It's so much fun to see Sunny Deol and Pooja Bhatt in "Chup" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15654262) …

It’s been ages since I’ve seen either of them in a movie and it’s such a trip down memory lane to see them acting again. I think the last time I saw Pooja Bhatt in a movie might have been ’98 or so and I don’t even remember when I saw Sunny Deol last, but it must have been in the early 2000’s?

The way Pooja is introduced, she says to Sunny Deol’s character, “Why are you calling me after so many years?” and I had to wonder if that was intentional, or if it accidentally mirrored how I felt about seeing them both in the movie 🙂

And Sunny introducing Pooja’s character as a member of the “Psychopath Society” — priceless. Or maybe it’s just one of those things where it makes sense only to me? 😛

#Movies #History #Bollywood #Memories

What can I say about "Chup” (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15654262)?

Actually, it feels as if I can write reams and reams about the movie. In fact, I think I’ll probably end up doing at least 2 -3 posts tangentially related to the movie …

But as for the movie itself, I’m only halfway through and I’m in love with it 🙂

It’s a movie about cinema, about critics, about people, about society.

Sure, it’s also about a psychopath and about some gruesome murders, but most of that seems far removed from the rest of the movie most of the time.

Most of the movie seems perfect so far to me and the characters just sing! Well, except for one. The one misstep I felt so far was a minor character who seemed way too stupid — mostly to show how clever another character was. And that just seemed forced.

But other than that, totally loving the movie!

#Hindi #Bollywood #Movies #MiniReview #Thriller #Psychopath #SerialKiller

“Por Thozhil" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27542289) is one of the better Tamil forensic murder mysteries. Unlike what’s usual for the genre, the stupid/impossible stuff is kept to a minimum and the story actually depends on investigation and deduction rather than sheer, dumb luck.

Except for the violence and the gory murder scenes, I really enjoyed the movie.

#Tamil #MiniReview #Movie #Mystery #Suspense

“Heart of Stone” (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13603966) attempts to tell a good story, but is hampered by really sloppy writing …

It’s about an “intelligence” agency which shows no intelligence at all. The whole story hangs upon agents making really stupid decisions and not seeing what is obviously right there …

Some of the storyline just makes me so angry at the stupidity of people and their reliance on “systems” that I was tempted to stop watching it several times.

Yeah, it’s that good 😛

#MiniReview #English #Netflix #Movie

@tazedhippo It *is* easy to get going out-of-the-box 😛 Or maybe that’s just me? I like the fact that common workflows can be loaded via a simple image, and the fact that it’s mostly self-explanatory once you figure out what each of the components does …

If you want custom functionality not provided by any of the existing workflows, then it gets harder because you actually have to figure it out …

@branfonk Happy to share 🙂

Like you, I’m excited to try it out. Opinions are simply that, opinions. And while I temper my expectations based on them, I do want to try it out for myself to know if it will work for me personally despite the reservations of others.

I’ve tried multiple VR headsets with the hope of finding one which will allow me to be free of monitors. So far, no luck.

But let’s see how AVP fares when it comes out since that has higher display specs than any of the others I’ve tried 🙂

The second part of Karl Guttag’s (now three part — it was originally a two-parter) series of posts on whether Apple VisionPro makes a good monitor replacement is now out:

https://kguttag.com/2023/08/09/apple-vision-pro-part-5b-more-on-monitor-replacement-is-ridiculous/

What I find interesting in reading the comments to the previous post is that there appear to be people who’ll come up with “magical” excuses for Apple when confronted with a logic-based analysis 😛

So, you say that based on current hardware and extrapolation the AVP would not display text legibly enough to be read easily by all?

Fine, I’ll counter by saying that Apple actually isn’t looking at monitor replacement at all but had to mention it just to keep people happy till they reveal their magical plans for how the AVP is to be actually used.

Or, I’ll talk about how Apple didn’t really mention that the AVP was to be a monitor replacement and so you shouldn’t talk about monitor replacement. Nevermind that some people might want to use the AVP as a monitor replacement whether Apple specifically said so or not ...

I really find this “defending” Apple thing (whether it is required or not) rather tiresome, especially when it seems a knee-jerk reaction to a perceived slight to the glory of Apple.

Other people can have different opinions. Not everybody has to like what Apple does. And you certainly can be critical of Apple while still liking/using their products. All of these things can be true at the same time.

I wish some people (or all people) understood this 🙂

#Apple #VisionPro #Analysis #Opinions #Reflections

@AngelaPreston Makes sense, thank you 🙂

The thing that I’ve been thinking about mostly is the fact whether most women even consider if there’s “another way”, as you said.

Would women have opted for high-heels (the extreme ones) if they’d themselves thought it through?

I know that’s a hard one to answer. But the choices that “society” forces on us (or worse yet, where we are not even aware that something is being forced upon us) is something I keep finding myself thinking about …

I'm not sure where this thought came from — I think it was to do with the lengths people would go to be “accepted”.

