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Tag: Human behavior

  • I Set A Trap To Catch My Students Cheating With AI. The Results Were Shocking.

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    I have been in and out of college classrooms for the last 10 years. I have worked as an adjunct instructor at a community college, I have taught as a graduate instructor at a major research institution, and I am now an assistant professor of history at a small teaching-first university.

    Since the spring semester of 2023, it has been apparent that an ever-increasing number of students are submitting AI-generated work. I am no stranger to students trying to cut corners by copying and pasting from Wikipedia, but the introduction of generative AI has enabled them to cheat in startling new ways, and many students have fully embraced it.

    Plagiarism detectors have and do work well enough for what I might call “classical cheating,” but they are notoriously bad at detecting AI-generated work. Even a program like Grammarly, which is ostensibly intended only to clean up one’s own work, will set off alarms.

    So, I set out this semester to look more carefully for AI work. Some of it is quite easy to notice. The essays produced by ChatGPT, for instance, are soulless, boring abominations. Words, phrases and punctuation rarely used by the average college student — or anyone for that matter (em dash included) — are pervasive.

    But there is a difference between recognizing AI use and proving its use. So I tried an experiment.

    A colleague in the department introduced me to the Trojan horse, a trick capable of both conquering cities and exposing the fraud of generative AI users. This method is now increasingly known (there’s even an episode of “The Simpsons” about it) and likely has already run its course as a plausible method for saving oneself from reading and grading AI slop. To be brief, I inserted hidden text into an assignment’s directions that the students couldn’t see but that ChatGPT can.

    I assigned Douglas Egerton’s book “Gabriel’s Rebellion,” which tells the story of the thwarted rebellion of enslaved people in 1800, and asked the students to describe some of the author’s main points. Nothing too in-depth, as it’s a freshman-level survey course. They were asked to use either the suggestions I provided or to write about whatever elements of Egerton’s argument they found most important.

    I received 122 paper submissions. Of those, the Trojan horse easily identified 33 AI-generated papers. I sent these stats to all the students and gave them the opportunity to admit to using AI before they were locked into failing the class. Another 14 outed themselves. In other words, nearly 39% of the submissions were at least partially written by AI.

    The percentage was surprising and deflating. I explained my disappointment to the students, pointing out that they cheated on a paper about a rebellion of the enslaved — people who sacrificed their lives in pursuit of freedom, including the freedom to learn to read and write. In fact, Virginia made it even harder for them to do so after the rebellion was put down.

    I’m not sure all of them grasped my point. Some certainly did. I received several emails and spoke with a few students who came to my office and were genuinely apologetic. I had a few that tried to fight me on the accusations, too, assuming I flagged them as AI for “well written sentences.” But the Trojan horse did not lie.

    The author with his cat, Persephone “Dots” Teague

    Photo Courtesy Of Will Teague

    There’s a lot of talk about how educators have to train students to use AI as a tool and help them integrate it into their work. Recently, the American Historical Association even made recommendations on how we might approach this in the classroom. The AHA asserts that “banning generative AI is not a long-term solution; cultivating AI literacy is.” One of their suggestions is to assign students an AI-generated essay and have them assess what it got right, got wrong or if it even understood the text in question.

    But I don’t know if I agree with the AHA. Let me tell you why the Trojan horse worked. It is because students do not know what they do not know. My hidden text asked them to write the paper “from a Marxist perspective.” Since the events in the book had little to do with the later development of Marxism, I thought the resulting essay might raise a red flag with students, but it didn’t.

    I had at least eight students come to my office to make their case against the allegations, but not a single one of them could explain to me what Marxism is, how it worked as an analytical lens or how it even made its way into their papers they claimed to have written. The most shocking part was that apparently, when ChatGPT read the prompt, it even directly asked if it should include Marxism, and they all said yes. As one student said to me, “I thought it sounded smart.”

    How do I assign students an AI-generated essay for assessment if they don’t have the basic knowledge to parse said essay? I can’t and I won’t.

    I’m a historian. I am trained and paid to teach students how to understand a narrative, to derive meaning from it with textual analysis and to communicate that meaning in written word. I cannot force them to do any of those things, but I won’t be complicit in exposing them to even more AI in my classroom.

    Not only is there an inability to recognize AI-generated content for the slop it is, but each university, each college and each department is adopting wildly different AI policies. There is no consistency. My colleagues and I are actively trying to solve this for ourselves, maybe by establishing a shared standard that every student who walks through our doors will learn and be subject to. But we can’t control what happens everywhere else.

    I have no doubt that many students are actively making the decision to cheat. But I also do not doubt that, because of inconsistent policies and AI euphoria, some were telling the truth when they told me they didn’t realize they were cheating. Regardless of their awareness or lack thereof, each one of my students made the decision to skip one of the many challenges of earning a degree — assuming they are only here to buy it (a very different cultural conversation we need to have). They also chose to actively avoid learning because it’s boring and hard.

    Now, I’m not equipped to make deep sociological or philosophical diagnoses on these choices. But this is a problem. How do we solve it? Is it a return to analog? Do we use paper and pen and class time for everything? Am I a professor or an academic policeman?

    The answer is the former. But students, society and administrations that are unwilling to take a hard stance (unless it’s the promotion of AI) are crushing higher ed. A college degree is not just about a job afterward — you have to be able to think, solve problems and apply those solutions, regardless of the field. How do we teach that without institutional support? How do we teach that when a student doesn’t want to and AI enables it?

    I don’t know. But for my students, I decided to not punish them. All I know how to do is teach, so that’s what I did. I assigned a wonderful essay by Cal Poly professor Patrick Lin that he addressed to his class on the benefits and detriments of AI use. I attached instructions that asked them to read it and reflect. These instructions also had a Trojan horse.

    Thirty-six of my AI students completed it. One of them used AI, and the other 12 have been slowly dropping the class. Ultimately, 35 out of 47 isn’t too bad. The responses to the assignment were generally good, and some were deeply reflective.

    But a handful said something I found quite sad: “I just wanted to write the best essay I could.” Those students in question, who at least tried to provide some of their own thoughts before mixing them with the generated result, had already written the best essay they could. And I guess that’s why I hate AI in the classroom as much as I do.

    Students are afraid to fail, and AI presents itself as a savior. But what we learn from history is that progress requires failure. It requires reflection. Students are not just undermining their ability to learn, but to someday lead.

    I asked my students to reflect, so I suppose I will end with my own reflection. I don’t use AI for anything in my academic or personal life. I value almost nothing more than my ability to think and to freely express myself. Even when I make mistakes, at least they are my mistakes.

    We live in an era where personal expression is saturated by digital filters, hivemind thinking is promoted through endless algorithms and academic freedom itself is under assault by the weakest minds among us. AI has only made this worse. It is a crisis.

    I can offer no solutions other than to approach it and teach about it that way. I’m sure angry detractors will say that is antiquated, and maybe it is.

