TwinIon

This is so terrible and so much worse than what I've seen before. I've heard of newsrooms that were told about AI content getting posted, and I've heard of newsrooms where AI content was getting posted without consulting actual writers, but coming up with full on fake identities is wild. It also seems like it's inevitable that the digital trail that the Futurism reporters looked for will be easily faked too. How long before these fictitious writers actually have a Facebook account? I've made fun of cypto in general and worldcoin specifically, and I'm not backtracking on any of it, but I suddenly understand why they think an ID system that just verifies that there's a person would have some value. It's still a bad idea, and if SI is going to invent profiles for fake writers, the existence of some blockchain blue check isn't going to solve anything, but at least I can see what they might be after. This is also one of those times where I wish that government could be an answer. I'd love Elizabeth Warren or the EU to step in with some governmental overreach that would help this, but I just can't imagine it actually mattering. Yeah, you could try and force companies to label what is AI created, but there's no way to actually police it. Maybe it would help at least a little, to the point it would keep big publications in line, but really it would probably just end with these companies paying a patsy a few bucks instead of inventing them.

I've been seeing this as well and it's getting out of control. The thing I've run into a few times recently is looking for some piece of information, finding an answer on IGN or other site I mostly trust, but their answer is wrong or incomplete, and then finding nothing but pages and pages of generated content that is wrong in the exact same way. For low stakes stuff about games, it's annoying and disappointing, but it must be happening all over the place and serving audiences that don't understand what is going on.

Exactly. We see some of what made him an effective military strategist, but nothing about what made him an effective commander to his troops. Did they follow him because he had won victories? Did they love him or simply put up with him? Did he just represent an idea of France they yearned for or was he connecting directly with them? There's barely anything to go on and I don't think Scott even cares. By contrast we see Maximus win one battle to open Gladiator and the film ends before he's reunited with them, but throughout the film you're shown why he's an effective leader of men and you understand why they'd choose to follow him should he return.

It's very true to the comic. Very few deviations, a few nice additions, and nothing major has been cut. A few things have been reshuffled as the timeline has been cut down and a few major character beats have been jettisoned, but all in all I'd say it's trying very hard to be comic accurate. Also helps that it looks extremely similar.

I did end up getting mine in on Friday, and I have to say that I get it now. I've been a bit down on the deck since its release, but now that I've got one it makes sense to me. It's both bigger and lighter than I expected, but it feels so good in my hands. I've put maybe 8 hours into it so far and it is so much better to hold than the Switch or any other handheld. Not only does it feel great, but the controls are top notch. The trackpads have that very cool haptic feedback to them, the buttons and sticks and triggers all feel solid with just the right click to them. I think my only real complaint about any of it is that I wish they could steal the triggers from the PS5. More than just feeling like a solid gadget, it works much more like a console than I expected. I honestly expected it to be a bit more jankey, or at least feel a lot more like this is a mini linux computer running a custom Steam skin, but it doesn't. It's a proper little console package. The overlays and menus are really well done and tie the whole software portion together nicely. I would feel very comfortable recommending one to my less tech savvy friends. For myself, I think the Steam Deck has already proven its value by being well suited to the games that didn't feel as at home on my desktop. I've started with Dave the Diver, Hades, and Midnight Suns and all three are perfect for the deck. I'm not even mildly tempted to install Cypberpunk or Starfield, I'll leave that to my powerful desktop where games can command my full attention and push the graphics all the way up. The deck is an excellent companion for those smaller games to enjoy on the couch. For that reason I don't have any issue with 512GB of storage. I have a bunch of games I could throw on there, but I don't bounce between games fast enough to need all of them installed at once, and the games I do have installed hardly use up much space at all. I haven't really even gotten into using it as a gadget. I've launched into desktop mode and made sure my password manager was on there, just in case I want to do more, but I don't see myself doing much. I still might bother to find a way to backup my camera's memory cards while on a vacation, but I think the deck will have a spot even if I don't use it for that.

