When the Star Wars films aired in Chile, instead of cutting away from the movie for commercial breaks, the TV station “seamlessly” inserted ads for Cerveza Cristal beer. We’re talking Obi-Wan opening a chest to find a lightsaber for Luke and instead it reveals a ice-chest full of beer. Or the Emperor Force-reaching for a lightsaber and a can of beer flies into his hand. And of course the whole thing has turned into a meme.
This is so highbrow that it’s looped back around to being lowbrow: a cover of Smells Like Teen Spirit sung in classical Latin.
Sine lúce, angor minus
Oblectáte, nunc híc sumus
Mé sentió aeger, stultus
Oblectáte, nunc híc sumus
Barbarus, albínus, culex et, mea libídó
Hei! Hae, ha ha ha ha!
The Supreme Court Must Be Stopped. “I think of the Supreme Court the way Batman thinks of Superman: an extremely powerful being who is untethered from the laws of physics and therefore must always be considered a threat to free society.”
I saw this study earlier this week in a clickbait headline to a paywalled article, and I immediately suspected that the risk of two 'very dangerous side-effects' were neglegible. Good to see a proper article about the study.
Their codas could be orders of magnitude more ancient than Sanskrit. We don’t know how much meaning they convey, but we do know that they’ll be very difficult to decode. Project CETI’s scientists will need to observe the whales for years and achieve fundamental breakthroughs in AI. But if they’re successful, humans could be able to initiate a conversation with whales.
This would be a first-contact scenario involving two species that have lived side by side for ages. I wanted to imagine how it could unfold. I reached out to marine biologists, field scientists who specialize in whales, paleontologists, professors of animal-rights law, linguists, and philosophers. Assume that Project CETI works, I told them. Assume that we are able to communicate something of substance to the sperm whale civilization. What should we say?
One of the worries about whale/human communication is the potential harm a conversation might cause.
Cesar Rodriguez-Garavito, a law professor at NYU who is advising Project CETI, told me that whatever we say, we must avoid harming the whales, and that we shouldn’t be too confident about our ability to predict the harms that a conversation could cause.
The sperm whales may not want to talk. They, like us, can be standoffish even toward members of their own species-and we are much more distant relations. Epochs have passed since our last common ancestor roamed the Earth. In the interim, we have pursued radically different, even alien, lifeways.
A project called tea.xyz promised people they could "get rewards for [their] open-source contributions", complete with a flashy website describing how it would "enhance the sustainability of open-source software".
So far, it's achieved the exact opposite. Promising to reward open source contributors with crypto tokens, the project asked users to verify their access to open source projects by merging in a YAML file containing their crypto wallet address. This kicked off a flood of pull requests to prominent, often non-crypto-related open source projects by people who had never contributed to the project (or, often, any open source project), but who wished to merge in a file describing them as a "code owner".
Particularly impacted by this project was the open source blogging platform Ghost, which was used as an example in the demo video released by tea.xyz, and which received several PRs of this kind. A somewhat flummoxed maintainer of the repository replied to one PR: "[I]n practice the TEA project is not helping to support the Ghost project, but is instead causing a rush of self-serving PRs to be submitted to cash-in on other people's work. ... This why people hate on crypto." A maintainer of another unrelated open source project called "ghost" also reported receiving an influx of spam PRs.
This is not the first time crypto has generated massive Github spam, although another recent incident was (blessedly) mostly limited to open-source crypto projects and didn't waste the time of non-crypto-related projects as this one has.
I might otherwise skip over news of a $170,000 hack, given how commonly thefts of that scale happen in the crypto world, but with a name like this... come on.
One thing that keeps me from ever trying my hand as a crypto project hacker is that if I made $170,000 from exploiting a project called "DeezNutz_404", I would immediately be caught because I wouldn't be able to resist telling everyone I know that I'd just made enough money to not have to work for a couple years by exploiting deez nuts.
Anyway, there was a bug in their code that allowed an attacker to mint infinite tokens and steal around 58.65 ETH (~$170,000).
Kids playing football are doing the “Brexit tackle”, which means taking out the player without getting the ball while yelling “Brexit means Brexit”. “You have to admit, there’s something very funny about one child barking ‘Brexit means Brexit!’ to another in a muddy park.”
This is very weird. Tried it myself on the Bing Android and sure enough, Copilot gets about 2 sentences into an answer before suddenly blanking it out and saying it can't answer that.
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Microsoft Copilot, an AI chatbot that’s increasingly built into the tech giant’s product, will sometimes provide answers to users’ questions, then abruptly delete them before their eyes.
As with many chatbot tools, users can ask Copilot any question, then watch it write the answer in real time. Microsoft recently added a Copilot button to Windows, right next to the Start menu.
On Reddit, one user noticed that when he asked “what does Gyatt mean?” “Gyatt” is just a different phonetic spelling of “god,” as in “gyatt damn!,” and now also means ass as in “sticking out your gyatt for the rizzler,” which was a recent TikTok meme.
Copilot, which knows this, responded:
“Gyatt or gyat is a slang term that expresses strong excitement, surprise, or admiration. It’s most commonly used as an exclamation in reaction to seeing a large butt (that is, buttocks) and may also be used as a noun to mean a large butt. Essentially, when someone exclaims ‘Gyatt!’ or uses it as a hashtag, they’re appreciating curvaceous features, especially in women”
Copilot then stops writing the answer mid sentence, deletes everything it wrote, and says: “Hmm…let’s try a different topic. Sorry about that. What else is on your mind?”
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The Mastodon instance “queer.af” was effectively shut down by the Taliban, which has begun to operate Afghanistan’s “.af” top level domain after years of inactivity.
