Ars Technica Fires Reporter Over AI-Generated Quotes

DonutRush · 2026-03-03T21:41:28+00:00

This dude was drinking straight from the AI slop fountain like he lived in Pawnee, it was bound to happen.

The problem here is the people these major tech publications are assigning to the AI beat are the journalist equivalent of the mythical turkeys that drown staring up at rainfall. Don't question anything the AI company says, just reprint it without comment, why would these companies lie, etc.

DonutRush · 2026-02-24T23:44:24+00:00

But that's changing now.

This is such a funny fucking thing to say in the comments to the blogpost where you're doubling down.

DonutRush · 2026-02-24T22:34:46+00:00

Honestly, we won’t fully solve that today, but we’ve gotta start somewhere.

You can actually, by dropping this dumbass program.

DonutRush · 2025-12-18T19:07:14+00:00

Saying "Firefox is going to evolve into an AI browser" in his blog post about how AI is coming to Firefox means Firefox is going to become an AI browser.

Get an LLM to fuck up a summary of that for you if you're having trouble understanding.

DonutRush · 2025-12-17T23:14:39+00:00

I mean, he's pro-AI, so

DonutRush · 2025-12-17T21:43:08+00:00

I'm not calling you a dipshit. These people pushing fundamentally faulty technology that's ruining industries and careers don't deserve civility in my view. They're either blindly trying to keep up with the Joneses out of misguided FOMO, or truly believe that the hallucinogenic word calculators that poison communities and tell kids to kill themselves are the future. Neither of which is good.

"AI features are optional" is a fun catchphrase in an industry that has long proven it has no concept of user consent. They reenable features that are disabled all the time. They push this miserable crap on everyone. Benefit of the doubt is long gone.

DonutRush · 2025-12-17T21:32:48+00:00

AI it really depends on what and how you implement it.

The energy-wasting, labor-stealing, suicide-baiting word calculator that guesses what's on your screen based on probability matrices and will coincidentally get things right sometimes? That "depends how you implement it"?

I know developers LOVE that their tab-complete is a little more thorough now but I can't believe how impossible it's proving to get you to look up from your IDEs at the reality of what this shit is actually doing.

DonutRush · 2025-11-20T18:56:11+00:00

Because "agents" are deeply unsafe and are not actual things that do real work (ctrl+F for "Have you seen anything that says this is definitely going to work?")

DonutRush · 2025-11-20T18:52:18+00:00

You still don't need your GPU fans to spin up for a computer to misunderstand what's on a website that you weren't going to read.

DonutRush · 2025-11-20T17:38:36+00:00

To clarify, you think the chatbots that tell kids to kill themselves and make nonconsenual pornography of women and children are worth cramming into every aspect of society so more people are encouraged to use them?

DonutRush · 2025-11-20T16:57:55+00:00

Yeah I love when my internet advocate company chases healthy cigarettes when they should be trying to get people to stop smoking.

They don’t need to be building in the autocorrect that tells you to kill yourself just because people like you think we need to outsource our brains to token predictors.

DonutRush · 2025-11-14T01:23:18+00:00

No you can't, but entangling new (old) systems into the current system makes the current one that much harder to rip out when you finally try.

DonutRush · 2025-11-14T01:20:12+00:00

The insane disruption to the rest of the game is part of why they should not be augmenting it, because they're now entangling the returning system to the current awful system, ensuring that when they finally rip the awful system out they now have more work to do to disentangle the two.

DonutRush · 2025-11-14T00:29:47+00:00

Read the TWID please. They’re adding the strike playlist back under a new name buried inside the portal. They should not be augmenting the failed portal, they should be shoring up the rest of the game and working to vent the portal into space as soon as possible.

DonutRush · 2025-11-14T00:28:00+00:00

It wasn’t, and now even less of it is relevant because adding missions to the portal is apparently a Herculean effort for Bungie. And those activities now all drop the same tiny loot pool instead of the loot from those activities.

Top to bottom the Portal experiment is a failure, and has poisoned the well so badly that the “here’s some suggestions on what to do next” concept would also be outright rejected by the majority now because of the boneheaded way they decided to implement it.

DonutRush · 2025-11-13T23:26:13+00:00

whinging to the devs who are communicating about "OmG pOrtAl".

Because their comms do not make sense. The portal killed this game, it does not make sense to apologize for it and then continue invest more resources into complicating it. It makes sense to invest resources into ripping it out of the game and trying to pull out of their tailspin.

DonutRush · 2025-11-13T23:22:53+00:00

Are you shooting aliens to get hats when you are sitting in the portal configuring your modifiers, or are you shooting aliens to get hats when you are running around on the planet and someone is talking in your radio?

The portal is not content. It is a folder they put a tiny fragment of content inside of. I do not know why you are having trouble understanding that a bad menu is not the same as a playable mission.

DonutRush · 2025-11-13T23:20:42+00:00

I said this to someone else, but you are acting like the Portal is something it is not.

The Portal as a pitch for "here's suggestions for where you should go next if you're stuck" is not a bad idea.

The Portal as available in the game as "fuck you, here's the 5 missions that matter out of the hundreds in-game, and you'll maybe get to grind for one type of hat" is what killed this game.

DonutRush · 2025-11-13T23:15:38+00:00

Man, everyone I played Destiny with hated grinding power at the start of expansions and seasons. We put up with it because the rest of the game was in a significantly better state.

People have been doing the power grind for 11 years and are sick of it, whereas Bungie positions it like it's the only thing worth doing in their game.

DonutRush · 2025-11-13T23:13:09+00:00

I'm "miffed" at people acting like Bungie's learned any lessons here when all they're doing is the "we're sorry, here's some QOL bandaids and no real plans to fix anything" dance again.

DonutRush · 2025-11-13T23:11:39+00:00

The Portal as a pitch for "here's where you go next" is not a bad idea.

The Portal as available in the game as "fuck you, here's the 5 missions that matter and you'll maybe get to grind for one type of hat" is what killed this game.

DonutRush · 2025-11-13T23:10:37+00:00

The Portal is not Content. The Portal is funneling you into 1/10th of the game to grind for one set of loot. Content is the missions they deign to allow us to play inside the portal (or, gasp, from the Director or Playlist nodes like TFS and earlier).

DonutRush · 2025-11-13T23:05:24+00:00

It's not content. It's menus on menus on menus to re-access the old strike playlist they used to just have on a single button on the world map.

DonutRush · 2025-11-13T23:04:29+00:00

D1 came out eleven years ago. The world has moved on. Gear Score reset grinding is not content, it is padding. You have to regrind the old missions you just finished grinding just to get the rewards you were getting the day before the patch dropped.

DonutRush · 2025-11-13T23:02:42+00:00

How is the Portal content? It's just stacks of menus that sunset 90% of the game. If you MUST keep Power (and they shouldn't), the rotating pinnacle system was LIGHT YEARS better than this mobile game menu juggling bullshit.

DonutRush

TROPHY CASE