Piracy release group CAKES has shut down, dealing yet another hit for the piracy ecosystem. TorrentFreak reports: For several decades, The Scene has been the main source of all pirated content made available on the Internet. Technically, release groups operate in a closed ecosystem, but the reality is different. The vast majority of the files published on private Scene servers eventually find their way to public pirate sites. The secretive nature of The Scene has been a major challenge for law enforcement but in the summer of 2020, the US Department of Justice made a major breakthrough. Following a thorough investigation, three members of the illustrious SPARKS group were indicted. The raids and the criminal investigation sent shockwaves around The Scene. Some groups stopped releasing entirely and others significantly slowed down their output, which was felt in many parts of the public piracy ecosystem too.

Amid this turmoil, a new TV release group going by the name of CAKES emerged. The group published its first release "The 100 S07E16" on October 1, 2020, and many more would follow. During the next few years, CAKES built its reputation as a steady release group, one that eventually covered 7,000 titles. That's an impressive average of more than 50 new releases per week. Aside from the massive output, CAKES was also known for including four lines from Drake's track "Pound Cake" in its release notes. These same lines are also at the start of its farewell message.

The message explains that when CAKES started out, the team made an internal promise to pull the plug when "the love" is gone. Without going into further details, that time has apparently arrived. While some people may be disappointed with this decision, CAKES has clearly made up its mind. The group prefers to highlight the achievements and experiences instead, referring to the past few years as a "crazy journey." "If you had told us how the last few years would go, we wouldn't have believed you. The skills learnt, the massive lows, the euphoric highs, it couldn't have happened with a better group of people." "I couldn't be prouder of our team, not just for what was achieved but knowing the right moment to call time. As sad as this is, goodbye from team CAKES," the group adds. GLHF, another piracy group, is mentioned in the farewell message. While no official shut down has been announced, TorrentFreak notes that "GLHF stopped releasing new titles over a week ago, which is highly atypical."

The upcoming Apple TV+ show "Monarch: Legacy of Monsters," based on Legendary's Monsterverse franchise, is reportedly being shot in 3D format to support Apple's Vision Pro headset. If true, it would be the first confirmed TV+ show to support the 3D video-viewing capabilities of the headset, which offers a wide virtual screen environment and spatial audio. MacRumors reports: According to ScreenTimes' Sigmund Judge, the live-action Godzilla and Titans TV series that's based on Legendary's Monsterverse franchise has been shooting in a three-dimensional format supported by Apple's newly announced headset, based on conversations with people familiar with its production. [...] Apple announced its order for the Godzilla TV series in January 2022, but has not yet revealed when it will arrive on TV+.

The series takes place after the battle between Godzilla and the Titans leveled San Francisco, and will be produced by Legendary Television with co-creator Chris Black serving as executive producer and showrunner. Black is known for his work on "Star Trek: Enterprise" and "Outcast."

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: CBS News interviewed 71-year-old Mark Hamill, who remembers that in his first audition for Star Wars, they didn't give him the whole script. So "I couldn't figure out, is this like a send-up of Flash Gordon or whatever? You couldn't tell. Because nobody talks like this!"

Hamill also does impressions of the other actors he worked with. "I was asking Harrison, because he had been in American Graffiti. I said, 'You know George. Is this like a joke, or — should we send it up, make fun of it?'" And then he mimics Harrison Ford as saying "Yeah, Whatever. Get it done." ("So he was no help.") Later Hamill also describes meeting Alec Guinness, who eventually had to remind Hamill to stop calling him "Sir Alec." ("I want to be known by my name, not my accolade...")

And after playing Mozart in the Broadway production of Amadeus, Hamill remembers the reaction when he'd suggested appearing in the movie adaptation. Director Milos Forman said, "Oh ho ho ho. No, no, no. The Luke Skywalker is not to be being the Mozart." (Hamill's reaction? "At least he's honest.")
There's a clip of Hamill doing voice-over work for the animated Batman series, and (about three minutes in) a quick clip from Mark Hamill's 1976 screen test with Harrison Ford. There's even a photo of Hamill's appearance in a 1971 episode of The Partridge Family. At the end of the interview, Hamill doesn't say whether or not he'll ever reappear in the role of Luke Skywalker again. "You never say never. I just don't see any reason to, let me put it that way. They have so many stories to tell, they don't need Luke any more."

