recent movies

"Many Shuvs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Slor that day, I can tell you."
Occulus: As "haunted mirror" movies go, this was pretty solid. In any given scene, it's hard to know whether what you are seeing is real-time, a flashback, a memory, or a hallucination. It's an interesting structure. It was much better than Mirror, Mirror (which I also re-watched. Wow, it's worse than I remembered.)

Under the Skin: It's not bad, but kind of slow. Scarlett Johansson drives around and eats people. It's basically Liquid Sky, but less psychedelic, and no faster paced.

Ghostbusters: I hadn't seen this in years, and I'm happy to report that it really holds up well. Some of the effects are terrible, but the jokes and plot are quality.

Ghostbusters II: This isn't terrible, but it's not that funny and there is far too much baby in it. The whole movie is basically nothing but people coo-ing at a baby. The baby doesn't even do anything, ever. It's just a prize token. More slime, less baby is what I'm saying.

Star Wars: Turn to the Dark Side, Episode 3.1: This is the 7+ hours of Star Wars episodes 1-3 edited down to a single 2:47 movie. It is a much better movie. I wouldn't say it's a very good movie, but there's only so far you can polish that turd. Still, given the raw material they had to work with, this came out better than I expected. This movie is about a monk with serious anger issues making terrible decisions, instead of being about tariffs and union negotiations or whatever the fuck Lucas's movies were about.

The torrent I found of it wasn't the greatest encoding, at 640×358, so it felt like a much older and lower budget B movie than it is, which made some of the stilted, terrible acting easier to tolerate.

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Automator

Dear Lazyweb, how do I turn off automator sandboxing?

For months now I've had an Automator action that was working fine: it does some stuff, then at the end does "run script XYZ with parameters ARGS". And now, magically, today, that last part has stopped working, even after I rebooted. I have no idea what changed. System log:

iTunes[269]: AppleEvents/sandbox: Returning errAEPrivilegeError/-10004 and denying dispatch of event syso/exec from process 'Automator Runner'/0x0-0x51051, pid=608, because it is not entitled to send an AppleEvent to this process.
com.apple.automator.xpc.workflowServiceRunner[554]: WorkflowServiceRunner received error running Workflow Service at /Users/jwz/Library/Services/Add to iTunes.workflow: The action "Run AppleScript" encountered an error.

I already have Automator, Automator Runner and AppleScript Editor enabled in System Preferences / Security and Privacy / Privacy / Accessibility.

I swear, the logo for Automator should be a little hammer hitting you in the face.


Update: Figured it out. What I had before was an Automator .workflow that did:

on run {input, parameters}
  tell application "iTunes"
   
...stuff...
    set ARGS to
...stuff...
    run script FOO with parameters ARGS
  end tell
end run

That doesn't work any more, but this does:

on run {input, parameters}
  tell application "iTunes"
   
...stuff...
    set ARGS to
...stuff...
  end tell
  run script FOO with parameters ARGS
end run

because security or something. Yeah.

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Rat Traders

"Ms. Kleinworth is about to press the button to go short in the Treasury Bond market."

The following text and pictures illustrate an experiment I carried out that involved training laboratory standard rats in trading in the Foreign Exchange and Commodity Futures markets, with the result that I managed to outperform some of the world's leading Human Fund managers. [...]

Each time after listening to a sound, the rat had to choose between pressing either a green or a red button, green for "long" (if the prices were expected to move up), red for "short" (if they predicted a decline in prices). When they were right they received a small amount of food (the good rats became fat very fast); when they took the wrong button, they received a minor electric shock. Very soon it showed that some rats were doing outstandingly well: they developed a good ability to remember the patterns they were listening to; we needed them to react to real time data though. [...]

STEP 3 DEVELOPING A PEDIGREE
After extensive training, we wanted to find out if the talent in trading might be rooted genetically and crossed the top traders with each other. After only 20 days, we had 28 new rats (15 males and 13 females), and we soon started to train again (even reducing the training time). The results were astounding: the second generation of top traders had a much better performance than their parents.

Previously, previously.

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