Star Wars Fans Send Support to Kelly Marie Tran With #FANARTFORROSE
https://ift.tt/2xS25sa
You’ve probably heard about it, Kelly Marie Tran, who played Rose Tico in The Last Jedi, deleted all her posts on Instagram after months of harassment from a group of bitter Star Wars fans. In support of the actress, artists on Twitter have created the hastag #FanArtForRose and used it to post some beautiful artwork to combat all that hatred and negativity.
Please note that the pictures below might take a few seconds to load.
— Rori! 100 Women Coloring Book on Indiegogo! (@RoriComics) June 6, 2018
shoutout to Kelly Marie Tran and @JohnBoyega for one of the funnest scenes in a Star Wars movie ever!! much love to them both, but especially Kelly who made me fall in love with Rose and her story #FanArtforRosepic.twitter.com/qznXy2mZCL
Wait, What? MIT Develops Psychopath AI That Captions Rorschach Inkblots
https://ift.tt/2JkiavP
What is wrong with people? Do you guys want to have a robot apocalypse on your hands? Because this is exactly how you get a robot apocalypse on your hands! And that thing is called “Norman,” presumably after the character from Cheers, not after Normal Bates from Psycho. Yeah, I’m not so sure about that.
Norman is an AI that is trained to perform image captioning; a popular deep learning method of generating a textual description of an image. We trained Norman on image captions…dedicated to…the reality of death. Then, we compared Norman’s responses with a standard image captioning neural network (trained on MSCOCO dataset) on Rorschach inkblots; a test that is used to detect underlying thought disorders.
Norman was not corrupted to make any sort of point about human psychology on the internet — a neural network is a blank slate. It doesn’t have any innate desires like a human. What Norman does address is the danger that artificial intelligence can become dangerously biased. With AI, you get out what you put in, so it’s important that these platforms are trained to avoid bias
Adam Savage Modifies Auto Nerf Blaster With 1,000-Shot Magazine
https://ift.tt/2sN5NNO
From Tested:
Adam picks up a Nerf Rival blaster, and upgrades it with a custom magazine to hold a THOUSAND soft plastic Nerf balls. Watch as Adam builds the new magazine from scratch, uses kit-bashing to detail the blaster, and adds more upgrades like the bi-pod and laser. And to test this massive rig, Adam sets his sights on some prehistoric prey! Life finds a way!
Steam’s Irresponsible Hands-Off Policy Is Proof That Valve Still Hasn’t Learned Its Lesson
https://ift.tt/2xQQucJ
Yesterday, Valve announced a sweeping new policy for Steam: From now on, the platform will allow “everything” except for games Valve decides are “illegal, or straight up trolling.” In light of controversies like the recently removed school shooter game Active Shooter, the announcement came as a surprise to those who were expecting Valve to offer a solution, rather than wash its hands of the task. But that’s what Valve does.
Valve’s post laid bare a set of ethos that have been driving Steam nearly since its inception, even if Valve rarely discusses them: a desire for openness, a hands-off approach to platform ownership, and an irrational fear of controversy that directly implicates Valve. In this particular case, Valve’s Erik Johnson espoused meritocratic, libertarian-style market openness while pointing to a vague notion of “controversy” as a key factor in Valve’s decision-making process. He explained that the company is reacting to controversies surrounding potentially “offensive” content like Active Shooter and a bevy of explicitly sexual games not by hiring more people to do a more comprehensive job of moderating Steam, but by opening the floodgates even wider. This is because, he wrote, good moderation of Steam looks vastly different depending on who’s doing the looking, and “there is absolutely no way we can navigate it without making some of our players really mad.”
Since yesterday, there’s been tremendous blowback to Valve’s decision from developers, critics, and journalists. “Shit, Valve, if your new platform content policy is the policy even the toxic hellfires that social media are slowly backing away from after years of troubles, that doesn’t bode very good for the content of your platform,” wrote Vlambeer’s Rami Ismail on Twitter.
“A platform that allows ‘everything, unless it’s illegal or straight up trolling’ is ridiculous,” said Leaf Corcoran, creator of indie game storefront Itch.io, a Steam competitor. “Please keep your malicious, derogatory, discriminatory, bullying, harassing, demeaning content off Itch.io. Our ban buttons are ready.”
Critics’ fears that Steam will become a cesspit of gross content aren’t just hypothetical: Steam isn’t just a store, and Valve has already done similar things with other portions of Steam, often to disastrous results.
