Adi Robertson
More like Baldur’s Crate.
I cannot get sucked into Baldur’s Gate 3. I will not stack 45 crates in a video game for any reason that you care to name. And yet this clip has me alarmingly close to giving Ash’s BG3 beginner’s guide a try.
Adi Robertson
Senior Editor, Tech & Policy
Senior Editor, Tech & Policy
More From Adi Robertson
Adi Robertson
Adi Robertson
Pay no attention to the USB port behind the “no USB” sticker.
Is covering a printer’s USB port with a sticker to push people into wireless printing the worst thing HP does with its hardware? Not remotely. Is it still pretty funny to watch someone just take off the sticker and plug their printer in? I think so.
Adi Robertson
“Redemption is sweet like ketchup.”
AI Weirdness’ gently surrealist designs are always delightful, and its AI-generated slogans for baby onesies are no exception. But it’s particularly fascinating to watch author Janelle Shane struggle against the stultifying blandness of modern LLMs, to the point where she now gets the best results by asking AI tools to imitate her own blog’s style:
In my opinion, the most interesting creative use of large language models is to generate text that’s nothing like a human would have written. [...] In that sense, BLOOM, with its less-perfect retrieval of human output, is better at this task than GPT-4.
It is creepy to me however that the only reason this method gets BLOOM to generate weird designs is because I spent years seeding internet training data with lists of weird AI-generated text.
Baby onesie designs
[AI Weirdness]
Adi Robertson
Everybody movement!
I just got back from vacation and this has been stuck in my head the past few days of it. Polygon has more context if you need it, but they had me at “women are my favorite guy.”
Adi Robertson
The Dutch government has its own Mastodon server.
As The Fediverse Report writes, it’s intended for government organizations, and one of its first users is State Secretary for Kingdom Relations and Digitalisation Alexandra van Huffelen. A loose automated translation of the announcement reads:
Today we are launching our government server on Mastodon.
In the letter I sent to the House on ‘Digital Community Goods’ on 22 June, I indicated that I support two value-driven alternatives to social media.
One of these alternatives is a ‘private’ Mastodon server used by government organisations.
With this, we are taking another step in our Value-driven Digitization Work Agenda.
The Netherlands is following Germany, which created a government instance last year.
Adi Robertson
This game about being an ‘80s radio host saving people from slasher movie villains looks great.
It’s billed as a VR game, but Killer Frequency is available on PC and console too, and it’s a fantastic conceit for a first-person puzzler. I totally missed it when it came out in June!
Adi Robertson
An appeals court upheld Section 230 carveout SESTA-FOSTA.
I won’t rehash the law’s problems. But the District of Columbia Appeals Court says it’s constitutional because it can be interpreted narrowly to only target aiding and abetting “prostitution of another person,” disregarding its overall chilling effects on online speech:
Nothing in the First Amendment required Congress to confer Section 230 immunity on speech that violates federal criminal laws in the first place, and nothing in the First Amendment ossifies such immunity once granted against any later clarification.
The decision echoes an earlier district court ruling, and the Woodhull Freedom Foundation — which sued over FOSTA-SESTA along with other organizations in 2018 — says it’s still evaluating its future options.