GO-CHI Sci-Fi Short Film is a Mind-Bending Collision of Cyberpunk and the Divine — GeekTyrant
Set in a dystopian future pulsing with digital decay and esoteric energy, the film follows Nector, a rogue data-runner from the secretive Black Ego group, as he uploads forbidden intel in the middle of a trance.
Surrounded by chanting, drugs, and relics of old-world mysticism, the countdown to his demise begins when the government's orbital weapon, Meghnath, locks onto his location.
The film ramps up the tension when Nector injects a mysterious compound known only as Go-Chi right before impact, unleashing something completely unexpected.
As described, 'In a high-tech dystopia where ancient mysticism collides with orbital warfare, a rogue data-runner named Nector enters a trance-fueled upload mission that triggers a government strike. With seconds to spare, he injects a mysterious drug—Go-Chi—unlocking a supernatural twist that bends the fate of man and machine. The title is paying homage to a cult reference from Sacred Games (2018).'
GO-CHI delivers a visually arresting, thought-provoking fusion of cyberpunk chaos and sacred delirium.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Forbes
11 minutes ago
- Forbes
Building AI Products That Stick: Transparency Is Your Secret Weapon
Anna Turos, Head of Design at Lighthouse HQ, Startup Mentor, Wtech Community Partner. You've seen the demo. Your AI product works flawlessly, impressing investors and early users with its sophisticated capabilities. But three months later, usage has plateaued and you're watching competitors with "inferior" technology somehow capture more market share. Here's the uncomfortable truth: 74% of companies struggle to achieve and scale AI value, and it's not because their algorithms aren't smart enough. The problem lies in the gap between artificial intelligence and human psychology. While founders obsess over model accuracy, users abandon products they don't understand or trust. In my 12 years designing digital products across multiple domains—immigration, healthcare, education, mental health and productivity—I've seen this pattern repeatedly: The most sophisticated AI features often see the lowest adoption rates. Not because they don't work, but because users can't grasp how or when to use them effectively. While it can feel like the solution is to keep adding layers of AI, the real answer lies in providing more transparency. The Black Box Paradox The irony of AI product development is the smarter our systems become, the more mysterious they appear to users. We've created products that can solve complex problems but can't explain how they did it. Consider the psychology: Humans need to understand cause and effect to feel comfortable. When your AI makes recommendations without explanation, you're asking users to trust a system they can't comprehend. Research shows that 70% of AI implementation challenges stem from people- and process-related issues, with only 20% attributed to technology problems. At Lighthouse, we're building a platform to assess visa eligibility—where the high stakes demand more than just accuracy; they need clarity. For visas like the O-1 or EB-1, users aren't simply looking for a yes or no—they need to understand why: which criteria they already meet, and where the gaps remain. By making our AI's reasoning transparent and explainable, we turn uncertainty into a clear path forward, transforming anxiety into confident, informed action. Some 85% of respondents want industries to be transparent about AI practices before bringing AI-enhanced products to market. Products that feel like black boxes create anxiety rather than confidence. You need to complete on functionality and comprehensibility of your product. The Transparency Framework: Four Pillars Of Sticky AI You don't need to dumb down your technology for it to become more transparent. Instead, create interfaces that help users understand, predict and control their interactions with intelligent systems. Every AI decision should come with a digestible explanation. When your recommendation engine suggests a product, show the three key factors that influenced the choice. When your analysis tool flags a risk, explain which data points triggered the alert. The impact is measurable. McKinsey research shows that explainable AI can increase trust and engagement. Transparency is essential for AI initiatives to make the journey from early deployment to scaled, enterprise-wide adoption. At Shortwave, where I led design for an AI-powered email platform, we learned this lesson directly. Our AI-driven email features that explained their reasoning—e.g., This seems important because it mentions your project deadline—saw 30% higher user retention than those that simply made predictions without context. Users need to develop mental models of how your AI works. This means consistent responses to similar inputs and clear boundaries around what your system can and can't do. Predictability reduces cognitive load and builds user confidence over time. Your AI isn't equally confident in every decision, so why hide that uncertainty? Display confidence scores or simple indicators that show when your system is accurate versus when it's making educated guesses. When confidence is low, explicitly recommend human oversight. When it's high, give users permission to trust the automation. Users need to feel agency over AI systems, not controlled by them. Build specific points where humans can intervene, adjust parameters or override decisions. Think of these as trust handles: specific ways users can grip and guide your AI when needed. From Transparency To Stickiness Here's where transparency becomes your competitive weapon. For humans, understanding breeds habit formation. When users comprehend how your AI works, they can optimize their inputs to get better outputs. This creates a learning loop that makes your product increasingly valuable over time. Transparent AI products enable progressive disclosure: Users start with simple interactions and gradually discover more sophisticated capabilities as their comfort level increases. This is the opposite of the typical AI product experience, where users are overwhelmed by capability and underwhelmed by comprehension. The feedback loop is powerful: Transparent systems build user trust, which leads to deeper engagement, which generates better data, which improves your AI performance, which increases user value. Implementation For Founders Implementing transparency requires three key shifts: Design for Understanding, Not Just Functionality: Every interface decision should consider: Will this help users understand what's happening? not just Will this showcase our AI capabilities? Measure Comprehension, Not Just Engagement: Track whether users understand your AI's decisions, not just whether they use your product. Studies show that transparent AI systems enhance trust and foster better decision-making. Measure the correlation between user understanding and retention. Embrace Iterative Transparency: Start with basic explanations and gradually add sophistication as users become more comfortable. Your transparency strategy should evolve with your user base's AI literacy. The Competitive Advantage While your competitors chase the latest model improvements, you can win by making AI approachable. Companies implementing generative AI report significant ROI from their investments, but that ROI depends entirely on sustained user adoption. In a market where 78% of organizations now use AI in at least one business function, the winners will be the products that users actually want to use every day. Your AI can be incredibly sophisticated under the hood, but make transparency your secret weapon. As a technology mentor, I've guided dozens of AI-focused startups, and the pattern is consistent: Founders who prioritize explainability from day one see faster user adoption and stronger retention. In the race to create smarter AI, the companies that help users feel smarter will ultimately win. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
