I appreciate the dedication to the bit. I once tried to figure out how much money was in the briefcases from the coke deal that goes bad in Vice City as a similar joke/curiosity.

People are stupid

Consumerism is absolutely out of control.

Good.
Shareholders are the bane of everything good in this world.

Because he is criminally insane. Basically, so mentally ill that we as a society have determined that he lacked the intent to commit the crimes. That doesn’t mean he can be free, because of the impact to public safety. It just mean he lacked the mens rea to be found guilty of the crimes, and lacks the mental capacity…

I’m as anti-prison as you can get when it comes to anything short of violent crimes but even then I believe in rehabilitation over incarceration. However, I’m already seeing takes like “he’s just a hacker, he didn’t hurt anyone” which is absolutely the most braindead take I could have imagined.

Eh...maybe.

That is in no way a fitting punishment for the crime of “hacking” companies that should already have had better systems in place. Does he not have any family, is house arrest not an option? 

The current use of AI can be equated to NFTs in that it is a grift by people who don’t understand art but want to profit off of it. For some reason, business types don’t want to use AI to erase the tedious parts of human existence but the artistic ones that people enjoy creating.

Kotaku equating AI to NFTs might be the dumbest thing I’ve read in a while. AI has legitimate uses across multiple industries and is inevitably going to be a part of most future development pipelines. It’s not some cash grab fad that’s going to quickly fade away like NFTs.

I agree with most of this list, with two exceptions.

Auteurs are at their best when they’re simply allowed to create. But man, if the guy wasn’t such an asshole I might have some sympathy.

Social media has given every narcissistic moron with access to a computer or a phone a megaphone, and we’re all dumber and worse off for it.

They should just give him a couple million. Fuck it. Let this guy build a waterpark that serves Bacardi or whatever his dream is.

Here’s the thing: there is a 0% chance he’ll get any money from Rockstar, as the tattoos aren’t the same, so there goes any possible copyright claims, and it’s obviously a work of parody.

Once again illustrating that Florida Man is a f***ing idiot. It’s called parody and satire, and they’re legally protected concepts. The fact that you’re a walking magnet for parody and satire of your stupidity is your own fault.

FYI the “random gibberish” they all spoke is a phonetic pangram, a sentence containing all the sounds from the english language (like the “quick brown fox...” contains all the letters, but for sounds)

What doesn’t help is that there’s Israeli interests who explicitly WANT this confusion to exist because it helps their geopolitical interests.

(As well as evangelical death cult interests in the US who want this confusion to exist because System Requirement for their doomsday prophecies, but that’s a whole other thing)

“The fact that a ‘shitty Arab country’ visual shorthand already exists says enough,” Nadia Shammas told me during a video call. “A shorthand, that, by the way, did not exist—it had to be punched into culture over and over and over again for it to stick in the subconscious to such an extent that you don’t even question…

Americans cope backwards and scheme forwards.