Rafael Camara will be watching his fellow Ferrari Driver Academy colleague Ollie Bearman closely as the two team up at Haas for the first time this weekend.

This is cool: Evan Puschak looks at the rush of cheapo knockoff space operas that came out in the wake of Star Wars, a once-in-a-generation film that refashioned the entire movie business. Even the names are kooky: Starcrash, War of the Planets, Battle of the Stars, The Humanoid, Message From Space, Battle Beyond the Stars, The Man Who Saved the World, Star Odyssey, and The Beast in Space — although tbh, Star Wars is a goofy name as well. Some of the movies even had lightsabers and anxious robots.

Puschak highlights Star Wars’ unique combination of realistic depictions of space with special effects (a la 2001) and an adventure story with colorful characters. He quotes Julie Turnock’s book, Plastic Reality: Special Effects, Technology, and the Emergence of 1970s Blockbuster Aesthetics, in making the case that Lucas and other filmmakers of his generation were using special effects to up the sensorial ante for moviegoers — I dug the full passage out of the book’s introduction:

Certainly what was so exhilarating to many about these films was not simply the experience of a new kind of realism. Perhaps even more important was the intensified density of effects in films of the era, which many at the time understood as a thrillingly new and vividly somatic technologized experience. This book aims to recover the excitement that not just ticket-buyers but also many academics, critics, and journalists felt upon experiencing the special effects-heavy films of the 1970s, in particular Star Wars and Close Encounters, and further grant historical dimension and context to that experience. It may be surprising for many to realize that in the 1970s George Lucas and Steven Spielberg were considered among the most interesting, ambitious, and exciting filmmakers of the era, alongside more canonized American filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, and Martin Scorsese. What critics praised most often about Lucas and Spielberg as filmmakers was their grasp of specifically cinematic visual dynamics that lent their films both greater visceral and sensual engagement and an extra layer of expressive and intellectual potential. While many critics have (often rightly) condemned the aggressive, pummeling blockbuster style that has arisen in the wake of the two successes of 1977, it is incumbent upon scholars to recover the creative process that made them so stimulating and exhilarating to the likes of Pauline Kael, Stanley Kauffmann, Roger Ebert, and other prominent critics of the era, as well as so popular with audiences. A renewed interest in special effects technology by influential auteurist filmmakers certainly made this historical development possible. However, even more strongly, auteurist filmmakers went to the considerable and painstaking effort to promote and develop complex special effects technology, precisely in order to realize aesthetic filmmaking goals they designed to rouse and provoke the sensorium. They called this approach variously “visual storytelling,’ “visceral engagement,’ or “graphic dynamics.”

Moreover, so-called New Hollywood filmmakers in the 1970s reinterpreted the role of cinematic aesthetics to suggest a purposeful relation between sensual and intellectual impact. In other words, filmmakers sought to stimulate the senses. This was not to numb the viewer but to activate him or her — not unlike the notion of drug-induced mind expansion. Intensified color schemes, beams of light, fast-moving objects, and quick editing first penetrate the body and then engage the mind with the films’ ideas about technology, kineticism, power structures, liberty, etc.

I am firmly in the camp of those who enjoy filmmakers that engage the senses like this — among contemporary filmmakers, Christopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve come to mind as continuing the legacy of Lucas et al. in this way.

Tags: Evan Puschak · film school · Julie Turnock · movies · Star Wars · video

conspectus_bs posted a photo:

Kodak Portra 400 with Mamiya 645 Pro and Sekor 35 mm

It's been an exciting week for our US members, democracy-wise, so let's keep that energy alive by voting in the upcoming MetaFilter Board Election. In order to do that you must REGISTER TO VOTE. Learn about the candidates here. Registration closes Monday, November 9, 2026 at midnight EST(GMT+ 5).

US midterms, Russian airstrikes in Sloviansk, student protests in Lyon and Russell Brand in court – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

Warning: this gallery contains images some readers may find distressing

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Jason Reding Quiñones led investigation into whether Trump’s rights were violated during 2020 election inquiry

A US attorney overseeing the so-called “grand conspiracy” investigation into Donald Trump’s rivals announced on Friday he is leaving the Department of Justice, one of several officials to leave the department in recent days after sweeping Democratic wins in the midterm elections.

Jason Reding Quiñones, the US attorney for the southern district of Florida, and John Eisenberg, who led the justice department’s national security division, are both leaving. Democrats have pledged to use their majorities in the US House and Senate to conduct aggressive oversight of the justice department, among other agencies.

