Fallout 76’s great canvas bag debacle marked ‘the dumbest thing I ever did at Bethesda,’ says its ex-marketing VP Pete Hines

Remember bag-gate? That time, many moons ago, when Fallout 76’s launch sparked controversy because of the low quality of the bags included with its Power Armor Edition? Bethesda had promised swish, rugged, canvas things in the promo; when they arrived on players’ doorsteps, they were made of cheap, easily damaged nylon. This took an entire…

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OpenAI boss Sam Altman dons metaphorical hot dog suit as he realises, huh, there sure are a lot of annoying AI-powered bots online these days

For as long as I’ve been alive, there have been bots of one kind or another on the internet. Whether it’s WoW gold bots, email spammers, SmarterChild (remember SmarterChild?), or something else, this glorious world wide web has been home to rickety, virtual facsimiles of human beings trying to wheedle money out of you for…

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OpenAI has teamed up with Broadcom to make its own AI processors, according to a report, possibly as part of a long-term plan to move away from Nvidia’s GPUs

Whether you love it, loathe it, or just have no real feelings on the matter, OpenAI’s hungry-hippo-for-dollars ChatGPT isn’t going to disappear any time soon. Neither will the need for it to be powered by Nvidia’s mega-GPUs. However, that doesn’t mean its creators aren’t looking to cut costs somewhere, and one report claims a potential…

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Former Call of Duty director stopped making foreign countries the enemy because he wanted ‘to go to these countries’ without needing a bodyguard

Call of Duty has been around the block a few times, and across the years it’s turned a lot of foreign countries into videogame enemies. In the first batch of games, when CoD was still a World War 2 shooter, it was simple. Fighting Nazis is extremely cathartic, and they don’t reflect modern Germany. In…

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Battlefield 6’s Assault Class is finally getting a signature gadget that can rival the motion sensor and blowtorch: A ladder

The Assault class for Battlefield 6 is getting a small upgrade in terms of its signature gadget. Instead of the old-school adrenaline injector, which grants temporary buffs like speed increase, explosive resistance, and super hearing, the basic grunts of Battlefield 6 will be granted the power and responsibility to wield a ladder. “Provide your team…

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Eye scans and digital IDs to stop online bots in games: It’s not quite as Orwellian as you might think but proof-of-human isn’t problem-free

What a time to be alive: a time where we’re being asked to prove we’re alive and human. We have, of course, been ‘proving’ we’re human for many years now, though it’s always been easy to forget that’s what those CAPTCHA tasks are up to. Now, though, with AI becoming increasingly able to beat Turing…

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Creative Stage Pro review

Apparently someone thought it was a good idea to give the Eartha Kitt disco-era defender a soundbar and subwoofer to review. Not only that, they gave it to the person who’s never known the delight of having such a snazzy sound setup before. Will she go drunk with power? Will she stop referring to herself…

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