OpenAI is now in­ter­nally test­ing ‘ads’ in­side ChatGPT that could re­de­fine the web econ­omy.

Up un­til now, the ChatGPT ex­pe­ri­ence has been com­pletely free.

While there are pre­mium plans and mod­els, you don’t see GPT sell you prod­ucts or show ads. On the other hand, Google Search has ads that in­flu­ence your buy­ing be­hav­iour.

As spot­ted by Tibor on X, ChatGPT Android app 1.2025.329 beta in­cludes new ref­er­ences to an “ads fea­ture” with “bazaar con­tent”, “search ad” and “search ads carousel.”

This move could dis­rupt the web econ­omy, as what most peo­ple don’t un­der­stand is that GPT likely knows more about users than Google.

For ex­am­ple, OpenAI could cre­ate per­son­alised ads on ChatGPT that pro­mote prod­ucts that you re­ally want to buy. It might also sneak in ads in the search ads, sim­i­lar to Google Search ads.

The leak sug­gests that ads will ini­tially be lim­ited to the search ex­pe­ri­ence only, but this may change in the fu­ture.

ChatGPT has roughly 800 mil­lion peo­ple us­ing it every week, up from 100 mil­lion weekly users in November 2023 and about 300 mil­lion weekly users in late 2024.

An OpenAI-backed study es­ti­mated 700 mil­lion users send­ing 18 bil­lion mes­sages per week by July 2025, which lines up with this growth, and other an­a­lysts now peg traf­fic at around 5–6 bil­lion vis­its per month.

GPT handles about 2.5 bil­lion prompts a day, and India has be­come the sin­gle biggest user base, ahead of the US.

ChatGPT has every­thing it needs for ads to suc­ceed. What do you think?

More than a decade ago, when I was ap­ply­ing to grad­u­ate school, I went through a pe­riod of deep un­cer­tainty. I had tried the pre­vi­ous year and had­n’t got­ten in any­where. I wanted to try again, but I had a lot go­ing against me.

I’d spent most of my un­der­grad build­ing a stu­dent job-por­tal startup and had­n’t bal­anced it well with aca­d­e­mics. My GPA needed ex­plain­ing. My GMAT score was just okay. I did­n’t come from a big-brand em­ployer. And there was no short­age of peo­ple with sim­i­lar or stronger pro­files ap­ply­ing to the same schools.

Even though I had learned a few things from the first round, the sec­ond at­tempt was still dif­fi­cult. There were mul­ti­ple points af­ter I sub­mit­ted ap­pli­ca­tions where I lost hope.

But dur­ing that stretch, a friend and col­league kept re­peat­ing one line to me:

“All it takes is for one to work out.”

He’d say it every time I spi­raled. And as much as it made me smile, a big part of me did­n’t fully be­lieve it. Still, it be­came a lit­tle maxim be­tween us. And even­tu­ally, he was right — that one did work out. And it changed my life.

I’ve thought about that fram­ing so many times since then.

You don’t need every job to choose you. You just need the one that’s the right fit.

You don’t need every house to ac­cept your of­fer. You just need the one that feels like home.

You don’t need every per­son to want to build a life with you. You just need the one.

You don’t need ten uni­ver­si­ties to say yes. You just need the one that opens the right door.

These processes — col­lege ad­mis­sions, job searches, home buy­ing, find­ing a part­ner — can be emo­tion­ally bru­tal. They can get you down in ways that feel per­sonal. But in those mo­ments, that truth can be ground­ing.

All it takes is for one to work out.

And that one is all you need.

Iceland has taken the rare step of treat­ing a cli­mate-linked ocean threat as a mat­ter of na­tional sur­vival, launch­ing a co­or­di­nated gov­ern­ment re­sponse to one of the most feared po­ten­tial tip­ping points in the cli­mate sys­tem.

Officials say the shift re­flects mount­ing ev­i­dence that a key Atlantic cur­rent sys­tem could be head­ing to­ward dan­ger­ous in­sta­bil­ity.

According to CNN, Iceland’s National Security Council for­mally la­belled the pos­si­ble col­lapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) a na­tional se­cu­rity risk in September — the first time the coun­try has ap­plied such a des­ig­na­tion to a cli­mate im­pact.

The move fol­lowed a gov­ern­ment brief­ing on new re­search that raised “grave con­cerns” about the sys­tem’s fu­ture sta­bil­ity.

Jóhann Páll Jóhannsson, Iceland’s min­is­ter for en­vi­ron­ment, en­ergy and cli­mate, said the risks ex­tend far be­yond weather.

“Our cli­mate, econ­omy and se­cu­rity are deeply tied to the sta­bil­ity of the ocean cur­rents around us,” he told CNN.

He later de­scribed the threat as “an ex­is­ten­tial threat,” warn­ing that a break­down could dis­rupt trans­port, dam­age in­fra­struc­ture and hit the coun­try’s fish­ing in­dus­try.