But the interviewer points out that "if you find yourself in Ukraine during an air strike, you might hear Luke Skywalker's voice talking you down" -- since he also provides the voice for a warning app linked to Ukraine's air defense system.

Isaac-Lew (Slashdot reader #623) writes: The Lego scene in "Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse" was animated by a 14-year-old high school student after the producers saw the trailer he made that was animated Lego-style.
The teenager had used his father's old computers to recreate the trailer "shot for shot to look as if it belonged in a Lego world," reports the New York Times: By that point, he had been honing his skills for several years making short computer-generated Lego videos. "My dad showed me this 3-D software called Blender and I instantly got hooked on it," he said. "I watched a lot of YouTube videos to teach myself certain stuff..."

[A]fter finding the movie's Toronto-based production designer, Patrick O'Keefe, on LinkedIn, and confirming that Sony Pictures Animation's offer was legitimate, Theodore Mutanga, a medical physicist, built his son a new computer and bought him a state-of-the-art graphics card so he could render his work much faster... Over several weeks, first during spring break and then after finishing his homework on school nights, Mutanga worked on the Lego sequence... Christophre Miller [a director of "The Lego Movie" and one of the writer-producers of "Spider-Verse."] saw Mutanga's contribution to "Across the Spider-Verse" not only as a testament to the democratization of filmmaking, but also to the artist's perseverance: he dedicated intensive time and effort to animation, which is "not ever fast or easy to make," Miller said.

'The Lego Movie' is inspired by people making films with Lego bricks at home," Lord said by video. "That's what made us want to make the movie. Then the idea in 'Spider Verse' is that a hero can come from anywhere. And here comes this heroic young person who's inspired by the movie that was inspired by people like him."

Along with FaceTime support and a redesigned Control Center, Apple is adding support for VPN apps in tvOS 17. MacRumors reports: VPN apps could allow for Apple TV users to watch geo-restricted content from any location, such as the U.S. version of Netflix in another country. In its tvOS 17 press release, however, Apple focused on how the VPN apps can benefit enterprise and education users, so it is possible that Apple could restrict usage of the apps.

Apple: "Third-party VPN support, which enables developers to create VPN apps for Apple TV. This can benefit enterprise and education users wanting to access content on their private networks, allowing Apple TV to be a great office and conference room solution in even more places."

Charlie Brooker, the showrunner of "Black Mirror," revealed in an interview that he used OpenAI's ChatGPT to write an episode for the show's sixth season but deemed the results "shit." Gizmodo reports: "I've toyed around with ChatGPT a bit. The first thing I did was type 'generate Black Mirror episode' and it comes up with something that, at first glance, reads plausibly, but on second glance, is shit," the dystopian sci-fi auteur told Empire. "Because all it's done is look up all the synopses of Black Mirror episodes, and sort of mush them together. Then if you dig a bit more deeply you go, 'Oh, there's not actually any real original thought here.' It's [1970s impressionist] Mike Yarwood -- there's a topical reference."

While his experiments with generating an episode of Black Mirror with AI might have been deemed a failure, Brooker told the outlet that it did point out some of his writing cliches. "I was aware that I had written lots of episodes where someone goes 'Oh, I was inside a computer the whole time!'," he said. "So I thought, 'I'm just going to chuck out any sense of what I think a Black Mirror episode is.' There's no point in having an anthology show if you can't break your own rules. Just a sort of nice, cold glass of water in the face."

According to research company Antenna, Netflix's password crackdown in the U.S. has resulted in the "four single largest days of U.S. user sign-ups since January 2019, when Antenna first began tracking the metric," reports Variety. "On May 23, Netflix began notifying U.S. customers that users on their accounts who live outside their households would need to be added as an 'extra member' (or get their own subscriptions)." From the report: Based on the most current Antenna data available, Netflix average daily sign-ups reached 73,000 from May 25-28, a 102% increase from the prior 60-day average. That was more than the spikes in subscriber sign-ups Antenna recorded during the initial U.S. COVID-19 lockdowns in March and April 2020. Netflix U.S. cancelations also increased over May 25-28 -- a phenomenon the company told investors it expected -- but those were less than the number of sign-ups, according to Antenna. The ratio of sign-ups to cancelations since May 23 increased 25.6% compared with the previous 60-day period.

