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  • 98 Comments
Joined 4 months ago
Cake day: August 26th, 2024
  • istewart@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 23rd December 2024English
    5·
    1 day ago

    I feel like before Redbox went under, it was also a dumping ground for this sort of thing. For instance, that mid-budget Western “Rust” where Alec Baldwin killed the camerawoman on set felt like it was destined for this sort of distribution strategy. Who’s clamoring to go out to the theater to see a Western with Alec Baldwin these days? But it might stand out among all the other slop when you’re looking to turn your brain off on a Saturday night.

    See also the rise of the “geezer-teasers,” where a random 80s/90s action star signs up to appear in the first and last 10 minutes of a generic action movie filmed someplace inexpensive, most likely eastern Europe or southeast Asia. There were a lot of those. Perhaps my favorite, that I still want to watch someday, was Danny Trejo and Danny Glover in “Bad-Ass 2: Bad-Asses.”

  • istewart@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 23rd December 2024English
    11·
    6 days ago

    I’m employing the working hypothesis that gamers are particularly easy to trick with rage-bait because of short-circuited dopamine loops. One must compulsively game, but if the game sucks, then there must be an explanation that’s as simple as the game. I’ve got a couple of buddies who are always whining about the new Call of Duty, but always pick it up every year anyway. This correlates with all the anti-woke misogyny freakouts, too… their gaming is on a spectrum with their porn consumption, and a lot of these weirdos are probably alt-tabbing back and forth as urges arise.

    I was rather shocked that Epic took down UT2003/2004 from the storefronts where it still existed, on top of already failing to deliver the new-generation Unreal Tournament. Seems like a wholly thoughtless way to bury their history, but maybe there were some expiring licensing rights tied up in that? I seriously have to doubt that, though.

  • istewart@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•"Defining AI"English
    8·
    14 days ago

    I sharply disagree, but this is a subtlety that’s lost on a lot of people. The tech industry’s success since at least the 1990s, up until the mid-2010s, was about making technology easier for the individual user, a more accessible and (potentially) more efficient means for accomplishing many routine interactions. Tech devices existed as tools in service of the will of the end user, and if you were really willing to drink the kool-aid, extensions of the user themselves, Jobs’ “bicycle for the mind.”

    The expectations being cultivated for AI now set it up as an entirely separate entity from the end user, and one that is potentially more capable at some point in the ill-defined future. This opens the door toward resources being reallocated towards this nebulously powerful entity, and the allocation of shared resources is at the very core of politics. This is a hard pivot away from how technology was designed before! You and I know it’s a load of complete hogwash, but that doesn’t prevent the potential bamboozlement of the lagging generation of policy-makers. Even someone as relatively young as Kamala Harris or her likely successor Gavin Newsom could be roped into this bullshit, if only because they know where their biggest donation checks come from.

    The future in which the current crop of AI retailers enjoy a successful political program is no longer one where a rising tide lifts all boats. But, for the time being, it can still be pitched as such due to deeply embedded cultural expectations.