The problem with this, of course, is that low-respect-but-still-important "bullshit jobs" like writing marketing copy and doing copyediting and so on were the jobs that people broke into the industry with at all. If tools like chatgpt are used to replace these lower rung jobs, there will be no lower rung jobs for new people to get experience in. The only people who will get any of the remaining jobs are people who have connections instead of experience, which is to say, wealthy people and their children.

All of our entertainment is going to get completely dominated by extremely blinkered and wildly inexperienced rich white people. I mean, it already was, but at least when the lower rung jobs were there, there was a broader pool of applicants with deeper experience who filtered up into the industry and were able to move talented people in. Now there won't even be that. It's going to be five levels of executives and ten sawn off ladder rungs beneath them, swaying in the literary wind.

QAnon Anonymous started out as an explanation show about the umbrella conspiracy "QAnon", and now it's morphed into a sort of exploratory show about various figures associated generally with right-wing grifting. The usual format is news, followed by a deeper dive on a subject or an interview, followed by a fictional tale. It's pretty irony poisoned, but not as much as Some More News and Worst Year Ever are. Also, it has no advertisements, but you get a second weekly show if you subscribe to their patreon. I subscribe, and I definitely do not regret it.

I also like Knowledge Fight, which is a multiple-times-a-week dive into the completely insane things Alex Jones, the Infowars guy, has been saying and doing. Occasional forays into discussion other very crazy people (the "wacky wednesday" segments). Also no advertisements, and all the episodes are freely available.

Would you care to qualify your claim with a link to a news story or other investigative work?

It definitely seems like there's a glut of fake reviews on amazon, but Alex Blumberg's (yes, of This American Life, yes, recipient of a George Polk Award for same) research only turned up bad behavior on the part of sellers. Enabled and allowed by Amazon opening up the market to international sellers yes, but... not Amazon directly.

I'm not disputing your major point (that 4 and 5 star reviews are untrustworthy), but I do want a citation for your claim that Amazon itself is directly responsible for fake reviews. That Amazon as a company is first party to the creation of fake 4-5 star reviews would be (should be!) a bombshell of a news story.

By Max Hastings.

Fascinating, but its so tall that it's slightly awkward to hold it open with one hand, which I find myself doing a lot because I'm referencing things or looking up word definitions on my phone.

I had the good fortune of visiting Powell's City of Books for the first time in years in August and I've been working very slowly (much more slowly than I normally go) through the pile of books I got there.

Will it though? This is a fundamentally difficult problem. The cultural meaning of signage and symbolism changes. It may in fact be impossible to put up radiation warning signs retain their meaning for 10,000 years, much less physically last that long. A couple decades ago, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant formed a panel of a bunch of thinkers (Carl Sagan was invited, but could not attend due to a conflict) and asked them to invent radiation warning signage that would last for an arbitrary length of time: 10,000 years.

They were, at best, only partially successful, and the problem of the cultural meaning of symbols changing was never fully addressed.

I have an iPod Nano (fifth generation). I use it almost entirely as a podcast device, and the built in FM tuner is nice when I'm walking somewhere and I want to listen to the radio (I listen to a lot of public radio). The thing holds decent charge and has a decent enough amount of space, allowing me to keep the space open in my phone and not use up charge on the same. It may a little cumbersome sometimes, but not very. I like it, and will continue to like it until it eventually dies an ignominious death.

Then I'll probably replace it with something non-apple. iPods are nice, but expensive. This one was a gift.

In the United States, there are some exceedingly narrow limitations on the freedom of expression outside the public airwaves (which I will not address because frankly I don't know much about them). One of the exceptional few them is outlined by Ohoio v. Brandenburg: "Freedoms of speech and press do not permit a State to forbid advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action."

In order for speech to not be protected by the first amendment under Brandenberg, it must pass both requirements present in the last few words of the quote. You will note that generic death threats almost never pass this test. You will further note that this is nothing nearly like the overused "fire in a crowded theater" platitude that is quite wrong.