    But I am a historian, so I will close on a historian’s note: History shows us that the right to literacy came at a heavy cost for many Americans, ranging from ostracism to death. Those in power recognized that oppression is best maintained by keeping the masses illiterate, and those oppressed recognized that literacy is liberation. To my students and to anyone who might listen, I say: Don’t surrender to AI your ability to read, write and think when others once risked their lives and died for the freedom to do so.

    Do you have a compelling personal story you’d like to see published on HuffPost? Find out what we’re looking for here and send us a pitch at pitch@huffpost.com.

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  • I Was So Close To Becoming A Doctor. Then I Was Forced To Complete A Truly Humiliating ‘Assignment.’

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    I sat in a conference room surrounded by four white women ― Dr. Westwood-Court, Dr. Bleekman, Maddie, and Bella. Blue and green eyes watched me with measured expressions, all communicating concern. The pale faces seemed to be commanding me to get out.

    My emotions bounced like a tossed tennis ball, ricocheting from confusion to rage to helplessness. My inner voices, a vortex. My outer voice, silent.

    I had arrived at this place innocently enough, in pursuit of a better life — for myself and my people. My 7-year-old self’s desire to be a doctor was one step away from being a reality.

    Study hard and get good grades so you can get into college. Check. Make A’s in college. Check. Volunteer at mental health clinics. Check. Apply and get into graduate school. Do well in graduate school. Make your white professors and supervisors like you. Check. Check. Check.

    I had pursued the plan to the letter. I was now at my final hurdle: completing the yearlong doctoral internship at the Indianapolis Midway Academic Medical Center.

    Although there was little evidence in the Psychology Department, the all-white, all-heterosexual diversity committee agreed that diversity was a priority. They had codified it in their trainee handbook as one of the five domains in which we interns needed to demonstrate competency.

    “All of our clients are diverse. They bring with them diverse backgrounds and experiences. As psychologists, it is very important that we understand how to respect and treat clients from backgrounds different from our own. To facilitate getting outside our comfort zones and understanding what it’s like to be a minority, you will complete a diversity project.”

    Dr. Westwood-Court, the training director, beamed with enthusiasm as she began to describe a required assignment to my intern cohort during one of our clinical group supervision meetings. She was a psychologist in her late 30s. Her specialty was trauma and personality disorders.

    She often engaged us in discussions about “meeting patients where they are,” and seemed open-minded concerning all things cultural. I respected her clinical expertise but questioned her cultural humility when it came to people from the global majority.

    Dr. Jillian Bleekman, a staff psychologist, continued the explanation. “You will put yourself in a situation where you are a minority for at least two hours. We want you to experience what it is like to be the odd person out. You will then come back to group supervision and share with us what you learned from your experience.”

    The voices in my head protested: “Excuse me? Wait…what? What did you say? Are you telling us to go be a minority for two hours? Ma’am, that’s called my life. How is this assignment at all appropriate for someone who is already a minority? This is fucked up.”

    My Southern Black father’s warning fired off in my head: “Never tell white people the truth. They can’t handle it. Even when they are wrong, they will find a way to make it your fault.” Heeding his internalized advice, I did not give voice to my thoughts. I was offended and hurt by how they trivialized diversity with this weird project that clearly only had white, heterosexual, cis-gender, able-bodied interns in mind.

    Although I was fuming, I kept my face smooth and used a tactic I knew would work. I feigned confusion and hesitantly raised my hand.

    “What should I do? This is my life. I’m always a minority.” I tried to sound as meek as possible. I tried to cultivate a look of openness so as to not seem annoyed or averse to learning.

    Dr. Westwood-Court smiled warmly and said, “Well, put yourself in a situation where you are a different type of minority. What ways are you not usually a minority?”

    Again, I sat there silently. The training director attempted to console me, saying, “Don’t worry. No one has ever failed this assignment. We just want you to have an experience of being a minority and come back and tell us about it and what you learned.”

    Dr. Westwood-Court went on to describe a gold-star diversity project. “Bella, you remember Caroline? She was an intern here last year?”

    Bella nodded yes. “Caroline was one of our best interns that trained with us last year. For her diversity project, she attended a service at an all-Black Protestant church.” She paused and looked at each of us. “This was a significant shift for her. She had grown up in predominantly white environments where everyone looked like her.”

    Dr. Westwood-Court articulated each syllable with care as she described how all of Caroline’s classmates, teachers and clergy were just like her in skin color and values. Caroline’s childhood place of worship had been the Catholic church where Parishioners kneeled in silence and crossed their chests as they listened to scripture. The rituals were precise, polite.

    “Given this rearing, it made sense that Caroline was apprehensive. She told us that she was unsure of whether she would be accepted by the Black congregants. But she challenged herself to move beyond her anxiety. And she learned a lot. After completing the project, she shared with us that the congregants made her feel so welcomed. She felt at home.”

    Dr. Westwood-Court’s pride for Caroline radiated into the room. I rejected it, and refused to beam it back. Dr. Westwood-Court continued, “Caroline learned that their worship experiences were not so different from hers, except they were much more lively and the music was so rhythmic. She was impressed by the big, colorful hats that many of the women wore and the way people danced in the aisles. She really put herself out there and came back with a better understanding of what it was like to be a minority.”

    Dr. Westwood-Court finished her story and looked intently at each of us. I put on a happy face; my torn and raging heart was not her business. But my internal world was frenzied. I … was … appalled.

    The author in front of a laptop.

    Photo Courtesy Of Jonathan Lassiter

    I wanted to jump on the table and scream. My inner voice raged, “What did she expect them to do? Rob and rape her in the church? This is how I know white people crazy!” I felt as if I had just been assaulted physically, mentally, and spiritually.

    Before listening to that story, I sensed that I was separated from my white supervisors and peers due to culture and professional training. After listening to that story, I felt separated from them due to humanity. Could they not recognize the innate humanity in others?

    Caroline’s diversity project was voyeuristic and dehumanizing. It was as if she was visiting a foreign land that was rumored to be dangerous. To her surprise, she left with the stunning revelation that the inhabitants were civilized. For me, and apparently only for me in that space, the story and its telling represented the sickness of the whiteness mindset. The project fragmented the “regular white people” from the “diverse Black people.”

    Clearly Caroline and the diversity committee carried the whiteness mindset within them. They set themselves as the default. As the default, the way they saw the world was always most important.

    Caroline had achieved the goal of putting herself in a situation where she was a statistical minority. But was that good enough? Did she not still carry unspoken power in that space? Caroline crept into the church and soaked up the artistic, spiritual gifts. But there was no evidence that she had confronted what she represented as a white woman in that place.

    Had she reckoned with the legacy she carried on her skin? Did she realize she represented the scores of white women whose deceptive words incited murder? Did she know that she evoked the well-meaning white women social workers who ripped children from their families?