I also disliked the color grading and had the same issue with Napoleon's tunic, though I would consider the failure to be an excess of grading rather than a lack of it. They've got some hard core tone curves going on and it always felt excessive and degrading. The French flag is only three colors, the white was so cool it was almost blue, the red was unrecognizable, and the blue was apparently exiled. Poor choices all around. I think Scott didn't know how to play with the ambiguity of Napoleon's power or his "goodness." Scott's success in his historical epics has been in their clarity. Maximus and Balian are such pure characters in so many ways, and the evil they faced was so obvious and brutish. Even with Frank Lucas in American Gangster I feel like Ridley loses his way a bit and isn't able to cleanly put forward an anti-hero with the same gravitas as he can an outright hero. The the ending title cards reveal how this film views Napoleon. Here's a list of battles he took part in, and here's how many died. It sets aside the winning and losing, the brilliance or the bumbling and reduces it only to death. I think that outlook on the man dooms much of what might have made for a complex an interesting take. It could have read something like "Napoleon fought in 61 battles; he won 50 and is considered one of the great military commanders in history. Six million people died in his wars." That diminished and simple view of the man is obvious in those ending title cards, but it's felt throughout the film. There's a sequence when Napoleon had left Elba and was marching to Paris and he runs into his first bit of resistance. Soldiers take up their places against him to stop his march, but he approaches them and convinces them to join him. That should have been such a powerful moment, but it ended up falling so flat. I know that both Scott and Phoenix have within them to make me believe that this is a man who inspires and aspires to greatness; a man for whom his former army would gladly forget their new oaths in order to follow once again, but I didn't get that at all. It felt perfunctory. I don't think this is a movie that would be saved by another hour or three. I think it's a director that isn't interested glorifying his subject even in the interest of telling a better story. I'm not arguing that there isn't room for a dour look on Napoleon or that this film should be exulting the man, but it didn't show a very convincing or interesting portrait. It makes me think about how another octogenarian director might have handled the same material. I don't think Martin Scorsese is terribly sympathetic to Jordan Belfort or Ernest Burkhart, but he makes you understand how Belfort got people to buy into his schemes and that Ernest really did love his wife. Which is all to say that there's room for a Napoleon who both a sad sack and a convincing military leader.

Still no shipping date for me, but I went ahead and bought a bunch of games on sale that I've been interested in but never got around to that also feel like they'd be a good match for the deck. Picked up Dave the Diver, Hades, Talos Principle 1 & 2, Disco Elysium, and Oxenfree. Started Dave the Diver already and it's great. Fun little bite sized game that seems like it would be really at home on the deck.

The funny thing about this to me is that to operate a social network in Germany you need to be able to filter out nazi content. Use that filter and just don't sell ads next to that content and it gets rid of much of this problem.

We've basically been getting the Filoni take on Star Wars for a while now, and I'm at peace with it, even if it's not super exciting. For better and worse he's basically the closest thing we have to Lucas. I don't think that the creative success of Andor means that all Star Wars should become Andor, but I do think it showed that Star Wars can find success when not telling the typical Star Wars stories that Filoni seems keen on telling.

So Sam is back as CEO, and the new board will be bigger, less concerned with the non-profit mission, almost certainly include some MS representation, and likely allow Altman to do whatever he wants. Not a super entertaining outcome from all this for all this. I still desperately want to know more about why the board fired him in the first place.

At this point it feels almost certain that the board are just a bunch of absolute idiots. Either they had a good enough reason to fire him, which they can share with concerned parties (MS, Open AI employees, interim CEOs), or they didn't. If they didn't have a great reason for firing him, then it's just a matter of how much damage they do the company before they exit themselves. Right now I don't think any permanent damage has been done, but they're certainly at the precipice.

At this point I just kinda feel bad for the guy.

I'm sitting here refreshing the shipping status of my Steamdeck instead of just playing the games that I could be playing on the deck.

Enjoyed the first episode well enough that I revisited Godzilla (2014) and will watch Skull Island tonight. Godzilla holds up really well, even if Aaron Taylor-Johnson is a non-entity.

It's almost there. I think it would have been more fun if Altman had left to form a new company that could compete with Open-AI. Having him in house at Microsoft when Open AI is already MS's defatcto AI house is a bit sad. At the end of the day all this adds up to putting MS in a better overall position.

