deceived, and (3) there was no informed consent!
If the IRB approved this as exempt and they had an accurate understanding of the experiment, it makes me question the IRB itself. Whether the researchers were dishonest with the IRB or the IRB approved this as exempt, it's outrageous.
Just so you know, you appear to have been shadowbanned. I'm not sure why, probably for having a new account and getting quickly downvoted in this thread. (Admittedly you come across slightly strong, but... not outside of what I think is reasonable, so I dunno what's going on.)
I do recommend participating more in other threads and a little less in this thread, where you're repeating pretty much the same point over and over.
As someone who's never been to Brazil, certainly not in the 1970s, watching Secret Agent still felt like being transported there. How did they make a movie that makes you feel like you're in a familiar place you've never been to?
And then after about an hour, it picks up a bit more, and by the end, it felt like they directly transmitted to the audience the horror of the Brazilian junta in all kinds of subtle and dramatic ways. We don't see the resolution of the main character's story because that moment is lost. Memories of his life are fractured (through disjointed audio recordings) or repressed (by those closest to him).
Hard to put it into words. I started out disliking it and ended up loving it.