Roger Rabbit was voiced by Charles Fleischer. (Paul Reubens was under consideration in an earlier version, and you can find his voice tests out on YouTube, which might be what you're remembering.)
Paul Reubens wasn't great. With the right direction he could easily have been as good as Fleischer, but I'm sure he was (incorrectly in this case) trying to show he could be less over the top than Pee Wee Herman, who was a known quantity in LA at that time.
What fascinated me is how I reacted to the Jessica Rabbit pencil test, where she snuggles up to the live actor. Even in that low resolution, lousy video transfer, I had a visceral reaction to her character. Those animators were all kinds of good even for a minor demo.
I read the "fantastic 1981 novel", too, and you know what? It wasn't very good. It had a lot of really interesting world-building and some cool ideas, but the characters were flat and the central mystery was terrible. Despite common wisdom, the book is not always better than the movie.
I mean, given that Disney wasn't doing anything new with Roger Rabbit, I'm glad he got the rights back. But I think part of the reason that very little new material got produced is that the first movie was kind of lightning in a bottle. It's possible other production companies would have had to be involved to get something new done, depending on how the rights were parceled out. (We're all talking about Disney here because that's who Doctorow focused on, but it was a co-production with Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment.) And I think you're right that he's unlikely to have the rights to do a sequel that's too close to the original.
I think it's not as much "if this guy becomes the lead I'm immediately quitting my Ruby job to return to PHP" as much as "if this guy becomes the lead I'm probably going to return to PHP for my next job."
I have my doubts, even for this softer version. These are things where one might feel very strongly in a moment, or even for a longer time, but facing a real life decision, there are so many other factors.
Of course we will never know the outcome of this, it's just my two cents.
The specific examples in the thread, AFAICT, are about iOS, not macOS, and the person you're responding to specifically mentioned Macs. It's very hard to find examples of "things you cannot do on an Apple Silicon Mac due to Apple-imposed restrictions that you can do on a PC" that aren't pretty esoteric. (Unless you want to argue that the inability to plug in a better third-party GPU is due to Apple-imposed restrictions, which is debatable but defensible.)
I liked the original Opera—it’s been a while, but I think I actually paid for it on Windows a long, long time ago—but I’m not sure they were ever a “potential Mozilla,” at least in the way I would interpret that. They were a closed source, commercial browser founded by a for-profit company.
(Also, point of order: Opera was always based in Norway, which is not a member of the European Union.)
AFAIK, the current version of Nota Bene -- a direct descendent of XyWrite -- still has this; the current feature list explicitly mentions "Editable Show Codes view so you can see exactly where commands take effect, and edit them as desired". Nota Bene has survived into the present day by moving pretty firmly into a niche academia market, though, and carries a pretty stiff price ($349).
Simon Willison is on Bluesky, and I'm going to go out on a relatively safe limb and suggest that if you check out what he reposts, who he follows, etc., you will find people who do not deeply hate AI. I do think Bluesky, in general, is a lot like the Twitter of, say, 15 years ago, where the quality of one's feed is very much dependent on how aggressively one curates it -- although I wish they would finally add a feature for selectively turning off reposts user by user.
(It is absolutely true that a lot of creators hate AI, although I would argue that they have fair reasons to do so given the way AI is frequently presented / talked about / used. I find it unfortunate that everything remotely related to machine learning has now been rebranded as "AI", which leads people to reflexively dunk on tools that really aren't that much like the AI they have in their heads, but it's not their fault.)
Sort of side question, but why do you set the command key to be Emacs' meta key? I've sort of waffled on that myself -- the plus to doing it is that it matches Windows (which I am in too much of the time) and Linux, but the minus is that it not only breaks 20+ years of muscle memory I have with MacOS, it collides with a few other global hotkeys. (Recent collisions I've noticed are Alfred's clipboard manager, which defaults to Shift-Command-\ (M-|, shell-command-on-region), and the system-level screenshot hotkey on Shift-Command-5 (M-%, query-replace).
Ah yes. I find the ⌘ key placement a little more ergonomic/convenient, but at the end of the day, pick whatever works for ya.
Thinking back, I prolly didn't use those two commands often enough to internalize M-| or M-% bindings, so the system-level handling didn't bother me. While I do replace things all the time, I typically use multiple cursors (I do use bindings for that). If I need querying, I just type `M-x que RET` which gets picked up by a completion frameworks (in my case ivy).
Relatedly, I also use Hammerspoon on macOS and set some global key bindings using the ⌥ key.
You can say anything to an LLM, but it’s not going to actually write in your voice. When I was writing a very long blog post about “creative writing” from AIs, I researched Sudowrite briefly, which purports to be able to do exactly this; not only could it not write convincingly in my voice (and the novel I gave it has a pretty strong narrative voice), following Sudowrite’s own tutorial in which they have you get their app to write a few paragraphs in Dan Brown’s voice demonstrated it could not convincingly do that.
I don’t think having a ML-backed proofreading system is an intrinsically bad idea; the oft-maligned “Apple Intelligence” suite has a proofreading function which is actually pretty good (although it has a UI so abysmal it’s virtually useless in most circumstances). But unless you truly, deeply believe your own writing isn’t as good as a precocious eighth-grader trying to impress their teacher with a book report, don’t ask an LLM to rewrite your stuff.
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