> A festival in Montreal has just done something that, judging from the reaction, you would think involved setting fire to the negative. [They] screened Anne Émond’s [Peak Everything) at 1.5 times its normal speed. [The initiative] was conceived to provoke a conversation about how a younger audience actually consumes moving images in 2026. > François Delisle pulled his own film Le temps from the festival in protest. (...) RTL France reported the experiment as a worrying new habit. (...) [Yet] the organisers did not [run it fast] for laughs. They went to Émond, to her producer and to her distributor, secured agreement from all three, scheduled a single 1.5x screening on 25 April, (...) and bolted on a panel discussion afterwards. > Watching cinema at the wrong speed is not new. (...) Any projectionist of a certain vintage will tell you (...) the last reel of the last film often ran a little faster than 24 frames per second. The motivation was rarely artistic. The bus home, the pub, a partner. (...) PAL television standard turned this into industrial practice. Films shot at 24 frames per second have, for the better part of seventy years, been broadcast across European television at 25 frames per second. > Variable playback speed on YouTube [has been] available since 2010. Netflix rolled out 0.5x to 1.5x playback on Android in July 2020, having been called everything from a vandal to a grave-robber. (...) Spotify, Audible and every podcast app on earth allow the same. (...) Fifty percent of 18-to-34-year-olds had watched a video on accelerated playback in the previous month. > Average runtime for wide theatrical releases rose from around 106 minutes in the 1990s and early 2000s to roughly 114 minutes. (...) Mission: Impossible expanded from 110 minutes to 170. (...) Their problem is not really that the audience is in a hurry. Their problem is that the audience is voting with the playback slider on a thing that, twenty years ago, the editor would have trimmed before anyone outside the room saw it. > If the work earns its 180 minutes, audiences will sit through it without reaching for the slider; Oppenheimer grossed nearly a billion dollars at full speed. (...) That is not the death of cinema. It is a question, addressed to the people who make the films, about whether every minute they have asked us to sit through is genuinely worth the asking. https://patrickvonsychowski.substack.com/p/the-projectionist-always-sped-up

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https://overcast.fm/+AA4DU-tjqfs

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> The last two epoch-defining shifts in technology were the smartphone in the 2000s, and the Internet/web in the 1990s. Neither of those moments generated this sort of mainstream popular backlash. (...) People were optimistically curious. The single most distinctive thing about “AI” today is the vociferous public opposition to it and deeply pessimistic expectations about what it’s going to do. > “Software brain” is a good term — a tidy two-word encapsulation of a sprawling worldview that is currently very much in vogue. Take some time to read Patel’s whole piece carefully. It feels important, and it’s really well considered. https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/23/patel-software-brain

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> The last two epoch-defining shifts in technology were the smartphone in the 2000s, and the Internet/web in the 1990s. Neither of those moments generated this sort of mainstream popular backlash. I’d say in both of those cases, regular people were optimistically curious. The single most distinctive thing about “AI” today is the vociferous public opposition to it and deeply pessimistic expectations about what it’s going to do. > “Software brain” is a good term — a tidy two-word encapsulation of a sprawling worldview that is currently very much in vogue. Take some time to read Patel’s whole piece carefully. It feels important, and it’s really well considered. https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/04/23/patel-software-brain

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> A lot of people hate AI. (...) There’s that NBC News poll showing AI with worse favorability than ICE and only a little bit above the war in Iran and the Democrats. (...) Gallup poll found that only 18 percent of Gen Z was hopeful about AI, down from an already-bad 27 percent last year. At the same time, anger is growing: 31 percent (...), up from 22 percent last year. > Everyone in tech understands how much regular people dislike AI. What I think they’re missing is why. (...) AI doesn’t have a marketing problem. People experience these tools every single day! (...) This is a fundamental disconnect between how tech people with software brains see the world and how regular people are living their lives. > [Software brain means] you see the whole world as a series of databases that can be controlled with the structured language. (...) This is a powerful way of seeing things. (...) Zillow is a database of houses. Uber is a database of cars and riders. (...) It’s a small jump to feeling like you can control everything if you can just control the data. > Elon Musk and DOGE showed up in the government. (...) And they ran into the undeniable fact that the databases aren’t reality, and DOGE ended in hilarious failure. (...) Law isn’t actually code. (...) It’s ambiguity that makes lawyers lawyers. Honestly, it’s ambiguity that makes people hate lawyers because it’s always possible to argue the other side [or] find the gray area. > You can see the same thing happening in every other kind of industry. You don’t hire a big consulting firm to actually come in and study your business and make it more efficient. You hire them to make slide decks that justify layoffs to your board and shareholders. Big consulting firms are great at this, and now they’re just going to generate those decks with AI. > There’s real value in introducing AI to business. (...) But: not everything is a business. Not everything is a loop! (...) Regular people don’t see the opportunity to write code as an opportunity at all. (...) Apple, Google and Amazon have struggled for over a decade now to make regular people care about smart home automation at all. > I’ve reviewed a lot of tech products over the past decade and a half, and all I can tell you is that it is a failure when you ask people to adapt to computers. (...) Asking people to make themselves more legible to software — to turn themselves into a database — is a doomed idea. https://www.theverge.com/podcast/917029/software-brain-ai-backlash-databases-automation