Heels.

Do women actually like/love them? They (especially the very tall ones) seem very painful to me since they contort your feet. Plus, there’s the whole balancing act of staying on top of them.

(Ah, this reminds me where this started — it was when we watched “Fatafati” (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27443234) a few days ago. Great movie, BTW.)

So again, do women really like wearing heels? And if yes, why? Can somebody (a woman and not a man theorising) please explain to me?

#Heels #Women #Fashion #TheLenghtsWeGoTo #TheHeightsWeAspireTo

@branfonk As I mentioned in my original post, the folk at Immersed have been using virtual monitors in Quest 2 for several years now 🙂

And yet, I can’t use that for more than an hour or two without it getting uncomfortable for me.

Being able to ≠ comfortable 😛

@branfonk I can’t speak for Karl (the author) since I’m not the author of the article, but I don’t believe his point was specifically “multi-monitor” or that he was claiming that that was Apple’s main focus.

My understanding was, that he was talking more about the fact that people (including myself) are looking at VisionPro as a monitor replacement solution. I don’t care about the multi-monitor aspect myself, but I do want a compact/portable monitor replacement solution.

Plus, the multi-monitor aspect might come from the fact that on Meta Quest, you can run only one app at a time. So you have to have a specific app to provide monitor/multi-monitor support.

On VisionPro, since you can run multiple apps as windows, it becomes sort of a defacto multi-monitor set up by simply having multiple large windows for different apps …

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@natik Good to know 🙂 Maybe I’ll take the plunge over the weekend … Thanks!

@trode Just slow — it doesn’t crash, but Stable Diffusion processing can be agonisingly slow without native GPU support …

@trode I’m already doing that 🙂 But it doesn’t work too well for GPU intensive stuff like running Stable Diffusion, unfortunately …

There are certain image generation tasks that I cannot try out without installing Sonoma — for example, use the SDXL model natively via CoreML in a Swift app, at least as far as I’m aware. (Though I must confess that I didn’t look into this too deeply …)

So I’ve been wondering about installing the Sonoma beta. But since this would be on my regular production machine (and I do development for regular work), I wasn’t really keen on the possible downtime should something go wrong or some major app I relied on didn’t work correctly on the Sonoma beta.

Beta 5 was the target that I’d set for myself. By beta 5, we should be close enough to release, and hopefully fairly stable, that I should be OK was my thinking.

And beta 5 is here now …

But I’m not sure I want to switch. Just too much going on at the moment …

So I guess I’ll keep dithering? 😛

#Apple #macOS #Sonoma #Beta

Karl Guttag had a series of articles on the Apple Vision Pro soon after it was announced, and I read them with interest since Karl goes into the hardware/technical side of things when most other people simply “Ooh” and “Aah” about the “shiny” 😛

Then there was nothing from Karl for about a month, even though Karl had promised more articles with further thoughts.

Finally, there’s a new article — part one of two — which discusses something that I’ve been very keen on — monitor replacement.

https://kguttag.com/2023/08/05/apple-vision-pro-part-5a-why-monitor-replacement-is-ridiculous/

Monitor replacement has been my goal with AR/VR from the outset. I’ve tried most of the available software solutions, but have yet to find one that really works for me.

Immersed (https://www.immersed.com/) on Quest 2 is probably the one which comes closest, in software terms, to what I wanted. And I know that Renji Bijoy and his team do use Immersed to do work on a day-to-day basis. Unfortunately, my old eyes still have issues doing work for a full day using Immersed and Quest 2 😕

To be clear, this is not an issue with Immersed. It’s just that the current hardware does not have the display resolution to display text in a way that isn’t jarring, at least for my own use.

So I was pinning my hopes on Vision Pro, but Karl seems to think that this will be just that — a hope, and not something which will turn out to be reality.

I’ll still wait to try it out myself, but at this point, I’m thinking “Maybe the next version?”

#Apple #VisionPro #MonitorReplacement #Hardware #Analysis #AR #VR

I've been testing between the latest version of InvokeAI (https://github.com/invoke-ai/InvokeAI) and ComfyUI (https://github.com/comfyanonymous/ComfyUI) and interestingly, it appears that ComfyUI is not as hard on the system as InvokeAI.

I tried the same model, LoRA, prompt, and batch size, and while the machine stayed totally fine during the ComfyUI generation (even after multiple batches), with InvokeAI, my MBP fan started going after just one set of images.

I do realize that InvokeAI is in a state of flux as they move to version 3.0, but the difference in usability is great enough that I think I’ll stick with ComfyUI for the time being …

#ImageGeneration #Python #macOS #ComfyUI #InvokeAI

@tazedhippo Since ComfyUI does not have any logic/control/input nodes (at least that I know of) you won’t be able to do selections from a batch etc. It’s just a different way of doing things to a UI like Automatic1111 …

You should however, be able to set up a new workflow which uses one of your previously generated images as the input for a new generation.

But of course, you might be looking for a single workflow which does it all?