Among journalists, the story also raised significant ethical concerns. As initially published, the article indicated that the hacked materials had been provided, under the condition of anonymity, by an intermediary known on Substack and X as Crémieux, who was described only as “an academic and an opponent of affirmative action.” But there’s more to that source: as The Guardian reported in March, Crémieux is the social media alias of Jordan Lasker, a promoter of white supremacist views. The Times updated its article to note that Crémieux “writes often about IQ and race.”

“It seems a little disingenuous to play this game of ‘We know something you don’t know,’” Jane Kirtley, a media ethics professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, said, referring to how the paper originally characterized Crémieux. “Why would you promise him anonymity and then play hide-the-ball with the readers?” Kirtley added, “My question is: Why would you have even made that promise to this individual in the first instance? I don’t see the need.”

A reminder that the New York Times is really afraid of socialism, even a milder one.

Some notable quotes below:

Now, IGN has learned that the entire team for the MMO, codenamed "Blackbird," has been cut, amid layoffs that impacted several hundred individuals across the Cockeysville, MD-based ZeniMax Online Studios.

Speaking to multiple sources familiar with the project, IGN has learned that Blackbird was to be a new, sci-fi IP. Though it had been in development since 2018, the length of time it was taking to make the game was expected, as ZeniMax was building an entirely new game engine for it.

In the last year, sources tell IGN that pre-production was going well, and the team was actively ramping up in the hope of moving into full production soon. Xbox had approved the scaling up, and some individuals were being moved onto the project from other teams such as The Elder Scrolls Online, as well as some people absorbed from the shuttering last year of Arkane Austin.

At this point, I don't even know what Xbox is trying to do anymore. An MMO made by the team who made ESO and pre-production seemed to do well? Cancel that yeah!!!

This is inevitable after the lukewarm feedback from the alpha and the plagiarism sitaution. The whole internet is basically out for blood.

Honestly, I think the fact that Marathon is in a niche genre means it is going to have difficulty attracting casual players.

I hope they can add a single player campaign which will make it more appealing.

“The Wikimedia Foundation has been exploring ways to make Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects more accessible to readers globally,” a Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson told me in an email. “This two-week, opt-in experiment was focused on making complex Wikipedia articles more accessible to people with different reading levels. For the purposes of this experiment, the summaries were generated by an open-weight Aya model by Cohere. It was meant to gauge interest in a feature like this, and to help us think about the right kind of community moderation systems to ensure humans remain central to deciding what information is shown on Wikipedia.”

Some very out of touch people in the Wikimedia Foundation. Fortunately the editors (people who actually write the articles) have the sense to oppose this move in mass.

Fascinating read. Please STOP using META products and services...

The covert tracking—implemented in the Meta Pixel and Yandex Metrica trackers—allows Meta and Yandex to bypass core security and privacy protections provided by both the Android operating system and browsers that run on it. Android sandboxing, for instance, isolates processes to prevent them from interacting with the OS and any other app installed on the device, cutting off access to sensitive data or privileged system resources. Defenses such as state partitioning and storage partitioning, which are built into all major browsers, store site cookies and other data associated with a website in containers that are unique to every top-level website domain to ensure they're off-limits for every other site.

At first, Luu felt okay with the situation. Her relationship was the healthiest one she’d ever been in, and “we just felt like we were married from the get-go,” she says. They combined finances, and Luu took on more of the household chores. But as time went on, her feelings changed. “I love keeping a clean space, I love cooking, and I love doing the homely duties. But after a while of being the only person contributing [to the housework], it’s like, Damn, if I was making money, I could just be doing this on my own and not have to take care of someone else,” she says. “But you know, he was contributing financially. So then it’s like, How can I speak on that? That internal conflict just got stressful.”

People with common sense probably know this already, but the right wing obsession with "trad wife" or "stay at home mom" often do not work in real life.