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> A lot of people hate AI. (...) There’s that NBC News poll showing AI with worse favorability than ICE and only a little bit above the war in Iran and the Democrats. (...) Gallup poll found that only 18 percent of Gen Z was hopeful about AI, down from an already-bad 27 percent last year. At the same time, anger is growing: 31 percent (...), up from 22 percent last year. > Everyone in tech understands how much regular people dislike AI. What I think they’re missing is why. (...) AI doesn’t have a marketing problem. People experience these tools every single day! (...) This is a fundamental disconnect between how tech people with software brains see the world and how regular people are living their lives. > [Software brain means] you see the whole world as a series of databases that can be controlled with the structured language. (...) This is a powerful way of seeing things. (...) Zillow is a database of houses. Uber is a database of cars and riders. (...) It’s a small jump to feeling like you can control everything if you can just control the data. > Elon Musk and DOGE showed up in the government. (...) And they ran into the undeniable fact that the databases aren’t reality, and DOGE ended in hilarious failure. (...) Law isn’t actually code. (...) It’s ambiguity that makes lawyers lawyers. Honestly, it’s ambiguity that makes people hate lawyers because it’s always possible to argue the other side [or] find the gray area. > You can see the same thing happening in every other kind of industry. You don’t hire a big consulting firm to actually come in and study your business and make it more efficient. You hire them to make slide decks that justify layoffs to your board and shareholders. Big consulting firms are great at this, and now they’re just going to generate those decks with AI. > There’s real value in introducing AI to business. (...) But: not everything is a business. Not everything is a loop! (...) Regular people don’t see the opportunity to write code as an opportunity at all. (...) Apple, Google and Amazon have struggled for over a decade now to make regular people care about smart home automation at all. And they just don’t. > I’ve reviewed a lot of tech products over the past decade and a half, and all I can tell you is that it is a failure when you ask people to adapt to computers. (...) Asking people to make themselves more legible to software — to turn themselves into a database — is a doomed idea. https://www.theverge.com/podcast/917029/software-brain-ai-backlash-databases-automation

891

> A lot of people hate AI. (...) There’s that NBC News poll showing AI with worse favorability than ICE and only a little bit above the war in Iran and the Democrats. (...) Gallup poll found that only 18 percent of Gen Z was hopeful about AI, down from an already-bad 27 percent last year. (...) Anger is growing: 31 percent (...), up from 22 percent. > Everyone in tech understands how much regular people dislike AI. What I think they’re missing is why. (...) AI doesn’t have a marketing problem. People experience these tools every single day! (...) This is a fundamental disconnect between how tech people with software brains see the world and how regular people are living their lives. > [Software brain means] you see the whole world as a series of databases that can be controlled with the structured language. (...) This is a powerful way of seeing things. (...) Zillow is a database of houses. Uber is a database of cars and riders. (...) It’s a small jump to feeling like you can control everything if you can just control the data. > Elon Musk and DOGE showed up in the government. (...) And they ran into the undeniable fact that the databases aren’t reality, and DOGE ended in hilarious failure. (...) Law isn’t actually code. (...) It’s ambiguity that makes lawyers lawyers. Honestly, it’s ambiguity that makes people hate lawyers because it’s always possible to argue the other side [or] find the gray area. > You can see the same thing happening in every other kind of industry. You don’t hire a big consulting firm to actually come in and study your business and make it more efficient. You hire them to make slide decks that justify layoffs to your board and shareholders. Big consulting firms are great at this, and now they’re just going to generate those decks with AI. > There’s real value in introducing AI to business. (...) But: not everything is a business. Not everything is a loop! (...) Regular people don’t see the opportunity to write code as an opportunity at all. (...) Apple, Google and Amazon have struggled for over a decade now to make regular people care about smart home automation at all. And they just don’t. > I’ve reviewed a lot of tech products over the past decade and a half, and all I can tell you is that it is a failure when you ask people to adapt to computers. (...) Asking people to make themselves more legible to software — to turn themselves into a database — is a doomed idea. https://www.theverge.com/podcast/917029/software-brain-ai-backlash-databases-automation

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> It’s fair to say that a lot of people hate AI. (...) There’s that NBC News poll showing AI with worse favorability than ICE and only a little bit above [the Democrats]. (...) Gallup poll found that only 18 percent of Gen Z was hopeful about AI, down from an already-bad 27 percent last year. At the same time, anger is growing: 31 percent (...), up from 22 percent. > Everyone in tech understands how much regular people dislike AI. What I think they’re missing is why. (...) AI doesn’t have a marketing problem. People experience these tools every single day! (...) This is a fundamental disconnect between how tech people with software brains see the world and how regular people are living their lives. > [Software brain means] you see the whole world as a series of databases that can be controlled with the structured language. (...) This is a powerful way of seeing things. (...) Zillow is a database of houses. Uber is a database of cars and riders. (...) It’s a small jump to feeling like you can control everything if you can just control the data. > Elon Musk and DOGE showed up in the government. (...) And they ran into the undeniable fact that the databases aren’t reality, and DOGE ended in hilarious failure. (...) Law isn’t actually code. (...) It’s ambiguity that makes lawyers lawyers. Honestly, it’s ambiguity that makes people hate lawyers because it’s always possible to argue the other side [or] find the gray area. > You can see the same thing happening in every other kind of industry. You don’t hire a big consulting firm to actually come in and study your business and make it more efficient. You hire them to make slide decks that justify layoffs to your board and shareholders. Big consulting firms are great at this, and now they’re just going to generate those decks with AI. > There’s real value in introducing AI to business. (...) But: not everything is a business. Not everything is a loop! (...) Regular people don’t see the opportunity to write code as an opportunity at all. (...) Apple, Google and Amazon have struggled for over a decade now to make regular people care about smart home automation at all. And they just don’t. > I’ve reviewed a lot of tech products over the past decade and a half, and all I can tell you is that it is a failure when you ask people to adapt to computers. (...) Asking people to make themselves more legible to software — to turn themselves into a database — is a doomed idea. https://www.theverge.com/podcast/917029/software-brain-ai-backlash-databases-automation