United Russia representative Vyacheslav Vegner said he wants to give free theater tickets to young Russians who toss pumpkins into a local river as an act of defiance against Halloween.
United Russia representative Vyacheslav Vegner said he wants to give free theater tickets to young Russians who toss pumpkins into a local river as an act of defiance against Halloween.
AI tools are making it easier to modify and recreate games, raising questions about piracy, copyright and how far the technology could disrupt the industry
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If your social media algorithms have clocked that you’re into video games, something strange will have happened in the past few weeks. Your feed, like mine, will have been full of clips of streamers playing bizarre mashups of popular video games. Skyrim in Minecraft. Halo, except the main character is Mario. Skate 2 in Call of Duty maps. A flood of professional-looking fan-coded game mods that are mildly interesting to look at for 30 seconds, but ultimately inconsequential. Would I download a mod that lets me play Wii Bowling inside a zombie shooter? No, but I am very interested in where they came from.
Of course, the answer – or at least, most of the answer – is AI. After a week of researching this (thanks especially to Replay Mode on YouTube for this informative video, which set me down this track) I now understand that these mashup mods are not just AI-generated videos, but AI-assisted coding. Basically, as of a few weeks ago, Anthropic’s Claude has become extremely good at decompiling video game code. Games are written by humans in readable code and then compiled into binary 1s and 0s that the PC or console running it can read; decompiling is the reversal of that process, revealing a game’s source code, which humans can then edit and mess around with for fun. This used to be an extremely laborious process. But now it is not, because humans aren’t doing much of it any more.
Continue reading...‘Les didn’t wear gloves as he needed to be able to feel the bees so he didn’t crush them. He looks like something out of The Odyssey’
The jumping-off point for my Bare Handed series was a bird becoming trapped in the netting around the raspberry bushes in my backyard. It made me think of the problem humans have interacting with the natural world. How do we navigate obtaining food and the other things we need while still being good stewards of the land? I’d seen work by photographers demonstrating how Big Agriculture was destroying the environment. I wanted to find people who took a respectful approach, tried to work in tandem with it, but who might be in a fearful or dangerous situation.
I approached Les, the man in this picture, after speaking to the director of an exhibition space in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who had hired him to remove a feral beehive from his tree. I’d already tried to photograph another beekeeper who wore a full protective suit, but he might as well have been an astronaut. With Les, I was able to stay nearby and work with him over three days. The first couple involved straightforward documentary pictures of him tending his hives. Then, on the third day, his apprentice Amber showed up to help.
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Nog één keer achter de gokkasten om nog één keer de spanning te voelen. Het was de laatste wens van de Rotterdamse Hans Zandbergen (69). Hij is terminaal ziek en ging afgelopen weekend dankzij Stichting Ambulansewens naar het casino met zijn dierbare dochters: “Een dag om nooit te vergeten.”