The AMOC — of­ten com­pared to a gi­ant con­veyor belt — car­ries warm wa­ter north­ward be­fore it cools and sinks, help­ing reg­u­late weather across the Atlantic basin.

CNN re­ported that sci­en­tists in­creas­ingly worry that warm­ing tem­per­a­tures and dis­rupted salin­ity lev­els are slow­ing the sys­tem.

Some stud­ies sug­gest a tip­ping point could be reached this cen­tury, though the ex­act time­line re­mains un­cer­tain.

Stefan Rahmstorf, an oceanog­ra­pher at Potsdam University, told CNN that a col­lapse “cannot be con­sid­ered a low like­li­hood risk any­more.”

The con­se­quences, he said, would be dra­matic: surg­ing sea lev­els along US and European coasts, ma­jor mon­soon dis­rup­tions across Africa and Asia, and a deep freeze across parts of Europe.

For Iceland, he said, the coun­try “would be close to the cen­ter of a se­ri­ous re­gional cool­ing,” with sea ice po­ten­tially sur­round­ing the is­land.

The se­cu­rity des­ig­na­tion means Iceland will now pur­sue a high-level, cross-gov­ern­ment ef­fort to analyse the threat and con­sider how to man­age or re­duce the con­se­quences. Jóhannsson said the de­ci­sion

“reflects the se­ri­ous­ness of the is­sue and en­sures that the mat­ter gets the at­ten­tion it de­serves.”

Rahmstorf praised Iceland’s stance, telling CNN that other na­tions should treat the risk with sim­i­lar ur­gency.

Jóhannsson said the coun­try is con­fronting a stark pos­si­bil­ity: “What we do know is that the cur­rent cli­mate might change so dras­ti­cally that it could be­come im­pos­si­ble for us to adapt… this is not just a sci­en­tific con­cern — it’s a mat­ter of na­tional sur­vival and se­cu­rity.”

Run Windows ap­pli­ca­tions (including Microsoft 365 and Adobe Creative Cloud) on GNU/Linux with KDE Plasma, GNOME or XFCE, in­te­grated seam­lessly as if they were na­tive to the OS.

Creating short­cuts to se­lected Windows ap­pli­ca­tions on the host GNU/Linux OS.

Using FreeRDP as a back­end to seam­lessly ren­der Windows ap­pli­ca­tions along­side GNU/Linux ap­pli­ca­tions.

* The GNU/Linux /home di­rec­tory is ac­ces­si­ble within Windows via the \\tsclient\home mount.

* Integration with Nautilus, al­low­ing you to right-click files to open them with spe­cific Windows ap­pli­ca­tions based on the file MIME type.

* The of­fi­cial taskbar wid­get en­ables seam­less ad­min­is­tra­tion of the Windows sub­sys­tem and of­fers an easy way to launch Windows ap­pli­ca­tions.

* Microsoft Office links (e.g. ms-word://) from the host sys­tem are au­to­mat­i­cally opened in the Windows sub­sys­tem. (Note: You may need to use a User Agent Switcher browser ex­ten­sion and set the User-Agent to Windows, as the Office we­bapps typ­i­cally hide the “Open in Desktop App” op­tion for Linux users.)

WinApps sup­ports ALL Windows ap­pli­ca­tions. Support does not, how­ever, ex­tend to ker­nel-level anti-cheat sys­tems (e.g. Riot Vanguard).

Scanning Windows for any com­mu­nity tested ap­pli­ca­tions (list be­low).

Scanning Windows for any other .exe files listed within the Windows Registry.

Community tested ap­pli­ca­tions ben­e­fit from high-res­o­lu­tion icons and pre-pop­u­lated MIME types. This en­ables file man­agers to de­ter­mine which Windows ap­pli­ca­tions should open files based on file ex­ten­sions. Icons for other de­tected ap­pli­ca­tions are pulled from .exe files.

Contributing to the list of sup­ported ap­pli­ca­tions is en­cour­aged through sub­mis­sion of pull re­quests! Please help us grow the WinApps com­mu­nity.

Please note that the pro­vided list of com­mu­nity tested ap­pli­ca­tions is com­mu­nity-dri­ven. As such, some ap­pli­ca­tions may not be tested and ver­i­fied by the WinApps team.

Both Docker and Podman are rec­om­mended back­ends for run­ning the Windows vir­tual ma­chine, as they fa­cil­i­tate an au­to­mated Windows in­stal­la­tion process. WinApps is also com­pat­i­ble with lib­virt. While this method re­quires con­sid­er­ably more man­ual con­fig­u­ra­tion, it also pro­vides greater vir­tual ma­chine cus­tomi­sa­tion op­tions. All three meth­ods lever­age the KVM hy­per­vi­sor, en­sur­ing ex­cel­lent vir­tual ma­chine per­for­mance. Ultimately, the choice of back­end de­pends on your spe­cific use case.