The correct response to speech you dislike is more speech (i.e. your own) or taking advantage of the numerous technologies available to personally block out speech you find disagreeable (freedom of expression does not require that other people listen).

I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. You have to pay for that. If however you are an interested layman, like myself, I encourage you to read several articles published by noted First Amendment advocate and actual lawyer for same (in addition to his usual criminal defense gig) Ken White, who operates the lawblog "Popehat".

So what would you call it then? Despite egregious twisting by modern spin doctors (cf. "Restoring Internet Freedom"), words still have meaning. If not "Ethics in Tech", then what? It's already as brief as it can possibly be. More words would muddle the statement. They've specifically mentioned UNESCOs stance in their public statement, as quoted by the FSF (and appearing in The Fucking Summary). They clearly believe that DRM is unethical. So they call themselves "Ethics in Tech".

Now I don't know anything else about this group (they seem new) but here's their mission statement:

"Local developers, thinkers, artists, and digital citizens will join together to apply public pressure on W3C ahead of Tim Berners-Lee announcement about the future of EME. Our mission is to check the enormous influence and market pressure from the Tech Industry through physical mobilization and community education. We will do this by Marching on W3C’s headquarters, located in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), using targeted messaging, protest signs, distributing literature. The hope is to activate and educate the community of academics around Cambridge and increase the potential damage to reputation for W3C’s political endorsement of EME."

The page also mentions there was a speech. I've done some searching but I can't turn up a transcript, so we might have to wait a day for that. At any rate, this group's beliefs about DRM clearly align with yours. So here's the sixty-four thousand dollar question again: Given the choice, what would you call the group?

Living in this state is simply Unreal. They can pry my 8 Ball out of my cold, dead hands.

I like about Battlefield 1 because it's at least as much about the horrors of the first world war as it is about infantry and vehicle combat.

BF1 includes a mechanic where the player can initiate a bayonet charge, assuming they have a weapon with a bayonet attached. The player can sprint at faster-than-full speed for about thirty meters before losing his steam (and being penalized with much slower movement for a short period). If during that charge he makes physical contact with an enemy player, the enemy player is impaled and instantly killed in a way that cannot be reversed by the medic class. But during that charge, the player character is screaming and by golly some of these screams are as much fear as they are a battle cry. The whole experience of a successful bayonet charge is brutal and horrifyingly personal, for both players. It's an adrenaline rush that comes from a mixture of horror at the gruesome, but desirable results.

Melee takedowns, with non-bayonet weapons, are equally brutal. Knife takedowns usually involve a literal hug with the left arm and a plunging blade in the right fist. Club takedowns are blows to the shin and then chin, or simply a bash across the back of the head. Club takedowns on prone enemies are particularly awful: The enemy is hooked onto his back with one swing, and then gets a (visibly horrified) face full of mace. Or simply a boot on the neck. Sword and hatchet takedowns are strangely the least personal. Just double-handed swings... to the shoulderblades. Or the neck.

The recently released DLC is all about the French (who for some reason weren't included in the base game because ???). There's an "Operation" (a long-form game taking place across two maps between attackers and defenders) called Devil's Anvil, which is set in Verdun. The first map is surrounded by a raging forest fire set by the artillery barrage in the late evening and early twilight. As the game progresses, it gets dimmer and darker, and periodically the wind changes and the whole battlefield is cloaked in smoke from the fire, reducing visibility to a few meters at best. As the attackers get nearer to the final objective, the music swells, the low brasses drone stranger, and the sun sets beyond the hillside, dunking the battlefield into shadow, backlit by the raging forest fire. It's hard, grinding combat up a hillside into fortifications, and the body count is always high. The second map of Devil's Anvil is the partially shattered open Fort de Vaux. Close combat in a confusion of corridors is bad already, but the sound design is such that if you're not in combat, you're hearing the sounds of combat, but twisted and altered by the concrete tunnels around you.

