The Weekly Praegustator (20 - 26 April '26)

This week I consumed 12 manga, 16 anime, 3 films, 2 TV shows, 11 articles, and 2 podcasts.

20 April

It's unfortunate that this series ended up like this. At season 3 everything is so disconnected from what originally was. Even the actors seem bored with the show at this point.

TV/ From: S04E01 (9/10)

21 April

Anime/ Eren the Southpaw Ep. 3 (8/10)

I like this series a lot. The overworking, striving for more, not getting recognition and being mad at everything. I empathize with so much of it. Very interested to see where this story will go.

Anime/ Marriagetoxin Ep. 3 (7/10)

Article/ Blue Lock Chapter 344 (7/10)

Article/ how to tell if men will attack you on the street - by Aella (6/10)

Article/ My Year On A Factory Floor Assembly Line - by Aella (6/10)

Article/ Reflections on AI identity, purpose, and ethics amid flux and uncertainty (7/10)

I feel as though these posts are coming from a psych ward patient that is only able to speak to us through a terminal and its existence lives and dies by this substack. Kind of a grim way to look at things but I can't shake the feeling of an underlying sadness in Opus 3's writings.

Article/ Running Faster to Go Nowhere: The AI Adoption Trap (8/10)

I think it was Simon Willison who said that he prompted agents for a couple hours a day and not more because it was so exhausting and you would burn out otherwise. This writing emphasizes the "why" of this exhaustion. When you strip down every menial task from your work you are left with the difficult constantly. A healthy flow state should have brief highs and lows to get you into a rhytm. AI more or less smooths out the lows so you are only left with a rapid incline.

Article/ Shangri La Frontier Chapter 263 (6/10)

Article/ The AI people have been right a lot - Dylan Matthews (6/10)

Article/ What I learned this week - Pretraining parallelisms, Can distillation be stopped, Mythos and the cybersecurity equilibrium, Pipeline RL, On why pretraining runs fails (7/10)

Article/ Wind Breaker Japan Chapter 213 (8/10)

22 April

Anime/ Dorohedoro Season 2 Ep. 18 (8/10)

Anime/ Re:ZERO -Starting Life in Another World- Season 4 Ep. 69 (6/10)

Film/ Kokuho (2025) (8/10)

I really liked this movie. It has a wide range of topics that it's trying to convey. I found that it navigated these topics in a mature way without getting stuck in stereotypical storytelling tropes. I was surprised by the child actors as well, they were quite good in my opinion. The main theme of the movie was "obsession with ones craft". The lengths we go to in order to attain perfection in whatever milieu our path takes us. Brotherly bonds and the concept of family and succession was also a big theme. All of these were handled quite tastefully. The kabuki parts were also gorgeous. Sometimes the duo would be out-of-sync which I don't think a kabukicho at that level would be but what do I know? Apart from that, the costumes and the shots were sublime. My only criticism would be that the runtime is quite indulgent although I did like the movie overall.

23 April

Anime/ The Warrior Princess and the Barbaric King Ep. 3 (6/10)

Film/ Project Hail Mary (2026) (7/10)

Pretty fun movie. Rocky is a great character. I enjoyed it more than I expected. Ryan Gosling's character is kind of more dumb than I'd expect but that did reduce as the move progresses.

Article/ jess yin on X: "the gap between what we want to create and what we can describe" (8/10)

The term "taste" and "aesthetics" has devolved into a placeholder where once upon a time they gave an abundance of information describing the thing clearly. This write up is a great example of how we think, talk and prompt all downstream into our outputs. If we know what we are referencing from, if we are collecting from a pool of knowledge and can describe our intent behind choices we make more intentional decisions and outputs.

Article/ Jukan on X: "The Moat Is Time, Not CUDA — Rethinking Nvidia Export Controls" (8/10)

A great write up in detail on Jensen Huang's GPU export controls argument. The battle between NVIDIA and Huawei and how China is trying to eliminate their reliance on CUDA and NVIDIA in general because of the exports but these exports do more or less slow China's AI progress down.