Doh! Should have read the full Wikipedia article.

Pfft. Real hoopy froods play Heroclix.

I do not play Heroclix but I bought some about 20 years ago.

Jesus christ 20 years? Huh. Also I didn’t notice but it was discontinued in 2008.

Yeah that was my read of the game from my first exposure to it. “You have to buy cards sight-unseen hoping to get good ones? That’s a scam.”

It’s like they looked at Dungeons and Dragons product churn and thought “No, that’s not shitty enough”

The Auryn project has a sub-project called North Star, founded by a VC partner, and a Bain Capital veteran, among others.

The whole thing gives me the ick.

Books would be really boring if the protagonists were all just the author speaking as themself but using various funny voices.

All you need to know about Gruber is in this claim of his about phone photography, in a critique of a NY Times tech journalist who deigned to acknowledge that readers could just use flash to get better low-light photos:

A mainstream technology columnist should be explaining to readers why they should not use flash, and how best to capture low-light photographs without it. “You could always just use flash” is technology malpractice.

In reality, a mainstream technology columnist’s job isn’t to encourage readers to cough up hundreds of dollars to buy the newest phone for the sake of something that might be of negligible importance to most of them.

Gruber clearly thinks his job is to always encourage readers to buy the latest Apple phone. At least when his job isn’t to sniff his own farts.

Flash is also technology! Most photography and videography is done using artificial light! There aren’t many people walking around with spy satellite lenses like fucking Kubrick to do natural light camera work.

Also I think he’s a bit of a fancy watch douchebag.

• came in a deck of cards

I hate the energy of That Guy that barges into the room and shouts “I solved X!” without researching for 5 minutes what all the people that were actually hard at work solving X came up with, what hurdles they identified, and which paths were already explored.

Reminds me of the time I was at Barnes & Noble and this lady comes in with her little boy (4-6 maybe?) and they head for the children’s section. At the entry to the children’s section she tells him to go find a book, and they separate. He walks a step to the first display in the center of the entry area, grabs something, and shouts “Momma I found a BOOK.”

I guess we’ll just punish random people for random things.

The sign of a great CEO is that sense of urgency.

I’m fairly sure some parts of Australia are still pretty Victorian. Editorial pages, much of the parliament thingy, etc.

It’s clearly Malcolm McDowell

They also mean “the wrong people are having too many children”.

Also:

Poor black people with lots of kids, using government assistance: “Don’t have kids you can’t afford!”

Middle-class white people putting off having kids because they can’t afford them: “Don’t give us that excuse, start breeding!”

By the beer standard the most tech-bro-y place I’ve worked was Swiss Bank Corp / O’Connor in Chicago, a software focused trading shop. In 1994. NeXT machines and Symbolics LISP machines on the private trading floor kind of place, with refrigerators kept stocked with free sodas and beer. Beer was for after 5, except on St Patrick’s day, when coolers of beer came out at about noon. Also, Nerf guns on the trading floor.

And yet, at least for the people I know best from there, they didn’t turn out to be tech bros. Perhaps there’s a generational aspect.

Sounds like they called it “Turing” in the midcentury law enforcement sense.

The real “techbros” are all business people in an actual position of power, not the introverted QA tester just trying to get through the day.

If the QA tester goes home and checks his Raspberry Pi dogecoin mining rig, and is saving up for a Cybertruck, he’s probably a tech bro, if only a larval one.

It’s been decentralized.

There’s probably some blurring of what “AI doom” means for people. People might be left thinking that “there could be negative effects due to widespread job loss etc” without necessarily buying into the weird maximalist AI doom ideas or “torturing simulated you forever” nonsense.

And the weirdo cultists probably use that blurring to build support for their cause without revealing the weird shit they actually believe.

To be fair though rodents can have pretty huge balls. Like dragging on the ground behind them huge.

I’m not sure the “frontiers in” journals are all that reputable.