San Francisco Chronicle
2 hours ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
S.F. schools spent $8 million to change the way they teach math. Here's what's new
Math will look and feel a lot different in San Francisco schools this year and that seems evident by the picture of the chilled-out chimpanzee on the cover of the new kindergarten textbook, with similar images on subsequent grades. These books, which came with the recently purchased k-8 math curriculum, the first in 16 years, offer a glimpse of what educators and district officials hope students will discover inside: Math is not only learnable and fun, but also incredibly relevant to the world around them. For generations of adults raised on the drill-and-kill math of decades past, 'fun' might not be a word they link to long division, the solving for X or those two trains traveling at different speeds toward Boston. The new curriculum, which cost $8 million, includes classroom math toys and digital practice problems with moving parts and instant feedback, making it feel more like a video game. But what schools and society expects kids to learn in math class has shifted in the past 15 years, in large part because of the Common Core standards, which provided an outline for the skills and knowledge students should have after each grade to prepare them for college and careers. That includes not the ability to do math, but also understanding when and why they would use it. 'If we're telling students how to do something, and they just do it they aren't internalizing,' said Renée Marcy, district director of STEM. 'They need to be able to make sense of it themselves.' Based on state standardized test scores, the district still has work to do. Less than half of its 48,000 students — just over 45% — were at grade-level proficiency or higher in math in the spring of 2024, the most recent data available. While that was well above the state average of 36%, a deeper look at the data shows subpar performance among subgroups in the district, with 11% of Black students and 17%of Latino students proficient in math. The goal, district officials said, is to get 65% of eighth graders to proficiency by 2027, up from 42% in 2022. San Francisco, for the most part, has been using in-house, teacher-developed instruction for nearly two decades, only now purchasing a comprehensive k-8 curriculum from two curriculum development companies — Imagine Learning for elementary schools and Amplify Desmos Math in middle schools. For k-5, that includes textbooks, workbooks and digital programs. It also provides hands-on games and math tools like blocks that click together, rulers, tiles and more, for each classroom, said Devin Krugman, assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction. While the emphasis is on 'student thinking,' she said, kids still learn the how-to of math as well as the real-world applications, despite initial concerns that the Common Core standards would give short-shrift to the basic functions like solving equations or simple arithmetic. The goal, Krugman said, is to break the cycle of adults with the same complaint: 'I never used what I learned in math class.' With classes starting on Aug. 18, hundreds of district teachers signed up for training on the new curriculum this week, which includes a video to introduce concepts that don't talk about math at all. In one case, a video addressed garbage and landfills and recycling that's crushed into cubes and transported in shipping containers, with the math messaging related to both the reduction of waste and the idea that trash 'takes up space.' The activities that follow might use hands-on tasks that stack blocks into boxes, for example, and then the math to calculate how many boxes could fit in a container, according to the curriculum. San Francisco Unified School District Superintendent Maria Su watched over teachers' shoulders as they navigated through the new curriculum, asking questions and smiling when the digital application gave immediate feedback as a teacher attempted a practice exercise, getting one x,y coordinate wrong when trying to invert a rectangle 180 degrees on a graph. A small red x pointed out the error. Su, who didn't like math as a child, noted this version of math class looked more like an online puzzle game than a paper and pencil worksheet. 'I wish I'd had a program that was responsive in real time and made math easy,' she said, 'one that made math fun to learn and not so scary.' Sixth grade teacher Karena Chiu could relate. Math was something she 'had to do' in middle school, a class taught by a teacher who terrified her, with content that confused her. 'I just didn't feel smart or capable of doing math,' she said. 'Math was there. I had to do it.' She never really understood the why or when of it, though. 'I don't want kids to feel the same way I did,' said Chiu, who teaches the subject at Presidio Middle School. 'I want them to feel like they can do math and follow a career in math if they so choose.' Her school was among the district sites that piloted the new curriculum last year, providing feedback before the school board approved and purchased it earlier this year. Chiu said she felt her students were more engaged using the new curriculum, compared to previous years, and it was easy to use. 'I feel like if I had this as a first year teacher, I might have had less stressful nights,' she said. 'Everything is packaged so well.' The program also allows teachers to see how each child is doing in real time on computer-based practice work. 'I could focus more on the kids who were having a harder time with the math,' Chiu said. In the spring, Presidio saw 'huge jumps' in sixth and seventh grade test scores, according to Chiu, while district officials said in a statement that 'early results from the pilot demonstrated promising outcomes: Students whose teachers used the new curriculum performed better on standardized testing than those whose teachers used the old one.' For Chiu, higher test scores are definitely part of the plan, but she has other goals too. 'I feel like all adults have math trauma,' she said. 'We have to break the cycle.'