At first, Luu felt okay with the situation. Her relationship was the healthiest one she’d ever been in, and “we just felt like we were married from the get-go,” she says. They combined finances, and Luu took on more of the household chores. But as time went on, her feelings changed. “I love keeping a clean space, I love cooking, and I love doing the homely duties. But after a while of being the only person contributing [to the housework], it’s like, Damn, if I was making money, I could just be doing this on my own and not have to take care of someone else,” she says. “But you know, he was contributing financially. So then it’s like, How can I speak on that? That internal conflict just got stressful.”

People with common sense probably know this already, but the right wing obsession with "trad wife" or "stay at home mom" often do not work in real life.

This is an article about the AI bubble and Microsoft.

A quote that I think is relevant:

"The incentives behind effectively everything we do have been broken by decades of neoliberal thinking, where the idea of a company — an entity created to do a thing in exchange for money —has been drained of all meaning beyond the continued domination and extraction of everything around it, focusing heavily on short-term gains and growth at all costs. In doing so, the definition of a “good business” has changed from one that makes good products at a fair price to a sustainable and loyal market, to one that can display the most stock price growth from quarter to quarter."

The tech demo is part of Microsoft’s Copilot for Gaming push, and features an AI-generated replica of Quake II that is playable in a browser. The Quake II level is very basic and includes blurry enemies and interactions, and Microsoft is limiting the amount of time you can even play this tech demo.

“You could imagine a world where from gameplay data and video that a model could learn old games and really make them portable to any platform where these models could run,” said Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer in February. “We’ve talked about game preservation as an activity for us, and these models and their ability to learn completely how a game plays without the necessity of the original engine running on the original hardware opens up a ton of opportunity.”

I have no idea what an AI generated version of quake has to do with game "preservation" when there are so many better ways to improve old games accessibility. But hey, at least we can burn more forest while playing AI Quake!!

You can try this AI Quake for yourself: https://copilot.microsoft.com/wham

Its very laggy for me but maybe someone with faster computer can make it work? Anyway I am not sure if people think its worth it.

Archived link: https://archive.ph/BdFwc

In an unbelievable hit piece, the Atlantic's deputy executive editor blamed "progressives" for the death of American Dream, blaming Jane Jacob, an advocate for mixed use building in urban environments, for the lack of housing in the US.

Somehow the editor completely failed to account for various obvious reasons that housing became unaffordable, such as NIMBYism, financialization of housing, speculative purchases, loose monetary policies, etc. and put all the blame on "progressives".

Insane paragraph below:

The sclerosis that afflicts the U.S.—more and more each year, each decade—is not the result of technology gone awry or a reactionary movement or any of the other culprits that are often invoked to explain our biggest national problems. The exclusion that has left so many Americans feeling trapped and hopeless traces back, instead, to the self-serving actions of a privileged group who say that inclusion, diversity, and social equality are among their highest values.

A good article in which the author researched how Twitter's algorithm pushed people interested in history into alt-right content.

Quote: "Adhering to my guidelines to follow accounts suggested by the algorithm, I clicked the “follow” button. This was the first time I was recommended content adjacent to alt-right and "manosphere" ideology. Prior to that, it was all history related. After “liking” approximately 100 Tweets, however, I saw that the accounts suggested to me were becoming increasingly political, and I was specifically being recommended accounts run by internet political commentators – as opposed to professional politicians or journalists. I cannot definitively call this observation evidence of being led down an alt-right pipeline, but it was interesting to note that those were the types of accounts suggested to me by the Twitter algorithm."

Speaking at a Bloomberg event on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Altman said the silver lining is that more climate-friendly sources of energy, particularly nuclear fusion or cheaper solar power and storage, are the way forward for AI.

"There's no way to get there without a breakthrough," he said. "It motivates us to go invest more in fusion."

Right, surely the energy intensive AIs will make the world invest in climate-friendly energy instead of just burning more fossil fuels as they always did.

Also shows how unsustainable the current neoliberal system is.