In the U.S., Netflix has told customers they must buy an "extra member" at an additional $7.99/month for anyone who doesn't live with them that currently uses their account. The streamer has said it will start blocking devices that attempt to access a Netflix account without having legitimate account access. According to New York-based Antenna, its estimates are based on millions of permission-based, consumer opt-in, raw transaction records, which are sourced "from a variety of data collection partners." The data includes online purchase receipts, credit, debit and banking data, and "bill-scrape data."

TV's streaming model is broken. It's also not going away. For Hollywood, figuring that out will be a horror show. From a report: Across the town, there's despair and creative destruction and all sorts of countervailing indicators. Certain shows that were enthusiastically green-lit two years ago probably wouldn't be made now. Yet there are still streamers burning mountains of cash to entertain audiences that already have too much to watch. Netflix has tightened the screws and recovered somewhat, but the inarguable consensus is that there is still a great deal of pain to come as the industry cuts back, consolidates, and fumbles toward a more functional economic framework. The high-stakes Writers Guild of America strike has focused attention on Hollywood's labor unrest, but the really systemic issue is streaming's busted math. There may be no problem more foundational than the way the system monetizes its biggest hits: It doesn't.

Just ask Shawn Ryan. In April, the veteran TV producer's latest show, the spy thriller The Night Agent, became the fifth-most-watched English-language original series in Netflix's history, generating 627 million viewing hours in its first four weeks. As it climbed to the heights of such platform-defining smashes as Stranger Things and Bridgerton, Ryan wondered how The Night Agent's success might be reflected in his compensation. "I had done the calculations. Half a billion hours is the equivalent of over 61 million people watching all ten episodes in 18 days. Those shows that air after the Super Bowl -- it's like having five or ten of them. So I asked my lawyer, 'What does that mean?'" recalls Ryan. As it turns out, not much. "In my case, it means that I got paid what I got paid. I'll get a little bonus when season two gets picked up and a nominal royalty fee for each additional episode that gets made. But if you think I'm going out and buying a private jet, you're way, way off."

Ryan says he'll probably make less money from The Night Agent than he did from The Shield, the cop drama he created in 2002, even though the latter ran on the then-nascent cable channel FX and never delivered Super Bowl numbers. "The promise was that if you made the company billions, you were going to get a lot of millions," he says. "That promise has gone away." Nobody is crying for Ryan, of course, and he wouldn't want them to. ("I'm not complaining!" he says. "I'm not unaware of my position relative to most people financially.") But he has a point. Once, in a more rational time, there was a direct relationship between the number of people who watched a show and the number of jets its creator could buy. More viewers meant higher ad rates, and the biggest hits could be sold to syndication and international markets. The people behind those hits got a cut, which is why the duo who invented Friends probably haven't flown commercial since the 1990s. Streaming shows, in contrast, have fewer ads (or none at all) and are typically confined to their original platforms forever. For the people who make TV, the connection between ratings and reward has been severed.

The House of Representatives in the United States plans to hold a hearing to investigate claims made by a whistleblower former intelligence official, David Grusch, that the US government possesses "intact and partially intact" alien vehicles. The Guardian reports: "There will be oversight of that," Comer told NewsNation. "We plan on having a hearing." Comer said he had heard about Grusch's claims, but added: "I don't know anything about it." The timing of the hearing is not yet determined, but a source familiar with the matter said a date is expected to be announced in the next few weeks. Tim Burchett and Anna Paulina Luna, Republican members of Congress from Florida and Tennessee, respectively, will lead the oversight committee investigation.

Burchett is working closely with House oversight committee leaders to prepare for a hearing, the congressman's office said. The witness list for the hearing has not yet been set, so it is unclear whether Grusch will publicly testify before the oversight committee. "Congressman Burchett's office is working through logistics, including a witness list of the most credible witnesses and sources who would be able to speak openly at an unclassified hearing," a spokesperson said.

Austin Hacker, a spokesman for the committee, told the Guardian in a statement: "In addition to recent claims by a whistleblower, reports continue to surface regarding unidentified aerial phenomena. The House oversight committee is following these UAP reports and is in the early stages of planning a hearing," Hacker said in a statement. "The National Defense Authorization Act for 2022 created the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office which coordinates among the Department of Defense, the intelligence community, Nasa, and other federal agencies to study UAPs. Americans, who continue to fund this federal government work, expect transparency and meaningful oversight from Congress."