“You’re assuming this is still some kind of abstract ‘slippery slope’ hypothetical?” Robert Yang, a developer of queer sex games who’s had a bumpy relationship with Steam in the past, said on Twitter in response to the idea that it could be bad if corporations got to decide what was and wasn’t moral. “They’re already picking bad moral norms, they’re already governing, they’re already giving tacit support to steam nazis to call me a degenerate.”
In the case of games like Yang’s, Valve’s devotion to openness will solve the problem. The lack of clarity surrounding sex games—even ones that try to explore nuanced ideas like sexuality and queerness instead of falling back on basic titillation—has been a constant thorn in developers’ sides. It’s good to hear that it shouldn’t be an issue anymore. But is it worth it for Yang et al to be able to publish their games on Steam when Valve won’t clean up the rest of it?
And yes, ideally, corporations should not be the sole deciders of what is and is not moral and ethical, because that’s a one-way trip to an even bleaker dystopia than the one we’re already occupying. But that’s not really what this is about. This is about basic safeguards that Valve has consistently failed to provide.
In those cases and many more, Valve didn’t take action until controversy came knocking. Only after sustained user outcry, lawsuits, or negative mainstream press, does it crack down—whether quietly, or in more legally fraught cases like the gambling issue, publicly. When it comes to Steam, Valve rarely acts; it mostly reacts. In the meantime, problems fester and ultimately come to define the platform’s caustic, oftentimes abusive culture.
It would be downright bizarre to see Valve throw its hands up at the idea of sifting through Steam’s endless game flood—despite having barely tried to do so previously—if this wasn’t so similar to decisions it’s made countless times before. Let’s not beat around the bush here: Valve is a stupendously wealthy and resourceful company, and it could have taken preemptive action against many of the above issues. It chose not to. It’s a matter of priorities, and Valve has proven time and time again that the particular shape Steam’s culture ultimately takes is not a priority. That’s a big problem, and it will almost certainly continue to be under Valve’s new approach.
The language Johnson used in yesterday’s post is telling of those priorities and the ways they actually threaten to undo Valve’s dream of a laissez-faire paradise. “The challenge is that this problem is not simply about whether or not the Steam Store should contain games with adult or violent content,” he said. “Instead, it’s about whether the Store contains games within an entire range of controversial topics—politics, sexuality, racism, gender, violence, identity, and so on.”
In lumping together so many different types of subject matter and pointing to them all as being controversial or offensive to somebody, Johnson ignores that these things are wildly different. Games with racist leanings do not even remotely pose the same kinds of problems as games about sexuality.
Not only that, these things tend to have knock-on effects. If Steam sees an upswing in overtly racist games, it’s unlikely that people will want to put their games with more nuanced takes on race on the same platform, given that racism’s whole thing is threatening people of certain backgrounds and identities. It inherently makes for a more hostile environment for certain types of expression, and as we’ve already seen in Steam’s community, white nationalists and overt Nazis are happy to invade these spaces en masse when presented with an opportunity.
Valve said it’ll work on providing tools that allow people to hide content that’s objectionable to them on their store pages, which, besides being a solution to a different problem, is something that Valve hasn’t done a great job with in the past; the tools it introduces are often exploited by malicious users. It remains to be seen what shape those tools take, but it’s hard to be hopeful—especially in light of the way that Valve framed them. It offered the example that a user might choose to hide anime games from their feed, as if that’s even on the list of users’ biggest problems.
Valve refuses to acknowledge the political context in which Steam exists, even as other social platforms like Facebook face a cultural and political reckoning after embracing similar technolibertarian ideals. Clearly, Valve is aware that things like Nazi groups are a bad thing, given that it’s gone on quiet delete sprees each time they’ve been specifically mentioned in the press. But there still seems to be a disconnect between that knowledge and Valve’s understanding of Steam’s broader cultural and political influence. Bafflingly, however, Valve does seem very aware of Steam’s influence in other ways. The company clearly understands that being able to publish on Steam is incredibly important for PC game developers—existentially so, even. “If you’re a developer,” said Johnson, “we shouldn’t be choosing what content you’re allowed to create. Those choices should be yours to make.” Valve knows it’s the biggest game in town—a company of near-monopolistic proportions—but it will only take responsibility for one side of that coin.
