April Fools’ Day 2023: the best and cringiest pranks
The holiday we didn’t ask for is back, as brands like Razer and Tesla put on their silly hats for the weekend.
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The holiday we didn’t ask for is back, as brands like Razer and Tesla put on their silly hats for the weekend.
Considering the date on the calendar and the lack of a price or other details, the first — and probably correct — response to Asus surprise-announcing a handheld gaming machine is that this must be an April Fools’ Day prank. Still, this Asus ROG Ally launch video is just a little too good to simply shake off.
According to Asus, the Windows 11-powered ROG Ally has a customized Ryzen APU from AMD inside, like the Aerith SOC inside Valve’s Steam Deck, and Asus claims it is the fastest one from AMD yet.
The screen will provide “full HD gaming,” and it promises a quiet dual-fan design along with the visible standard setup of dual analog sticks, left-mounted D-pad, and four face buttons, plus a few smaller buttons around the screen to access…
“As AI-generated shitposting becomes easier, it’s inevitable that one of these will catch you with your guard down, or appeal to some basic emotion you are too eager to believe…”
Even if you’re trained in recognizing fake imagery and can immediately spot the difference between copy written by a language model and a human (content that’s increasingly sneaking into online articles), doing endless fact-checking and performing countless micro-decisions about reality and fraud is mentally draining. Every year, our brains are tasked with processing five percent more information per day than the last. Add to this cognitive load a constant, background-level effort to decide whether that data is a lie. The disinformation apocalypse is already here, but not in the form of the Russian “dezinformatsiya” we feared. Wading through what’s real and fake online has never been harder, not because each individual deepfake is impossible to distinguish from reality, but because the volume of low effort gags is outpacing our ability to process them….
Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley who’s been studying manipulated media since long before deepfakes, told me that while he’s used to getting a few calls every week from reporters asking him to take a look at images or videos that seem manipulated, over the past few weeks, he’s gotten dozens of requests a day. “I don’t even know how to put words to it. It really feels like it’s unraveling,” Farid told me in a phone call.
When AI generated fakes started cropping up online years ago, he recalled, he warned that this would change the future, and some of his colleagues told him that he was overreacting. “The one thing that has surprised me is that it has gone much, much faster than I expected,” he said. “I always thought, I agree that it is not the biggest problem today. But what’s that Wayne Gretzky line? Don’t skate to where the puck is, skate to where the puck is going. You’ve got to follow the puck. In this case, I don’t think this was hard to predict.”
Buzzfeed noted that a viral image of the Pope in a white “puffer” coat” was created by a 31-year-old construction worker who created it while tripping on mushrooms, then posted it to Facebook.
But Motherboard’s article concludes with a quote from Peter Eckersley, the chief computer scientist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation who died in 2022. “There’s a large and growing fraction of machine learning and AI researchers who are worried about the societal implications of their work on many fronts, but are also excited for the enormous potential for good that this technology processes.” Eckersley said in a 2018 phone call. “So I think a lot of people are starting to ask, ‘How do we do this the right way?’
“It turns out that that’s a very hard question to answer. Or maybe a hard question to answer correctly… How do we put our thumbs on the scale to ensure machine learning is producing a saner and more stable world, rather than one where more systems can be broken into more quickly?”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
We all love a gritty game with plenty of realism, and things that do what they’re supposed to, but sometimes you’ve just got to get a little silly. Instead of pranking you this April Fools, we thought we’d treat you to a rundown of the wackiest, most ridiculous mods you can download for your favourite games.
Sonic is dead, according to Sega’s new release, The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog. The game is an April Fool’s gift, and The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog is free on Steam.
The game takes a visual novel format and opens with Sonic dying on the Mirage Express during Amy Rose’s murder mystery party held to celebrate her birthday. It’s up to you, the player, to find out who killed Sonic and what sinister things are afoot.
As for whether this game is canononical, the answer is no. “This is not a Sonic Team title, but we strongly believe in the power of headcanon,” the Steam description says.
If you got your blue Twitter verification checkmark the old-fashioned way—you know, by not paying for it—then I have bad news for you. The Tesla CEO turned Twitter CEO reiterated today that legacy blue checkmarks on the platform will be yoinked from users’ authenticated hands on April 1…or will they?
Twitter has announced that it’ll start “winding down” its legacy verified program and removing “legacy verified checkmarks” starting on April 1st, and is telling users to subscribe to its Blue subscription if they want to keep their blue check.
There’s a lot to unpack here. First, the announcement isn’t necessarily a surprise. CEO Elon Musk has been promising to get rid of “legacy” blue check marks, or verification badges that were given under Twitter’s previous rules, since November, and he’s reiterated that they’d be going away “in coming months” several times. According to Musk, those verification badges were given out in a “corrupt and nonsensical” manner (though they are in fact quite useful for letting users confirm that the…