Chicago Tribune
2 hours ago
- Chicago Tribune
‘Demascus' review: A sci-fi comedy about one man's alternate realities
In the sci-fi comedy 'Demascus,' a man attending therapy tries a new technology that allows him to visit alternate versions of his life that exist in his subconscious in an effort to figure out why he's feeling so bleh. But which version is closest to his real life? Actually, which one is his real life, anyway? The show premieres on the free, ad-supported streaming platform Tubi, but it almost never made it to light. From writer-producers Tearrance Arvelle Chisholm and Mark Johnson, it was originally created for AMC and shot in its entirety, and then canceled in early 2023 before it could air (the network cited cost-cutting measures). It languished on the shelf until now. Kudos to Tubi, which offers only a limited number of originals, for taking a chance on it. But while the premise of 'Demascus' is enticing — what might our lives look like with small changes? — the six-episode series doesn't live up to its initial promise. There is a 'solution' offered by the final episode that explains everything we've seen up to that point, but instead of resonating, it felt somewhat pat. Okieriete Onaodowan plays the title character, a 33-year-old Everyman who moves through his days in a numb haze. His therapist (Janet Hubert) asks: Are you unhappy? What's making you unhappy? 'It's 2023 and I'm a Black man,' he says. 'The world is as inhospitable as ever.' Then he offers up an anecdote from work: Walking toward the break room, he hears someone sharing an anecdote about him, of which he only hears the last line: 'Y'all know how Demascus is, right?' Everyone in the break room laughs uproariously. 'Nobody knows me,' Demascus tells his therapist, confused by what this person could have meant. 'My one dominant quality is I'm unknowable.' You pride yourself on that, comes the response? 'Yeah, actually, I do. I can be anybody. Or nobody. And that's a good quality for a Black man to have, right?' But in your effort to remain unknowable, his therapist says, perhaps you have made yourself unknown even to you. This is good, interesting stuff and had me locked in. Then his therapist places a white contraption on his head that sends him into something called digital immersive reality therapy. 'By identifying commonalities across your alternate timelines, you'll be able to combat the issues you're facing in your everyday life.' It also comes with a warning. 'Attempting to take control of the narrative can permanently corrupt your primary reality.' In one of those alternate realities, he has a sister whose boyfriend has been roughing her up; she wants Demascus to round up some friends to set the guy straight. Demascus is reluctant — this is not his thing — but agrees and calls up Uncle Forty (Martin Lawrence), an aging no-bull type, and his best friend Redd (Caleb Eberhardt), who is ready, willing and eager. Not surprisingly, things go horribly, comically awry. And so it continues. We meet his girlfriend Budhi (Sasha Hutchings), who he is seriously involved with in one timeline, less so in another. In another timeline, it's Demascus and Redd who are a couple. In yet another, Demascus is a priest. In another, he and Budhi are on an instant marriage reality show. Everyone's styling is different each time. At one point, Demascus does the therapy while he's already in a therapy session, which is like staring into an infinity mirror, or waking from a dream, only to still be dreaming — when does the trance stop? The show is commenting on all kinds of ideas, from how we run away from (or suppress) our deepest pain, to the psychological issues — the addiction — that can result from people pretending they have a relationship with computer-generated reality. As his therapist said early on, he's created a world where he's unknowable not only to those around him but to himself as well. The larger issue is that he also remains unknowable to the viewer, and I think that is where the show loses me. Ultimately, who are we supposed to become invested in? 'Demascus' — 2 stars (out of 4) Where to watch: Tubi
