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

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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

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.

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.

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

The Indie Internet Index, another new directory of independent websites

8 April 2026

Hot on the heels of Monday’s link to indie/independent blog post aggregator Blogosphere, comes the Indie Internet Index. The importance of these sorts of resources cannot be understated at a time when the independent, open web, is under increasing threat.

Yahoo, cornerstone of pre-2000 old web, is bouncing back

7 April 2026

Nilay Patel, writing for The Verge:

After a long series of mergers and spinouts and an extremely odd moment where it was part of Verizon, Yahoo is once again an independent, privately held company. And it has big properties in sports and finance, and, against all odds, email, where it’s growing with young people. Gen Z loves Yahoo Mail, people. You heard it here first.

If we want a return — at least in part — to the ethos of the so-called “old web”, a period — debatably — spanning the mid-nineties through to the advent of social media, circa 2008 or so, then Yahoo getting back on its feet is surely a prerequisite. It seems strange to think now, twenty-five plus years later, that prior to 2000, Yahoo’s search engine was just about the only player in town.

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technology, trends, web history

Blogosphere: an algorithm free blog post aggregator

6 April 2026

The new (to me at least) aggregator of blog posts aptly and cleverly titled Blogosphere, is the creation of engineer and writer Ramkarthik Krishnamurthy:

But it’s really about something bigger: rebuilding a thriving community of independent writers and thinkers who share their thoughts freely, without waiting for an algorithm to decide who gets to see them.

A list of recent blog posts can also be viewed in a more simple text style format. In addition, both listings of posts have their own RSS feeds.

Blogosphere joins other fine IndieWeb/SmallWeb blog post aggregators including Blogs Are Back, Blogroll Club, Blogroll, Feedle, powRSS, Oceania Web Atlas, and ooh.directory, to name but a few.

Britons social media use declines, but not because they now write blogs

6 April 2026

Data compiled by Ofcom, being the Office of Communications, Britain’s communications regulator, says 49% of adult social media users now post content, compared to 61% in 2024.

The slow down in publishing content cannot, however, be attributed to an IndieWeb/SmallWeb led switch-over to personal websites or blogs. Unfortunately.

Rather, British social media users are concerned old, long forgotten, posts may surface in the future, potentially causing embarrassment, or hamper their employment prospects, should a recruiter view an old post in the wrong context.

Australia facing an AI led job ‘wipe out’ that no one is prepared for

1 April 2026

The latest round of redundancies in the tech sector could well be a result of excess hiring in recent years, even though they are being attributed to greater uptake of AI technologies.

Then again, AI may be the precisely why there have been so many job losses. And there could be more, much more, to come.

This is the sentiment being echoed by a number of IT professionals who are working with AI, including Shaon Diwarkar, a Sydney based Australian entrepreneur and software developer.

Diwarkar is the founder, and sole employee, of InboxAPI, an email app for AI agents, which itself makes use of numerous AI agents including ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity, to carry out much of the company’s work.

People are saying “adopt AI or die”. If a large number of enterprises can be operated in the same fashion as InboxAPI, I can see why. Companies previously employing half-a-dozen staff, maybe more, could well be able to get by with one person, working in conjunction with several AI agents.

The AI future is now; we all need to start thinking about it.

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