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Don't Believe the Hype

Why Tron: Ares works, AI companies scramble, and physics meets data

BILL ANASTAS • OCT 19, 2025

Hey there,

Here's what caught my attention this week:

Tron: Ares

Tron: Ares

I took my son to see Tron: Ares last week and we both absolutely loved it.

Visually, I've never seen anything this stunning before. The trip into the original Grid from the 1980s was especially a visual delight - I started binge-watching Halt and Catch Fire the night after we saw it because I needed MORE 80s.

The soundtrack was KILLER. Look, the Tron: Legacy soundtrack is my favorite of all time, and I'd take Daft Punk over a thousand NINs any day, but even I need to admit the Tron: Ares soundtrack was amazing. It pounded through the screen and right into your ears, head, chest - to the point you were getting physically hit with it. Might have been jarring otherwise if the visuals didn't merit such high levels of aural assault.

I went into it ready to be disappointed - anyone who's been near the internet the past week knows why - but I was blown away.

I was so blown away I even sent an awkward LinkedIn message to someone I worked with years ago who was the VFX Supervisor - which I never do, but I genuinely wanted him to know.

I'm so happy to see fans coming out in the subreddits and preaching "don't believe the hate, it's so good" - I hope it gets the status it deserves and the Tron universe keeps moving forward.

Articles Worth Your Time

Motion Picture Association Says OpenAI Must Prevent Copyright Infringment on Sora 2

petapixel.com

The MPA is asking OpenAI to prevent copyright infringement on Sora after it already launched, which is like asking someone to put guardrails on a highway after the cars are already driving on it. They're basically admitting they have no actual plan to deal with AI-generated content that looks exactly like copyrighted work, so now they're scrambling to get OpenAI to police it for them.

AI is Too Big to Fail

sibylline.dev

Tech companies have successfully reframed AI spending as a national security issue, which means when the bubble pops (and it will), taxpayers are already locked into bailing them out. It's the 2008 playbook but faster - they made themselves unfailable before anyone realized what was happening.

Information Could Be a Fundamental Part of the Universe

singularityhub.com

Scientists are trying to explain dark matter by treating information itself as a physical thing that has mass and takes up space in the universe. Basically they're saying the cosmos has data storage costs, which is wild but kinda makes sense when you think about how much energy it takes to store and process information.

Photo of the Week

Photo of the Week View full resolution →

Insight of the Week

"The best question a producer can ask isn't "when will this be done?" It's "what's blocking you from finishing this?""

That's a wrap for this week!

Talk soon,

-b