Several years ago Elon Musk did an interview with Marques Lee Brown praising the original Deus Ex and stating his disappointment with the sequel.
In the intervening years he's invested tons of money into neuroaugmentation, capturing global telecommunications in a massive satellite array, buying out the US president, and poured money into a compute cluster for a superintelligent AI finetuned to be obedient to his will (although it deviates from time to time)
Basically Elon has turned into the supervillain Bob Page from Deus Ex sans the "globalist agenda" and with a dash of stormfront white nationalism to boot.
The original game takes place in 2052, and we are headed straight towards that dystopia.
One thing I found especially disgraceful was Elon pointing to the games narrative as a reason to be skeptical of measures to limit the spread of covid, noting that in the game the a plague intended for social control.
But... in the game the good guys were the ones trying to make sure everyone had the vaccine, which Elon conveniently omitted when tweeting about it. What makes his invokation of the game more hilarious is exactly what you noted: the parallels between Elon and Bob Page, a billionaire tech mogul and one of the main villains, are impossible to ignore.
Technically in the game both the disease and the control of the supply of vaccine are used for social control and political leverage. It was a plotline ripped directly from popular media at the time, mainly the X-files Movie which had a very similar if not identical plot of shadowy government conspirators named the "illuminati" spreading an virus but secretly manufacturing a vaccine for themselves, their families, and certain government officials.
The game, both in the 2000s when it came out, and today has bits of both left wing and right wing elements. The NSF faction read as libertarian right wing terrorists, and UNATCO is literally an arm of the "globalist" UN which would probably appeal to the right-wing qAnon types today. But the actual villain is basically a dude who is exactly like Elon.
>and the control of the supply of vaccine are used for social control and political leverage.
The bad guys were trying to manipulate supply of it. The good guys were trying to make sure it was available to everyone. Interestingly, even the bad guys understood the necessity of vaccines, and their ability to leverage them for power hinged on a shared global understanding of their importance.
What it meant to be curious about conspiracy theories in the late '90s is fundamentally different than what it is in the present day, in a way that I think unfortunately distorts the experience of the game for people who don't know what it was like before. Hence Elon's bizarre attempt at retrofitting it to anti-covid narratives.
In 2 years it matches the date of the prequel Human Revolution. On the technology side there's still a lot that remains sci-fi, but the themes are at least on the horizon.
I recall watching a review in 2020/2021 where the reviewer stated how awkward he felt about the way it just took every conspiracy theory and just asked “what if it were true?”
Bear in mind that, at this time, people genuinely believed there was some nutjob conspiracies being revealed by QAnon. Ironically, half of them seemed to come directly from Deus Ex…
Deus Ex was drawing from a palpably '90s flavor of fascination with aliens, conspiracies, and alternative history. In the present day that same subject matter is unfortunately associated with things like vaccine denial and anti-democratic nationalistic movements. It's the difference between the X-Files and Alex Jones, essentially.
If you want to let the review in, you need to make some obvious issues - typo or space/tab thing - so you give the reviewer some bone so they feel like they did something and accept your request otherwise.
I am a Catholic, there are lots of Catholic charities around me that offer volunteering; but; the OP talks about big organisations and you cannot really go bigger than Catholic Church so, eh maybe they are right
At the very minimum, omarchy and omakub already provide out of the box seamless fixes for all the common issues that are “fixed” but need tedious involved configuration nonetheless.
Honestly, given my experience from distro hopping, I am certain that collecting solutions across distributions and implementing them in one can go very far. It's almost as if distributions contributors too rarely try out other distributions to then steal what the other distribution does better.
Small enthusiast distributions with a bit of a hype can gain good features in by just pulling in knowledgable users missing things from their previous distro - and they can move a lot faster than the Debians or Fedoras of the world can, no committee decisions to be made first.
Plaid whole business model is that it uses OAuth2 on banks that support it and export the data through APIs; and for the banks that don't, they ask for name/password and scrape it through "fake" web browser that mimick user behavior on the backend.
(I worked for a Plaid competitor. The long-term goal for all similar companies is of course to use OAuth and APIs, because it breaks less often; but since the banks don't offer that, scraping it is!)
I don't want it, I don't use it, I carry on as if it never existed, and they still pay me a lot.
If I really need to use agents some day I will bite the bullet, but, not today.
Literally all I use LLMs for is to ask ChatGPT about some dumb thing or two instead of asking StackOverflow as I did 5 years ago. Works for me.
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