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ML admins will be happy to learn that one bad GPU may no longer mean starting an entire training job from scratch. The latest 2.15 release of PyTorch includes a rewritten backend for Nvidia's Collective Communications Library (NCCL), designed to improve fault diagnosis and recovery when GPUs work together. This latest feature shows how its creators continue to advance the software from being a tool for researchers to being a cornerstone in production AI work. The interface to the networking library in PyTorch needed a rewrite – it was drowning in technical debt, said PyTorch core developer Tristan Rice, a Meta software engineer specializing in distributed computing, during a live YouTube livestream on Thursday. NCCL is pronounced "Nickel" and stands for the Nvidia Collective Communications Library. It provides PyTorch with a set of inter-GPU communication primitives, allowing GPUs to communicate within a single-node or across multi-node clusters, which is vital for running inference on large neural networks and for other tasks in building and maintaining LLMs. The old NCCL interface was too chaotic The previous PyTorch backend for NCCL, called ProcessGroupNCCL, could spawn dozens of communicators per process group, leading to intermittent deadlocks and unpredictable performance. The new version of the NCCL backend comes with a strict rule: One process group gets only one communicator during initialization. By default, this rule eliminates crosstalk between multiple communicators and all the complexities that entails. If a program requires parallelism, it will have to dispatch more process groups. The updated library also better handles stragglers by allowing for easier reconfiguration. If a GPU crashes or runs slowly, a third-party orchestrator can exclude the laggard and even assign a replacement worker. A “flight recorder” has also been added to give admins a better idea of what went wrong. Previously, if a cluster of GPUs stalled—perhaps from a timeout or deadlock—the user would just get a generic message. The new flight recorder captures all operations in a series of snapshots that can be inspected after a failure occurs. Rice noted the cleaned-up NCCL backend, also called ProcessGroupNCCL, will give developers a blank slate, making it easier to add new features. The legacy ProcessGroupNCCL is part of the 2.15 package as a rollback, but if the new NCCL backend works as expected, the older version will be removed in the 2.16 release, planned for early next year. Nvidia origins Why, you may ask, does a machine learning framework need a specialized communications library? Like NumPy, PyTorch supports numerical computing, but it also provides tools for building and training neural networks on CPUs and GPUs. In these environments, workers must constantly exchange data such as tensors, gradients, activations, and weights. The standard TCP-based networking stack can introduce bottlenecks in large GPU clusters, so NCCL uses optimized communication paths to move data between GPUs while reducing CPU overhead. Nvidia initially released NCCL at SC15 as a general-purpose accelerator, and it was adopted by the Facebook folks when they first built PyTorch in 2016. Their goal was to build a Python-based version of the Lua-based Torch ML library. “Every major ML lab (OpenAI, DeepMind, Meta, Nvidia) uses PyTorch. It powers everything from diffusion models and LLMs to recommender systems and robotics. This widespread adoption isn’t accidental,” noted Will Stewart, co-founder of AI software provider Northflank, in a blog post. More support for Apple and Nvidia’s next GPUs Other new features of PyTorch 2.15 include a new Python transport API for asynchronous one-way data movement – ideal for training jobs where weights are synchronized between trainers and generators – as well as parallel processing improvements for Apple gear and for supporting Nvidia’s next-generation Blackwell GPUs. Overall, the update consisted of 3,117 commits from 583 contributors. ®

Onlangs werd bekend dat de meeste mensen niet meedoen aan het bevolkingsonderzoek naar darmkanker. Sterker nog: ze gooien de envelop bij het oud papier. Naar aanleiding van ons artikel over dit nieuws kregen we veel vragen over het bevolkingsonderzoek. In dit artikel geeft Mariël Croon, directeur van het MDL Fonds antwoord op die vragen.

Say you’re on the hunt for a drawing of a duck wearing a hat or a glimpse at Morocco in 1850 or a clip of people celebrating in the streets. Whatever imagery it is you’re searching for, Arkivism has likely got you covered.

An accessible antidote to generative AI, Arkivism is a new public domain index that catalogs millions of artworks, illustrations, photos, video, and more from dozens of museums and archives around the world. While many digital collections exist online, the “visual library of Alexandria,” as its creator dubs it, is searchable with a phrase, a mode of research that’s become commonplace with the proliferation of chatbots. Simply describe what you’re looking for and be presented with an array of human-made results.(via Open Culture)

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Arkivism Is an Accessible Antidote to AI with 4 Million+ Public Domain Images appeared first on Colossal.

