> I don't care if someone knows how many times I've watched Idiocracy.

I come from Germany, from East Germany. And some people there wanted to know if you had seen certain films and how often. And ‘Idiocracy’ would have been very high up on their list.

Not all films were banned right from the start (‘The Legend of Paul and Paula’ [1]), but right from the beginning the Stasi found it very interesting who had watched the film.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Paul_and_Paula

This. Privacy does not matter until it does.

Thanks for your example, qrios

What if I have recently watched The Lives of Others?

(Which everyone in the US should.)

‘The Lives of Others’ is an outstanding film. However, it is a reappraisal of East German history and was made seven years after the collapse (the director grew up in West Germany and Western Europe).

US-America has looked at the subject of surveillance of its own population and its own (possible) collapse many times and often in a timely manner.

"The Conversation": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conversation

"Enemy of the State": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_of_the_State_(film)

"The Siege": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Siege

"In the Heat of the Night": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Heat_of_the_Night_(film...

"Eagle Eye": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Eye

If you ask publicly, ‘What if I've seen XYZ?’ then it's actually already too late.

The collapse being the collapse of the DDR? The Lives of Others must have been made way further beyond that than 7 years. Closer to 20, I'd figure.

TLOO came out in 2006, 16 years after the DDR collapsed.

I wondered if GP was thinking of another movie so I asked ChatGPT, which told me: "The German film you’re thinking of is "Good Bye, Lenin!" — released in 2003, exactly seven years after the formal end of the DDR in 1990." (My emphasis.)

So much for GPT-5.

Right, I missed a whole decade. (For me 1989, the Mauerfall is the official end of GDR)

That's hilarious. Imagine going back two years and showing someone GPT-5? They might think the Pause AI movement had won. It makes you ponder an alternate timeline where the OpenAI brain trust wasn't dismantled

Which version did you use, though? GPT-5, GPT-5-Thinking, GPT-5 Pro, GPT-5-Mini, GPT-5 with Thinking (reasoning effort=high) or one of the other 18 options? Did you tell it to think harder? Maybe you are just holding it wrong?

Making what is essentially a router dispatching queries to the smallest engine susceptible to answer a question was maybe a good optimization from a techical and business pont of view.

But branding that router "GPT5" is a huge marketing mistake, because now, every time a smaller model says something stupid (as they often do), it seems that's the best OpenAI has to offer...

Linguistically it's an ok association. If you look at it unconsciously, you can find it plausible too, add 7 but in reverse.

GPT-5 fell into a coma and missed a few critical years.

A perfectly grammatical and plausible sentence. Those words all seem quite likely to occur in that sequence. Another LLM success.

I’m confused. It was a great movie and wildly applicable to what the right wants to do to the US now. What is too late?

I mean it may be too late to save us/US but it still bears saying.

Trivia about that movie: The spying devices used were authentic and from the era depicted.

Interesting. There isn't one sentence in that article (English) which describes the political controversy of that movie. A single sentence mentions the film almost being banned for its 'political overtones'.

The English article is incomplete. The banner is there. I guess I could try to complete it but it’s highly my work would be struck out by an angry editor feeling territorial for a reason or another so maybe not.

The French article is a bit better - I don’t understand German sadly.

The controversy stems from the protagonists values. They put their love for each other and their search for fulfilment above other commitments which was seen as dangerously non communist. The film was cleared by the head of East Germany but the censors still imposed a tragic ending.

> Tell me, does the original cast get any of that or is it just adding pocket change to Google's coffers?

Google will have negotiated with the “owner” (in this case I think Disney) for a wholesale price and then adds its retail markup (eg 20%). Disney pay the industry standard SAG/DGA union negotiated residual agreements to cast, writers and directors

I find myself wishing for a lower-overhead approach to this. 20% already gets the price from $14.99 to $12.49. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the cast gets less than 50% and lawyers get more than 40% of that. If true, that's less than $6.25 to the folks that actually made the movie and $8.75 (or more) of pure, unadulterated overhead. Finally, clicking on "where to watch" shows prices within $0.20 of each other. It's not ... not price-fixing, but it kinda is.

Also, "wholesale" is such a strange way to look at this. There is no way the digital asset is sent to them more than once. It's some kind of strange fiction for me to imagine, "here are X downloads of movie Y at a discounted rate. If you want more, you need to come back and purchase another X downloads." It's as if a download itself is a consumable that Disney provides.

The actor residuals are much less than 50%, but the remaining goes to the studio/funders who own the rights, not lawyers.

Wholesale/retail makes more sense if you think of google having to deal with consumers, providing a website/apps, advertising, collecting payments etc. whilst the movie company makes the content and negotiates deals with broadcasters and streaming companies around the world.

> I just wish I could know how many times I've watched it too.

I exported all my private data from Netflix and it had very detailed information on exactly when I (or anyone else in the household) watched what.

Sadly it only went back a few years. Either they do not keep older data or they pretend not to. My Spotify data seemed to be complete for all years I have used it, listing the exact time and location, what device etc, I listened to any track there ever.

>isn't popular enough No that's because it's good enough to get rented regularly. Why sign a streaming deal if your IP prints money?