"A Big Bold Beautiful Journey" Is None of Those Things Kogonada's fantasy film, starring Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie, suggests that a great directorial talent is losing his way. In Kogonada's new film, Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie try gamely to overcome the thinness with which their characters have been imagined. If movies were given scores as figure skaters are, fantasy would start with a high rating for technical difficulty. The landings of the genre are hard to stick, because fantasy, by definition, isn't rooted in experience. No one has lived on a distant planet, in the far future, or any place where dragons or wizards rule--so, kudos to anyone who can make such realms feel truly lived in.

One of Chantal Akerman's Best Films Is in Legal Limbo The Belgian-born director's 1994 coming-of-age masterwork, about a precocious teen-ager's romantic audacity, can't be reissued because of its needle drops. Much of direction is production: the material conditions under which a movie is made plays a major role in the creative process. Movie lovers tend to think of producers as dictators of formulas, oppressors of originality, the enemies of art, but that just reflects the unfortunate history of studio filmmaking in Hollywood and elsewhere. In fact, producing a movie can be a kind of art in itself, a practical imagining of possibilities for filmmakers that they wouldn't themselves have come up with. The complete retrospective of Chantal Akerman's work that runs at from September 11th to October 16th includes a superb instance of this phenomenon--of visionary production fostering directorial artistry--in her "Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 60s in Brussels," an hour-long movie from 1994.

Grid-based storage systems with uniformly shaped loads (e.g., containers, pallets, totes) are commonplace in logistics, industrial, and transportation domains. A key performance metric for such systems is the maximization of space utilization, which requires some loads to be placed behind or below others, preventing direct access to them. Consequently, dense storage settings bring up the challenge of determining how to place loads while minimizing costly rearrangement efforts necessary during retrieval. This paper considers the setting involving an inbound phase, during which loads arrive, followed by an outbound phase, during which loads depart. The setting is prevalent in distribution centers, automated parking garages, and container ports. In both phases, minimizing the number of rearrangement actions results in more optimal (e.g., fast, energy-efficient, etc.) operations. In contrast to previous work focusing on stack-based systems, this effort examines the case where loads can be freely moved along the grid, e.g., by a mobile robot, expanding the range of possible motions. We establish that for a range of scenarios, such as having limited prior knowledge of the loads' arrival sequences or grids with a narrow opening, a (best possible) rearrangement-free solution always exists, including when the loads fill the grid to its capacity. In particular, when the sequences are fully known, we establish an intriguing characterization showing that rearrangement can always be avoided if and only if the open side of the grid (used to access the storage) is at least 3 cells wide. We further discuss useful practical implications of our solutions.

Agility Robotics shared a demo video Wednesday of one of its Digit robots upgraded with AI. Although that may conjure terrifying pop-culture images of sentient sci-fi machines taking over the world, the demo video reveals something much more pedestrian, if not boring. The bipedal warehouse robot ploddingly works to complete a slightly puzzling task without direct human control or detailed guidance. In the clip, it slowly but successfully interprets and executes the command, "Take the box that's the color of Darth Vader's lightsaber, and move it to the tallest tower in the front row." The company, which added a "head" and "hands" to Digit earlier this year, pitches the demonstration as a glimpse into how large language models (LLMs) can enhance its humanoid machines. It suggests it's a natural fit, describing Digit as "a physical embodiment of artificial intelligence."

"I'm absolutely a Luddite," the author and columnist Brian Merchant said the other day at an outdoor café in Brooklyn. He has long, brown hair and a goatee, and was wearing a plaid shirt over a T-shirt that read "The Luddites Were Right." On the chair next to him sat an HP printer. Merchant feels that the original Luddites, early-nineteenth-century cloth-makers who raided British factories and destroyed the new machines that were replacing them, have been getting a bad rap lately. Modern people tend to see them as fools who didn't appreciate the benefits of technology.

The commercial cloud that was once synonymous with the mundane task of hardware outsourcing has increasingly become far more about the services and analytic capabilities that can be built when computing power is no longer a limitation. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the world of deep learning. Companies like Google not only provide access to bleeding edge battle-tested hardware, but wrap those systems with point-and-click and data-scale analytic offerings that are increasingly democratizing access to AI. Deep learning in the cloud today is no longer merely about outsourcing compute, but actually joining the front row of the AI revolution itself. The early days of the commercial cloud were largely relegated to the unglamorous tasks of migrating workloads from bare metal on-premises computer racks to virtualized remote managed data centers. The focus was often on lifting and transferring applications to data centers that provided scalability and reliability nearly unheard of in on-premises environments.

New York Fashion Week is drawing to a close. The US event is the first of February's four big international Fashion Weeks, which are also held in London, Paris and Milan. It usually features a heady mix of supermodels, front rows peppered with celebrities and political controversy. Before the style set descends on London, it's time to look back at what we've learned from the US style capital. Tom Ford showed his serious side, kicking off NYFW with a show that expressed his feelings about President Trump's proposed border wall.