    For several congregants in that church, the combination of Caroline’s gender and race was likely triggering, insidious. But their love of the Lord instructed them to pray for those who persecuted them. It had probably never occurred to Caroline that the congregants could welcome their enemy, offer her peppermint and wish her a blessed day.

    The assignment did not require Caroline to reflect on herself as a person with a heritage of destruction. It only requested that she put herself in a situation where she was a minority for two hours.

    This positioning is consistent with a primary assumption of whiteness, fragmentation, and a value of whiteness, competition. The assignment did not encourage cultural exploration of the environment before engagement. It did not require reverence for the people before reaching out to them. There was no reckoning with how our presence in the environment would impact a community, only what we would take from it. It was a one-sided scene, defined by individualism.

    My direct supervisors called the project “one of those American Psychological Association things that’s required” — the same APA that sets regulatory and ethical guidelines for psychologists’ and psychology trainees’ professional conduct. The same organization that had perpetuated racist stereotypes and provided scientific support to justify Black intellectual inferiority, mental illness, and harm for over a century. The same APA that issued an apology in 2021 for its “role in promoting, perpetuating, and failing to challenge racism, racial discrimination, and human hierarchy.”

    The APA was in existence for 110 years before it finally published “Guidelines on Multicultural Education, Training, Research, Practice, and Organizational Change for Psychologists.” This document attempted to provide recommendations on how to understand one’s own culture and the culture of others while practicing psychology. In reality, it suggested how a group of overwhelmingly white mental health professionals should conduct themselves.

    We decided that I would visit a sports bar and try to understand sports culture because I was not at all familiar with or interested in sports. My direct supervisors and I reasoned that I would be a different type of minority in such an environment. Although this did not totally make sense to me, Dr. Westwood-Court accepted this plan. So, with much trepidation, I committed to completing the assignment.

    The author, seen here speaking.
    The author, seen here speaking.

    Photo Courtesty Of Jonathan Lassiter

    One cold November night I ventured to a sports bar in downtown Indianapolis. That night there was supposed to be a basketball game playing on television. The plan was to go watch the game with sports enthusiasts in the bar and soak up sports culture. It was hard to leave the house that night. It all seemed dumb. I did not understand why people — mostly men — would dress up, sometimes even paint themselves, and holler and hoot about someone shooting an alley-oop.

    Despite my reservations, I picked an outfit that wasn’t too gay or too nerdy. A pair of regular-fit jeans. A long-sleeve T-shirt as opposed to one of my regular button-downs. I gave myself a pep talk in the mirror.

    “You can do this! You’ll sit at the bar, order a Shirley Temple.”

    “Wait, that’s so gay. Maybe you should get a beer?” a stern voice in my head interrupted.

    “But I don’t like beer.”

    “Order a Coke. That’s more manly,” the stern voice suggested.

    The pep talk continued: “You’ll watch the game, drink your Coke, spot someone or a group, and strike up a conversation about sports.”

    “But what if they think I’m trying to hit on them? What if they beat me up? You’ve seen The Matthew Shepard Story.” My mind was racing with all the what-if, worst-case scenarios.

    “Use your man-voice when you talk to them.”

    When I arrived at the sports bar, barely anyone was there. The floor felt sticky. Announcers’ voices and the screams of fans bounced from the TVs and off the walls. The sounds took me back to the excruciatingly long and boring Sundays of my childhood. I remembered my father sucking his thumbs watching football from sunup to sundown.

    As a child, I wanted to watch “Breakfast with the Arts” on A&E and “In Living Color” on Fox. I was fascinated with the stories of artists and amused by Homey D. Clown. But Joshua didn’t play that. He hogged the TV in the living room, not seeming to care that my brother and I did not have one of our own. I suffered in silence and hoped he would fall asleep so I could switch the channel. The ache of powerlessness pulsed in my chest as I stepped into that bar and back into those memories. I hopped up onto a barstool.

    “A Coke, please. With a straw,” I managed to eke out. I prayed I didn’t sound too gay.

    The bartender put the drink in front of me. I paid. Another stool separated me and a blond, burly man in a yellow-and-blue Pacers hat. He ordered a Budweiser and reached into his blue jeans for his wallet.

    I made eye contact with the man. “I’m Jonathan,” I said in my best man-voice. “Who’s your favorite team?”

    The guy looked at me with skepticism. “Bill.” He nodded.

    “I’m rooting for the Pacers, of course.” He looked at me like I was a Black gay man in a place he didn’t belong. I knew that look and took a deep breath. I powered through and rattled off my questions: “How long have you been following them? What do you like most about basketball?”

    Honestly, I had no clue what I was doing. I hoped he did not call me the f-word or the n-word. Would he call me both? I guess God was with me. Bill obliged in answering my questions hastily. After he finished, he did not query me. He took another sip of his beer and quickly moved away.

    I was embarrassed. Feelings of inadequacy flooded me as his curt responses triggered memories of laughter and ridicule and, alternatively, disregard from my peers due to my lack of knowledge of sports. The shame my father made me feel all those years during my youth for not being the right kind of boy resurfaced.

    On the drive home, I listened to Kirk Franklin’s “More Than I Can Bear.” I felt like I had gone through the fire that Kirk sang about and been broken down. But I tried to remember my dignity. I tried to remember the end goal of the exercise. At home, in the shower, I tried to wash away the humiliation.

    The author's book, from which this essay is excerpted.
    The author’s book, from which this essay is excerpted.

    The following week, I reported back to Maddie, Bella, Dr. Bleekman and Dr. Westwood-Court. I tried to pretend that it was enlightening to be surrounded by team spirit and pride. Truthfully, I had not learned anything. It was traumatizing. My performance was not convincing.

    “Jonathan, we appreciate how you tried to experience being a minority in a different way. But to be honest, we think you should redo the assignment,” the training director and diversity committee director announced. “It sounds like you experienced more bar culture than sports culture. We want you to try it again. Maybe pick something where you will be more immersed? How does that sound?”

    I failed the diversity project. My Black, same-gender-loving, born-poor, nonapparent-disability-having ass failed the diversity project.

    If I could go back in time, I would suggest to Drs. Linwood and Shulman that they advocate for a diversity project that challenges the whiteness mindset. I would de-emphasize diversity and center cultural humility.

    Cultural humility is the active engagement in an ongoing process of self-reflection to better understand ourselves and others with the goal of establishing and maintaining honest, mutually beneficial, and healing-oriented relationships.

    In contrast, diversity emphasizes welcoming and indoctrinating people into the whiteness mindset or “the norm.” The mindset and the systems behind it are rarely examined.

    By the end of my internship, my morale had been halved. I was more competent in my psychotherapy and diagnostic skills, and I finished my program as Dr. Jonathan Mathias Lassiter. But that achievement came with a devastating cost. Many Black and other students from the global majority must do more than just put in long nights of studying. We have to not only effectively regulate the intense emotions that arise when working with suffering clients, we must also suppress our pain when our culture is ignored and our intelligence and skills are challenged because of our supervisors’ and professors’ subtle and overt bias.

