no problem! it’s much more dark than comedic in a lot of parts, but it’s excellent overall.

I was gonna pull a quote to sneer at how much capitalism and hustle culture have poisoned this guy, but holy fuck that kept getting so much worse the more I read. he’s in the hospital with such severe burns from a stupid stunt he did for a scam that he needs a strong opioid cocktail to function, but capitalism has hijacked so much of his brain he’s going to go straight back to it as soon as he’s out of the hospital

this is the kind of shit you’d see in an absurdist dark comedy and go “yeah the filmmaker’s right, these are the consequences of a world where capitalism has gone too far and twisted us into something unrecognizable and self-destructive” but it’s here, we’re the absurdist dark comedy and these are the consequences

fuck it, I’m gonna go rewatch The Lobster

you’re right, and I hate that you’re right. it really was that easy for the biggest alt-right pissbabies in FOSS to make this a damn thing, and nobody who could’ve stopped them did

god damn, the orange site supposedly being anti-crypto was never true (they were very much for it before it got a reputation for being a grift, and everything now just feels like damage control) but fuck is that thread surprisingly dense with cryptobros.

Note that the same tactics that were used to wreck Bitcoin are now being deployed against Nix

I’m sure Mike has something monstrous in mind with this comparison, but it’s apt in ways he almost certainly didn’t intend. let’s compare the problems in Nix with a traditional crypto scam!

• the veneer of decentralization and collective decision making masks a highly centralized, informal leadership structure that overrules any community consensus that impedes their ability to get a payout
• extreme forking hostility
• “all complaints should go to the discord of the company we pretend isn’t in control!”
• all critical discussions get sidetracked by right-wing trolls with financial incentives who can’t be banned because of project principles that defend them (and their money) but are easily weaponized against marginalized folks.

oh naming this fucking thing Uncharted (a Naughty Dog/Sony franchise that makes a shitload of money and got a movie 2 years ago) won’t end well if anyone in the industry notices. but crypto projects compulsively steal names for SEO, so here’s more weird stolen names from the article:

with participation from The Spartan Group

Halo and also a bunch of chud shit (and also history)

32-bit

this one’s just confusing? it’s a relatively small integer size for most things crypto-related, and architecturally it hasn’t been exciting since the early 90s (when computers and consoles being 16-bit, no ours is 32-bit, well do the maths cause Jaguar is 64-bit, was a big marketing thing) but I’m sure there’s an SEO gambit here

Rich Cabrera (Founder, Ready Player DAO)

oh come the fuck on

But to really spell it out for you: you’re carrying water for extremely harmful systems, built out at scale with no true regard for their present or future impact on people, the environment, or the world otherwise.

what really makes it awful is not only is all that true, but (at risk of sounding like a broken record) the output really is fucking garbage. we got, what, two awful fucking cards that manage to look more generic than hearthstone, aren’t the right size (and one of them just has a fragment of a hearthstone screenshot in the background? wonder where it got that from!) and artistically start at bland and get worse the more details your eyes and brain notice.

and for fucking what. so this shithead can come here and do the lazy plagiarist “uhhh this only took me 30 seconds but it’d be good if I took 2 more minutes bro I swear” shit that doesn’t work when you’re a high schooler passing off a Wikipedia article as your own work and sure as fuck doesn’t work as an adult? all the machine does is enable labor exploitation on a mass scale, burn an already fucked planet, and steal, and this, right here in this fucking thread, AI art shithead included, is the result? what a fucking waste.

oh do shut the fuck up and take your lazy shit with you

yep, looks like shit to me

An AI can spit out amazing images

where are they? these cards look like shit

nobody fucking asked and this is functionally spam so I’m treating it as such

can’t wait for it to generate a rat with something extra named Dik

monster train is very good! lately I’ve been obsessed with the poker deckbuilder with RPG elements (yes) Balatro, and I’ve posted before about how awesome Netrunner is.

bottom teeth? geometrically coherent tongue? fucking overrated

can’t have extra fingers if one of your arms is a weird fucking fin thing and you’re missing a rear leg (which seems to happen a lot for these)

my poor Xavier: Renegade Angel meets the goombas from the 1993 Super Mario Bros movie meets “system prompt: just give me a fuckin Pokémon but don’t make it too obvious” boy

the way you interact with posts on all is to call them fake in spite of all evidence to the contrary? that sounds exhausting

“We pay our AI artist 15,000 USD per month for exactly 10 hours of work,” reads an X post from the official Champions TCG account. "Why? In that time, he still makes HUNDREDS of AMAZING bits of artwork—ASTRONOMICALLY FASTER than ANY team of traditional artists.

[…]

The anonymous artist “has 15 years of digital art experience” and doesn’t use social media, he says.

“For us to get this with a team of traditional artists it would cost us a lot more money, and time,” said Malec. “The guy’s a pro and he charges what he’s worth. We are well connected in the space and no one comes close to the quality he delivers.”

I’m convinced this is money laundering, and pcgamer is negligent for not putting “NFT card game” anywhere in the title for this one so people have sufficient warning of that before they read half the article

“His art is 100% AI generated, yet it has no extra fingers, no generic designs, no mistakes… It has consistent evolutions, skins, alt art styles—literally no one is on his level. We don’t care how he makes it, we only care that the end user enjoys our game.”

extreme disagree on these not being generic — they look like shit, to be honest, and most of them seem to be poorly framed on the card at the very least. according to the article, a bunch of them also have extra fingers and mistakes, so there’s that too.

Instead, the company challenged artists to complete a series of “art tests” in 48 hours, claiming that anyone who can match the quality of its AI prompt writer will be considered for a job as their assistant.

aaaand there it is. do unpaid labor for us to prove your worth in this ridiculously unfair competition, and if you’re lucky you’ll get the chance to make less than minimum wage photoshopping the extra fingers out of thousands of shitty AI generated card images

how quick we are to forget the outlaw rapper razzlekhan and her toilet phone

it’s the end of a very stupid era. who knew opening a restaurant with worse styling and food than a 90s Taco Bell was a bad business move?

It feels like the type of scheme a high schooler would come up with and call it an “infinite money glitch” while patting themselves on the back for just outsmarting Warren Buffett.

having met far too many bitcoiners: yes, it’s exactly this

I cannot imagine the type of gambling problem needed to keep playing craps even when the cash cage refuses to redeem your chips and a crew of repo guys is taking away half the casino

maybe the real innovation in crypto is the level of social control needed to prevent their gamblers from cashing in their chips or take their eyes off the craps table at all

how hilarious are things going to get if Binance can’t pony up the cash? from your summary, it seems like they’ve got very little real cash on hand that doesn’t belong to their customers. I’m not an accountant, but won’t they get in even deeper shit if they use customer funds to pay off their fines?