TechTakes

Decided to check the Grokipedia "article" on the Muskrat out of morbid curiosity.

I haven't seen anything this fawning since that one YouTube video which called him, and I quote its title directly, "The guy who is saving the world".

LET THE MATING BEGIN

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.

Baldur Bjarnason's (indirectly) given his thoughts on the piece, treating its existence (and the subsequent fallout) as a cautionary tale on why journalistic practices exist and how conflicts of interest can come back to haunt you.

(In particular, Baldur notes that Zitron could've nipped this problem in the bud by firing his AI-related clients after he became the premier AI critic.)

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

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).

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.