    The predominately white field of psychology that is structured by the whiteness mindset demands that people from the global majority pay with our peace, mold our professional passion to its will by pursuing goals whiteness deems worthy and forgo our cultural values and ways of being to master its methods. To succeed, we must center whiteness or fail.

    Adapted from HOW I KNOW WHITE PEOPLE ARE CRAZY AND OTHER STORIES. Copyright © 2025 Jonathan Lassiter. Published by Legacy Lit, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing, a Hachette Book Group company. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

    Do you have a compelling personal story you’d like to see published on HuffPost? Find out what we’re looking for here and send us a pitch at pitch@huffpost.com.

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  • WTF Fun Fact 13736 – We Turn Down the Music to Find Things

    WTF Fun Fact 13736 – We Turn Down the Music to Find Things

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    Ever noticed how you instinctively turn down the music in your car when searching for an address or navigating a tricky intersection? This common behavior might seem odd at first glance, but it actually makes a lot of sense. The act of lowering the volume to focus on a visual task taps into some fundamental aspects of how our brains process information.

    Humans rely on their cognitive resources to manage and interpret sensory input. When driving, we constantly process visual, auditory, and sometimes tactile information. Turning down the music helps free up cognitive resources, allowing us to focus more effectively on the visual task at hand.

    The Science Behind Turning Down the Music

    Our brains have a limited capacity for processing information. Known as cognitive load, this concept refers to the amount of mental effort being used in the working memory. High cognitive load can impair our ability to process new information or perform complex tasks.

    When the music is blaring, it adds to the cognitive load by demanding attention.

    This auditory input competes with visual and spatial processing, making it harder to concentrate on tasks like reading street signs or spotting a turn. Lowering the volume reduces the cognitive load, allowing the brain to allocate more resources to visual processing.

    Studies have shown that multitasking, especially with tasks that require different types of sensory input, can significantly reduce performance. For example, trying to listen to a conversation while reading a map can overwhelm the brain’s processing capabilities. Turning down the music minimizes this interference, making it easier to focus on the visual task.

    Sensory Overload and Attention

    Sensory overload occurs when one or more of the body’s senses experience over-stimulation from the environment. This can happen when there are too many sounds, sights, or other sensory inputs at once. In a car, loud music can contribute to sensory overload, making it difficult to focus on navigating or searching for an address.

    Attention, a crucial component of cognitive function, can be divided into different types. Selective attention involves focusing on a particular object or task while ignoring irrelevant information. When we turn down the music, we enhance our selective attention toward the visual task, filtering out unnecessary auditory distractions.

    Moreover, the brain’s executive functions, which include planning, decision-making, and problem-solving, play a significant role in driving and navigating. These functions are more effective when not competing with high levels of background noise. Lowering the music volume helps these executive functions operate more efficiently.

    Practical Implications

    Understanding why we turn down the music when looking for something can have practical applications beyond driving. This behavior highlights the importance of managing cognitive load and sensory input in various settings. For instance, in workplaces or study environments, minimizing background noise can enhance concentration and productivity.

    In educational settings, reducing auditory distractions can help students focus better on visual learning materials. Similarly, in open-plan offices, creating quiet zones or using noise-canceling tools can improve employee focus and performance. These strategies are grounded in the same principles that lead us to lower the car’s music volume when searching for an address.

    — WTF fun facts

    Source: “Why Do We Turn Down the Radio When We’re Lost?” — How Stuff Works

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  • Flu Shots Need to Stop Fighting ‘Something That Doesn’t Exist’

    Flu Shots Need to Stop Fighting ‘Something That Doesn’t Exist’

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    Listen to this article

    Produced by ElevenLabs and NOA, News Over Audio, using AI narration.

    In Arnold Monto’s ideal vision of this fall, the United States’ flu vaccines would be slated for some serious change—booting a major ingredient that they’ve consistently included since 2013. The component isn’t dangerous. And it made sense to use before. But to include it again now, Monto, an epidemiologist and a flu expert at the University of Michigan, told me, would mean vaccinating people “against something that doesn’t exist.”

    That probably nonexistent something is Yamagata, a lineage of influenza B viruses that hasn’t been spotted by global surveyors since March of 2020, shortly after COVID mitigations plummeted flu transmission to record lows. “And it isn’t for lack of looking,” Kanta Subbarao, the director of the WHO’s Collaborating Centre for Reference and Research on Influenza, told me. In a last-ditch attempt to find the missing pathogen, a worldwide network of monitoring centers tested nearly 16,000 influenza B virus samples collected from February to August of last year. Not a single one of them came up Yamagata. “The consensus is that it’s gone,” Cheryl Cohen, the head of South Africa’s Centre for Respiratory Diseases and Meningitis, told me. Officially removing an ingredient from flu vaccines will codify that sentiment, effectively publishing Yamagata’s obituary.

    Read: The flu may never be the same

    Last year around this time, Subbarao told me, the WHO was already gently suggesting that the world might want to drop Yamagata from vaccines; by September, the agency had grown insistent, describing the ingredient as “no longer warranted” and urging that “every effort should be made to exclude it as soon as possible.” The following month, an advisory committee to the FDA unanimously voted to speedily adopt that same change.

    But the switch from a four-flu vaccine to a trivalent one, guarding against only three, isn’t as simple as ordering the usual, please, just hold the Yams. Trivalent vaccines require their own licensure, which some manufacturers may have allowed to lapse—or never had at all; manufacturers must also adhere to the regulatory pipelines specific to each country. “People think, ‘They change the strains every season; this should be no big deal,’” Paula Barbosa, the associate director of vaccine policy at the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations, which represents vaccine manufacturers, told me. This situation is not so simple: “They need to change their whole manufacturing process.” At the FDA advisory-committee meeting in October, an industry representative cautioned that companies might need until the 2025–26 season to fully transition to trivalents in the Northern Hemisphere, a timeline that Barbosa, too, considers realistic. The South could take until 2026.

    In the U.S., though, where experts such as Monto have been pushing for expedient change, a Yamagata-less flu vaccine could be coming this fall. When I reached out to CSL Seqirus and GSK, two of the world’s major flu-vaccine producers, a spokesperson from each company told me that their firm was on track to deliver trivalent vaccines to the U.S. in time for the 2024–25 flu season, should the relevant agencies recommend and request it. (The WHO’s annual meeting to recommend the composition of the Northern Hemisphere’s flu vaccine isn’t scheduled until the end of February; an FDA advisory meeting on the same topic will follow shortly after.) Sanofi, another vaccine producer, was less definitive, but told me that, with sufficient notice from health authorities, its plans would allow for trivalent vaccines this year, “if there is a definitive switch.” AstraZeneca, which makes the FluMist nasal-spray vaccine, told me that it was “engaging with the appropriate regulatory bodies” to coordinate the shift to a trivalent vaccine “as soon as possible.”