The fol­low­ing guides are avail­able:

If you al­ready have a Windows VM or server you wish to use with WinApps, you will still have to fol­low the fi­nal steps de­scribed in the lib­virt doc­u­men­ta­tion.

WinApps re­quires FreeRDP ver­sion 3 or later. If not avail­able for your dis­tri­b­u­tion through your pack­age man­ager, you can in­stall the Flatpak:

flat­pak in­stall flathub com.freerdp. FreeRDP

sudo flat­pak over­ride –filesystem=home com.freerdp.FreeRDP # To use `+home-drive`

However, if you have weird is­sues like #233 when run­ning Flatpak, please com­pile FreeRDP from source ac­cord­ing to this guide.

Create a con­fig­u­ra­tion file at ~/.config/winapps/winapps.conf con­tain­ing the fol­low­ing:

# WINAPPS CONFIGURATION FILE #

# INSTRUCTIONS

# - Leading and trail­ing white­space are ig­nored.

# - Empty lines are ig­nored.

# - Lines start­ing with ‘#’ are ig­nored.

# - All char­ac­ters fol­low­ing a ‘#’ are ig­nored.

# [WINDOWS USERNAME]

RDP_USER=“MyWindowsUser”

# [WINDOWS PASSWORD]

# NOTES:

# - If us­ing FreeRDP v3.9.0 or greater, you *have* to set a pass­word

RDP_PASS=“MyWindowsPassword”

# [WINDOWS DOMAIN]

# DEFAULT VALUE: ‘’ (BLANK)

RDP_DOMAIN=“”

# [WINDOWS IPV4 ADDRESS]

# NOTES:

# - If us­ing ‘libvirt’, ‘RDP_IP’ will be de­ter­mined by WinApps at run­time if left un­spec­i­fied.

# DEFAULT VALUE:

# - ‘docker’: ‘127.0.0.1’

# - ‘podman’: ‘127.0.0.1’

# - ‘libvirt’: ‘’ (BLANK)

RDP_IP=“127.0.0.1”

# [VM NAME]

# NOTES:

# - Only ap­plic­a­ble when us­ing ‘libvirt’

# - The lib­virt VM name must match so that WinApps can de­ter­mine VM IP, start the VM, etc.

# DEFAULT VALUE: ‘RDPWindows’

VM_NAME=“RDPWindows”

# [WINAPPS BACKEND]

# DEFAULT VALUE: ‘docker’

# VALID VALUES:

# - ‘docker’

# - ‘podman’

# - ‘libvirt’

# - ‘manual’

WAFLAVOR=“docker”

# [DISPLAY SCALING FACTOR]

# NOTES:

# - If an un­sup­ported value is spec­i­fied, a warn­ing will be dis­played.

# - If an un­sup­ported value is spec­i­fied, WinApps will use the clos­est sup­ported value.

# DEFAULT VALUE: ‘100’

# VALID VALUES:

# - ‘100’

# - ‘140’

# - ‘180’

RDP_SCALE=“100”

# [MOUNTING REMOVABLE PATHS FOR FILES]

# NOTES:

# - By de­fault, `udisks` (which you most likely have in­stalled) uses /run/media for mount­ing re­mov­able de­vices.

# This im­proves com­pat­i­bil­ity with most desk­top en­vi­ron­ments (DEs).

# ATTENTION: The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) rec­om­mends /media in­stead. Verify your sys­tem’s con­fig­u­ra­tion.

# - To man­u­ally mount de­vices, you may op­tion­ally use /mnt.

# REFERENCE: https://​wiki.arch­linux.org/​ti­tle/​Ud­isks#Moun­t_­to_/​me­dia

REMOVABLE_MEDIA=“/run/media”

# [ADDITIONAL FREERDP FLAGS & ARGUMENTS]

# NOTES:

# - You can try adding /network:lan to these flags in or­der to in­crease per­for­mance, how­ever, some users have faced is­sues with this.

# If this does not work or if it does not work with­out the flag, you can try adding /nsc and /gfx.

# DEFAULT VALUE: ‘/cert:tofu /sound /microphone +home-drive’

# VALID VALUES: See https://​github.com/​awake­cod­ing/​FreeRDP-Man­u­als/​blob/​mas­ter/​User/​FreeRDP-User-Man­ual.mark­down

RDP_FLAGS=“/cert:tofu /sound /microphone +home-drive”

# [DEBUG WINAPPS]

# NOTES:

# - Creates and ap­pends to ~/.local/share/winapps/winapps.log when run­ning WinApps.

# DEFAULT VALUE: ‘true’

# VALID VALUES:

# - ‘true’

# - ‘false’

DEBUG=“true”

# [AUTOMATICALLY PAUSE WINDOWS]

# NOTES:

# - This is cur­rently INCOMPATIBLE with ‘manual’.

# DEFAULT VALUE: ‘off’

# VALID VALUES:

# - ‘on’

# - ‘off’

AUTOPAUSE=“off”

# [AUTOMATICALLY PAUSE WINDOWS TIMEOUT]

Above all, thank you to every­one that made this pos­si­ble. But I wanted to em­pha­size and give spe­cial thanks to

Rairii for en­gi­neer­ing all these ROMs,

Mac84 for archiv­ing and shar­ing all the CHRP discs

, ELN for en­gi­neer­ing all the Mac mini G4 ROM com­pat­i­bil­ity scripts and cre­at­ing all the ROM and other Mac OS tool­ing, and to the Mac com­mu­nity at large every­where that as­sisted in all of this into be­com­ing re­al­ity. There’s hon­estly many, many peo­ple to thank we owe over this one way or an­other, both in small and big ways.

