[gcanyon]

I read an article once that claimed an early draft/version that was cut for time or narrative complexity had the human brains being used as raw compute for the machines, with the Matrix being the idle process to keep the minds sane and functional for their ultimate purpose.

[ben_w]

I've read a file that claimed to be that script; it made more sense for the machines to use human brains to control fusion reactors than for humans to be directly used as batteries.

(And way more sense than how the power of love was supposed to be a nearly magical power source in #4. Boo. Some of the ideas in that film were interesting, but that bit was exceptionally cliché.)

[gcanyon]

I'd love to read that file. Of course, we're close (really close?) to being able to just ask an LLM to give us a personalized version of the script to do away with whatever set of flaws bother us the most.

[ben_w]

One of the ways I experiment with LLMs is to get them to write short stories.

Two axies: Quality and length.

They're good quality. Not award winning, but significantly better than e.g. even good Reddit fiction.

But they still struggle with length, despite what the specs say about context length. You might manage the script length needed for a kid's cartoon, but not yet a film.

I'll see if I can find another copy of the script; what I saw was long enough ago my computer had a PPC chip in it.

[gcanyon]

> PPC chip

Pizza box? I loved the 6100.

[ben_w]

Beige proto-iMac. I had a 5200 as a teen and upgraded to either a 5300 or a 5400 at university for a few years — the latter broke while at university and I upgraded again to an eMac, but I think this was before then.

Looks like there's many different old scripts, no idea which, if any, was what I read back in the day: https://old.reddit.com/r/matrix/comments/rb4x93/early_draft_...

I miss those days. Even software development back then was more fun with REALbasic than today with SwiftUI.

[gcanyon]

HA! I used REALbasic a bit back in the day, then spent my time comparing it to LiveCode, back then called Revolution. Geoff Perlman and I once co-presented at WWDC to compare the two tools.