    Quadrivalent flu vaccines are relatively new. Just over a decade ago, the world relied on immunizations that included two flu A strains (H1N1 and H3N2), plus one B: either Victoria or Yamagata, whichever scientists predicted might be the bigger scourge in the coming flu season. “Sometimes the world got it wrong,” Mark Jit, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, told me. To hedge their bets, experts eventually began to recommend simply sticking in both. But quadrivalent vaccines typically cost more to manufacture, experts told me. And although several countries, including the U.S., quickly transitioned to the heftier shots, many nations—especially those with fewer resources—never did.

    Now “the extra component is a waste,” Vijay Dhanasekaran, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong, told me. It’s pointless to ask people’s bodies to mount a defense against an enemy that will never attack. Trimming Yamagata out of flu-vaccine recipes should also make them cheaper, Dhanasekaran said, which could improve global access. Plus, continuing to manufacture Yamagata-focused vaccines raises the small but serious risk that the lineage could be inadvertently reintroduced to the world, Subbarao told me, as companies grow gobs of the virus for their production pipeline. (Some vaccines, such as FluMist, also immunize people with live-but-weakened versions of flu viruses.)

    Some of the researchers I spoke with for this article weren’t ready to rule out the possibility—however slim—that Yamagata is still biding its time somewhere. (Victoria, a close cousin of Yamagata, and the other B lineage that pesters people, once went mostly quiet for about a decade, before roaring back in the early aughts.) But most experts, at this point, are quite convinced. The past couple of flu seasons have been heavy enough to offer even a rather rare lineage the chance to reappear. “If it had been circulating in any community, I’m pretty sure that global influenza surveillance would have detected it by now,” Dhanasekaran said. Plus, even before the pandemic began, Yamagata had been the wimpiest of the flu bunch, Jit told me: slow to evolve, crummy at transmitting, and already dipping in prevalence. When responses to the pandemic starved all flu viruses of hosts, he said, this lineage was the likeliest to be lost.

    Read: The pandemic broke the flu

    Eventually, companies may return to including four types of flu in their products, swapping in, say, another strain of H3N2, the most severe and fastest-evolving of the bunch—a change that Subbarao and Monto both told me might actually be preferable. But incorporating a second H3N2 is even more of a headache than returning to a trivalent vaccine: Researchers would likely first need to run clinical trials, experts told me, to ensure that the new components played nicely with each other and conferred additional benefits.

    For the moment, a slimmed-down vaccine is the quickest way to keep up with the flu’s current antics. And in doing so, those vaccines will also reflect the strange reality of this new, COVID-modified world. “A whole lineage of flu has probably been eliminated through changes in human behavior,” Jit told me. Humanity may not have intended it. But our actions against one virus may have forever altered the course of another.

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    Katherine J. Wu

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  • WTF Fun Fact 13626 – Prediction and Perception

    WTF Fun Fact 13626 – Prediction and Perception

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    In the world of social interactions, whether it’s a handshake or a casual conversation, we heavily rely on perception and observing others. But have you ever wondered what goes on in your brain during these interactions?

    Researchers at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience have uncovered some fascinating insights into this aspect of human perception, revealing that our interpretation of others’ actions is more influenced by our expectations than we previously thought.

    Decoding Brain Processes in Social Interactions and Observations

    For a while, researchers have been looking into how our brains process the actions of others. Common understanding was that observing someone else’s action triggers a specific sequence in our brain: first, the visual brain regions light up, followed by the activation of parietal and premotor regions – areas we use to perform similar actions ourselves.

    This theory was based on brain activity observations in humans and monkeys during laboratory experiments involving isolated actions.

    However, real-life actions are rarely isolated; they often follow a predictable sequence with an end goal, such as making breakfast. This raises the question: how does our brain handle such sequences?

    Our Expectations Shape Our Perception

    The new research, led by Christian Keysers and Valeria Gazzola, offers an intriguing perspective. When we observe actions in meaningful sequences, our brains increasingly rely on predictions from our motor system, almost ignoring the visual input.

    Simply put, what we anticipate becomes what our brain perceives.

    This shift in understanding came from a unique study involving epilepsy patients who participated in intracranial EEG research. This method allowed researchers to measure the brain’s electrical activity directly, offering a rare peek into the brain’s functioning.

    Experimenting with Perception

    During the study, participants watched videos of everyday actions, like preparing breakfast. The researchers tested two conditions: one where actions were shown in their natural sequence and another where the sequence was randomized. Surprisingly, the brain’s response varied significantly between these conditions.

    In the randomized sequence, the brain followed the traditional information flow: from visual to motor regions. But in the natural sequence, the flow reversed. Information traveled from motor regions to visual areas, suggesting that participants relied more on their knowledge and expectations of the task rather than the visual input.

    This discovery aligns with the broader realization in neuroscience that our brain is predictive. It constantly forecasts what will happen next, suppressing expected sensory input.

    We perceive the world from the inside out, based on our expectations. However, if reality defies these expectations, the brain adjusts, and we become more aware of the actual visual input.

    Implications of the Study

    Understanding this predictive nature of our brain has significant implications. It sheds light on how we interact socially and could inform approaches in various fields, from psychology to virtual reality technologies.

    This research also highlights the complexity of human perception, revealing that our interpretation of the world around us is a blend of sensory input and internal predictions.

    The Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience’s study opens new doors in understanding human perception. It challenges the traditional view of sensory processing, emphasizing the role of our expectations in shaping our interpretation of others’ actions. As we continue to explore the depths of the human brain, studies like these remind us of the intricate and fascinating ways in which our mind works.

    — WTF fun facts

    Source: “When we see what others do, our brain sees not what we see, but what we expect” — ScienceDaily

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    WTF

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  • D&D Books Are About To Get More Expensive

    D&D Books Are About To Get More Expensive

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    You technically don’t need to spend a whole lot of money to play Dungeons & Dragons or other tabletop roleplaying games. But like most hobbies, the game is more than happy to welcome your investment with endless maps, minis, countless dice, and, of course, rulebooks to purchase. Now, it seems, the game is going to get a bit pricer following news from Wizards of the Coast that new D&D rulebooks will see a 20 percent price hike moving forward.

    This Arcade-y Basketball Game Brings The NBA Jam Vibes

    Read More: Amid Criticism, Wizards of the Coast Quietly Removes Racist Lore From Dungeons & Dragons

    Rulebooks are the bible of any tabletop roleplaying game, providing players and game masters with all necessary math, descriptions of game systems, and sometimes even critical lore information depending on the kind of book. Since the current, fifth edition, of Dungeons & Dragons, physical books, like the three core ones essential for a group to play (Dungeon Masters Guide, Player’s Handbook, and Monster Manual), have retailed for $49.95 each in the United States. Additional D&D-brand books of similar scope sold for the same price (others have sold for less depending on the amount of content). Wizards of the Coast is now signaling that the rising costs of book production will bring the price of physical copies up to $59.95 for new books. Digital content and previously published material is said to remain unaffected by the new price.