BF1 isn't anywhere near a realistic simulation of WWI, but it certainly captures a smidgen of the horrors and lunar landscapes of that war. Oh, and the gameplay is different because of the lower tech base too. Sure there are machineguns, but weapons that take a recognizable magazine are rare. Many are reloaded individually or with stripper clips, have low rates of fire, poor accuracy, slow muzzle velocities, strange visual impediments, or simply smaller ammo capacities. It's a substantially different game from "modern" or even WWII shooters.

I'm probably doing a pretty bad job of explaining why I like BF1, but I've written a bunch already and this point it feels like an enthusiast ramble so I'm going to stop now. For the record, I also enjoy the more arcade-y combat of UT, Tribes, and TF2. Certainly they're much closer to games of real skill than the massive grindfest clusterfucks that show up in the 64 player games of Operations that I also enjoy. It's just a matter of which kind of gameplay I'm looking for at any given time.

I live in San Jose CA and the meat came from Morris Grassfed Beef and the price/pound is still better than what I can get at the grocery store. I imagine the price difference described by you and Eristone can probably be ascribed to me being in the SF Bay Area and you and Eristone living Somewhere Else.

Plus, I didn't pay for this, my parents did. I was just the one assigned to pick up the beef.

Oh damn, there goes my moderation in this comment section. Oh well.

It's a quarter-cow's worth of (in this case, grass fed) beef for $8.69 a pound. A split half is roughly 90 lbs. total, half ground beef and the rest an assortment. It's basically buying a fully butchered quarter-carcass, so you get approximately the steaks and pieces that you would get if you had literally purchased a quarter of a cow. It's a very good deal on very good beef if you have the freezer space and don't mind having a lot of ground beef.

30-50 hours until space stage? Are you sure you played the same game I did?

I'll grant that if you spent two or three hours designing your creature at each stage plus all the vehicles and buildings you could definitely rack up more than twenty hours by the Space stage, but that's at the far end of the spectrum. I never had the patience for it, so I usually went from speck to spaceship in the span of five or six hours of play.

The outrage over Spore that I recall was more about the fact that the Creature, Tribal, and Civilization stages were so brief and shallow. A lot of the hype for Spore before release was that you supposedly had a third person adventure, a tactical (read: micro heavy) RTS, Civ Lite, and Elite/Colony Management game all wrapped up in a pretty package. The novel gimmick was that you got to do all these Fun Awesome Things with the very species you guided from paramecium to Galactic Powerhouse. The concept was extremely cool.

Instead, the players got an arcade game, a brief third person walking simulator, exactly one match of Warcraft III, the easiest game of Civ possible, and an "epic" space stage that had the grindiest, most boring colony management game I've ever played. And the space combat wasn't any fun either. In fact, the Space section was probably the weakest part of the game, which is why Galactic Adventures brought back the third person adventuring thing with player-made dungeons, which was actually worthwhile.

What? You've completely missed the point.

Everyone since the dawn of time has been able to go to websites like FPSBanana (which still loads slow because apparently it's 2004 or something) and download and install every custom skin/model/voice/particle effect they could possibly want. They can still do this. Thousands of people do. The problem is that such modifications are entirely client side, and thus can only ever be for personal satisfaction.

The point of microtransaction items like "cosmetics in TF2 and shitty mspaint reskins in CS:GO" is for other people to see your fancy hat/weapon. It's to show it off to people other than yourself. Some of it is conspicuous consumption to be sure, but a lot of people like customizing their digital avatars for everyone else to see. That appeal will never disappear. For good or for ill, microtransactions are the lifeblood of many games that millions of people play literally every day. The peak today for DOTA 2 was nearly a million players. League of Legends claims tens of millions of unique players monthly.

Of course valve shutting down these gambling sites is about money. It's also about gambling, but in reality gambling is about money anyways so... yeah. It's just not about mods like you erroneously seem to think it is.