Under World Building Rating or is it underrating world builds....

There's a lot of very fancy CGI these days - not least movies like Dune (like a bit but maybe prefer Lynch's flawed earlier take) or Avatar (hate), but I went back to some older stuff and was surprised really how very fine some older efforts (maybe not so old) are...

First off, Altered Carbon on Netflix - while they slightly softened the politics, which was almost as harsh as the contrasts in the great Ursula le Guin Disposessed, and then some, they got the world(s) (two seasons are planets apart) bang on for me - as a contrast, see The Expanse (good), which got historical scoping right (much much better than Foundation, which I hated), the adaptation of Richard Morgan's really excellent trilogy got vibe which was really something.

Then there's the Riddick franchise. Got totally hooked by Pitch Black, which is actually a minor masterpiece of horror/creature feature (wish someone would make a similar movie series of Harry Harrison's seriously great Deathworld books, or if they had the wit, the Stainless Steel Rat).... but then the whole Chronicles thing got out of hand - I read that there's a fourth movie in the pipeline. I like Vin Diesel. He knows his limitations and when he plays within them, like Bruce Willis (perhaps not quite that good:-), he's fun. But the world look in the Chronicles is top rank - the planet scale up/down views remind me of classic covers of Astounding Sci Fi magazines, or great moments at the end of the 1950s movie, This Island Earth's epic ending. (not to mention Forbidden Planet...).

Then there's Serenity. A lot has already been written about this, so not a lot to add, but the angle of making it like a western,  plus the end-of-an-era mood about the whole thing is just fantastic.

There are tons of films like this (Brother From Another Planet, Liquid Sky, Repo Man, Attack the Block, Hardware, I could go on, but new year's eve beckons, and I need to go out and fetch another pail of air.

cyberdark

There was criticism of the Turing Institute for not warning the government about LLMs, and praise for its defense program.

But no-one criticised the defense and security folks for failing to warn the imminent  Jaguar Land Rover cyberattack. Or Tescos. Or Asahi Super Dry. Or many others. There have been cybersecurity centers of excellent across the UK for 10 years or more and a public face to national security, the NCSC, and what do we actually have to show for that in terms of a rugged/resilient defense of the digital realm? What are the costs and what benefit can these organisations and institutes transparently report?

Sure cyberdefense is a complex (wicked) problem because a large fraction of the initial vectors are social engineering and people are difficult to re-train to think suspiciously the whole time. But then there's the actual technical part component (including the recovery - why are ransomeware attacks so difficult to recover from? what's wrong with integrity checked secured backup/restore?). etc etc

Meanwhile, the government passes laws like the online harms bill, which largely annoys civilians but does zilch to prevent actual large scale industrialised economic damage and very little to even help prevent id theft. Oh yeah, digital identity will fix that, won't they? (answer: no, likely make it worse - because? see above).

In another space, we have chat about possible war. Where are our drone defense plans? It is clear that rapid evolution of swarms of low cost quadcopters are a problem, but also they are pretty slow - so easily bought down e.g. by more drones, and a bit of AI driven planning/deployment/reaction. Could also have competitions (like robot wars in the air) to train up a new generation of kids at high school/uni engineering&computing departments to provide a set of actually new ideas on demand...

Lamentable.