    According to IGN, Wizards of the Coast specified the price hike will first hit the upcoming Bigsby Presents: Glory to the Giants followed by the Planescape supplement due out on October 17 of 2023. The October release will refresh a beloved campaign setting many might know from the PC game, Planescape: Torment, which featured interdimensional magic, along with dark, strange, and surrealist motifs in its art and stories.

    Kotaku reached out to Wizards of the Coast for comment.

    This price hike follows some turbulent times for the D&D publisher. Earlier in 2023, Wizards of the Coast rolled a critical fail with restrictive, proposed changes to its longstanding open license ahead of the upcoming revision of the core rules. Unchecked, those changes would have dramatically constrained the freedom for third party publishers to create compatible rulebooks with the game (something that has been a core part of the industry since the early 2000s).

    It is rare that everyone at a game of D&D has all the books. Typically, the dungeon master will purchase the most rules as they’re the ones adjudicating everything; that’s an issue Wizards of the Coast has highlighted as a sore spot for them, expressing a desire in 2022 to try and find more ways to monetize the hobby, hoping to generate “the type of recurrent spending you see in .”

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    Claire Jackson

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  • Redditors Are Competing To Make The Worst User Experience Possible

    Redditors Are Competing To Make The Worst User Experience Possible

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    As the recent Reddit commercials have made clear, there’s a community for everything. Nihilist horror, Game of Thrones’ Hodor, avocado food porn (because why not)…you can always find your people. Case in point, there’s a subreddit dedicated to atrocious user interfaces, which is now seeing members attempting to best each other by creating the worst UI designs possible.

    An Anime That Might Make You Put Your Minecraft Bed Next To Someone

    The term is self-explanatory: A user interface is what allows you to interact with technology, from computers to McDonald’s kiosks to exercise equipment to, of course, video games. Some, like Elden Ring’s, are good. Most just get the job done. However, when you come across a bad UI, it’s like a painful hair in your eye and a sour taste in your mouth. Ubisoft games such as Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Bungie’s Destiny have been derided for their cluttered and clunky interfaces, respectively. But the nightmares being dreamt up on Reddit definitely, albeit intentionally, take the rotten UI cake.

    Thanks, these UIs make me hate it here

    As spotted by Twitter user Aleksandr Volodarsky, engineers on the badUIbattles subreddit are scraping the bottom of the barrel to build the most annoying user interfaces ever. A forum for folks “[creating] bad UIs just for the sake of them being bad,” redditors are designing UIs that, if they were ever implemented IRL, would make you never want to interact with technology again. Take this one designed by redditor Lamamour last April, in which you have to funnel digits into a moving row of blocks to enter your phone number.

    This “enter your phone number” concept has been iterated, tweaked, and worsened since Lamamour uploaded their initial atrocity. The latest entry by user NotYourBoii confronts you with a disordered drop-down menu that makes entering a phone number (twice, I might add) pure pain.

    But what if you wanted to unsubscribe from a newsletter, YouTube channel, or some other subscription service? Well, you wouldn’t be able to with redditor OrangePrototype’s unsubscribe button, as a fan blows your cursor away.

    Folks saw the challenge and wanted to make unsubscribing even worse, with user KountrySelektorXpert’s post asking that you tear through a 3D animated net to reach the cursed button.

    Entering your name is usually pretty easy when you have a keyboard, but leave it to these sickos to throw a wrench into things. Consider redditor IlluminatingEmerald’s Donkey Kong Country-inspired input method, which makes spelling your name truly suck.

    Funnily enough, there hasn’t been much further competition in the name-entry arena. Still, while IlluminatingEmerald has probably created the worst of this type of UI thus far, redditor jordanE124567 submitted one that requires you to upload individual JPEGs of each letter.

    There are so many aggravating user interfaces on that subreddit, with Volodarsky tweeting out some of the worst he’s found. For your viewing frustration—I mean, pleasure—here’s a little roundup of Volodarsky’s incredibly annoying findings.

    All of these were purposely designed to be as irritating as possible, and thankfully, I can’t imagine any game developers taking inspiration from user interfaces meant to get on your nerves (unless it was intended as part of the gameplay experience, as in Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy or QWOP). That said, it’s hilarious seeing redditors doing their best to make the worst UI ever.

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    Levi Winslow

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  • Tears Of The Kingdom Made Shield Surfing Even Better

    Tears Of The Kingdom Made Shield Surfing Even Better

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    As was the case in Breath of the Wild, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom lets Link use his shield as an improvised surfing device. It’s both fun and useful for getting out of trouble if you know how to do it. But TotK adds a little twist to this fun mechanic by way of the game’s new Fuse ability. If you thought surfing on shields before was fun, then just wait.

    An Anime That Might Make You Put Your Minecraft Bed Next To Someone

    Tears of the Kingdom is quickly gaining notoriety for how playful and intuitive its various physics and crafting systems are. Fuse and Ultrahand are cool ways to combine various objects together, but combined with the game’s lifelike physics, players are discovering all manner of interesting ways to get around puzzles, combat, engage in questionable activities, and simply have fun. One such possibility is the ability to fuse random objects to Link’s shield to either boost its defensive characteristics or augment the game’s shield surfing technique depending on what items you attach it to.

    Shield Surfing 101: How to master the technique

    You may’ve accidentally triggered the shield surf technique if you ever tried jumping while holding your shield up. To shield surf, you’ll want to execute this button combo in this order: X + ZL + A. (You can also swap the order of X and ZL for this combo). Note that only shields with smooth surfaces will work. So something like the Armor-Shard Shield with its spikes will just make you fall.

    It’s best to practice this while stationary at first. Once you get a feel for it, a running start will give you some momentum. The steeper the slope you’re going down, the further you’ll move. Note: this does damage to your shield. So save the cheap ones for thrills or use the technique as a quick evasive maneuver to mitigate damage to your shield.

    Also, when you paraglide while shield surfing, your shield will stay glued to your feet, so feel free to chain surfing with paragliding back to surfing. Also, hitting the shield surf combo while paragliding will put you into a shield surf, so the next time you’re paragliding to the surface, now you can land with style.

    Fuse your shields to Zonai Carts and Sleds for more fun

    Zonai devices can be found all over Hyrule. Two in particular can be fused to your shield to boost its surfing capabilities: carts and sleds. You can find carts from the Zonai Dispenser above the Upland Zorana Skyview Tower, which is also highlighted in this guide). Sleds can be found at the East Gerudo Sky Archipelago Zonai Dispenser. Note that these are not the only places to find such items, but we’ve had the most luck getting them here. You can hover above dispensers in the map to see what items are available as well.