Let’s rip the Band-Aid off im­me­di­ately: If your un­der­ly­ing busi­ness process is a mess, sprin­kling “AI dust” on it won’t turn it into gold. It will just speed up the rate at which you gen­er­ate garbage. In the world of Business IT, we get se­duced by the shiny new toy. Right now, that toy is Artificial Intelligence. Boardrooms are buzzing with buzz­words like LLMs, agen­tic work­flows, and gen­er­a­tive rea­son­ing. Executives are fran­ti­cally ask­ing, “What is our AI strat­egy?“Like every ma­jor tech­no­log­i­cal shift be­fore it—from the steam en­gine to the spread­sheet—AI does not in­her­ently make an or­ga­ni­za­tion smarter. AI, like any other tool, only makes faster.If you au­to­mate a stu­pid de­ci­sion, you just make stu­pid de­ci­sions at light speed. If you ap­ply an agen­tic AI work­flow to a bu­reau­cratic night­mare of an ap­proval chain, you haven’t fixed the bu­reau­cracy; you’ve just built a ro­bot that hates its job as much as your em­ploy­ees do.For decades, tra­di­tional soft­ware de­manded struc­ture. Rows, columns, booleans, and fixed fields. If data did­n’t fit the box, the com­puter could­n’t read it.Be­cause com­put­ers could­n’t han­dle the mess, hu­mans han­dled it (before AI). And hu­mans don’t al­ways fol­low a flow chart. These processes—like “handling a com­plex cus­tomer com­plaint” or “brainstorming a mar­ket­ing cam­paign”—are of­ten ad-hoc, in­tu­itive, and com­pletely un­doc­u­mented. They live in the heads of your se­nior staff, not in your SOPs.If you want to use AI to process un­struc­tured data, you must first bring struc­ture to the work­flow it­self. You need to im­prove your process de­sign to ac­count for the am­bi­gu­ity that AI han­dles.What is the trans­for­ma­tion? (What ex­actly is the hu­man—or now the AI—supposed to ex­tract or de­duce from that mess?)The Old Way: An an­a­lyst reads 50 con­tracts (unstructured), high­lights risks based on gut feel­ing (unstructured process), and sum­ma­rizes them in 3 days.The AI Way: An AI scans 50 con­tracts and ex­tracts spe­cific risk clauses based on de­fined pa­ra­me­ters in 3 min­utes.The process (Review Contracts -> Identify Risk -> Summarize) has­n’t changed, but it had to be rig­or­ously de­fined for the AI to work. The in­tel­li­gence (knowing what a “risk” ac­tu­ally means) still re­quires hu­man gov­er­nance. What has changed is the ve­loc­ity.Go back to the white­board. Map out your value chain—es­pe­cially the messy, hu­man-cen­tric parts in­volv­ing un­struc­tured data that you pre­vi­ously ig­nored. Find the bot­tle­necks. Identify the waste.Tech­nol­ogy changes.

The rules of busi­ness ef­fi­ciency do not.

It’s al­ways the process, stu­pid!

And that’s where ac­tual AI Tools are miss­ing that point, be­cause they weren’t build for that

Von der Idee zur App ohne eine Zeile Code zu schreiben

Vom Datengrab zur Goldmine - KI Einsatz mit schnellem ROI (Promptcast)

Wie man KI am schnell­sten gewinnbrin­gend ein­set­zen kann (Diesmal nur als Prompcast)

Vom Datengrab zur Goldmine - KI Einsatz mit schnellem ROI0:00/894.6184131×

Live long and pros­per 😉🖖

Silicon Valleys KI-Burggraben hat ein Leck — es heißt Open Source

Der Mythos der un­ein­nehm­baren Festung

In den Strategie-Etagen des Silicon Valley erzählt man sich gerne die Geschichte von den un­ein­nehm­baren Burggräben. Der KI-Wettlauf, so die Legende, sei ein Spiel für Giganten mit Budgets so groß wie Kleinstaaten. Nur eine Handvoll US Tech-Konzerne könne hier mit­spie­len, der Rest der Welt schaut

Was, wenn der lauteste Teilnehmer im Raum nicht zwangsläu­fig der führende ist?

