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If you want to catch a bear, honey will do the trick. If you want to make a certain kind of impressionable person miserable for life, you give them something that will make them feel superior to others without actually raising their status in the world. The cognitive dissonance of feeling better than the “phonies” but watching the phonies thrive...

Sonic the Hedgehog is one of the first video game movies to be considered free of the video game movie curse. It has made a lot of money, and critics and fans are for once mostly on the same page about its underlying quality. I still think, though, that we haven’t really explored the possibilities of “video game movies.” What I mean by this is t...

r/unixporn has no chance against this config The original Terminator is a truly terrifying film. But its most horrifying moment is also unintentionally comical. The titular Terminator is a massively overpowered killing machine that stalks its human prey through urban hunting grounds. A couple moments in the film, we see what the Terminator se...

Whenever I try a new Doom mod, I always do a quick run on E1MI, as its the classic opening level. I had heard that Complex Doom: Clusterfuck was a very intense mod, so I ran it on that classic first Doom level. I did not know how intense that could be until I heard some special music start playing in the background, the theme you hear in movies ...

Machine learning pioneer Geoffrey Hinton came up with a seemingly intractable dilemma: “Suppose you have cancer and you have to choose between a black box AI surgeon that cannot explain how it works but has a 90% cure rate and a human surgeon with an 80% cure rate. Do you want the AI surgeon to be illegal?” But data practitioner Vicki Boykis res...

the eternal recurrence of bueller Imagine giving someone that craves control a level of power they lack in any other context. But they instead are seized with incorrigible gloom and despair. This is the plight of the digital dirigiste. If your goals make it impossible to attain victory, or anything resembling a steady state, then the world i...

At the the time of this writing, the corona virus (COVID-19) has spread outside of China. Cases in South Korea, Japan, Italy, Iran, and other countries are rising. Stopping the virus is still a possibility, but the Center for Disease Control (CDC) sees a pandemic scenario as increasingly likely. Since the emergence of COVID-19, the public has be...

I honestly laughed when I read headlines last year that the new Call of Duty game would add “ethical decision-making” as an underlying mechanic. In another past CoD game, the surreal superficiality of being asked to hit the “F” key to honor a fallen comrade during a mostly scripted funeral scene became the basis of a famous meme. In contrast, t...