#beta-testers

[merrycrisis-if]

Merry crisis announcements! 🎉

Upcoming chapter

I'm 95% done with writing the next chapter of Merry Crisis (i.e. 27th Dec) and it's already a banger at 56k words!

Features

The lead-up to the Nat surprise(!!)

Visit the columbarium with your family (to commemorate your grandparents 👴👵), and relive some childhood memories! <flesh out your MC's family life!>

Skip the columbarium family trip and have lunch with Qiu (at their workplace 💼🌶) or Shay (includes an optional boxing 🥊 session, and potentially meet someone dear to them 🍲). Or play boardgames with Joony 🎲 instead!

Meet Qiu or Shay at a 'winter'-themed funfair/carnival in the evening (or save it for a future Nat date)🧸🎄🍻 <win stuffed animals, drink mulled wine, sit on the lawn and... experience... snow(?)>

Release dates

Early: 22 Mar

Public: 5 Apr

Call for Beta-testers

Merry Crisis has reached a really substantial word count (past 200k with this new chapter), so it's about time I started editing it more systematically! :)

I would love to get a couple of beta testers involved, so do drop me an email at allieebobo@gmail.com if you're interested to help beta-test the newest chapter and the entire IF!

If you have noticed some errors, do also drop them here (much appreciated!)

Sneak peak scenes

As you guys know, I was meant to publish an early sneak peek for Qiu's lunch scene a long time ago--and it just took a long time to take shape.

I'll be releasing not just Qiu's lunch, but also Shay's lunch, and both will be fully interactive. You will need to do a quick input of your MC's/Qiu/Shay's pronouns though.

Release dates

Early: 15 Mar

Public: 22 Mar

Love, Allie

[allieebobo]

This is an open letter to everyone who's just loading their saves to get into new content: You will never comprehend with each and every update just how much previous things have consistently changed. It's so good. Allie you're a genius.

Awwww. And this is a shout-out to all my beta testers, including @raptorofwar (and readers who spend time sending in thoughts and feedback and bug reports too!) - I'd never be able to make all these improvements to CT:OS without all the love, thoughtfulness and attention you guys lavish on the game, so thank you so so much. 💞

Well, I hope the consistent changes are for the better! 😅

[chloesimaginationthings]

Vanessa TOTALLY got those Tapes for the FNAF lore..

[genshin-impact-updates]

Now seems like as good a time as any to tap the sign, since I've received a few asks lately that assume I'm a qualified hoyo spokesperson. I am not, I'm just some guy!

This also means that I have no control over character design decisions – in fact, I have as many complaints as you do. If you want to express your opinions in a way that's more likely to reach the company, I recommend using the current in-game survey and this petition that's been circulating in both the Chinese and global communities.

[gracieoro23]

Show me your score losers I’ll tell you what I think about it 😏

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Three AI insights for hard-charging, future-oriented smartypantses

MERE HOURS REMAIN for the Kickstarter for the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There’s also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

Living in the age of AI hype makes demands on all of us to come up with smartypants prognostications about how AI is about to change everything forever, and wow, it's pretty amazing, huh?

AI pitchmen don't make it easy. They like to pile on the cognitive dissonance and demand that we all somehow resolve it. This is a thing cult leaders do, too – tell blatant and obvious lies to their followers. When a cult follower repeats the lie to others, they are demonstrating their loyalty, both to the leader and to themselves.

Over and over, the claims of AI pitchmen turn out to be blatant lies. This has been the case since at least the age of the Mechanical Turk, the 18th chess-playing automaton that was actually just a chess player crammed into the base of an elaborate puppet that was exhibited as an autonomous, intelligent robot.