From a physi­cist point of view I want to men­tion this trick and its gen­er­al­iza­tion for op­er­a­tors:

“Two com­mut­ing ma­tri­ces are si­mul­ta­ne­ously di­ag­o­nal­iz­able”

(for physi­cists all ma­tri­ces are di­ag­o­nal­iz­able). Of course the idea is that if you know the eigen­vec­tors of one ma­trix/​op­er­a­tor then di­ag­o­nal­iz­ing the other one is much eas­ier. Here are some ap­pli­ca­tions.

1)The sys­tem is trans­la­tion in­vari­ant : Because the eigen­vec­tors of the trans­la­tion op­er­a­tor are $e^{ik.x}$, then one should use the Fourier trans­form. It solves all the wave equa­tions for light, acoustics, of free quan­tum elec­trons or the heat equa­tion in ho­mo­ge­neous me­dia.

2)The sys­tem has a dis­crete trans­la­tion sym­me­try: The typ­i­cal sys­tem is the atoms in a solid state that form a crys­tal. We have a dis­crete trans­la­tion op­er­a­tor $T_a\phi(x)=\phi(x+a)$ with $a$ the size of the lat­tice and then we should try $\phi_k(x+a)=e^{ik.a}\phi_k(x)$ as it is an eigen­vec­tor of $T_a$. This gives the Bloch-Floquet the­ory where the spec­trum is di­vided into band struc­ture. It is one of the most fa­mous model of con­densed mat­ter as it ex­plains the dif­fer­ent be­tween con­duc­tors or in­su­la­tors.

3)The sys­tem is ro­ta­tional in­vari­ant: One should then use and di­ag­o­nal­ize the ro­ta­tion op­er­a­tor first. This will al­low us to find the eigen­value/​eigen­vec­tors of the Hydrogen atom. By the way we no­tice the eigen­space of the Hydrogen are sta­ble by ro­ta­tion and are there­fore fi­nite di­men­sion rep­re­sen­ta­tions of $SO(3)$. The ir­re­ducible rep­re­sen­ta­tions of $SO(3)$ have di­men­sion 1,3,5,… and they ap­pears, con­sid­er­ing also the spin of the elec­tron, as the columns of the pe­ri­odic table of the el­e­ments (2,6,10,14,…).

4)$SU(3)$ sym­me­try: Particle physics is ex­tremely com­pli­cated. However physi­cists have dis­cov­ered that there is an un­der­ly­ing $SU(3)$ sym­me­try. Then con­sid­er­ing the rep­re­sen­ta­tions of $SU(3)$ the zo­ol­ogy of par­ti­cles seems much more or­ga­nized (A, B).

Anthony Bourdain pub­lished about 30 lists on the de­funct li.st web site around 2015. This page pre­sents a par­tial archive of those, re­cov­ered from the Internet Archive.

Lists for which the con­tent could not be found are listed be­low. If you know where to find them, email me. Thanks to RB for the spark.

CNN asked me to pro­vide some fa­vorite 80’s songs, and I as­sumed they weren’t ex­pect­ing Duran Duran . I of course, pre­fer the X ver­sion of Johnny Hit and Run..

This Is Not A Love Song - Public Image Ltd.

You Dropped A Bomb On Me - The Gap Band

Fight For Your Right - Beastie Boys

Give It To Me Baby - Rick James

More Than This - Roxy Music

C’Mon! Everybody can play! I’ll go first!

The can­di­date strug­gles to de­liver a Yen Shee Baby. Come on Donald! Bear down! You can do it, bro’!

The Brioche Hamburger Bun: The ham­burger bun is de­signed to ABSORB grease, not add greasi­ness to the ex­pe­ri­ence. A proper ham­burger bun should re­tain its struc­tural in­tegrity, play­ing its role as de­liv­ery ve­hi­cle for the meat patty un­til the last bite. The brioche bun, woe­fully un­suit­able for this role, crum­bles. God is against the brioche bun

The Third Slice Of Bread on a Club Sandwich: You know who in­vented the mid­dle slice? Enemies of free­dom. Their mis­sion? Sap our will to live by ru­in­ing our sand­wich ex­pe­ri­ences through “tectonic slide”.

The Half-Assed Muffin on an Eggs Benedict: You know it. The lazy cook toasts it un­der the broiler for a few sec­onds on one side, leav­ing the outer sur­face gummy and raw tast­ing and lack­ing the tex­tural note your poached egg and Canadian ba­con and sauce des­per­ately need.

Slurry of Soy Sauce and Wasabi: If you im­me­di­ately plop a big wad of wasabi into your dish of soy sauce, mix it around with your chop­sticks? Your sushi chef loses all re­spect for you. Dip your ni­giri into it rice side down? He hates you now. You may as well spit in his face. Seven years learn­ing rice and you just shat in it.

Chicken Caesar: Why? They’re go­ing to cook the chicken to shit any­way.

“Kobe Meatballs” (ditto “Kobe Burger”): if you or­der ei­ther of these ut­terly fraud­u­lent items at a restau­rant or pop­u­lar gath­er­ing spot for bro’s, all I can say is I’m truly sorry about your pe­nis.