Johnson concluded yesterday’s post by stressing that Valve does not want games on Steam to be seen as an expression of the company’s values. “If we allow your game onto the Store, it does not mean we approve or agree with anything you’re trying to say with it,” he said. “If you’re a developer of offensive games, this isn’t us siding with you against all the people you’re offending. There will be people throughout the Steam community who hate your games, and hope you fail to find an audience, and there will be people here at Valve who feel exactly the same way.”
But this decision, and a procession of similar calls the company has made over the years, does constitute an expression of values. Valve just doesn’t want to own up to those values or the online environment it has shaped. The company is happy to turn a massive profit off all of it, but it doesn’t care to clean up the dogshit dotting its front yard. It’s just going to ask users to hide it. But it’ll still be there.
If nothing else, it’s hard to be too disappointed that Valve refuses to moderate Steam because, frankly, it’s hard to believe that such a confused, inconsistent, irresponsible company would do a passable job of it. There is no good outcome here—the sensible thing would be to use some of Valve’s enormous profits to hire more people to do a better job of moderation, but that’s clearly not in the cards either
No matter how you slice it, Valve is the problem. I’ve given up on hoping that’ll change anytime soon. Meanwhile, a game called AIDS Simulator is coming to Steam next week. It’s a game where “you’re mad and want to kill all Africans that gave you aids to get revenge.” I wish I was joking.
Update – 9:15 PM, 6/7/18: AIDS Simulator has been removed from Steam, presumably because it violated Valve’s still-nebulous rules around “straight up trolling.” Still, that’s something, at least.
Steam’s Irresponsible Hands-Off Policy Is Proof That Valve Still Hasn’t Learned Its Lesson
https://ift.tt/2xQQucJ
Yesterday, Valve announced a sweeping new policy for Steam: From now on, the platform will allow “everything” except for games Valve decides are “illegal, or straight up trolling.” In light of controversies like the recently removed school shooter game Active Shooter, the announcement came as a surprise to those who were expecting Valve to offer a solution, rather than wash its hands of the task. But that’s what Valve does.
Valve’s post laid bare a set of ethos that have been driving Steam nearly since its inception, even if Valve rarely discusses them: a desire for openness, a hands-off approach to platform ownership, and an irrational fear of controversy that directly implicates Valve. In this particular case, Valve’s Erik Johnson espoused meritocratic, libertarian-style market openness while pointing to a vague notion of “controversy” as a key factor in Valve’s decision-making process. He explained that the company is reacting to controversies surrounding potentially “offensive” content like Active Shooter and a bevy of explicitly sexual games not by hiring more people to do a more comprehensive job of moderating Steam, but by opening the floodgates even wider. This is because, he wrote, good moderation of Steam looks vastly different depending on who’s doing the looking, and “there is absolutely no way we can navigate it without making some of our players really mad.”
Since yesterday, there’s been tremendous blowback to Valve’s decision from developers, critics, and journalists. “Shit, Valve, if your new platform content policy is the policy even the toxic hellfires that social media are slowly backing away from after years of troubles, that doesn’t bode very good for the content of your platform,” wrote Vlambeer’s Rami Ismail on Twitter.
“A platform that allows ‘everything, unless it’s illegal or straight up trolling’ is ridiculous,” said Leaf Corcoran, creator of indie game storefront Itch.io, a Steam competitor. “Please keep your malicious, derogatory, discriminatory, bullying, harassing, demeaning content off Itch.io. Our ban buttons are ready.”
Critics’ fears that Steam will become a cesspit of gross content aren’t just hypothetical: Steam isn’t just a store, and Valve has already done similar things with other portions of Steam, often to disastrous results.
“You’re assuming this is still some kind of abstract ‘slippery slope’ hypothetical?” Robert Yang, a developer of queer sex games who’s had a bumpy relationship with Steam in the past, said on Twitter in response to the idea that it could be bad if corporations got to decide what was and wasn’t moral. “They’re already picking bad moral norms, they’re already governing, they’re already giving tacit support to steam nazis to call me a degenerate.”
In the case of games like Yang’s, Valve’s devotion to openness will solve the problem. The lack of clarity surrounding sex games—even ones that try to explore nuanced ideas like sexuality and queerness instead of falling back on basic titillation—has been a constant thorn in developers’ sides. It’s good to hear that it shouldn’t be an issue anymore. But is it worth it for Yang et al to be able to publish their games on Steam when Valve won’t clean up the rest of it?
