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Updating Simia
The last few days, the Website was going really slow again. And I was preparing for a frustrating fight with Bitnami, Google Cloud, and whatever else to figure things out.
I have to admit that this is not what happened. Google Cloud has a Gemini-powered Cloud Assist chatbot. And I just asked it what to do. The suggestions sounded reasonable, and it wrote down the exact commands. A few times I came to an error, but just copy-pasting it to the assistant, it quickly found out what to do instead, and, well, it seemed to have worked. The site is now up and running, and for the last half an hour or so, CPU utilisation has dropped dramatically. Cloud Assist predicted a drop from 100% utilisation to 5%, so far I can see 40%, but hey, that's a great start. I can actually read my own entries again!
Then I went a step further, to resolve a long-standing issue: the page did not have https yet. What was OK 25 years ago, when it launched, has long been something that browsers really loudly complain about. Rightfully.
Again, it was a question to cloud assist, and it took me through the steps.
All of the steps I did today, none of them were hard. It was, in fact, embarrassingly easy. It was just configuring tools that already were downloaded and existed and downloading and running one tool.
Well then, that's a win, for me and for AI! Thanks Google Cloud Assist!
The Odyssey 2026
I mean, it's Nolan. It's a great movie. He knows how to make movies. So the three hours pass like a breeze and are enjoyable. The cast is great, I particularly enjoyed Matt Damon, Robert Pattinson and Samantha Morton as Circe.
Agamemnon was absolutely breathtaking. He stole every scene he was in. (Until he started talking. I didn't like his voice. But those looks!)
The first half hour or so of the movie felt like an extended trailer. Which is very Nolan, but surprising and a little unsettling given the familiar setting and story. It gets more settled and classical later on.
I really disliked the body horror scenes around Circe. And the design of the monsters was... unsatisfying. Polyphem? Ok. Unusual and new. But then Scylla with the same beige color and skin-like texture? It looked like Ray Harryhausen. Which was fine in his time, but underwhelming in a 2026 AAA title. But it did give me a genuine jump scare.
I found the whole movie lacking color saturation. I have to compare it to 2004 Troy, which I find much more appealing as a Greek mythology saga movie. The Odyssey is a 2026 movie, binding it to our time in subtle ways, on the expense of the timelessness that Troy has.
(Spoilers in this paragraph) But what I really enjoyed was the novel twist to the plot, that I haven't seen before. That it was Odysseus who broke the old contract that was keeping society together. That this was the reason for the long way home. In a way this was the same core plot point as Oppenheimer. And possibly an important lesson for our age. That gave food for thought. But almost like a memory of the thoughts that Oppenheimer provoked. But I enjoyed these ideas explored in such a familiar setting.
Now that I spilled out my thoughts, let's see what others have written. And again, it's a great movie. Worth watching.