Dishes from my trav­els that I want, badly, for my even­tual mar­ket in NYC. These are the dishes, as pre­pared by the orig­i­nal ven­dors, that we need and de­serve.

Usually, they fuck it up. But these films got ei­ther the busi­ness of cook­ing–or the sheer joy of it–ab­solutely right:

EAT DRINK MAN WOMAN

just about per­fect com­edy/​drama about a fam­ily only able to com­mu­ni­cate through food. The food prep scenes–par­tic­u­larly the breath­tak­ing ex­tended open­ing se­quence — are ab­solutely un­ri­valed.

TAMPOPO

There is no more “foodie” a film, though it pre­dates the term, an­tic­i­pat­ing a kind of in­sane fetishism that no longer seems that un­likely.

LA GRANDE BOUFFE

Four ag­ing bach­e­lors de­cide to eat, drink and screw them­selves to death. This film was said to have caused ran­dom pro­jec­tile vom­it­ing at Cannes and cre­ated a ma­jor scan­dal.

MOSTLY MARTHA

For the spaghetti scene. Pretend the dis­mal re­make never hap­pened.

BABETTE’S FEAST

All it takes is one, amaz­ing meal to get a joy­less group of sex­less creep­ing Jesuses to start bon­ing like its 1999!

RATATOUILLE

Pretty much the only film to ever get pro­fes­sional cook­ing right.

CHEF

was, I thought, quite good–though as much of a fa­ble as Ratatouille. The cook­ing scenes were dead right. Underrated.

BIG NIGHT

Yes! BIG NIGHT was won­der­ful. The “risotto in­ci­dent” par­tic­u­larly on tar­get.

If I had one. And could play a mu­si­cal in­stru­ment. Or sing. Or any­thing.

Every song great. Impossible to im­prove on . I’ll start :

Clowns: I’m sure I’m not alone here. Were clowns ever funny? No. Of course not. They were al­ways sin­is­ter fig­ures, dis­guis­ing their homi­ci­dal in­ten­tions un­der thick make-up, all the while their crawl spaces and chest freez­ers were brim­ming with Cub Scout parts .

Mimes: like cats, when en­ter­ing a space, they grav­i­tate to­wards the one per­son who fears them . Their pur­poses are al­ways to em­bar­rass, to draw at­ten­tion to the shy, the trou­bled, the hun­gover. Pure evil.

Switzerland: I think I must have ex­pe­ri­enced some aw­ful child­hood trauma in view of a mural of snow capped peaks and Lake Geneva. I live with a per­sis­tent dread of alpine vis­tas, chalet ar­chi­tec­ture, Tyrolean hats, even cheese with holes in it. You will no­tice I have never been there. That’s be­cause Switzerland fright­ens me.

Karaoke: singing in pub­lic in gen­eral . Korean karaoke is an ex­cep­tion. Like any­thing shame­ful, I pre­fer to do it in pri­vate. And af­ter enough soju, any­thing is pos­si­ble. Karaoke should only be per­formed with peo­ple who have al­ready seen your gen­i­tals.

Rats: Fuck snakes. I eat them. Spiders? No prob­lem! But rats. Rats! Maybe it’s my years in the restau­rant busi­ness , but the ap­pear­ance of a rat was al­ways the be­gin­ning of the end. An au­gur of doom. A poi­soned rat once crawled out of a wall and flopped limply onto my foot to die. They had to scrape me off the ceil­ing.

Also: Polka mu­sic, ukele­les, neck­beards with ban­jos, golf clothes—in fact golfers in gen­eral, The Real Housewives of Anywhere ( their glassy gazes, sur­gi­cal ad­dic­tions and sin­gle minded hunger for at­ten­tion are a clear and pre­sent dan­ger to any­one in their tra­jec­to­ries), pres­sure cook­ers, and Nashville Hot Chicken ( the ex­tra hot ver­sion).

SEQUELS THAT MIGHT (ARGUABLY) BE BETTER THAN THE ORIGINAL

SIX TRUE THINGS ABOUT DINNER WITH OBAMA

Bun Cha is a typ­i­cal Hanoi dish, de­cid­edly every­day, and much loved by lo­cals . To the con­ster­na­tion, no doubt, of the Secret Service (who were very cool about it) I was re­cently joined for din­ner by the leader of the free world in a work­ing class joint near the old quar­ter of town for an up­com­ing episode of Parts Unknown .

The President is very com­fort­able with chop­sticks. He han­dled the sticky, hard to sep­a­rate noo­dles that ac­com­pany the pork and the broth com­po­nents of Bun Cha skill­fully. He even went in for sec­onds.

The President is an Asiaphile. He spoke wist­fully of his time in Indonesia and his mem­o­ries of the smells and fla­vors of street food there.

He clearly en­joyed sit­ting on a low plas­tic stool eat­ing bun Cha . It felt to me like his night off. Even with Secret Service lurk­ing nearby .