And yes, ideally, corporations should not be the sole deciders of what is and is not moral and ethical, because that’s a one-way trip to an even bleaker dystopia than the one we’re already occupying. But that’s not really what this is about. This is about basic safeguards that Valve has consistently failed to provide.
In those cases and many more, Valve didn’t take action until controversy came knocking. Only after sustained user outcry, lawsuits, or negative mainstream press, does it crack down—whether quietly, or in more legally fraught cases like the gambling issue, publicly. When it comes to Steam, Valve rarely acts; it mostly reacts. In the meantime, problems fester and ultimately come to define the platform’s caustic, oftentimes abusive culture.
It would be downright bizarre to see Valve throw its hands up at the idea of sifting through Steam’s endless game flood—despite having barely tried to do so previously—if this wasn’t so similar to decisions it’s made countless times before. Let’s not beat around the bush here: Valve is a stupendously wealthy and resourceful company, and it could have taken preemptive action against many of the above issues. It chose not to. It’s a matter of priorities, and Valve has proven time and time again that the particular shape Steam’s culture ultimately takes is not a priority. That’s a big problem, and it will almost certainly continue to be under Valve’s new approach.
The language Johnson used in yesterday’s post is telling of those priorities and the ways they actually threaten to undo Valve’s dream of a laissez-faire paradise. “The challenge is that this problem is not simply about whether or not the Steam Store should contain games with adult or violent content,” he said. “Instead, it’s about whether the Store contains games within an entire range of controversial topics—politics, sexuality, racism, gender, violence, identity, and so on.”
In lumping together so many different types of subject matter and pointing to them all as being controversial or offensive to somebody, Johnson ignores that these things are wildly different. Games with racist leanings do not even remotely pose the same kinds of problems as games about sexuality.
Not only that, these things tend to have knock-on effects. If Steam sees an upswing in overtly racist games, it’s unlikely that people will want to put their games with more nuanced takes on race on the same platform, given that racism’s whole thing is threatening people of certain backgrounds and identities. It inherently makes for a more hostile environment for certain types of expression, and as we’ve already seen in Steam’s community, white nationalists and overt Nazis are happy to invade these spaces en masse when presented with an opportunity.
Valve said it’ll work on providing tools that allow people to hide content that’s objectionable to them on their store pages, which, besides being a solution to a different problem, is something that Valve hasn’t done a great job with in the past; the tools it introduces are often exploited by malicious users. It remains to be seen what shape those tools take, but it’s hard to be hopeful—especially in light of the way that Valve framed them. It offered the example that a user might choose to hide anime games from their feed, as if that’s even on the list of users’ biggest problems.
Valve refuses to acknowledge the political context in which Steam exists, even as other social platforms like Facebook face a cultural and political reckoning after embracing similar technolibertarian ideals. Clearly, Valve is aware that things like Nazi groups are a bad thing, given that it’s gone on quiet delete sprees each time they’ve been specifically mentioned in the press. But there still seems to be a disconnect between that knowledge and Valve’s understanding of Steam’s broader cultural and political influence. Bafflingly, however, Valve does seem very aware of Steam’s influence in other ways. The company clearly understands that being able to publish on Steam is incredibly important for PC game developers—existentially so, even. “If you’re a developer,” said Johnson, “we shouldn’t be choosing what content you’re allowed to create. Those choices should be yours to make.” Valve knows it’s the biggest game in town—a company of near-monopolistic proportions—but it will only take responsibility for one side of that coin.
Johnson concluded yesterday’s post by stressing that Valve does not want games on Steam to be seen as an expression of the company’s values. “If we allow your game onto the Store, it does not mean we approve or agree with anything you’re trying to say with it,” he said. “If you’re a developer of offensive games, this isn’t us siding with you against all the people you’re offending. There will be people throughout the Steam community who hate your games, and hope you fail to find an audience, and there will be people here at Valve who feel exactly the same way.”
But this decision, and a procession of similar calls the company has made over the years, does constitute an expression of values. Valve just doesn’t want to own up to those values or the online environment it has shaped. The company is happy to turn a massive profit off all of it, but it doesn’t care to clean up the dogshit dotting its front yard. It’s just going to ask users to hide it. But it’ll still be there.
If nothing else, it’s hard to be too disappointed that Valve refuses to moderate Steam because, frankly, it’s hard to believe that such a confused, inconsistent, irresponsible company would do a passable job of it. There is no good outcome here—the sensible thing would be to use some of Valve’s enormous profits to hire more people to do a better job of moderation, but that’s clearly not in the cards either
No matter how you slice it, Valve is the problem. I’ve given up on hoping that’ll change anytime soon. Meanwhile, a game called AIDS Simulator is coming to Steam next week. It’s a game where “you’re mad and want to kill all Africans that gave you aids to get revenge.” I wish I was joking.