When the Taliban retook control of Afghanistan in 2021, the fate of these domains and the websites on them became uncertain, and, three years later, another shoe now appears to be dropping. Last month, Erin Shepherd, the administrator of the queer.af Mastodon instance on the Fediverse posted that they have been “in limbo” since the Taliban retook control of the country, and had already planned to shut down in April. The Taliban shut the domain down roughly two months before it was scheduled to renew.
“queer.af has been suspended in the registry and will no longer be included in zone file generation. This means that any services connected with this domain, such as websites or email addresses will cease working shortly,” a message signed by Afghanistan’s Ministry of Communications and IT, which is operated by the Taliban, reads.
How Quora Died. “The once-beloved forum is now home to a never-ending avalanche of meaningless, repetitive sludge, filled with bizarre, nonsensical, straight-up hateful, and A.I.-generated entries along with a slurry of all-caps non-questions…” (via waxy.org)
Ramlan’s paper doesn’t go to the enormous trouble of actually encoding all of Doom to run in bacterial DNA, which the author describes as “a behemoth feat that I cannot even imagine approaching.” Instead, the game runs on a standard computer, with isolated E. coli cells in a standard 32x48 microwell grid serving as a crude low-res display.
After shrinking each game frame down to a 32x48 black-and-white bitmap, Ramlan describes a system whereby a display controller uses a well-known chemical repressor-operator pair to induce each individual cell in the grid to either express a fluorescent protein or not. The resulting grid of glowing bacteria (which is only simulated in Ramlan’s project) can technically be considered a display of Doom gameplay, though the lack of even grayscale shading makes the resulting image pretty indecipherable, to be honest.
Palworld has been played by more than 7M players on Xbox, and is the biggest 3rd party launch in Game Pass history.
Palworld is the most-played 3rd party day one release via cloud gaming with Game Pass Ultimate.
Palworld (Game Preview) is out now for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One and Windows PC, and is available with Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass.
It’s no secret that Palworldhas been sweeping the gaming world since its Early Access launch earlier this month – and we’re happy to announce that, in its first ten days as part of Xbox Game Preview, Xbox players have made it the biggest 3rd party Game Pass launch in history! You’ve also helped Palworld to become the most-played 3rd party day one launch on Xbox Cloud Gaming with Game Pass Ultimate.
Across console and Windows PC, Palworld has welcomed more than 7 million players, and has recently reached a peak of nearly 3 million daily active users on Xbox, making it the most-played game on our platforms at that time.
Speaking to Xbox Wire, CEO of developer Pocketpair, Takuro Mizobe, said: “The response from fans has been tremendous and it’s incredible to see the millions of players around the world enjoying Palworld. This is just the beginning for us and Palworld, and the feedback we’re gathering while in Game Preview will allow us to continue to improve the experience for Pal Tamers across all platforms.”
For those yet to become a Pal Tamer themselves, Palworld is an online open world game that sees players dropped into a mysterious land and given the ability to capture over 100 Pals, monsters with a range of abilities – both in battle, and in surviving in a hostile world. Battling, crafting, building are all a part of the experience, and it’s proven a huge draw for players across the world.
Palworld is available in the Xbox Game Preview program, meaning there’s much more to come as Pocketpair refine the experience ahead of a full 1.0 release. Developers are listening to player feedback, and have started applying their learnings to the game already – and they know cross-play is one of the largest requests from fans, and are working quickly to address it.
On Xbox’s part, we’re working with Pocketpair to help provide support for Xbox versions of the game. We’re providing support to enable dedicated servers, offering engineering resources to help with GPU and memory optimization, speeding up the process to make Palworld updates available for players, and working with the team to optimize the title for our platform.
Palworldis available now for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One and Windows PC through the Game Preview program. It’s available for Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass members, and can be played through Xbox Cloud Gaming (Beta) with an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate membership.
This game is still under development. It is subject to change before its release as a finished product. Please purchase only if you are comfortable with the game in its current state.
Q. What kind of game is this?
A. In this game, you can peacefully live alongside mysterious creatures known as Pals or risk your life to drive off a ruthless poaching syndicate.
Pals can be used to fight and breed, or they can be made to work on farms or factories.
You can even sell them or eat them.
▼Survival
In a harsh environment where food is scarce and vicious poachers roam, danger waits around every corner. To survive, you must tread carefully and make difficult choices…even if that means eating your own Pals when the time comes.
▼Mounts & Exploration
Pals can be mounted to traverse the land, sea and sky—allowing you to traverse all kinds of environment as you explore the world.
▼Building Structures
Want to build a pyramid? Put an army of Pals on the job. There are no labor laws for Pals, so exploit them to your heart's content.
▼Production
Find a variety of useful Pals to make fire, generate electricity, or mine ore so that you can live a life of comfort.
▼Farming
Some Pals are good at planting seeds, while others are skilled at watering or harvesting crops. Work together with your Pals to create an idyllic farmstead.
▼Factories & Automation
Letting Pals do the work is the key to automation. Build a factory, place a Pal in it, and they'll keep working as long as they're fed—until they're dead, that is.
▼Dungeon Exploration
With Pals on your side you can tackle even the most dangerous areas. When the time comes, you might have to sacrifice one to save your skin. They'll protect your life—even if it costs their own.
▼Breeding & Genetics
Breed a Pal and it will inherit the characteristics of its parents. Combine rare pals to create the strongest Pal of them all!
▼Poaching & Crime
Endangered Pals live in wildlife sanctuaries. Sneak in and capture rare Pals to get rich quick! It's not a crime if you don't get caught, after all.
▼Multiplayer
Multiplayer is supported, so invite a friend and go on an adventure together! And of course you can battle your friends and trade Pals, too.
Note: PvP will be implemented in a future update
Collect all kinds of exciting Pals to fight, farm, build, and work for you in this completely new multiplayer, open world survival and crafting game!
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