Tom Rothman calls on cinemas to screen films, not trailers and ads

17 April 2026

That’s the upshot of what Rothman, CEO of Sony’s Motion Picture Group, said at CinemaCon, held in Las Vegas, in the United States, this week, says Brent Lang, writing for Variety:

At CinemaCon, the annual exhibition industry conference unfolding this week in Las Vegas, Rothman bluntly told the cinema operators in the audience at Caesars Palace that they needed to cut back on the trailers and commercials that can last for roughly 30 minutes before the opening credits even roll.

It’s been sometime since I saw a movie in an actual cinema (an Australian cinema). We just about always stream movies at home now. I don’t know then if local film-goers are subjected to thirty-minutes of ads and trailers, prior to a screening — euphemistically called pre-feature entertainment — as appears to be the case in parts of the United States.

If memory serves, when I first started going to cinemas to see films — streaming was not a thing then — a few trailers and a small selection of ads were all we saw.

The whole thing lasted no more than ten minutes. If that. I don’t know who paid attention to the ads — not me — but I’d usually look at the trailers. Back then, trailer screenings were just about the only way to learn about upcoming film releases.

Whatever, the trailer/ad segment was usually considered to be a buffer, affording late arrivals a few minutes grace before the main feature commenced. Pre-feature entertainment was also an opportunity to buy snacks and drinks before the screening.

One Sydney cinema I once went to regularly, didn’t hold back in this regard. “You still have time to visit the candy-bar before the film starts”, the audience would be informed, part way through the trailer/ad segment. A shrewd business model if ever there was one. Make advertisers pay to promote their goods and services, while oblivious patrons are downstairs buying popcorn.

I doubt the practice would surprise Rothman. He also noted reserved seating meant cinema-goers were not entering the auditorium until just before the feature screening starts, sparing themselves the prolonged pre-feature entertainment anyway.

I might, by the way, sound critical of watching movies at a cinema. While I’m definitely an adherent of home streaming, I used to — ten to fifteen years ago — almost live at the cinema. Something the then staff of a place I was a regular at, could attest to. Back then I also used to write a lot about film here. Not so much now though. Plus, there is no nearby cinema where we are now based.

Streaming then — minus unwanted ads and trailers — it is.

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film, movies, technology, trends

Hampshire College, a liberal arts university, to close

16 April 2026

Not good news. Word that the university, located in the American state of Massachusetts, is to close. I didn’t go to university after leaving high school, couldn’t decide what to study, but maybe a liberal arts degree might have been a good fit.

If I’d known, back in the day, such courses even existed.

And while a number of local tertiary education institutions offer liberal arts courses, I believe Australia only has one dedicated liberal arts uni, Campion College, situated in Toongabbie, in Sydney’s west, which opened in 2006.

If liberal arts degrees are new to you, here’s how Campion describes the course:

We celebrate the humanities at the heart of the Western intellectual tradition — literature, philosophy, theology, history, and the study of languages and culture. These disciplines are not simply subjects to be learned; they are the foundations of a rich education that shapes the whole person and has guided human flourishing for centuries.

I’ve heard it said liberal arts degrees are for those interested in everything, but nothing in particular.

This is sort of thing no longer desirable? University courses catering for people with broad interests, rather than something more focused? It would be unfortunate if that were so, and was resulting in the closure of places such as Hampshire College.

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education, philosophy, trends

Mark Zuckerberg will exist as the forever Meta CEO as an AI clone

15 April 2026

Claudia Efemini writing for The Guardian:

The AI clone of Zuckerberg, Meta’s founder and chief executive, is being trained on his mannerisms and tone as well as his public statements and thoughts on company strategy.

Ostensibly Zuckerberg’s AI clone will allow tens-of-thousands of Meta employees “access” to their CEO, someone whom they never see in person, no matter how long their tenure at the company.

Of course employees won’t actually be interacting with Zuckerberg, something anyone “connecting” with the ai-CEO (does that seem like a good title for such an entity?) will be acutely aware of.

I doubt it’s Zuckerberg’s intention to remain CEO of Meta after his death by way of an AI clone — ignoring for a moment the legalities of such a premise — but the technology Meta is developing has the potential to make the scenario a possibility.

Summers starting sooner, becoming longer and hotter, in many places

15 April 2026

Erik Rolfsen, writing for the University of British Columbia (UBC):

A new study by UBC researchers has found that between 1990 and 2023, the average summer between the tropics and the polar circles grew about six days longer per decade. That’s up from roughly four days per decade found in past research investigating up until the early 2010s.