Well, when I was guessing what a sufficient reason to fire Altman was, I was thinking this board was acting rationally. It’s increasingly looking like they’re just clowns who are about to be tossed themselves. I think the more exciting possibility is that basically everyone at Open AI resigns to join Altman’s new company, Open AI continues on in some form, probably dominated by the non-profit research side, and Altman’s new company spins up a new LLM.

A $10 PS4 upgrade is awesome. I doubt I’ll even bother to replay the main game until the second season of the show gets closer, but for $10 I’ll pick it up for the improved graphics and the other features.

Building games is hard and there is a lot of risk built into the project from the get go. I'm sympathetic to the idea that the creative process is hard and that games in particular are a difficult and risky medium to work in. This should not have been. This is taking one of the most beloved games in one of the most lucrative franchises of all time, and just updating it. Yeah, you can be ambitious and think "I'll improve the gameplay and make it a modern game" but that's not necessary. I feel like if all else fails you just have to update the graphics and it'll still cover the dev costs. To fail at this is a real incitement of everyone involved.

That's a surprise to me. The dudes I know didn't even have the option of being put under.

I would be shocked if the problem ends up being that the board thought that Sam was moving too fast and not being sufficiently "safe" with the technology. I completely believe that the LLM engineers at Google/Open AI/etc/. didn't think the tech was ready for mass consumption, but the market and public opinion has ended up siding with Open AI to an enormous extent. We know that Google, Meta, and plenty of others had LLMs ready to go, but we're not sure when and how they should be used. By releasing Chat GPT when they did, Open AI changed the game and established themselves as the leader in the most important tech race of our time. If the board knows something about the "safety" of this technology that justifies firing the CEO but doesn't justify notifying the public, that's not great.

It was a local though, right?

It is a small miracle that that D1P still exists, and I for one, am thankful for that.

This is the most surprised I've ever been at a CEO getting fired. Sam Altman was at the top of the world and then he's just fired completely out of the blue? They just announced they're bringing in $1.3B a year, and between a lucrative deal with MS and launching one of the fasted adopted products of all time, I suspect that revenue is real. This also isn't a Theranos situation where the product doesn't exist. It's the most talked about product of the year, it works well, and as far as anyone can tell they're still the leading company in the most transformative sector in tech. So they've got money, they've got an excellent product, and a bright future, at least from all appearances. Whatever Altman did, it must have been pretty bad. I haven't even seen any reasonable speculation on what went down, but I'm super curious to find out. Personal issues are always a possibility, but speculating that Sam Altman eats people or something isn't much fun. My first guesses are that either the company's structure as a “capped-profit” company was ill conceived or poorly implemented, or the deals with Microsoft are much worse for Open AI than we're aware. If MS somehow owns more of their tech than we thought, if it prevents Open AI from profiting somehow, or if it just ties their hands too much, that might justify a firing. It would be kind of hilarious to me if somehow the novel capped-profit setup prevented investors or the board from making as much money as they thought.

I went to go see this last night and I was not a fan. I'm actually a defender of the Hunger Games films. They're far from perfect, but there is a melancholy and brutality that they do well. Even when they stray into camp or love triangle drama, it doesn't take long for the films to come back to the horror of children being forced to murder each other for entertainment and how that affects them in and outside the arena. Somehow, despite being an origin story for a villain, Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes is much more upbeat, even casual, about its killings. There are some implied gruesome deaths and a few instant reactions to death, but everyone seems to more or less get over it. The Hunger Games films were about PTSD more than anything, and there's none of that here, despite the content being rather ripe with opportunities. I think there's a good chance that this film will play better to its YA audience because it isn't wallowing in grief and loathing, but I feel like that's the thing that made these films stand out. There are some brief moments where Songbirds and Snakes does try to reckon with the repercussions of the horrors endured, but by and large the effects are temporary. I also think the film is too long and poorly paced. It's covering a lot of plot and juggling a lot of characters, and it suffers for it. While I think Rachel Zegler and Tom Blyth both put in individually compelling performances, their chemistry leaves a lot to be desired. Maybe we're not supposed to believe in them as a couple, but if that was the case, they didn't sell that very well either. The bigger problem, which is related to my primary issue, is that these aren't people that seem terribly changed by the events of the film. These are characters that go through a lot, and I don't think it's reflected well in the film.

Excellent cast, if true. Of course, the last one had a great cast as well.