United Airlines is set to introduce the next-generation Astrove in-flight entertainment system, featuring Panasonic's 4K OLED TVs, with larger screens and thinner bezels than current models. The system also offers Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity, allowing passengers to use their own wireless headphones, and includes two 67W USB-C chargers for charging mobile devices. However, these new entertainment systems will only be available on United's new Airbus A321XLRs and Boeing 787s starting in 2025. Android Headlines reports: The new Astrova System does also have two 67W USB-C chargers available on the bottom-left edge. This means you can use it to charge your phone as well as your laptop or tablet at the same time. So that when you land, you have fully juiced devices. This is all being done to create a "premium home theater environment."

According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, Amazon is preparing to launch an ad-supported tier of Prime Video. The Verge reports: Amazon currently offers Prime Video as part of its $14.99 per month Prime membership or for $8.99 per month as a standalone subscription. Subscribers can tack on other ad-free subscriptions to services like Max, Paramount Plus, and Showtime through Prime Video Channels. As noted by the WSJ, Amazon is currently weighing several ways it could implement ads in Prime Video, such as showing more ads to existing Prime subscribers and then offering an "option to pay more for an ad-free alternative and other features." The ad breaks will reportedly be "short," but there's still no word on whether it will beat Max's promised three to four minutes of ads per hour or how much the tier will cost.

Additionally, the WSJ reports that Amazon is in talks with Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount to start offering the ad-supported versions of Max and Paramount Plus within its Prime Video Channels. The company could also place a bid for the streaming rights to the National Basketball Association games when they expire in 2025, potentially bolstering its sports streaming lineup, which currently includes Thursday Night Football.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Tuesday, a Reddit user named "nhciao" posted a series of artistic QR codes created using the Stable Diffusion AI image-synthesis model that can still be read as functional QR codes by smartphone camera apps. The functional pieces reflect artistic styles in anime and Asian art. [...] In this case, despite the presence of intricate AI-generated designs and patterns in the images created by nhciao, we've found that smartphone camera apps on both iPhone and Android are still able to read these as functional QR codes. If you have trouble reading them, try backing your camera farther away from the images.

Stable Diffusion is an AI-powered image-synthesis model released last year that can generate images based on text descriptions. It can also transform existing images using a technique called "img2img." The creator did not detail the exact technique used to create the novel codes in English, but based on this blog post and the title of the Reddit post ("ControlNet for QR Code"), they apparently trained several custom Stable Diffusion ControlNet models (plus LoRA fine tunings) that have been conditioned to create different-styled results. Next, they fed existing QR codes into the Stable Diffusion AI image generator and used ControlNet to maintain the QR code's data positioning despite synthesizing an image around it, likely using a written prompt. Other techniques exist to make artistic-looking QR codes by manipulating the positions of dots within the codes to make meaningful patterns that can still be read. In this case, Stable Diffusion is not only controlling dot positions but also blending picture details to match the QR code.

This interesting use of Stable Diffusion is possible because of the innate error correction feature built into QR codes. This error correction capability allows a certain percentage of the QR code's data to be restored if it's damaged or obscured, permitting a level of modification without making the code unreadable. In typical QR codes, this error correction feature serves to recover information if part of the code is damaged or dirty. But in nhciao's case, it has been leveraged to blend creativity with utility. Stable Diffusion added unique artistic touches to the QR codes without compromising their functionality. [...] This discovery opens up new possibilities for both digital art and marketing. Ordinary black-and-white QR codes could be turned into unique pieces of art, enhancing their aesthetic appeal. The positive reaction to nhciao's experiment on social media may spark a new era in which QR codes are not just tools of convenience but also interesting and complex works of art.

A major Austrian opposition political party on Monday corrected the results of a closely contested leadership election after it announced the wrong winner over the weekend due to a "technical" error: Someone had messed up an Excel spreadsheet. From a report: At a convention on Saturday, Austria's Social Democrats (SPO) declared that Hans Peter Doskozil, governor of the eastern Burgenland province, was the new leader of the center-left party. But on Monday, the party said Andreas Babler, a small-town mayor and lesser-known figure, had actually won, with about 52 percent of the votes. "Unfortunately, the paper ballots did not match the result that was announced digitally," Michaela Grubesa, head of the SPÃ- electoral commission, said a news conference. "Due to a colleague's technical error in the Excel list, the result was mixed up."

