Meta's push towards virtual and augmented reality has clearly been a massive failure from the billions they invested into the "metaverse" only to come up with a shitty VRChat clone that lasted mere months. Meanwhile the only reason they're really in the news lately is because they stole Google's failed smart glasses concept, paired up with Ray-Ban and made the ultimate tool for creeps to record and harass women without their consent.

Valve are wise to poach their talent who have undoubtedly been throigh wave after wave of mass layoffs. The only other more significant hire they could have made other than Amanda would have been somehow bringing the fourth-dimensional being housed in a meatsuit known as John Carmack on board. But he's busy with AGI.

If Cyberleek isn't shitposting out of his ass and actually has a deadman's switch which could leak the build in its entirety online, then this could be a very dumb move on Take Two's end. The authorities would need to go full Ross Ulbricht on his ass and hope they can control the switch.

What's even sadder is that T2I and Rockstar have been such greedy litigious fucks over the years that I'm genuinely rooting for a crypto scammer who has used this entire leak to promote his shitcoin over them.

Just the fact that the GTA6 Extended Look will be a timed Netflix exclusive gives me the ick. That's one step removed from releasing game trailers as exclusive PPV events.

If we're gonna start treating game reveals like UFC and WrestleMania then I'm out.

I was gifted an Alexa by a (previous) girlfriend. I haven't even opened it because I have very little use for an AI companion. And I too know people working in FAANG and how invasive those smart devices are.

If your device was even capable of downloading a cat video, we were still in the era when your cell phone carrier would have charged you $1.99 to do it.

Or companies like Jamba/Jamster would have buried a clause in their T&Cs allowing them to send you periodic promotional texts and bill the fuck out of you for it.

What you think is them selling a $1.99 video of an anthropomorphic frog with a visible schlong making car noises is actually a predatory subscription scam.

Do what they did with Killer Instinct 2013 and Battletoads 2020. Bring in another studio but keep the main company associated with the IP in an advisory/support role. Rare clearly shouldn't be trusted with solo developing another game and neither should Bungie.

Or, do what Activision did with Neversoft when they effectively merged them with Infinity Ward and became one of the three core CoD developers. Merging Arkane with Bungie could make one hell of a team.

Bungie holds serious brand recognition with Halo fans.

That is one of the worst names I've seen...

And I say this as someone who played the US version of RollerCoaster Tycoon and saw the localization team at MicroProse renamed the Launched Freefall ride the "Whoa Belly."

The only reason I even have EGS installed is for the occasional free game they offer. But also Kingdom Hearts. I bought the trilogy on PC long before a Steam release was even announced, and I thought that if Tim Sweeney managed to convince Disney and Square-Enix to finally give the franchise a PC release then he must have thrown ludicrous amounts of Fortnite money to secure exclusive distribution rights.

Will be great if I can get their launcher and games running far more easily on my Steam Deck...

I think it was a consequence of them fleshing out the Halo lore after the first game became a surprise hit. To me Halo 2 Cortana will always be the best design.

Apart from Master Chief Collection and Campaign Evolved, I haven't touched a post-Bungie Halo game, so I can't really comment on the quality of 4, 5 or Infinite. From what I've heard, 4 had a divisive campaign and horrible multiplayer, Halo 5 had decent multiplayer and a terrible story, and Infinite was heavily flawed.

What I can say is that 343 Industries fucked up hard with remastering the old games. Not even Rare (a development studio with a similarly bad reputation for pumping out shit game after shit game under Microsoft) have managed the feat of fucking up a remaster. Halo 1 Anniversary genuinely has updated graphics that do not align at all with the level geometry, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the Truth & Reconciliation mission where you had to sneak past Covenant forces, and if you were playing on the updated graphics, they could see and shoot you through boulders.

The studio rebrand and switch to Unreal 5 was a huge gamble that clearly didn't pay off, because Campaign Evolved had terrible gunplay, glaring bugs, prequel missions with bad design and more exposition than a Shounen anime, and a redesign of Cortana where she has an incredibly masculine jawline and genuinely looks like Jerma985 wearing a wig.

I once saw a comment on Facebook about how the Halo Studios logo looks like an ODST being pounded in the ass with a giant dildo and I genuinely cannot unsee that image. It's also a very fitting metaphor for what they did to the Halo franchise.

Disbanding Halo Studios, waiting for Marathon to inevitably fail and then buying Bungie from Sony for chump change is probably the best thing Asha Sharma can do with the franchise right now.

Hate to disappoint you, but their EBITDA looks fucking solid.

Unfortunately being an asshole and a Tintin-looking snake has worked wonders for Spez and his bank account.

Each technological advancement has created new jobs in some capacity. What new jobs has AI created? And don't tell me "prompt engineer" like every AI bro likes to hype up. That is not an actual position and the fact that I cannot find any jobs advertised where typing out very specific and accurate prompts are one of the skills required is proof of this.