The re­ac­tion among reg­u­lar peo­ple in Hanoi to the fact that the US President chose to eat Bun Cha was be­yond all imag­in­ing. The ef­fect was un­be­liev­able. People were ac­tu­ally cry­ing the next day, de­scrib­ing to me their shock and their pride, the re­ac­tions of their neigh­bors, to this com­pletely un­ex­pected choice of meal—and the venue.

He was among the very few guests on my show who ever asked the cam­era crew if they got to eat too.And he made a point of tak­ing a pic­ture with all of them when we were done.

I be­lieve he en­joyed that beer.

SOME FILMS FROM THE CRITERION COLLECTION

MAMMA ROMA

Pasolini’s pi­o­neer­ing, bril­liant, mer­ci­less and mer­ci­ful story of a moth­er’s love, class war, and rough trade–per­sis­tent ob­ses­sions in his later work, came to­gether in per­fect bal­ance in this early mas­ter­piece. Magnani is, of course, riv­et­ing in the lead role, but the largely un­trained non-ac­tor cast bring a harsh au­then­tic­ity to as un­ro­man­tic a de­pic­tion of Rome as has ever been filmed.

PANDORA’S BOX

Two words. Louise Brooks. Never has a more beau­ti­ful, in­tel­li­gent, quirky, sexy, uniquely com­mand­ing char­ac­ter graced the screen.

UNDER THE VOLCANO

Some books are un­filmable. Malcom Lowry’s dense, sym­bol­ism loaded mas­ter­work took him his whole life to write and it stood to rea­son that there was no way that a two hour film could ever con­tain its sprawl­ing, por­ten­tous, nar­ra­tive, it’s lin­guis­tic py­rotech­nics.

But John Huston did a VERY cred­itable job here–and Albert Finney pretty much puts his stamp on the role of the Consul for­ever. If you go back and read the book, you will al­ways pic­ture Finney. It’s a ter­rific la­bor of love, doomed to fail­ure..yet it man­ages to squeak out a re­mark­able if nec­es­sar­ily com­pressed suc­cess.

IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES

It’s porn. People hav­ing sex. Real sex. On cam­era –and its per­haps the one time in the his­tory of cin­ema where that’s in­ter­est­ing. Based on a true story of ob­ses­sive love, Oshima’s trans­gres­sive clas­sic is beau­ti­ful with­out pret­ti­fy­ing any­thing, graphic with­out be­ing par­tic­u­larly pruri­ent, ro­man­tic with­out il­lu­sion, and at all times deeply po­lit­i­cal.

RIDE WITH THE DEVIL

is a ter­rific adap­ta­tion of the as-ter­rific Daniel Woodrell Civil War novel about gueril­las war in Missouri and its af­ter­math. It’s also among Ang Lee’s best films, a crim­i­nally ne­glected clas­sic, and a great per­for­mance by Toby Maguire. Hell, EVERYBODY is great in it. Beautiful writ­ing and di­a­logue de­liv­ered flaw­lessly.

THIEF

Michael Mann’s cold, shiny early work with James Caan as a just out of jail mas­ter safe­cracker and an as won­der­ful Tuesday Weld in one of cin­e­ma’s great dys­func­tional re­la­tion­ships. Watching Caan try and steal and buy and kill his way to the “normal” life he dreamed of in prison is both chill­ing and heart­break­ing.

THE GREAT BEAUTY

No film in re­cent mem­ory was the sen­sory punch in the gut that this one was. When I saw it the first time, I was dev­as­tated by its au­da­cious­ness, it’s lush, lush, gor­geous­ness–it’s yes–great beauty. What film has ever man­aged to be an “homage” to a clas­sic Fellini film and man­age ( ar­guably) to sur­pass the orig­i­nal? I think it’s the great­est film I’ve seen in a decade. Few film’s cin­e­matog­ra­phy alone can make you cry. This one does.

THE AMERICAN FRIEND

This quirky Wim Wenders film is, to my mind, the best adap­ta­tion from Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley se­ries and the only one to cap­ture both the charm and hu­mor as well as the dark­ness of its deeply so­cio­pathic cen­tral char­ac­ter. Dennis Hopper is the ami­ably mur­der­ous Ripley–and Bruno Ganz his in­stru­ment.

CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT

One of Orson Welles’ finest works, a wildly in­flu­en­tial adap­ta­tion of Shakeseare made for about ten dol­lars over the span of many years. This is film­mak­ing at its purest and best. The bat­tle scenes alone are a mas­ter class in in­de­pen­dent film­mak­ing on a bud­get.

THE SHOOTING / RIDE THE WHIRLWIND

two cu­riosi­ties from Monte Hellman , two vaguely psy­che­delic Westerns with Jack Nicholsen well worth see­ing for their sheer strange­ness and as a re­flec­tion of in­ter­est­ing times. It’s worth re­mem­ber­ing that the Psych Western was briefly some­thing of a genre back in the day. These are two of the best.