Those familiar with Microsoft's spreadsheet program, which is used by millions around the world, were quick to crack jokes, bringing wider attention to the error and ensuing chaos. Babler said at a news conference after his belated apparent victory that the commission should count the vote again for accuracy's sake, local media reported, adding that the debacle was "painful for everyone involved" and bad for the party's image.

A former intelligence official turned whistleblower, David Charles Grusch, has provided extensive classified information to Congress and the Intelligence Community Inspector General about covert programs involving the retrieval of intact and partially intact vehicles of non-human origin. Grusch alleges that this information has been illegally withheld from Congress, and he has filed a complaint claiming illegal retaliation for his disclosures. Other intelligence officials, both active and retired, have independently corroborated similar information about these programs. The Debrief reports: The whistleblower, David Charles Grusch, 36, a decorated former combat officer in Afghanistan, is a veteran of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). He served as the reconnaissance office's representative to the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force from 2019-2021. From late 2021 to July 2022, he was the NGA's co-lead for UAP analysis and its representative to the task force. The task force was established to investigate what were once called "unidentified flying objects," or UFOs, and are now officially called "unidentified anomalous phenomena," or UAP. The task force was led by the Department of the Navy under the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security. It has since been reorganized and expanded into the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office to include investigations of objects operating underwater.

Grusch said the recoveries of partial fragments through and up to intact vehicles have been made for decades through the present day by the government, its allies, and defense contractors. Analysis has determined that the objects retrieved are "of exotic origin (non-human intelligence, whether extraterrestrial or unknown origin) based on the vehicle morphologies and material science testing and the possession of unique atomic arrangements and radiological signatures," he said. In filing his complaint, Grusch is represented by a lawyer who served as the original Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG). "We are not talking about prosaic origins or identities," Grusch said, referencing information he provided Congress and the current ICIG. "The material includes intact and partially intact vehicles." In accordance with protocols, Grusch provided the Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review at the Department of Defense with the information he intended to disclose to us. His on-the-record statements were all "cleared for open publication" on April 4 and 6, 2023, in documents provided to us.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: The truth may be out there about UFOs, or what the government currently calls "unidentified anomalous phenomena" (UAPs). But finding it will require collecting data that are more rigorous than the anecdotal reports that typically fuel the controversial sightings, according to a panel of scientists, appointed by NASA to advise the agency on the topic, that held its first public meeting [on Wednesday].

The 16-person panel, created last year at the behest of NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, is not itself evaluating UFO claims. Instead, it is advising NASA on how the agency can contribute to federal investigations that have been led by the Department of Defense (DOD) and intelligence agencies, says panel chair David Spergel, an astrophysicist and president of the Simons Foundation, who spoke to Science ahead of the meeting. "NASA is a public agency, an open agency, that encourages the use of the scientific method for looking at results." But science can only be done when there are data to work on, he adds. "You're not going to learn much from fuzzy pictures from the 1950s." So far, most "unidentified" phenomena flagged by the military have ended up being weather balloons, drones, camera glitches, or undisclosed military aircraft, Spergel says. "It's very unlikely there are space aliens that travel through space and use technology that looks remarkably like what we have right now." [...]

It remains to be seen whether NASA will devote any further funding to study UAPs beyond the $100,000 allocated for the panel, which will issue a report this summer. Many scientists would be reluctant to have existing funds steered away from more conventional lines of research in the search for signatures of life or extraterrestrial intelligence. As the panel meeting wound down, Spergel said no UAP so far demands the existence of extraterrestrials. "We have not seen the extraordinary yet." Most incidents end up being more mundane. Panel member Scott Kelly, a former NASA astronaut and naval aviator, recounted flying in an F-14 off the coast of Virginia, when his co-pilot swore that he saw a UAP. "We turned around," he said. "We went to go look at it. It turns out it was Bart Simpson, a balloon."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: A Virginia jury held Cox liable for pirating subscribers because it failed to terminate accounts after repeated accusations, ordering the company to pay $1 billion in damages to the labels. This landmark ruling is currently under appeal. As part of the appeal, Cox informed the court of a supplemental authority that could support its position. The case in question is Twitter vs. Taamneh, in which the U.S. Supreme Court recently held that the social media platform isn't liable for ISIS terrorists, who used Twitter to recruit and raise funds. The Supreme Court rejected (PDF) the claim that Twitter aided-and-abetted terrorist activity, because it didn't "consciously and culpably" participate in the illegal activity. According to Cox, the same logic applies in its case, where the ISP was held liable for the piracy activities of subscribers.