The most prominent Mechanical Turk huckster is Elon Musk, who habitually, blatantly and repeatedly lies about AI. He's been promising "full self driving" Telsas in "one to two years" for more than a decade. Periodically, he'll "demonstrate" a car that's in full-self driving mode – which then turns out to be canned, recorded demo:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-video-promoting-self-driving-was-staged-engineer-testifies-2023-01-17/

Musk even trotted an autonomous, humanoid robot on-stage at an investor presentation, failing to mention that this mechanical marvel was just a person in a robot suit:

https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/elon-musk-tesla-robot-optimus-ai

Now, Musk has announced that his junk-science neural interface company, Neuralink, has made the leap to implanting neural interface chips in a human brain. As Joan Westenberg writes, the press have repeated this claim as presumptively true, despite its wild implausibility:

https://joanwestenberg.com/blog/elon-musk-lies

Neuralink, after all, is a company notorious for mutilating primates in pursuit of showy, meaningless demos:

https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-pcrm-neuralink-monkey-deaths/

I'm perfectly willing to believe that Musk would risk someone else's life to help him with this nonsense, because he doesn't see other people as real and deserving of compassion or empathy. But he's also profoundly lazy and is accustomed to a world that unquestioningly swallows his most outlandish pronouncements, so Occam's Razor dictates that the most likely explanation here is that he just made it up.

The odds that there's a human being beta-testing Musk's neural interface with the only brain they will ever have aren't zero. But I give it the same odds as the Raelians' claim to have cloned a human being:

https://edition.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/01/03/cf.opinion.rael/

The human-in-a-robot-suit gambit is everywhere in AI hype. Cruise, GM's disgraced "robot taxi" company, had 1.5 remote operators for every one of the cars on the road. They used AI to replace a single, low-waged driver with 1.5 high-waged, specialized technicians. Truly, it was a marvel.

Globalization is key to maintaining the guy-in-a-robot-suit phenomenon. Globalization gives AI pitchmen access to millions of low-waged workers who can pretend to be software programs, allowing us to pretend to have transcended the capitalism's exploitation trap. This is also a very old pattern – just a couple decades after the Mechanical Turk toured Europe, Thomas Jefferson returned from the continent with the dumbwaiter. Jefferson refined and installed these marvels, announcing to his dinner guests that they allowed him to replace his "servants" (that is, his slaves). Dumbwaiters don't replace slaves, of course – they just keep them out of sight:

https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/blog/behind-the-dumbwaiter/

So much AI turns out to be low-waged people in a call center in the Global South pretending to be robots that Indian techies have a joke about it: "AI stands for 'absent Indian'":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

A reader wrote to me this week. They're a multi-decade veteran of Amazon who had a fascinating tale about the launch of Amazon Go, the "fully automated" Amazon retail outlets that let you wander around, pick up goods and walk out again, while AI-enabled cameras totted up the goods in your basket and charged your card for them.

According to this reader, the AI cameras didn't work any better than Tesla's full-self driving mode, and had to be backstopped by a minimum of three camera operators in an Indian call center, "so that there could be a quorum system for deciding on a customer's activity – three autopilots good, two autopilots bad."

Amazon got a ton of press from the launch of the Amazon Go stores. A lot of it was very favorable, of course: Mister Market is insatiably horny for firing human beings and replacing them with robots, so any announcement that you've got a human-replacing robot is a surefire way to make Line Go Up. But there was also plenty of critical press about this – pieces that took Amazon to task for replacing human beings with robots.

What was missing from the criticism? Articles that said that Amazon was probably lying about its robots, that it had replaced low-waged clerks in the USA with even-lower-waged camera-jockeys in India.

Which is a shame, because that criticism would have hit Amazon where it hurts, right there in the ole Line Go Up. Amazon's stock price boost off the back of the Amazon Go announcements represented the market's bet that Amazon would evert out of cyberspace and fill all of our physical retail corridors with monopolistic robot stores, moated with IP that prevented other retailers from similarly slashing their wage bills. That unbridgeable moat would guarantee Amazon generations of monopoly rents, which it would share with any shareholders who piled into the stock at that moment.

See the difference? Criticize Amazon for its devastatingly effective automation and you help Amazon sell stock to suckers, which makes Amazon executives richer. Criticize Amazon for lying about its automation, and you clobber the personal net worth of the executives who spun up this lie, because their portfolios are full of Amazon stock:

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

Amazon Go didn't go. The hundreds of Amazon Go stores we were promised never materialized. There's an embarrassing rump of 25 of these things still around, which will doubtless be quietly shuttered in the years to come. But Amazon Go wasn't a failure. It allowed its architects to pocket massive capital gains on the way to building generational wealth and establishing a new permanent aristocracy of habitual bullshitters dressed up as high-tech wizards.

