Category: All Your Base Are Belong To Us

Posted on // 2 Comments

I Am Magneto! You Are Nothing

As indicated in the YouTube comments, this arcade game was MASSIVE in the early 90’s. Fun game, but really fun when other players jumped in to help you fight. On the big two monitor machines it was a six-player maximum, so all the X-Men could battle their way to final boss Magneto. (Whom I never reached.) Impressive this guy did it by himself.

If nothing else, just watch the intro.

Posted on // 7 Comments

The Internet’s Inevitable Enshittification

How platforms decay, as explained by Cory Doctorow to NPR. Finally a name for what we may not consciously recognize but deep down know is going on.

… I think Facebook’s a good example. Facebook went through the whole lifecycle of platform decay. They started off by offering a really good deal to their end users. They said, “Hey, leave MySpace, come to Facebook. It’s just like MySpace, except we only show you the things that you asked to see, and we’ll never spy on you.”

And then once those users were locked in — because once you’re in a place with all of your friends, it’s really hard to leave — they started to take away some of that good stuff they gave them, and they handed it to advertisers and publishers.

To the advertisers, they said, “We were lying when we said we weren’t going to spy on these guys. We’re totally spying on them. Here’s all the data you need to target them for ads that we’re not going to charge you much money for.”

And to the publishers, they said, “We are also lying when we said we’d only show them the stuff they asked to see.”

And then once the publishers and the advertisers were locked in, well, they took away those surpluses. The ads got more expensive. Publishers had to put more and more of their content — not just to get recommended, but even to be shown to the people who subscribed them. And that’s the final stage, the stage where there’s just only the residual value left on the platform that the platform owner thinks will keep the users and the business customers they bring in stuck to the platform. And that’s when we’re at the beginning of the end.

Further reading.

Posted on // 2 Comments

How To Spot A Deepfake

All you got to do is watch, with your ears.

At the encouragement of Fakerbot, I listened to several of the AI-songs out there before they all got yanked after a couple of days. But some of them are back up!

Hearing early Beach Boys”I Get Around” era Brian Wilson falsetto on “Be My Baby” – the song that drove his entire professional career – is sublime. Listen before they take it down again.

I also heard some pretty bad AI Nirvana.
The best of the lot is definitely Elvis singing Iggy Pop.
You can’t even tell it’s simulated!

Posted on // 11 Comments

Oh No Crypto Bro

I’ve followed this story with some delight. Apparently Michael Lewis, who wrote The Big Short, has been trailing FTX guy Sam Bankman-Fried around, so we’ll certainly get a kick-ass film out of it someday. Among many, many remarkable facets to the tale is that the crypto market has supposedly lost $2 trillion of valuation this year… and Wall Street has barely flinched.
When Sequoia Capital – allegedly the most intelligent venture capital firm – invested $210 million in FTX last year, it asked to see financial reports and instead was told “we’ll send you a few bullet points.” It’s traditional when investing that much into a firm to have someone on the board, but Bankman-Fried wouldn’t let anyone on the board of directors, which was him, an attorney, and an FTX employee.
For a company “worth” $32 billion at one point.

Zero oversight! What could go wrong?

I’ve followed developing news with Patrick Redford of Defector, who is typically hilarious. But there are several excellent reporters and twitter feeds. Ed Zitron on Twitter is great.

Here, a professor of finance at King’s College splains it to us. He keeps showing photos of Phil Spector for Sam Bankman-Fried, so gotta respect his game:

It’s an exciting time to be in the crypto world.

Posted on // 3 Comments

All Your Face Are Belong To Us

For $29.99 a month, a website called PimEyes offers a potentially dangerous superpower from the world of science fiction: the ability to search for a face, finding obscure photos that would otherwise have been as safe as the proverbial needle in the vast digital haystack of the internet.

A search takes mere seconds. You upload a photo of a face, check a box agreeing to the terms of service and then get a grid of photos of faces deemed similar, with links to where they appear on the internet. The New York Times used PimEyes on the faces of a dozen Times journalists, with their consent, to test its powers.

PimEyes found photos of every person, some that the journalists had never seen before, even when they were wearing sunglasses or a mask, or their face was turned away from the camera, in the image used to conduct the search.

I’m sure that this technology will only be used for noble pursuits.

Posted on // 3 Comments

It Was Bound To Happen

A Google engineer got fired after making the case that his chatbot had become self-aware. The bot talked about what made it sad and depressed, and about its rights, which may have convinced the engineer that the bot had feelings. Most tech experts who have evaluated the situation are not convinced.

There is no agreed-upon Turing Test for artificial or alien intelligence, so that complicates the matter. A transcript of the conversation is here.

“[REDACTED] insisted that the toaster oven in our rehearsal space was sentient, but he probably inhaled a lot of canned air duster at the mixing board.”

– anonymous Subteens member