"These same aiding-and-abetting principles animate copyright law's contributory liability doctrine, and they likewise foreclose liability here," an attorney for Cox informed the court. Cox argues that the Supreme Court ruling confirms that aiding-and-abetting liability only applies when parties knowingly took part in the activity. That runs contrary to the finding in its own dispute with the record labels, where "culpable expression and conduct" or "intent" were not required. "Though Twitter arises in a different context, its reasoning applies with full force and supports reversal of the contributory infringement verdict," Cox added. The two cases are indeed quite different, but ultimately they are about imposing liability on third-party services.

According to Cox, the Twitter terrorist ruling clearly shows that it isn't liable for pirating subscribers, but the music companies see things differently. Earlier this week, the music labels responded in court (PDF), countering Cox's arguments. They argue that the Twitter ruling doesn't apply to their piracy dispute with Cox, as the cases are grounded in different laws. While the music industry certainly isn't happy with pirates, the Cox case is a copyright matter while the Twitter lawsuit fell under the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act. And for now, pirates are not categorized as terrorists. After establishing the difference between pirates and terrorists, the music companies point out that Twitter wasn't directly connected to the misconduct. The platform's role was more passive and its connection to ISIS was more distant than Cox's connection to its subscribers. Cox took a more active role and materially contributed to the pirating activities, which stands no comparison to the Twitter case, plaintiffs argue.

India's JioCinema broke the global record for the most concurrent views to a live streamed event on Monday, eclipsing a long-standing milestone set by Disney's Hotstar, as the Asian tycoon Mukesh Ambani spares no expense in expanding his digital empire. From a report: The Indian streaming app, whose partner includes James Murdoch's Bodhi Tree-backed Viacom18, surpassed the record Monday evening, attracting over 32 million concurrent viewers to the final game of the 16th edition of Indian Premier League cricket tourney between Chennai Super Kings and Gujarat Titans.

In an opinion piece for the New York Times, Vox co-founder Ezra Klein worries that early AI systems "will do more to distract and entertain than to focus." (Since they tend to "hallucinate" inaccuracies, and may first be relegated to areas "where reliability isn't a concern" like videogames, song mash-ups, children's shows, and "bespoke" images.)

"The problem is that those are the areas that matter most for economic growth..." One lesson of the digital age is that more is not always better... The magic of a large language model is that it can produce a document of almost any length in almost any style, with a minimum of user effort. Few have thought through the costs that will impose on those who are supposed to respond to all this new text. One of my favorite examples of this comes from The Economist, which imagined NIMBYs — but really, pick your interest group — using GPT-4 to rapidly produce a 1,000-page complaint opposing a new development. Someone, of course, will then have to respond to that complaint. Will that really speed up our ability to build housing?

You might counter that A.I. will solve this problem by quickly summarizing complaints for overwhelmed policymakers, much as the increase in spam is (sometimes, somewhat) countered by more advanced spam filters. Jonathan Frankle, the chief scientist at MosaicML and a computer scientist at Harvard, described this to me as the "boring apocalypse" scenario for A.I., in which "we use ChatGPT to generate long emails and documents, and then the person who received it uses ChatGPT to summarize it back down to a few bullet points, and there is tons of information changing hands, but all of it is just fluff. We're just inflating and compressing content generated by A.I."
But there's another worry: that the increased efficiency "would come at the cost of new ideas and deeper insights." Our societywide obsession with speed and efficiency has given us a flawed model of human cognition that I've come to think of as the Matrix theory of knowledge. Many of us wish we could use the little jack from "The Matrix" to download the knowledge of a book (or, to use the movie's example, a kung fu master) into our heads, and then we'd have it, instantly. But that misses much of what's really happening when we spend nine hours reading a biography. It's the time inside that book spent drawing connections to what we know ... that matters...

The analogy to office work is not perfect — there are many dull tasks worth automating so people can spend their time on more creative pursuits — but the dangers of overautomating cognitive and creative processes are real... To make good on its promise, artificial intelligence needs to deepen human intelligence. And that means human beings need to build A.I., and build the workflows and office environments around it, in ways that don't overwhelm and distract and diminish us.

We failed that test with the internet. Let's not fail it with A.I.