"Wizard" is the right word for it. The high-tech sector pretends to be science fiction, but it's usually fantasy. For a generation, America's largest tech firms peddled the dream of imminently establishing colonies on distant worlds or even traveling to other solar systems, something that is still so far in our future that it might well never come to pass:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

During the Space Age, we got the same kind of performative bullshit. On The Well David Gans mentioned hearing a promo on SiriusXM for a radio show with "the first AI co-host." To this, Craig L Maudlin replied, "Reminds me of fins on automobiles."

Yup, that's exactly it. An AI radio co-host is to artificial intelligence as a Cadillac Eldorado Biaritz tail-fin is to interstellar rocketry.

Back the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle here!

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/31/neural-interface-beta-tester/#tailfins

[camzverse]

theyre having a pro gamer moment

^og image

[infamous-if]

Infamous-if is looking for beta testers!

Hello everyone! As infamous gets more dense and variable heavy with the upcoming update and with me finishing off the prologue, it's time to look for some kind people to help me beta test and provide additional help.

As a beta tester you will:

find errors, bugs and inconsistencies

be in a beta testing discord (must have a discord account)

agree not to reveal any information on the story and what is discussed on discord

reading the story multiple times/agree to the fact that you will likely be spoiled in case extra context is needed

put up with my endless rambling about the story lolol

MORE INFO + GOOGLE FORM LINK

[elucienweekofficial]

Thank you so much to everyone who participated in Elucien Week 2024! We were blown away by the amount of people who showed up to pour their love, creativity, and support into this event! It was so beautiful to see the community come together, and we already can't wait to do it all again next year!

Before we leave to start planning for Elucienweek2025, we have one last surpise we wanted to share as a thank you to everyone who contributed to this fantastic week! We've taken a look through all 60 works in this year's AO3 collection and have sorted them into a quiz that will help you decide which one is perfect for you!

>>>Click here to take the quiz

And again, thank you to everyone for a fabulous week! We can’t wait to see you again next year!

[ramonag-if]

Call for beta testers!

The form for beta testers is now open. I need a few more testers to help me test parts of Chapter Ten of Crown of Exile. If you're interested, please consider completing the form here.

Things to keep in mind before applying:

You must be 18 years or older.

You must have access to Discord or already have an account on Discord.

I expect you to be an active member.

I'm looking mostly for bugs, continuity errors and overall gameplay feedback.

If you're already on the beta testing channel, feel free to apply again through this form.

I will be going through the submissions towards the end of August, so if you're keen on helping out in this round of testing, please make sure to fill the form!

[incorrect-fnaf-quotes]

Another AU idea: Instead of it happening to Vanessa, Beta-Tester Jeremy ends up in the situation as Glitchtrap’s Reluctant Follower, makes a suit, and then heads to the Pizza Plex.

Though, Vanny still does exist within the AU. Here, she’s an actual animatronic rabbit that was being worked on at some point—except... she’s not really finished.

She was created, yes, and there was a lot done with her... but she’s basically an abandoned animatronic. For whatever reason, everyone just kind of stopped doing anything relating to her, and stored her away.

Because of that, none of the other animatronics know about her—nobody met her. Reluctant Follower Jeremy discovers her, and Glitchtrap decides to infect her with his virus or whatever.

So then, he has both of them following his plan(s), and the two are both going after Gregory, alongside the other affected animatronics.

[dykevanny]

i like them tbh. The buddies…

[lightofthedeep]

Woooo congrats Black Clover mobile for the global launch !!

[thatrandombystander]

New screenshots from the KH Missing Link early access download page!!

[separatist-apologist]

Before it all begins, and we have this last 30ish minutes of quiet, I want to say I genuinely hope this upcoming month leading to elucien week feels fun and supportive. Behind the scenes, we've been working on some of these things for months- its been such a labor of love.

I genuinely adore this ship and this place and I hope you all feel that. We've tried to include as many people as we possibly could in the early hype days and I'm so excited for people to see themselves and their talent and hard work in some of the little activities. You all make this place so great.

I can't wait to see what everyone puts together for elucien week (my Roman Empire)!!

[lemonttwhat]

FASHION MEME ANIMATION!! ✨

YESS!! FINALLY! I FINISHED! Hope u like this guys it took so long x')