DR. STRANGELOVE

My fa­ther loved this film so much, he could­n’t wait for me to grow old enough to watch it. I think I was 8 or 9 when he first showed it to me and it shaped my life. he mes­sage was clear: we are all go­ing to die. It will be funny. Also: life is filled with the ab­surd and hyp­o­crit­i­cal and that too can be funny.

Peter Sellers, Sterling Hayden and Slim Pickens were highly re­garded in my house. Their names were guar­an­tees of qual­ity as far as my Dad was con­cerned. But Kubrik was a God. Truly one of the great films–cer­tainly the great­est satire. With so many epic, mem­o­riz­able mo­ments…..”Pu­rity of Essence” !

SOME WEBSITES YOU SHOULD VISIT

BRUCE ELLIOTT : GERIATRIC GENIUS. The daily do­ings large and small at Chicago’s OLD TOWN ALE HOUSE lov­ingly chron­i­cled by its rogu­ish pro­pri­etor .

CINEPHILIA & BEYOND : Pure crack for film nerds. Great ar­ti­cles, amaz­ing links to un­be­liev­able rare footage, en­tire orig­i­nal screen­plays

DANGEROUS MINDS : A grab bag of ever chang­ing, un­pre­dictable awe­some­ness, from new wave films, pol­i­tics , trans­gres­sive lit , to old school punk.

ROADS & KINGDOMS : Because it’s the best long form, deep dive ‘travel’ writ­ing on the web. Because it tran­scends travel writ­ing. And be­cause I’m a part­ner in the com­pany and be­lieve deeply in it.

Want to go where every­body else is NOT go­ing? Discover things for your­self? Have an ad­ven­ture? Eat well? No high fiv­ing bros, oli­garchs in Speedos, binge drink­ing soc­cer fans, tour buses filled with ugly ass leisure wear? These spots, in my ex­pe­ri­ence, of­fer hope:

URUGUAY.

Montevideo is beau­ti­ful and un­crowded. The coast–once you get away from the re­sort ar­eas, is wild and mag­nif­i­cent. The food is gen­er­ally su­perb–though not ex­actly veg­e­tar­ian friendly. I rec­om­mend the ex­cel­lent mor­cilla sausages cooked on a “parilla”.

MARSEILLE.

The French may be am­biva­lent about their sec­ond largest city, but I am not. Eat bouil­l­abaise, Corsican char­cu­terie, cous-cous, swim in the sea, take a day trip through Provence, drink a whole lot of Pastis. It’s laid back, spicy, mixed up, multi-eth­nic, at­ti­tude free, work­ing class and wildly un­der ap­pre­ci­ated.

LAOS.

Okay, Luang Prebang and Vientiane are not ex­actly parts un­known any more, but take a road trip through the moun­tains around the PLAIN OF JARS and step back into an­other cen­tury. You want to get lost? Do it here. Absolutely gor­geous, tons of his­tory that you are prob­a­bly un­fa­mil­iar with, amaz­ing food tra­di­tions.

SARDINIA.

NOT the coast! That’s where Italian soc­cer stars go to pose in the surf with their “Velena” girl­friends of the mo­ment. The in­te­rior is an­other planet. A tasty, tasty planet. Malloredus, roasted baby goat, in­cred­i­ble hams, lob­ster “Catalan”, fan­tas­tic cheeses and spaghetti a la bot­targa.

BEIRUT.

Don’t be afraid. Beirut is a mag­i­cal, mag­i­cal place. It may suf­fer from all the world’s prob­lems si­mul­ta­ne­ously, but it’s also got every­thing you want and ex­pect of the one time “Paris of the Orient”: it’s a quick ed­u­ca­tion on how com­pli­cated the world can be. It’s beau­ti­ful, mad­den­ing, heart­break­ing, ex­cit­ing, con­fus­ing…the food is fan­tas­tic and di­verse. To go there is usu­ally a joy and an ed­u­ca­tion. Go. The more peo­ple who do–who go and see first hand? The bet­ter the world will be.

Things I No Longer Have Time or Patience For

If I Were Trapped on a Desert Island With Only Three TV Series

The Film Nobody Ever Made

Four Spy Novels by Real Spies and One Not by a Spy

5 Photos on My Phone, Chosen at Random

People I’d Like to Be for a Day

I’m Hungry and Would Be Very Happy to Eat Any of This Right Now

Fed up with tril­lion-dol­lar com­pa­nies ex­ploit­ing your data? Forced to use their ser­vices? Your data held for ran­som? Your data used to train their AI mod­els? Opt-outs for data col­lec­tion in­stead of opt-ins?

Join the move­ment to make com­pa­nies more like Clippy. Set your pro­file pic­ture to Clippy, make your voice heard.

Below is a video that ex­plains the Be Like Clippy move­ment. It’s a call to ac­tion for de­vel­op­ers, com­pa­nies, and users alike to em­brace a more open, trans­par­ent, and user-friendly ap­proach to tech­nol­ogy.