You're absolutely right, I should have just followed Hitchens's razor from the start:

What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

Or, put simply: launching a major patch and running a wider Free Fly in the same week… we’re not going to do that.

Well, it's good to see that they're trying to handle the inevitable fires before the next free fly.

The single player game (Squadron 42) is supposed to release this year. Monthly newsletters still state this, but they haven't locked in a release date for it yet. I wouldn't be surprised if they pushed it back to next year.

They showed off over an hour's worth of gameplay footage for the first mission recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H-0x4xk2Xk

The Star Citizen 1.0 release date won't be for at least a few more years (I would guess 5 years if they stick with their currently projected release items).

On the plus side, the game is in a much better state than where it was 2 years ago. Server crashes (30k's) are practically non-existant. We have fauna in game now. There are some "boss fights" and raid-like gameplay. NPCs don't T-pose all over the place. NPCs can be very reactive (if you find a good server). There can be ~700+ players flying around across the 3 solar systems at the moment. VR support has been added. However, the learning curve is still heavily geared towards learning the workarounds to common bugs.

There's always controversy for one reason or another. My biggest recommendation is to avoid grinding for anything in this game. Just play to have fun.

Interesting, I've never heard the "front for some government op" angle. Care to explain some more?

Their financials are more public than many companies, you can dig through them yourself if you suspect something.

They summarize everything from their most recent financial statements here.

Or you can review everything in much more detail with what they submitted to the UK here.

Direct link to the most recent 51 page document here.

As far as fake ships, most of the announced ships have already been released and are playable today. They're continuing to release new major updates a few times a year that anyone can play. So, I'm not sure what you mean by "no output".

I'm getting invalid cert errors when trying to access PieFed.social now.

Edit: looks like it's resolved now.

To quote one of my favorite authors:

“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

Someone just got the AWS bill.

It's worth pointing out that once Pokémon Go players found out about OSM, we saw a massive increase in new users as well as those contributing to OSM so that the maps would better reflect the areas they played in.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334378297_How_an_augmented_reality_game_Pokemon_GO_affected_volunteer_contributions_to_OpenStreetMap

Unfortunately there are always a few that will try to game any system. In this case they're essentially vandalizing OSM for their own selfish reasons.

Jail makes the most sense considering he returned with the same ticket in his pocket, but then again, since his family reported him missing you would have thought that they would have found out that he was in jail...

Better/additional info here: https://www.gamesradar.com/games/third-person-shooter/helldivers-2-community-manager-seemingly-fired-after-encouraging-negative-reviews-over-now-canceled-psn-mandate-i-knew-i-was-taking-a-risk-with-what-i-said/

Spitz:

"Generally it's not a good idea to tell people to refund and leave negative reviews when you're a community manager. TIL," Spitz said. "I appreciate all the support and I appreciate even more that everyone can play the game again without restrictions. I knew I was taking a risk with what I said about refunding and changing reviews. I stand by it. It was my job to represent the community, that's what I did."

They added: "I wanted to work for Arrowhead because they're my all-time favorite studio. I got that chance. I'm thankful for that opportunity. I'd happily continue working for them if I had the choice, but that isn't up to me or anyone else in here. I can walk away happy and I don't want anyone causing trouble on my behalf, especially not to people I still have a lot of care and respect for."

This definitely sounds like Sony wanted them out and Arrowhead wanted them to stay.

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1747/

Disney lost their old camera tech used to make a "yellow screen" with sodium vapor lights.

It's actually better than a green screen because the yellow light is so specific that even if you remove that particular frequency of light, everything else still looks fine. You can do all sorts of things that would normally be very difficult to pull off with any of our green screen tech (like drinking water in a clear bottle or wearing a rainbow dress).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQuIVsNzqDk

The list of apps that were found to have this malware:

• AirFS
• Astro Explorer
• Amber
• CryptoPulsing
• Brain Matrix

For those curious, the apps that sold your specific geolocation data were "Drunk Mode" and "Walk Against Humanity".

Edit: Although Wikipedia notes that X-Mode's SDK is in use in more than 400 apps. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Mode_social#cite_note-13

This is a big win for privacy advocates as well:

"By securing a first-ever ban on the use and sale of sensitive location data, the FTC is continuing its critical work to protect Americans from intrusive data brokers and unchecked corporate surveillance,” said Khan.

To anyone who is reading this comment without reading through the article. This ruling doesn't mean that it's okay to pirate for building a model. Anthropic will still need to go through trial for that:

But he rejected Anthropic's request to dismiss the case, ruling the firm would have to stand trial over its use of pirated copies to build its library of material.

They do have a free tier, and while it doesn't auto request your data removal they can at least notify you which data brokers have your info so you can make the requests manually yourself. https://monitor.mozilla.org/

Edit: The data removal features are currently available only in the US according to their FAQ:

Why is data removal only available in the US? When will it be available in my country?

Data removal is only available in the US because of legislation that allows data brokers to operate there. In many other countries and in regions like the EU, laws like GDPR prevent these websites from collecting and selling people’s personal information without their consent. We’re exploring ways to expand protection and personal data removal outside of the US where needed.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/mozilla-monitor-faq

Just don't forget to give the game a positive review now that Sony backpedalled. That way we can be ready for next time.

As someone who uses Whisper fairly often, it's obvious that they've trained off of a bunch of YouTube videos.

Most of the time it's very accurate, but there have definitely been a few times in long transcription sessions where it will randomly hallucinate that someone is saying "Don't forget to like and subscribe!" When nothing was said anywhere near that.

Really good article discussing the unfortunate trend where

a lot more people are trying to push gamers to play games that aren't really designed to be played for months on end.

-Buckley

Some other great quotes in there, the whole thing is worth a read.