Weer voor Rotterdam ☁️ - 06-11-2026 19:15 CET

In één oogopslag:
• 7.6°C · Bewolkt ☁️ | Min 3.0°C / Max 9.4°C

Verwachting voor vandaag:
• Min 3.0°C, Max 9.4°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, 🧭 1023.6 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 9.4 km/u (2.6 m/s), richting: ← 97°

Uurlijkse voorspelling voor de komende 12 uur:

• 20:00: 7.3°C (Gedeeltelijk bewolkt) ☁️, 🧭 1023.5 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 7.6 km/u (2.1 m/s), richting: ↖ 113°
• 21:00: 7.2°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, 🧭 1023.5 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 5.8 km/u (1.6 m/s), richting: ↖ 129°
• 22:00: 6.4°C (Gedeeltelijk bewolkt) ☁️, 🧭 1023.7 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 4.7 km/u (1.3 m/s), richting: ← 76°
• 23:00: 5.5°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, 🧭 1023.7 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 7.2 km/u (2.0 m/s), richting: ↙ 54°
• 00:00: 5.4°C (Licht bewolkt) 🌕, 🧭 1023.6 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 4.7 km/u (1.3 m/s), richting: ← 104°
• 01:00: 5.1°C (Gedeeltelijk bewolkt) ☁️, 🧭 1023.6 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 5.4 km/u (1.5 m/s), richting: ← 68°
• 02:00: 4.6°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, 🧭 1023.5 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 8.3 km/u (2.3 m/s), richting: ← 78°
• 03:00: 4.3°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, 🧭 1023.6 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 8.6 km/u (2.4 m/s), richting: ← 97°
• 04:00: 4.2°C (Gedeeltelijk bewolkt) ☁️, 🧭 1023.5 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 6.1 km/u (1.7 m/s), richting: ← 100°
• 05:00: 3.8°C (Licht bewolkt) 🌕, 🧭 1023.2 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 7.6 km/u (2.1 m/s), richting: ← 83°
• 06:00: 3.0°C (Licht bewolkt) 🌕, 🧭 1023.2 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 9.0 km/u (2.5 m/s), richting: ← 82°
• 07:00: 3.0°C (Licht bewolkt) 🌕, 🧭 1023.2 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 7.9 km/u (2.2 m/s), richting: ← 94°

Voorspelling voor de komende dagen:

• zaterdag 07 november: Min 2.9°C, Max 8.4°C (Lichte motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 0.6 mm, Kans op neerslag 4%, 🧭 1023.1 hPa ↘️ -0.5 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 10.1 km/u (2.8 m/s), richting: ← 111°
• zondag 08 november: Min 7.4°C, Max 9.8°C (Matige motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 1.2 mm, Kans op neerslag 16%, 🧭 1021.9 hPa ↘️ -1.2 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 13.3 km/u (3.7 m/s), richting: ↑ 185°
• maandag 09 november: Min 2.9°C, Max 9.6°C (Mist) 🌫️, Kans op neerslag 3%, 🧭 1018.7 hPa ↘️ -3.2 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 10.4 km/u (2.9 m/s), richting: ↖ 154°
• dinsdag 10 november: Min 1.5°C, Max 6.4°C (Mist) 🌫️, Kans op neerslag 5%, 🧭 1014.6 hPa ↘️ -4.1 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 12.6 km/u (3.5 m/s), richting: ← 96°
• woensdag 11 november: Min 4.0°C, Max 13.0°C (Lichte motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 2.7 mm, Kans op neerslag 24%, 🧭 1005.1 hPa ↘️ -9.5 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 14.7 km/u (4.1 m/s), richting: ↑ 166°
• donderdag 12 november: Min 8.0°C, Max 14.0°C (Matige motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 5.8 mm, Kans op neerslag 31%, 🧭 999.5 hPa ↘️ -5.6 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 18.4 km/u (5.1 m/s), richting: ↑ 193°

Details:
• 🌡️ Huidige temperatuur (om 19:15): 7.6°C (Bewolkt)
• 🤚 Gevoelstemperatuur: 4.8°C (-2.8°C)
• 💨 Windsnelheid: 8.6 km/u (2.4 m/s), richting: ← 111°
• 🌬️ Windstoten: 12.6 km/h (3.5 m/s)
• 💧 Luchtvochtigheid: 81%
• 🧭 Luchtdruk: 1023.5 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/3h
• 👁️ Zichtbaarheid: 50.0 km
• ☀️ UV-index: 0.0
• 🌅 Zonsopgang: 07:45 · 🌇 Zonsondergang: 17:05

Luchtkwaliteit:
• AQI: 68 🟡 (Matig)
• PM2.5: 25.0 μg/m³
• PM10: 30.4 μg/m³

Gegevens geleverd door Open-Meteo

#Rotterdam #Meteo #MeteoBot #MeteoNetherlands #OpenMeteo #FediMeteo