He is the one comic foil among three straightmen (well 2 if you account that one character was essentially a plot piece who had 10 minutes in the opening and 10 minutes in the closing).
It was a product of it's time and was creative and interesting in that era. You have to remember I think that there was a prolonged desert of comedies at that time and this breathed some fresh air and life into that genre after the "Frat Pack" had peaked and that formula had sunset. but yea, i watched it last year with 2025 eyeballs and it wasn't that great. But still decent, IMO.
Saw something today with some stats and wanted to circle back on this line of thinking. As I previously said, I think it's undisputed that AI will take jobs and is a labor net negative, in the short and medium terms. And maybe long term. Estimates are that AI destoyed 200 to 250k jobs in 2025 in the US. The methods were excess layoffs and independently looking at what a typical GDP growth by % would statistically mean historically for labor/jobs in growth (and that is controlling for things like tariff reductions and immigration supression). 200-300k jobs doesn't sound horrible in the aggregate, but the fear is that with only 5-6% of business cases and enterprise programs showing success of that famously cited Fortune study of 92% of F500 adopting AI, if the current estimates only reflect that 5-6%, and IF artificial intelligence gets better YoY, etc., that number can become more scary. and early 2026 data is not encouraging. January had almost 110k job cuts, the highest total since the last financial crisis (job opening continue to fall and hiring plans are lowest Jan on record). All that to say, it's still not a very scientific methodology for tracking these things and I think many camps can massage the data still all too liberally to curate a narrative, however they want. Stay frosty out there!
No. My recommendation is to wait and binge them all at once for an enjoyable time. Some have liked to watch it in a serial fashion, but for me it's been frustrating as the episodes are around 30 minutes and every episode leaves you on cliff hanger just as it was building up to something, almost like a telenovella.
I remember reading a few things about Luther. 1) His was derivative in that he didn't really create the theses out of any divine or even creativity, but maybe collated existing IP and memorialized it rather famously 2) He fought tooth and nail to not include the Book of James in the NT because exactly some things you describe and James being the "True Religion is helping widows" and "Faith without works is dead", etc. and 3) He was a very nasty person and became a very nasty anti-semite later in his life. So much so that his views and writings were later used by Nazi Germany to defend their vile behaviors. I'm always a bit confused when people lionize, if not diefy, old Marty Luther.
I largely agree, though I'd put Barbarians at the Gate a bit higher. But the reason I bit off on 1929 was that it was meticulously researched (8 years) by the same author as TBTF. Unfortunately it wasn't as good.
What kills me is we've had like what? 2 hours of storyline? 0 action. And it's a herky jerky build. This is a series best binged, watching it as a weekly serial is frustrating to me.
Also, what is the over/under on AI/GenAI ads and all the A-list celebrities shilling AI in the superbowl. I have to assume this is the AI Superbowl like how 2023 or whatever was the Crypto Superbowl.
While I generally agree with you and defer to you on most things AI, I think it's actually a fact that even this sloppy interation of AI will let you cut headcount. It's just another jump in the leap of automation (from spreadsheets to macros to RPA to now "AI") in that a lot of low skill, repetitive white collar labor can be automated and headcount can be compressed. A base line of "doing away with jobs and cut headcount" I think that's indisputable, to be honest. That said I agree (I think) and defer wholly to your specific point with firing devs for genAI tooling.
More unbelievable to me than Baelor would go against his family (unless we are to find out something illicit or politically intriguing later) is that the Tony Stark rake character Baratheon would be like, "okay sure, let's fight for the hedge knight I'll get up at 5am for this guy". I liked how the drunk guy isn't just some drunk idiot but seems like he's a dark and twisted soul touched by that Westeros magic and this epsiode brought some empathy to the guy who is just miserable and trying to self-medicate his prophetic mental illness.
Depends. How do you define "main line Protestant sects"? Is that the Methodists who let women preach and who subvert the word of God with wearing rainbow cloth and saying "Love is love"? I think the problem is really more that the biblical basis of scripture is extremely difficult to wrestle with even if you have the appropriate interpretations. As an aside, I caught a random 30for30 ESPN episode on Reggie White. It did a great job of going through his whole career and controversies of gays and marriage, etc. as a strict intrepetation of the bible. But that was the rather tired story. What was REALLY interesting was that before his death, he was really wrestling with his faith. He had come to believe that he'd been used (groomed as someone said) by the souther baptist faith and powers that be, and that he had erred by not reading the bible and self-determining with agency his own Christian faith walk and leadership. So he set out to learn Hebrew and Greek because his contention, which I think was actually pretty solid, he wanted to read the text as it was written, not as interpretors have sought to write it.
Yes the Moltbook situation was a scam and stupid. The "Am I alive" meme is making fun of people who don't understand AI. Which is why I presume @Captainant thought it was funny too. I get it, "sufficiently advanced technology is no different to the masses than magic" or however that quote goes, but still...
Maybe it's the surly demographic, but all the old people on here who get really fearful and have strong opinions, but who don't understand how anything works, really is actually a good straw poll for the American population writ large. Obviously guys like you @Captainant and a few others on here who are really into the weeds on AI are different, but it's an interesting time to be alive nonetheless. https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/02/06/1132448/moltbook-was-peak-ai-theater/