I mean a lot of the services that companies are using are cloud-hosted, meaning that especially if you have branch offices or a lot of remote workers a normal firewall in the datacenter introduces an unnecessary bottleneck. Putting the logical edge of your organization’s network in the cloud too makes sense from a performance perspective in that case, and then turning the actual firewalls into SaaS seems much less absurd.

There’s a certain spirit of online debate about trivial or nonsensical things like this that can best be understood as happening purely for the sport of it.

I didn’t say anything about voting, I’m just trying to be realistic about who else is looking forward to the collapse of the current system. If you want to roll the dice on that then you should at least be honest about who else is sitting at the table.

So the neocons of the 2000s are the C’tan, providing neoliberals with unending life by running against fascists and also necrosteel bodies but at the cost of their souls. One day we will overthrow the gods and place their shards into our doomsday weapons.

Hey now, let’s be fair. It’s not just ashes, it’s also going to be blood. And between 2 and 3 of the 4 cats are literal Nazis.

This is goin’ in tha book.

So when Ukrainians try to push for closer alignment with the EU it’s a Washington-backed color revolution and thus is no different than Russia rolling into the literal tanks.

Like, even if you’re not a Russian troll you’re still adopting a conspiracy theory that completely ignores any agency the Ukrainian people have.

But only the specific subset of anarchists that I read about first in my early 20s! All the others are just like those fascists in the Judean People’s Front!

I think the other important point to add is that evo psych in popular discourse is rarely used to explain alone. Instead it seems to always lead into the naturalistic fallacy as an explanation for why the world can’t or shouldn’t be kinder, more humane, or less authoritarian. Add on to this that the people making these arguments are usually pretty out of touch with the actual archaeological record about their supposed environment of evolutionary adaptiveness and it’s not at all surprising that whatever legitimate insights it may offer are buried under a mountain of bullshit.

Honestly I think a lot of the worst evo psych takes don’t even get as far as hypothesizing or evidence. They fail at the first hurdle of “identify something about the world”. It’s the classic Freudian error of never once asking “hey wait is everyone like this or is it just me?”

Honestly I feel like in this case it works out better. “Eat shit, Rene Magritte” is such a good line to have no context on.

Horses were at least marginally less ridiculous before people got involved. Not quite to the same extent as dogs, but compare a steppe horse with a thoroughbred and you’ll see that they’re smaller and hardier. Much better equipped to live, slightly less able to carry fully armored people on their back.

Of course, some months later as fall approached, travellers saw stretched between the ruined pillars a banner proclaiming: Spirit Halloween Now Hiring!

Actually it’s vitally important if you’re going to have an outdoor catgirl. Otherwise they’ll decimate the local birdgirl population.

Obligatory plug for calcgpt

I got all the way down on my one knee and nothing short of the second coming is gonna move me from this spot

I feel like in a lot of cases the context is also sometimes important to differentiate between a real-life idiot and someone who is “Just Asking Questions.”

The trite disclaimer is one thing, but explaining how you came to the specific question you’re asking helps me trust that it’s worth giving you an actual explanation rather than the dismissal that some folks want so they can post it on wherever the new home is for “so much for the tolerant left” bullshit.

Possibly fair. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen that exact screenshot used in other articles about Doom, but I’m not enough of a Doom nerd to be sure.

There’s a decent writeup over at Pivot-to-AI that looks at the paper as a whole in more detail.

Note that the image here isn’t from the AI project, it’s from actual Doom. Their own screenshots have weird glitches including a hit splat that looks like a butt in the image I’ve seen closest to this one.

And when they say they’ve “run the game” they do not mean that there was a playable version that was publicly compared to the original. Rather they released short video clips of alleged gameplay and had their evaluators try to identify if they were from the AI recreation or from actual Doom.

Even by the abysmal standards of generative AI projects this is a hell of a grift.

It’s not that beauty is skin-deep, it’s that the subdermal tissues and structures are the stuff of eldricht nightmares and cronenbergian horror.