Unthinking machines

It's interesting that my Claude search turned up the movie I was looking for but did not reveal the Joseph Stefano link. That the screenplay was by the guy who wrote Psycho has more than a little to do with why the film was so memorable. Claude didn't volunteer that because it was beyond the perimeters of my very specific query.

LLMs are good for searching when you know what you're looking for but not what it's called. The applications accommodate context, and the output is randomly personalised to give the appearance that they're talking to you, Chad – you were really smart to ask that! But the content remains aggregated from things people spent time typing up. This is scale, not intelligence.

Mémoire

I'd heard that LLMs are good at identifying TV shows and movies from general descriptions so last week I tried it out on a show I'd stumbled across in my childhood in the unsupervised way kids find things that aren't made for them. I fed Claude what I remembered:

There is an old movie I saw when I was young, in the 1970s, and I wondered if you could work out which one it is. I watched it on a black-and-white TV, although I have the feeling it was filmed in colour. It was medium to low-budget. It could have been a movie made for TV. The movie is about a mature or infirm woman living in a brownstone-style apartment with a basement. A repairman (an plumber?) comes to her house to fix something, and she traps him in a cage (or a room with a cage door) in the basement. The man has done something bad to the woman's daughter: he has abused her or possibly murdered her, but got away with the crime. This trap is the woman's revenge. There are scenes where he confronts her angrily but cannot escape. He is younger and stronger than her and would pose a real threat if he escaped. The woman plans to murder him. She keeps him captive, feeding him. There is a scene where she sprinkles a white powder on a dark jam sandwich and feeds it to him, drugging him. After he falls unconscious from the drug, she enters the cage and spreads a plastic sheet on the ground with the intention of murdering him and dismembering the body. That's all I remember about the film. Can you work out what it might be?

Hey presto, Claude found the film that's haunted me since I was seven years old:

That's almost certainly Revenge! (1971) — an ABC TV movie. The match is remarkably close to everything you remember:

• It's a made-for-TV film from 1971, featuring the magnificent Shelley Winters as an unhinged mother who lures a man to her home and imprisons him in a cage in her basement, as revenge for harm done to her daughter.
• She lures him by engineering a switched briefcase, then brains him with a fireplace stoker and chains him in a cellar cage.
• The film's tone matches your recollections perfectly — he is younger and stronger, a real threat if he escaped, and there are confrontational scenes while she holds him captive.
• One reviewer specifically recalled the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches — which almost certainly corresponds to your memory of the drugged sandwich with white powder sprinkled on dark jam.
• It stars Shelley Winters as the mother and Bradford Dillman as the captive man, and runs just 74 minutes – tight and economical, as TV movies of the era tended to be.
• The original source novel by Lou Ellen Davis was titled There Was an Old Woman, a nursery rhyme reference that fits the "mature woman vs. younger, stronger man" dynamic you described.
• The San Francisco setting (brownstone-style architecture) and the black-and-white look on your TV also fit – it was shot in actual San Francisco locations. It's quite a sought-after cult oddity now. Well worth a rewatch if you can track it down!

The teleplay was by Joseph Stefano who wrote The Outer Limits and – hello! – the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. Revenge! is online and continues to disturb.

My cup of iced tea

Ladytron's new album Paradises is really good. Helen Marnie on the 25-year anniversary of their debut album 604:

"I think the way that we perceive time now — because everything is simultaneous — chronology has kind of gone out of the window, especially with music. Everything is simultaneous, right? So I feel like we're naturally selective when we think about that 25 years. It actually feels, to me, quite compressed when you only think about the times we were actually working. I mean, we took like a six or seven-year break. I think doing all these interviews at the moment, and being asked questions about the early days, it's started to feel closer in a way. It's funny how our minds play these tricks."

Alan Tudyk had a bad feeling about Firefly

"This was a terrible sign right from the start: Fox made us pay for our lunches. We'd have to go to the commissary to buy it and that wasn't worked into the schedule, so we had to make it over there and eat in costume sometimes."

Tamigotcha

"What if the exhaustion everybody feels isn't a moral failure but the completely rational response to being made responsible for an ecosystem of objects that never stop asking?"

Page architecture and hostility

"Publishers aren't evil but they are desperate. Caught in this programmatic ad-tech death spiral, they are trading long-term reader retention for short-term CPM pennies. The modern ad industry is slowly de-coupling the creator from the advertiser. They weaponize the UI because they think they have to.

"Viewability and time-on-page are very important metrics these days. Every hostile UX decision originates from this single fact. The longer you're trapped on the page, the higher the CPM the publisher can charge. Your frustration is the product. No wonder engineers and designers make every UX decision that optimizes for that. And you, the reader, are forced to interact, wait, click, scroll multiple times because of this optimization. Not only is it a step in the wrong direction, it is adversarial by design.

"The reader is not respected enough by the software. The publisher is held hostage by incentives from an auction system that not only encourages but also rewards dark patterns."

-- Shubham Bose, Thatshubham.com 

Eyes without a face

"The biggest rookie mistake is to have a little work done too soon before an event. We've all seen the effects of what we can only assume to be poor planning, with difficult-to-unsee appearances by Madonna at the 2023 Grammys and Tom Cruise at a Lakers game in 2020 (both with inflated cheeks) and Renée Zellweger at the Elle Women in Hollywood Awards in 2014, with upper eyelids dramatically altered. Their faces certainly wouldn't have looked so startling if given the chance to settle in."