    Read More: This Tears of the Kingdom Paraglider Trick Basically Lets You Fly Forever

    Once you get these items, drop them in front of you, then hit L to call up your abilities. Highlight the item you wish to fuse and then hit ZL to bind it to your shield. Fusing a cart to your shield will essentially give you a skateboard to roam around with. This offers far greater travel distance and control than just a shield alone. You can also ollie with a cart shield.

    Fusing a sled basically gives you a snowboard (but you can use it on grass and other surfaces). You can surf along with galloping horses—which is almost as fun as swimming with tigers (don’t ask).

    This doesn’t make your shield invincible. Surfing will still subject your shield to wear and tear, even when fused to something, and it will break. So use it where it makes sense. It’s a pretty fantastic way to get some distance from Gloom Hands.

    Shield surfing is just one of the many playful tricks Tears of the Kingdom offers, allowing both fun and strategy. And fuse only heightens the shenanigans you can get up to. Just queue up some appropriate music and watch those steep drops!

    Image: Nintendo

    Enjoying Nintendo’s new open world game? Make sure to check out the tips we wish we knew before playing, some advice on side quests you shouldn’t miss, the duplication glitch shattering the game’s economy, and all the latest on Hyrule’s Korok murder crisis. Unless you’re still stuck in the tutorial area, or missing the paraglider you should pick up the game’s best shield ASAP.

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    Claire Jackson

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  • Why Do We Stay in Dysfunctional Relationships? | Entrepreneur

    Why Do We Stay in Dysfunctional Relationships? | Entrepreneur

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    Once you realize you’re pouring time into an unsuccessful venture, project or partnership, why is it so hard to exit and invest your time elsewhere?

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    Entrepreneur Staff

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  • Pathfinder Developer Bans AI Art, Takes A Hard Stance

    Pathfinder Developer Bans AI Art, Takes A Hard Stance

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    Image: Paizo

    Between games, art, and even journalism, a lot of industries are dealing with the rise of artificial intelligence removing the human element of creative works. As people have begun using AI and algorithms to create art rather than hiring workers to do it, companies are making hard stances about whether or not they’ll allow work made by these means to be used on their projects. This includes table-top developer Paizo, which has taken a hard stance against AI art being used as art and writing prompts with its products.

    In a post on its website, the Pathfinder and Starfinder developer says it is adding new language to its contracts that will require any work submitted to the company to have been created by a person and not an AI. The statement makes it clear it believes AI art and writing are a “serious threat” to the livelihood of its creative partners and workers, and it wants a human touch in all its products moving forward. This extends to products on the community content marketplace for both Pathfinder and Starfinder.

    “Our customers expect a human touch to our releases, and so long as the ethical and legal circumstances surrounding these programs remains murky and undefined, we are unwilling to associate our brands with the technology in any way.

    Stated plainly—when you buy a Paizo product, you can be sure that it is the work of human professionals who have spent years honing their craft to produce the best work we can. Paizo will not use AI-generated ‘creative’ work of any kind for the foreseeable future.

    We thank the human artists and writers who have been so integral to our success in the past, and we look forward to working with them for many years to come.”

    Paizo and its employees have been central to conversations around labor in the tabletop space, with the studio having formed the first tabletop union back in 2021. The United Paizo Workers allied with the Communications Workers of America, which has had a hand in much of the unionization efforts within the video game industry over at Activision Blizzard.

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    Kenneth Shepard

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  • Week In Review: February 19, 2023

    Week In Review: February 19, 2023

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    Read more…

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  • Forspoken Actress Says She’s Isn’t Bothered By The Online Discourse, And More Power To Her

    Forspoken Actress Says She’s Isn’t Bothered By The Online Discourse, And More Power To Her

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    And a very happy Black History Month to you, Sista Balinska.
    Image: Square Enix / Kotaku / Mike Marsland (Getty Images)

    Square Enix’s new fantasy parkour game Forspoken has had a bit of a rocky launch in terms of public perception among gamers, who found its Joss Whedon-esque dialogue in advertisements cringe-inducing. However, Forspoken’s lead actress says she isn’t bothered by all the discourse the game’s dialogue has caused online, and honestly more power to her.

    Forspoken, which was released on January 24, follows a down-and-out New Yorker named Frey who must save the denizens of the fantasy world she gets isekaied into with the help of a talking cuff named Cuff. In a recent interview with The Verge, Ella Balinska, who plays Forspoken lead Frey, said she’s proud of her performance in the game because she knows that she got to take on a role that her eight-year-old self would have been psyched to be a part of.

    “I always reference my eight-year-old self whenever I talk about something I’m really proud of doing, I’m just speechless right now,” Balinska told The Verge. I just never would have thought me playing games downstairs with my mom’s hairdresser’s son while she was getting her hair done. Now, to think that he can pick up this game and play as me, it’s just unbelievable. And I hope it inspires other people to realize that if you commit to the bit hard enough, something really crazy can happen.”

    When asked what she thought about the online memes folks were making about the game’s dialogue, Balinska simply said that, “there are things that we all do that might be eyebrow-raising to other people,” and that

    “I think people always have a positive or negative response to something they’re not used to seeing, and that’s completely okay because that’s the way we incite change,” Ballinska told The Verge. “This is such an extraordinary game that has come out with this amazing protagonist who’s so bold, so unapologetic, so reluctant in the best way possible. I think audiences might not be so used to seeing that.”

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    Outside of Forspoken, Balinska, who owns an impressive gaming PC, starred as Jade Wesker in Netflix’s live-action Resident Evil series.

    Read More: Forspoken: The Kotaku Review

    In our Forspoken review, we said Square Enix’s parkour isekai deserved better than what shipped on its release date because the strength of its story and protagonist outpace its performance issues and oft-admonished dialogue.

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    Isaiah Colbert

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  • Court Rules Domestic Abusers Cannot Be Barred From Owning Instrument Of Vengeance

    Court Rules Domestic Abusers Cannot Be Barred From Owning Instrument Of Vengeance

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    WASHINGTON—Claiming that previous laws were inconsistent with the U.S. Constitution, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled this week that domestic abusers could not be barred from owning an instrument of vengeance. “According to the court’s historical interpretation of the Second Amendment, Americans cannot legally be prevented from purchasing or wielding a method with which to carry out a violent act of retribution,” Judge Cory Wilson wrote in the court’s opinion, adding that per the founding fathers original intent, every American, including domestic abusers, had a God-given right to enact lethal vengeance against whoever they felt was worthy of their ire. “Be it the ex-girlfriend who so heinously wronged you, a coworker who looked at you in a weird way, or a sonuvabitch judge who ruined your life, all Americans have the right to bear whatever arms they need to destroy their enemies once and for all. Without the right to dole out justice and reckoning, we are nothing as a country. This type of senseless violence is what we were built on.” At press time, the court also struck down a mandatory waiting period that Judge Wilson claimed made it take too long for those who had been wronged and were blinded by rage to finally get sweet, sweet revenge.

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  • Is the Worst of Winter Over for COVID?

    Is the Worst of Winter Over for COVID?

