The fact that Silicon Valley interests effortlessly shrugged off the non-profit board’s attempt to hit the kill switch last year, and now are preparing to take the company commercial despite the deliberate design otherwise, becomes much more interesting when you consider the theory that corporations are a form of artificial superintelligence.

If the AI idealists can’t stand up to basic forces of capitalism, how do they expect to control an actually dangerous AGI?

ECHO (2017)! It’s an indie game with AAA-feeling production quality from a tiny Danish studio that sadly went bankrupt after the game only sold a few thousand copies. I played it during lockdown on an old recommendation from MetaFilter and it has since become one of my favorite hidden gem titles.

Trailer

You play a bounty hunter named En (voiced by Game of Thrones star Rose Leslie) who wakes from hibernation when her spaceship arrives at a legendary artificial planet said to hold the secret to resurrection and eternal life. When she arrives on the surface, she soon discovers that its interior is a vast, abandoned baroque Palace, straight through to the core. As she wanders the infinite halls guided by her witheringly sarcastic AI London (voiced by Nicholas Boulton), she is surprised to find the Palace generates hostile clones of herself that hunt her down and copy her actions in a unique spin on the stealth genre. Gameplay consists of trying to navigate through various beautiful, byzantine concourses, collecting artifacts and unlocking elevators that lead deeper into the secret at the heart of the planet.

You may or may not enjoy this based on how you feel about stealth games with minimalist combat, but for me the challenging adaptive gameplay combined with the evocative score, compelling voice acting, intriguing story, and gorgeous environmental/sound/UI design made this a really nice surprise. (And while the studio might be dead, I’m really hoping the plans to turn it into a movie eventually rise from development hell.)

That attack might have a little more juice if they didn’t deploy it against every single Democrat in the last 60 years, including Joe fuckin’ Biden.

“Associate your personal brand with the fringe-right/antivax/Nazi YouTube! What could possibly go wrong?”

they won’t have to self-censor themselves from saying fuck or shit

…or “non-white people are degenerate inferiors”.

Fuck Odysee.

Attacking the capital was a last-ditch hail mary move, and only viable when he controlled the military.

They’re going to use baseless conspiracies to try to fuck with the election certification enough (with an assist from the courts) to force a contingent election in the House, where they’ll likely have a majority of state delegations.

I assume they didn’t include my man Tim Walz because he would have embarrassed the competition.

And still no Halo movie.

Mike Johnson is (as usual) full of shit. The DNC is still a month away and not a single state ballot deadline has passed.

He isn’t “conservative”. He’s a fascist.

Oh my god, I thought this was a joke.

Here Comes the Sun. Simple melody, timeless lyrics, and it’s the most-streamed Beatles song out of an already strong and memorable catalog.

It wasn’t just the delivery, though – it was the meandering logic, the failure to make key points against Trump, and the pathetic response to the party-wide freakout.

https://old.lemmy.world/comment/11034581

Then watch them lean on it after the fact for days on end, such as the post you are replying to. It’s almost… almost… like they’re reposting this shit with malicious intent, isn’t it?

OP here. I voted for Obama (primary and two generals), Sanders->Clinton, Warren->Biden, even busted my ass to elect my man Dougie Jones to the Senate (who should have been the pick for AG over Merrick Garland). And the debate made it immediately obvious that Biden has become a shadow of himself, and does not have what it takes to beat Trump – no media/Russia/Qanon incepting necessary. Despite consistently leading in 2020, he ended up barely winning by a few tens of thousands of votes across a handful of states – this time he’s consistently trailed (both nationally and in the swing states), the biggest news stories have not moved the needle, and the awful debate, follow-on reporting, and feeble response dug him an even deeper hole exactly when he most needed to turn perceptions around on the biggest remaining stage.

Biden was near the bottom of my list in 2020 (again, I preferred Warren), but I’ve grown to like him a lot – he really exceeded my expectations and accomplished sweeping victories with tiny congressional margins. But he’s not the guy to beat Trump this time, and it’s essential he step down in favor of a new Harris/??? ticket (hopefully Beshear) that has at least a fighting chance to prevail in November.

The minimum wage was last raised by a Dem House, Senate, and President, all of which were arguably less progressive than the current incarnations. Why wouldn’t they do it again if they had the votes?

I could see trying to spin it as “As an elder statesman, I don’t have it in me to simultaneously run a national campaign and govern the country, so I’ll be putting 100% of my focus on finishing out my term and passing the torch to the next generation of blah blah blah.”

I really wish they’d rerelease this in 4K, the visuals are spectacular.

But between Biden’s ego and the DNC’s determination to stick with a wholly-owned establishment neoliberal hack at all costs - even if it means losing - I expected that they wouldn’t take this golden opportunity.

Biden has objectively been the most progressive president since LBJ, and the most effective progressive president since FDR. And he did it with about the slimmest possible congressional margins, a situation which would have made it very easy for an actual “establishment neoliberal hack” to say “my hands are tied” and accomplish nothing of substance. Instead we got the biggest climate reform package ever, the biggest infrastructure package since the Interstate Highway system, a child tax credit that massively reduced child poverty, the most significant industrial policy in decades (CHIPS and Science), a veritable bulldog FTC chair with an aggressive anti-monopoly stance, and that’s just for starters.

Not great when that show ended with industry collapsing the biosphere and destroying civilization.