Risking some downvotes here, but just like most stories, not every character in the Bible is supposed to be a paragon of morality. Just like in any story, people do bad things.
Obviously this post is somewhat satirical, but dunking on something like this just reminds me of book banning arguments, and that general lack of literary comprehension. There's better things to take issue with.
I do really think they fumbled the bag here with "Welcome Tour". Could've been a cool pack in, would've been reminiscent of Wii Sports, and apparently it's a decent quality package that probably would've been well received, and helped build hype for the console.
Instead, they charged a pittance for it. No way are they getting many sales, and they gave us an easy narrative that they're greedy and have lost their way since Reggie and the Wii, just as they launch a hella expensive console with big price increases and don't need that kind of PR.
They turned an easy PR win that might have helped move units into a PR disaster in a touchy time, for chump change next to their profit margins on the console + games like Mario Kart World. Also lost a chance to advertise and show off what the new hardware can really do, the whole thing looks like a big advertisement anyways. Hell, it even looks pretty neat, but there's not a snowballs chance in hell of me paying for it.
Mhm, of course, critical thinking in general is absolutely important, although I take some issue with describing looking for artifacts as "vague hunches". Fake photos have existed for ages, and we've found consistent ways to spot and identify them, such as checking shadows, the directionality of light in a scene, the fringes of detailed objects, black levels and highlights, and even advanced techniques like bokeh and motion blur. You don't see many people casting doubt on the validity of old pictures with Trump and Epstein together, for example, despite the long existence of photoshop and advanced VFX. Hell, even this image could have been photoshopped, and you're relying on your eyes to catch the evidence of that if that were the case.
The techniques I've outlined here aren't likely to become irrelevant in the next 5+ years, given they're based on how the underlying technology works, similar to how LLMs aren't likely to 100% stop hallucinating any time soon. More than that, I actually think there's a lot less incentive to work these minor kinks out than something like LLM hallucination, because these images already fool 99% of people, and who knows how much additional processing power it would take to run this at a resolution where you could get something like flawless tufts of grass, in a field that's already struggling to make a profit given the high costs of generating this output. And if/when these techniques become invalid, I'll put in the effort to learn new ones, as it's worthwhile to be able to quickly and easily identify fakes.
As much as I wholeheartedly agree that we need to think critically and evaluate things based on facts, we live in a world where the U.S. President was posting AI videos of Obama just a couple weeks ago. He may be an idiot who is being obviously manipulative, but it's naive to think we won't eventually get bad actors like him who try to manipulate narratives like that with current events, where we can't rely on simply fact-checking history, or that someone might weave a lie that doesn't have obvious logical gaps, and we need some kind of technique to verify images to settle the inevitable future "he said, she said" debates. The only real alternative is to just never trust a new photo again, because we can't 100% prove anything new hasn't been doctored.
We've survived in a world with fake imagery for decades now, I don't think we need to roll over and accept AI as unbeatable just because it fakes things differently, or because it might hypothetically improve at hiding itself in the future.
Anyway, rant over, you're right, critical thinking is paramount, but being able to clearly spot fakes is a super useful skill to add to that kit, even if it can't 100% confirm an image as real. I believe these are useful tools to have, which is why I took the time to point them out despite the image already having been proven as not AI by others dating it before I got here.
True, someone else did some reverse image searching before I got here, but I think it's an important skill to develop without relying on dating the image, as that will only work for so long, and there will likely be more important things than memes that will need to be proven/disproven in the future. A reverse image search probably won't help us with the next political scandal, for example. It's a pretty good backup to have when it applies though, nice that it proves me correct here.
Haha, that's just because I used a bullet point list. No em dashes though, at the very least.
I'd recommend you get some practice identifying and proving AI generated images. I agree this has a bit of that "look", but in this case I'm quite certain it's just repeated image compression/a cheap camera. Here's the major details I looked at after seeing your comment:
It's useful to be able to prove or disprove your suspicions, as well as to be able to back them up with something as simple as "this is AI generated, just look at the grass". Hope this helps!
I'll give two answers to this question, from the perspective of a Christian reading the Old Testament/Torah.
Wouldn't it be effective to convince followers of a religion if a religion could accurately predict a scientific phenomenon before its followers have the means of discovering it?
This is interpretative, but if there is a God, he seems big on free will. Why give humanity the option to sin in the garden at all? Why not just reveal himself in the sky each morning? Why even bother creating a universe that can be explained without him? There's an abundance of easy ways God could make himself irrefutable, and yet in the Bible he makes us "in His image", and offers us choices like that tree in the garden.
Furthermore, why even create us to sin in the first place? My interpretation of the Torah is that God is big on relationship, and that free will is a key part of that. Just like a human relationship based on a love potion is kinda creepy, and a pale imitation of something real, it seems like God doesn't want to be irrefutable.
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I think that's the more relevant answer to your question, but I'll also give the only example that comes to mind of the Bible seemingly imparting "scientific knowledge", which is to look at the laws around "cleanliness". Someone else already mentioned some "unclean" animals, but if you read more, they pretty consistently seem like good advice around bacteria. Some examples of times you need to "purify" (essentially take a bath) that seem like common sense now:
Reading this as a modern person aware of germs, many of these "laws" seem like they would have kept the death rate of faithful Jews a lot lower than their neighbours in that day.
Interesting. I've been using XeSS lately, after seeing better results in DOOM TDA, but now I'm curious if this is worth using instead, and figuring out an FSR replacer on Bazzite to use this.
Exactly what I've done. Set my settings to hide NSFW, blocked most of the "soft" communities like hot girls and moe anime girls and whatever else (blocking the lemmynsfw.com instance is a great place to start), and I use All frequently. That's how I've found all the communities I've subscribed to, but frankly, my /all feed is small enough that I usually see all my subscribed communities anyway.
Hard to blame them. Proton is dang impressive, and if it works, it works.
At this point, my assumption whenever I see heavy handed RTO orders like this, is that you're seeing disguised layoffs.
Don't want to spook the stock market, but still "need" to cut people to show profit "growth" this quarter? Just be such a massive ass to your employees that a ton of them quit. It's that easy.
"Good" also doesn't mean flawless at all times. Characters can make mistakes and still be "good" without you having to justify everything they've done as perfect.
An even better example is King David, the one and only "man after God's own heart" taking another man's wife while he was fighting David's war, and then arranging his death to cover it up after he got her pregnant.
Arguing that that, or this, is advice for the reader, or meant as an example of something you should do, is a comical straw man. A narrative doesn't usually stop to explicitly label "good" and "bad" for us like children. There's loads to complain about with popular far-right Christianity, why would we invent ridiculous arguments that are easy to debunk and make us look like we don't have good literary comprehension?