AI isn't perfect. It hallucinates and sometimes gives bad answers. But I think that we are one incredibly good model away from being able to reliably automate white collar work.

I'm talking about a scenario where entire industries of workers end up getting displaced by AI and robotics, and I don't think we're far off from this becoming a reality. If Tesla's Optimus 3 robots are anywhere near as advanced as they are rumoured to be, they could easily replace warehouse and logistics workers.

We already have Waymo disrupting the taxi industry further by removing the driver from the equation, and Miso Robotics automating kitchens in restaurant chains like Jersey Mike's Subs and White Castle.

Also, doesn't means-testing UBI kinda defeat its intended purpose?

UBI to me is a leftist pipe dream of how a post-scarcity society could work. When you actually look at the financials and how greedy humanity is, it all falls apart and will either bankrupt entire nations or pay an absolute pittance.

The UK's voluntary living wage is £13.45 an hour, which translates to £26,227.50 for someone working full time 37.5 hours a week. If we replaced our entire welfare system (state pensions, Universal Credit, child benefit, Personal Independence Payments, Disability Living Allowance, etc) and paid our approx 58.1 million population of working age people and retirees the living wage, it would cost us over £1.5 trillion, or roughly half our annual GDP. Our current welfare expenditure by comparison is at an estimated £333.7 billion.

I am using the Living Wage as a comparison since it's an agreed metric calculated by a non-profit organisation for how much a worker would need to earn to live on their wage in the UK. To pay a living wage to every adult in the country we would need to spend nearly three times as much as what the USA spends on its military.

The question then becomes "How the fuck will we pay for it?" We can't even get the rich to pay their fair share of tax as things stand. They are going to flat-out refuse to foot the bill once AI leads to mass unemployment.

What I think is a more likely scenario is societal collapse. People starve, leading to widespread civil unrest and then a brutal and violent crackdown, made easier than ever by armed drones and humanoid robots that have no sense of morals. This is exactly the kind of doomsday scenario that a lot of billionaires are prepping for.

The only way I can see humanity not ripping itself apart is if automation somehow makes the cost of living so cheap that UBI could viably exist.

I got a warning for replying to a comment on the r/WTF subreddit about the legality of using lethal force on a home intruder literally bashing your door down with a rifle, which basically read like "fire a warning shot, if theh dont back down, pew pew pew"

(In retrospect it was bad advice. I'm from a country that heavily restricts guns. Warning shots are a bad idea as many pointed out to me.)

Penalty upheld on appeal. These cucks genuinely believe I'm glorifying violence.

I am very tempted to pull the UK GDPR card on them, which would restrict them from using my data to make fully automated decisions and escalate it to an ICO complaint. AI got an infraction on my account and to know I'm one step away from a suspension or permanent ban is unsettling.

I work in financial reporting, so I have a decent idea of what makes up things like operating profit/loss and Adjusted EBITDA.

This does not look good for Reddit and if the company only managed a $90.8m loss after jacking up API costs, nuking virtually every third-party client, backstabbing every power mod, giving alternatives like Lemmy and Kbin an actual user base and selling off user data to Google, then I fully expect things to get a lot worse on the site.

That $50,000 bounty is likely a bigger payout than two years of wages as a burger flipper...

Anyone with basic critical thinking skills would have known this whole scandal was bullshit in the first place. Did it not occur to any of these TERFs and transphobes that Algeria (a Muslim nation known for persecuting the LGBTQ community as a whole) is one of the least-likely nations to field a trans candidate?

Adobe: "We want to acquire Figma"

CMA: "Figma balls"

Unlike Reddit, Stack Overflow would probably be better without moderators.

In fact, you could easily replace Stack Overflow mods with a script that goes into every new question, comments "USE THE FUCKING SEARCH BAR" and locks the thread.

I think a lot of moderators are just going to back down and return to business-as-usual from tomorrow. Reddit will suffer as a business but this isn't going to downright kill the site. Unlike say... Tumblr or OnlyFans, Reddit has a far more diverse clientele and many of them couldn't give a shit about third-party apps.

These half-arsed protests staged after the 14th June have told me that most of Reddit's mods are fucking cowards who are more afraid of losing their status as internet janitors than all the third-party apps.

Reddit's moderators could have easily brought the site to its knees if they just collectively stopped enforcing rules (including site-wide ones), removed Automoderator, unbanned everybody, then told the community to just go nuts.

The mods of /r/interestingasfuck had the right idea by encouraging users to post NSFW content, since this would have chased away advertisers in droves.

I mean the whole "sexy pics of John Oliver" protest that /r/pics had isn't going to chase away advertisers and was something that Spez could easily ignore, but having your content displayed alongside a flood of explicit pornographic images definitely will.