The Matrix Code Came from Sushi Recipes | Hacker News Reader

The Matrix Code Came from Sushi Recipes

wired.com

101 pointstosh56 comments

Incidentally, we watched The Matrix last night, for the first time in at least a decade, and were impressed by how well it has held up. I was expecting the technology references and special effects to make it feel old, but it really didn't. The way the plot requires a (special?) land line to escape the matrix felt oddly relevant in the context of today's addictive social media tech...

Tempted to buy a Nokia 8110 4G now, I wonder how hard it would be to port Signal to it?

I rewatch it about once a year, and it's amazing to me how well it's held up. Honestly, it's just a really well-made film from every angle; not perfect, but very solid.

The sequels don't hold up as well, graphically-speaking, but they are definitely better than most people give them credit for. Deeply, deeply flawed movies, but still enjoyable.

I do love it, don't get me wrong. But I wish that they'd explained how humans were basically used in computing clusters. For running the Matrix. Not as "batteries", for producing power.

Because, after all, they'd need to be "fed", and wouldn't produce any net energy. That was in the original screenplay. But they decided that most people just wouldn't get it. So we got what we got.

Stuff like that ruins (for me) most films that ~rely on ~hard science. Explosions, for example. They are typically far too slow, with far too much dancing flame. In reality, they're virtually instantaneous at scales much less than kilometers. Saving Private Ryan is a notable exception.

I remember reading on Stack Overflow that the writers originally wanted for the human minds to be critical to a neural network, not actually used as a power source, but Hollywood executive producers didn’t think cinema audience could understand this concept:

“The original story had the brains of the humans being used as part of a neural network for additional computing power. But the suits thought that was too hard for people to understand.” [0]

[0] https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/19817/was-executiv...

That's probably where I read it.

I don't want TV or movies often (About 150 hrs a year total consumption), but when I do I actively suppress the skeptic inside in order to enjoy the narrative and special effects.

> Hard science

Of course, this is "hard science" that you learned in The Matrix...

Computing cluster vs battery is pretty basic.

Transistor is basically a battery.

More like a resister, I think. A variable resister. The gate is the knob.

You (ok well Neil Tyson really) are the motivation for this curated content

https://mobile.twitter.com/hardscifimovies

I'm not sure which are funnier. The satires of films, or the satires of reality.

> But I wish that they'd explained how humans were basically used in computing clusters. For running the Matrix. Not as "batteries", for producing power.

From what I recall, that was actually what was originally scripted, though the explanation in the script was changed after test audiences for the first film responded poorly to it.

But it's also pretty clearly the underlying mechanics in the film, that guide how everything in the Matrix actually works, even after they made the explanation given in character more appealing to test audiences. (And, actually, I think given what we find out about “free” humanity being a system of control itself, having them adhering as an article of faith to a fairly transparently false explanation that they've clearly been fed actually fits the theme fairly well.)

Try: ..we live in a dystopia, confined to our coffins, fed with wifi and ethernet, and Mark Zuckerberg is Agent Smith constructing the Matrix on our metaData

Zion and Neo are control mechanisms in the Matrix, they are used to control the one called Smith. They are in the Matrix when they think they have left. The human batteries story is just a b/s narrative. The best proof of this is Neo's ability to control the machines outside of the Matrix in the supposed real world.

Or they're so 1337 they're DDOSing the CnC server during the fight.

Either that or Neo is not human but a machine with admin rights - no inception required :)

Right, it's turtles all the way down.

You know what, this is the first I'd heard this. That makes so much more sense than the battery thing which always left me shaking my head. I agree, and I think the execs underestimated their audiences.

I cant let the producers making a minor script change like that ruin the movie for me. it doesnt make the movie any less good that the human farm breaks thermodynamics laws. im already suspending my disbelief enough in other parts of the movie.

The 8810 4G doesn't have great frequencies for the US, so be aware of that if you live around here.

Interesting - this isn't a big issue for me, but I guess does limit the size of the community that might be interested in developing for it. Do you happen to know of any KaiOS phones that work well in the US?

T-mobile sells a KaiOS phone, the Alcatel Go Flip, that my mom reports works well. Her old phone was gsm only, and was starting to have coverage issues (because of band reprovisioning) and then died.