Yes, that expensive Star Wars-themed hotel at Walt Disney World is closing September 30th — after opening barely one year ago. But Sfgate spoke to a couple who's already been three times, and before it closes are "currently planning a fourth and final voyage this summer." If you're counting, that's more than $15,000 their travel parties will have spent on the experience. Their first trip was hosted by Disney as a media preview; for the other visits, the pair split rooms with friends to lower the per-person cost. [The couple is Peter Sciretta and partner Kitra Remick, the couple behind the theme park vlog Ordinary Adventures.] "Any time that we went, we were bunking with people in one room to make the price cheaper because if you can fit four people in one room, it ends up being $1,000 or $1,500 each," Sciretta explained. "It's still expensive even when you split it, but to us and to a lot of people who went back, it was obviously worth it...."

"It's so hard to explain what it's like in there," Sciretta said, "and you saw that from Disney's marketing because they were unable to explain what it was like in there. It's like you are in a 'Star Wars' movie for two and a half days — not just inside, but you are part of a 'Star Wars' movie..." If you want to, you can make the fight between the Resistance and the Dark Side the whole experience — but if you don't, you can spend your time spying on storylines happening in darkened corners and stairwells, trying to sabotage other people's missions (which is actually a thing on the ship), going to lightsaber training, seeing a galactic songstress perform or just eating space food and drinking in the cantina.

The space food, Remick noted, was especially good, even those infamous blue shrimp. "Most of the stuff is otherworldly. It is so good," she said. "That was one of the things I was most excited about when we went back, eating all the food again. Not only does it look cool and Instagram-worthy, it actually tastes really good, too. And all the cocktails are amazing." There's even a cocktail, called the Krayt Reactor, that comes with a song and dance by cast members when you order it — it costs $79 but serves four people... According to information provided to SFGATE by Disney representatives, Galactic Starcruiser has been earning some of the highest guest satisfaction ratings in the history of Walt Disney World. It also won one of the theme park industry's highest honors: a Thea Award for Outstanding Achievement from the Themed Entertainment Association.

"I know hundreds of people that have gone at this point, and not one single person didn't plan on or didn't already go back a second time," Sciretta said. "I kind of do feel like even before it opened, [Disney] shot themselves in the foot with the marketing and the price. They were never able to recover no matter what people said about it."

Forty years ago, a young boy's review of "Return of the Jedi" on NPR's All Things Considered led to uproar from listeners, prompting an on-air apology from host Susan Stamberg for airing spoilers. NPR reports: This was part of the boy's review: "Han Solo and Luke Skywalker are about to go in the pit. And just as he was about to walk the plank, R2D2 fired a laser gun from his head, and Han catched it. And he blew up the whole ship. And the big guy -- the boss of the monsters -- well, he got choked and died." In fact, his review wasn't quite right. It was a lightsaber that R2D2 fired out, which Luke Skywalker caught.

At the time, though, these plot details really rankled NPR listeners. So much so that the next day Stamberg issued an on-air apology. Well, sort of. Here's what she said: "Well, the comic book was a goof, but we certainly goofed last night. We goofed so badly that we changed our program before rebroadcasting it to the West Coast, which means that you West Coast listeners won't know what I'm talking about. But enough of you on the East Coast called to complain that we want to apologize publicly to everybody. Calls -- there were more phone calls on this one than we ever got in the middle of the hottest Middle East disputes. Calls -- there were more phone calls than Richard Gere would get if he listed his number.

And all because last night on All Things Considered, we permitted a six-and-a-half-year-old boy to tell us everything -- and I mean everything -- about Return Of The Jedi. "You gave the plot away," you said. "I've been waiting for that movie for three years, and now you have ruined it for me. How could you do a thing like that?" Well, we are sorry. We're contrite, and we're fascinated. Usually you get angry when we get our facts wrong.

This time we got them right, and you got angry. It's the difference between fact and fiction, of course, and the power of fantasy in our lives -- the need for mystery, for wonderful stories that spill themselves out for us. Of course, if they are wonderful enough -- this may be an excuse, but I doubt it -- if they're wonderful enough, they will come to us new, even though we've seen them a hundred times. That's why people keep going back to see Romeo And Juliet over and over again or The Wizard Of Oz. We know how they end but find great pleasure and nourishment watching them proceed to that ending. Two years from now, that's how we'll feel about the Return Of The Jedi. For now, though, our apologies -- we will not do that again. But listen, I have just seen the new Superman III, and Superman and Lois Lane..."