On a day less than a week ago, the maximum temperature in Sydney, NSW, was forecast to reach thirty-three degrees Celsius. That’s nearly a month and a half into what is meant to be autumn in this part of the world. Sure, one swallow does not a summer make, so to speak, and the region can experience unseasonably warm days anytime of the year, I know.

But the UBC findings confirm what many of us have long suspected: summers today are longer and warmer than they once were. The consequences are far reaching though, impacting on health, water supplies, and food production, among other things.

No basic income for Australian artists, but some writers can live in reduced rent accommodation

14 April 2026

Ireland pays a select group of artists a basic income for a three year period, an initiative the Irish government claims is a world first.

At present, the weekly value of the payment equates to about five-hundred-and-forty Australian dollars. You’d be hard pressed to live on that sort of money in Australia, but it’s better than nothing, considering no such scheme exists locally.

But there is a glimmer of hope. For some local creatives at least. The NSW state government is offering writers the opportunity to rent terrace houses in The Rocks area of Sydney, for two-hundred dollars (Australian) per week.

Spots are limited, and creatives still need a source of income, but the initiative is a (small) step in the right direction. To be eligible, a writer must be considered to be a literature practitioner:

In this instance, ‘Literature Practitioners’ are defined as: writers working in any creative form, including fiction, short stories, screenplay/drama, poetry, children’s books, and narrative non-fiction, and illustrators working in children’s books and graphic novels. The Program is open to NSW Literature Practitioners at any stage of their career.

AI must be integrated into everything because it is AI

14 April 2026

Han Lee:

Every company, every function, every individual contributor is expected to close the AI gap. Ship AI features. Build agents. Automate workflows. That nobody on the team has ever trained a model, designed an evaluation system, or debugged a retrieval system is beside the point. Conviction is sufficient.

AI technologies must be integrated into every aspect of our professional and personal lives, not because AI is worthy, but because we should simply just do so.

The Titanic Story of Evelyn, a biography by Lisa Wilkinson

13 April 2026

Evelyn Marsden, a steward and nurse on the Titanic’s doomed 1912 maiden voyage, became known as the only Australian woman to survive the tragic sinking of the ocean liner.

Marsden helped distressed passengers, before eventually being told to get into a lifeboat.

Growing up, Marsden used to row in the Murray River, during family holidays, and would set herself the challenge of rowing against the tide. The skill proved invaluable as she helped row the lifeboat she was aboard, with forty other people, against the pull the sinking Titanic exerted on them.

Marsden was born in Stockyard Creek, South Australia in 1883. After the sinking, she married William James, a doctor who also worked for the White Star Line, owner of the Titanic.

They lived in South Australia for some years before moving to Bondi. Marsden died at age fifty-four in 1938, and is buried in Waverley Cemetery, with her husband, who died a short time afterwards.

Marsden’s life is now the subject of a biography, The Titanic Story of Evelyn, written by Australian TV presenter and journalist, Lisa Wilkinson, which is being published tomorrow, Tuesday 14 April 2026.

Artemis II returns safely to Earth despite heat shield concerns

13 April 2026

Splashdown occurred at about ten o’clock in the morning in my part of the world. I had been dreading the fiery re-entry phase of the flight, after a number of commentators expressed doubts as to the integrity of the return vehicle’s heat shield. Thankfully all was well in the end.

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astronomy, science, space exploration

Hacker News: built on more than good software

10 April 2026

JA Westenberg:

Every developer who sees HN thinks, “I could build that in a weekend.” And they’re right; they absolutely could. In fact, I’d assume they’re pretty shite at their jobs if they couldn’t. What they couldn’t build in a weekend // month // year // probably ever, is the thing that makes Hacker News actually work. And that ~thing is not the software.

There’s this concept called googlyness. Legend has it, if you want to work at Google, you need a certain set of traits, apparently referred to as googlyness.

To build the next Hacker News, and make a success of it, you’re going to need hackernewsness, something possibly far more elusive than googlyness.

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design, technology, trends

Say nothing to Houston: decades old bug found in Apollo guidance system code

9 April 2026

JUXT, a software consultancy based in the United Kingdom, report discovering a bug in the code of the Apollo Guidance Computer, nearly fifty-four years after the last Apollo Moon flight:

The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) is one of the most scrutinised codebases in history. Thousands of developers have read it. Academics have published papers on its reliability. Emulators run it instruction by instruction. We found a bug in it that had been missed for fifty-seven years: a resource lock in the gyro control code that leaks on an error path, silently disabling the guidance platform’s ability to realign.

The guidance systems were installed in both the command module, and lunar module (the vessel that landed on the Moon), of the Apollo craft.

Thankfully, the bug didn’t manifest itself during the Apollo missions. There’s enough happening during a flight to the Moon without wanting to worry about patches for software bugs.

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science, space exploration, technology

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