Update – 9:15 PM, 6/7/18: AIDS Simulator has been removed from Steam, presumably because it violated Valve’s still-nebulous rules around “straight up trolling.” Still, that’s something, at least.
SpaceX option package for 2020 Tesla Roadster could add more performance
https://ift.tt/2sJFXew
Seems a detail escaped our story on Tesla’s Annual Shareholder Meeting last week. Company CEO Elon Musk said the Roadster and semi introduced last year are merely the base versions, and that their production units would offer more performance. Concerning the open-top, Musk said, “What we unveiled with the Roadster was the base model performance. It’s going to have a SpaceX options package. It’s crazy.”
The comment adds more detail to a few tweets Musk wrote in November last year, one saying, “There will be a special option package that takes it to the next level.” Following tweets added, “Not saying the next gen Roadster special upgrade package *will* definitely enable it to fly short hops, but maybe …,” and, “Certainly possible. Just a question of safety. Rocket tech applied to a car opens up revolutionary possibilities.”
Some believe the SpaceX package could be no more than special badging and the Midnight Cherry color matching the Roadster Musk recently sent into space. However, the betting line leans heavily toward an even more potent Roadster. We’ve already been promised a 0-60 mile-per-hour time of 1.9 seconds – likely using the four-seater’s Plaid Mode, a quarter-mile time of 8.8 seconds, a top speed beyond 250 mph, and 620 miles of range on a single charge. That’s hypercar performance for around $200,000 to $250,000, less than one-sixth the usual hypercar price.
Yet Musk wants no question about the Roadster’s superiority, telling the audience at the shareholder’s meeting, “It’s important for us to show with the Roadster that an electric vehicle can outperform a gasoline car in every way. Because gasoline cars still have sort of a halo effect, and I think if we can show an electric car can outperform a gasoline car in every way, then we sort of get rid of that halo effect of gasoline cars.”
The semi and the Roadster are expected in production next year, so it shouldn’t be too long before we find out what the SpaceX package entails — perhaps a faster form of ground-based flight, or something with a bit more altitude.
SpaceX option package for 2020 Tesla Roadster could add more performance
https://ift.tt/2sJFXew
Seems a detail escaped our story on Tesla’s Annual Shareholder Meeting last week. Company CEO Elon Musk said the Roadster and semi introduced last year are merely the base versions, and that their production units would offer more performance. Concerning the open-top, Musk said, “What we unveiled with the Roadster was the base model performance. It’s going to have a SpaceX options package. It’s crazy.”
The comment adds more detail to a few tweets Musk wrote in November last year, one saying, “There will be a special option package that takes it to the next level.” Following tweets added, “Not saying the next gen Roadster special upgrade package *will* definitely enable it to fly short hops, but maybe …,” and, “Certainly possible. Just a question of safety. Rocket tech applied to a car opens up revolutionary possibilities.”
Some believe the SpaceX package could be no more than special badging and the Midnight Cherry color matching the Roadster Musk recently sent into space. However, the betting line leans heavily toward an even more potent Roadster. We’ve already been promised a 0-60 mile-per-hour time of 1.9 seconds – likely using the four-seater’s Plaid Mode, a quarter-mile time of 8.8 seconds, a top speed beyond 250 mph, and 620 miles of range on a single charge. That’s hypercar performance for around $200,000 to $250,000, less than one-sixth the usual hypercar price.
Yet Musk wants no question about the Roadster’s superiority, telling the audience at the shareholder’s meeting, “It’s important for us to show with the Roadster that an electric vehicle can outperform a gasoline car in every way. Because gasoline cars still have sort of a halo effect, and I think if we can show an electric car can outperform a gasoline car in every way, then we sort of get rid of that halo effect of gasoline cars.”
The semi and the Roadster are expected in production next year, so it shouldn’t be too long before we find out what the SpaceX package entails — perhaps a faster form of ground-based flight, or something with a bit more altitude.
#weloveyoukellytran #fanartforrose pic.twitter.com/NcZT63Wkqe
pic.twitter.com/cNiGNxBJoo
Jenn
St-Onge
(@princess_jem4) June 6, 2018