It has a menu item for updates, but claims to be running KaiOS 1.0 and doesn't have any updates available (wikipedia says 2.5 is the latest); so that's not super promising.

You're gonna take a phone The Matrix inspired you to get, skip over Riot (Matrix!!), and use Signal on it? Damn, haha.

Dark City was and is the better version of The Matrix.

Okay, not everyone will agree, but you should see them both.

The recent 4k Blu-ray release is also quite remarkable.

I like how the small things about the software development are still relevant.

“A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he’d taken and the corners he’d cut in Night City, and still he’d see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void. . . . The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he’d cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark..."

Neuromancer. William Gibson 1984

I think of this bit every time I dream of Rez, which happens a few times a year.

Anyone else remember back in two-thousand and something or other (back when CRTs were still supreme), that it was all the rage to have a Matrix-style code-rain[0] screen-saver or is that just a "me" thing?

[0] - https://youtu.be/rpWrtXyEAN0

I definitely had one too.

TBH it's dated pretty well. Still a cool asthetic.

I definitely remember that on more than a few screens in the college dorms around that time. Screensavers were a great little bit of self expression that's no longer in use.

My computer still has a screensaver, so they’re not completely dead :)

Don't worry about it. They went away with LCD screens, but they'll come back with OLED screens :-)

I'm still an XScreenSaver fan, mostly because I like having something visually interesting on my monitors when I lock my workstation to go afk at work. Many of the engineers I work with do the same. Makes me glad they're not dead everywhere yet.

Particularly attached to the analog TV one: https://youtu.be/VmM1KkFsry0?list=PLbe67PprBSpqM_-HU49fmIS8n...

I remember learning about the Canvas API by making one of those in JavaScript. Good times!

I still have this on my desktop, my laptop, as a live wallpaper on my phone, and the background on my spare phone, which is the new 4g version of the Nokia 8810 from the first movie. I'll never give up my digital rain screensavers!

Indeed. I also recall a number of pretty cool Max Payne Matrix mods.

There was also the Lobby Shootout done on an earlier version of the Max Payne engine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E14Kt1ynvic

And then people used electric sheep in the later two-thousands which was a pretty interesting concept.

I've got one on my 1440p IPS screen today, not quite as good as a CRT though. I wasn't even alive when it came out but it has always been my favorite film from the day I saw it.

Well now I'm feeling old.

Dunno if it's still "all the rage" but I've been using nothing else on some of my machines for at least 7 years, because I've not found another screen saver that I liked more. Otherwise I'll just go for blank=black.

That hero picture at the top isn’t the Matrix code...it isn’t even kanji...in fact it’s full of “missing character” boxes. Not impressed, Wired. :)

Yeah, that's from the Windows ripoff screensaver version. They could have at least used a screenshot from the real XScreenSaver version, or, duh, a still from the movie.

It's still a rip of the Ghost in the Shell opening credits, but an interesting one and iconic in its own way.

Matrix release date: March 31, 1999. 20 years ago today

I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere except here. I wonder if the silent passing the film's 20th anniversary is due to the soon-to-come 20th anniversary of the Columbine massacre.

It was a great effect at the time, and holds up well now too. Not that it was technically sophisticated, but it added quite a bit of mysticism to an already mystery filled movie.

The moment I saw it, I knew it was Korean / Japanese / Chinese, while some characters looked overlapped.

Was obsessed with the graphic for quite a while. Screensavers, Wallpapers, etc.

Wired web site displays annoying "pay us now" banner over half of the page on a phone browser, which cannot be removed, probably due to JavaScript bug. Can't help, but flag this.

Have you tried the "reader mode" of your browser? Maybe it helps.

Weird that a paying subscriber would see that banner. You are a paying subscriber, right?

I'm fine with paywalled content overall. I'm not fine with paywalled content on the front page of hn, because it reduces hn utility: I can't see the content.

Kind of similar to what SuperDry is doing with clothes, stylyzed Japanese characters that don’t really mean anything. They choose the words to be nonsensical but inoffensive phrases.

Not really nonsensical, just badly translated.

You get used to it. I don’t even see the code. All I see is hamachi, unagi, toro…

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