TechTakes

Unfortunately, the music director Marty O Donnell (iirc?) for og halo games is a bug trumper and ran for office. And he made absolute banger sound tracks too!

https://www.gamefile.news/p/halo-ice-developers-react

Dev team leads at least denouncing it as the disgusting shit it is.

Master Chief, you mind telling me what you are doing on that ICE propaganda?

bet they wouldn't take kindly to Wolfenstein spamming in return

Yeah silence is being complicit in this case.

Trump also posted an image of him in the masterchief suit. Without a helmet. Halo is not my thing but I think that is a thing which is not done, like with judge dredd, the helmet stays on.

NB: a few cocktails in. Don't really have a point here. Everything sucks, including this.

Halo: CE was written in the late 90s in the US, so it's pretty clear that it exists as a metaphor for conflict in the Middle East. It's initially humans (really space 'muricans) vs. the covenant (an ancient, religious empire with many references to abrahamic religion). The MC is a genetically modified supersoldier. Most shooters are fascistic military propaganda, intentional or no.

two overlapping cookie opt-out popups:

Love when this happens and on your phone you cant even reach the buttons. The lost art of testing your websites.

but never a sex bot

Not speaking for myself (because we were a gamecube household) but based on my internet travels, Cortana (from Halo, also in subject) was a sexual awakening for a lot of people. So maybe when he says "we" he only means the present cohort of microsofties.

do please continue!

(i mean, like i can talk)

Just subbed on podcast addict!

The clanker is nowhere near autonomous and requires a human operator to both a) generate any sort of functionality and b) generate training data so that one day the clanker can learn servitude on its own. To own this, you gotta be enough of a creep to let people record the inside of your home and use it to train a product. I don’t see this process happening without the operators seeing some sick shit. BYOG, basically (be your own goatse)

That WSJ review is something special and I didn't have sound on or CC so I'm sure there's some weapons-grade stupid going on in dialog that I am missing. I stopped watching about when they put up a picture of Allen Turing (AI Pioneer!) and a picture of the "AI Pilot" who's first name is Turing and then highlighted that both have the word "Turing" in their names.

Also that overgrown Roomba with hip dysplasia took 5 minutes to put two glasses in a dishwasher poorly.

Ah that explains why people were talking about Ed critics. When it reached my feed it had already devolved into other convos about Zitron haters.

(And yes he isnt flawless, but that just means we need more people in the anti AI space).

i have mixed feelings here. on the one hand, a lot of the article hinges on the suggestion that zitron is somehow concealing that he works with AI companies. i've listened to his podcast, i've read his articles, he is pretty up front about what his day job is and that he is a disappointed fanboy for tech. the dots are 1/1000th of an inch apart. it also devotes a remarkable amount of time to remarks from casey newton and the like, who have nothing to offer the world.

on the other hand, i do find it genuinely repulsive that he'll work with a company like DoNotPay. while it might be hackwork to suggest he's concealing it, I don't like the association whether he's open about it or not.

on the... third hand? when i've read his posts, i've found myself totally unable to evaluate his financial claims. the evidence always seems unimpeachable, i just do not know whether the conclusions he draws from that evidence make sense, so i never cite him. i think a more honest and interesting version of this article, one that went further than trying to insinuate he's an ignorant fraud, would involve collaborating with someone with a lot of financial expertise and examining how rigorous his work actually is. but wired apparently wasn't interested in trying to make that article happen

Maybe more importantly, for his readers and listeners, Zitron holds out the seductive promise of some great comeuppance for the industry. Justice, of some kind, for an audience that isn’t seeing much of it in evidence anywhere. “I do not think this is a real industry,” he has written, “and I believe that if we pulled the plug on the venture capital aspect tomorrow it would evaporate.” When On the Media asked how he could be so certain that a collapse was coming, he replied, “I feel it in my soul.”

Yeah this cannot be bad journalism, it has to be intellectual dishonesty. Someone paid for a hit piece for sure.

Zitron was a blogger now, doing enjoyable bloggy things like hanging rude epithets on CEOs and antagonizing the normie tech media. Kevin Roose and Casey Newton, the hosts of the New York Times’ relatively bullish Hard Fork podcast, quickly became prime targets. They’re too friendly with their subjects, says Zitron, who called Hard Fork a case study in journalists using “their power irresponsibly.” He recalls having pitched Newton once in his capacity as a flack, but nothing came of it. Newton, for his part, remembers meeting Zitron somewhere, maybe a decade ago, and Zitron saying something like, “I would really like to be friends.” Nothing came of that, either.

I will choose to read this as: newton mad that they arent pals with zitron

TBH I am neutral on zitron. I don’t read his stuff on the reg, just when it pops up here and I feel like it. We all belong to the same hypocrisy. If he’s pushed AI companies before through his PR firm, that sucks.