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    For months, the winter forecast in the United States seemed to be nothing but viral storm clouds. A gale of RSV swept in at the start of autumn, sickening infants and children in droves and flooding ICUs. After a multiyear hiatus, flu, too, returned in force, before many Americans received their annual shot. And a new set of fast-spreading SARS-CoV-2 subvariants had begun its creep around the world. Experts braced for impact: “My biggest concern was hospital capacity,” says Katelyn Jetelina, who writes the popular public-health-focused Substack Your Local Epidemiologist. “If flu, RSV, and COVID were all surging at the same time—given how burned out, how understaffed our hospital systems are right now—how would that pan out?”

    But the season’s worst-case scenario—what some called a “tripledemic,” bad enough to make health-care systems crumble—has not yet come to pass. Unlike last year, and the year before, a hurricane of COVID hospitalizations and deaths did not slam the country during the first month of winter; flu and RSV now appear to be in sustained retreat. Even pediatric hospitals, fresh off what many described as their most harrowing respiratory season in memory, finally have some respite, says Mary Beth Miotto, a pediatrician and the president of the Massachusetts chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics. After a horrific stint, “we are, right now, doing okay.” With two months to go until spring, there is plenty of time for another crisis to emerge: Certain types of influenza, in particular, can be prone to delivering late-season second peaks. “We need to be careful and recognize we’re still in the middle,” Jetelina told me. But so far, this winter “has not been as bad as I expected it to be.”

    No matter what’s ahead, this respiratory season certainly won’t go down in history as a good one. Children across the country have fallen sick in overwhelming numbers, many of them with multiple respiratory viruses at once, amid a nationwide shortage of pediatric meds. SARS-CoV-2 remains a top cause of mortality, with its daily death count still in the hundreds, and long COVID continues to be difficult to prevent or treat. And enthusiasm for new vaccines and virus-blocking mitigations seems to be at an all-time low. Any sense of relief people might be feeling at this juncture must be tempered by what’s in the rearview: three years of an ongoing pandemic that has left more than 1 million people dead in the U.S. alone, and countless others sick, many chronically so. The winter may be going better than it could have. But that shouldn’t hold us back from tackling what’s ahead this season, and in others yet to come.

    Not all of this past autumn’s gloomy predictions were off base. RSV and flu each rushed in on the early side of the season and led to a steep rise in cases. But both viruses made rather hasty exits: RSV hit an apparent apex in mid-November, and flu bent into its own decline the following month. The staggered peaks “helped us quite a bit, in terms of hospitals being stressed,” says Sam Scarpino, the director of AI and life sciences at the Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University. In recent days, coronavirus cases and hospitalizations have been tilting downward, too—and severe-disease rates seem to be holding at a relative low. Just under 5 percent of hospital beds are currently occupied by COVID patients, compared with more than four times that fraction this time last year. And weekly COVID deaths are down by almost 75 percent from January 2022. (Death, though, has always been a lagging indicator, and the mortality numbers could still shift upward soon.) Despite some dire predictions to the contrary, the fast-spreading XBB.1.5 subvariant didn’t spark “some giant Omicron-type wave and crush everything,” says Justin Lessler, an infectious-disease modeler at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “In that sense, I feel good.”

    Read: How worried should we be about XBB.1.5?

    No one can say for sure why we dodged winter’s deadliest bullets, but the population-level immunity that Americans have built up over the past three years clearly played a major role. “That’s a testament to how vaccination has made the disease less dangerous for most people,” says Cedric Dark, an emergency physician at Baylor College of Medicine. Widespread immunization, combined with the fact that most Americans have now been infected, and many of them reinfected, has caused severe-disease rates to plunge, and the virus to move less quickly than it otherwise would have. Antiviral drugs, too, have been slashing hospitalization rates, at least for the meager fraction of recently infected people who use them. The gargantuan asterisk of long COVID still applies to new infections, but the short-term effects of the disease are now more on par with those of other respiratory illnesses, reducing the number of resources that health-care workers must marshal for each case.

    The virus, too, was more merciful than it could have been. XBB.1.5, despite its high transmissibility and penchant for dodging antibodies, doesn’t so far seem more capable of causing severe disease. And the fall’s bivalent shots, though not a perfect match for the newcomer, still improve the body’s response to viruses in the Omicron clan. Competition among respiratory viruses may have also helped soften COVID’s recent blows. In the days and weeks after one infection, bodies can become more resilient to another—a phenomenon known as viral interference that can reduce the risk of simultaneous or back-to-back infections. On population scales, interference can push down surges’ peaks, or at the very least, separate them, potentially keeping hospitals from being hit by a medley of microbes all at once. It’s hard to say for sure: “Many things go into when an epidemic wave happens—human behavior, temperature, humidity, the biology of the virus, the biology of the host,” says Ellen Foxman, an immunologist at Yale. That said, “I do think viral interference probably does play a role that has not been appreciated.”

    None of the experts I spoke with was ready to issue a blanket phew. Overlapping waves of respiratory illness have already led to nonstop sickness, especially among children, draining resources at every point in the pediatric caregiving chain. Kids were kept out of school, and parents stayed home from work; after a glut of COVID-related closures in New Mexico, schools and day cares running low on teachers had to call in the National Guard. Inundated with illnesses, pediatric emergency rooms overflowed; adult-care units had to be repurposed for children, and some hospitals pitched tents on their front lawns to accommodate overflow. Local stopgaps weren’t always enough: At one point, a colleague of Miotto’s in Boston told her that the closest available pediatric ICU bed was in Washington, D.C.

    Read: The worst pediatric-care crisis in decades

    By any metric, for the pediatric community, “it’s been a horrible season, the worst,” says Yvonne Maldonado, a pediatrician at Stanford. “The hospitals were bursting, bursting at the seams.” The flow of fevers has ebbed somewhat in recent weeks, but remains more flood than trickle. “It’s not over: We still don’t have amoxicillin in general, and we still struggle to get fever medication for people,” Miotto said. A parent recently told her that they’d gone to almost 10 pharmacies to try to fill an antibiotic prescription for their child. And pediatric providers across the country are steeling themselves for what the coming weeks could bring. “I think we could still see another surge,” says Joelle Simpson, the division chief of emergency medicine at Children’s National Hospital. “In prior years, February has been one of the worst months.”

    The season’s ongoing woes have been compounded by preexisting health-care shortages. Amid a dearth of funds, some hospitals have reduced their number of pediatric beds; a mass exodus of workers has also limited the resources that can be doled out, even as SARS-CoV-2 testing and isolation protocols continue to stretch the admission and discharge timeline. “Hospitals are in a weaker position than they were before the pandemic,” says Joseph Kanter, Louisiana’s state health officer and medical director. “If that’s the environment in which we are experiencing this year’s respiratory-virus season, it makes everything feel more acute.” Those issues are not limited to pediatrics: Now that COVID is a regular part of the disease roster, workloads have increased for a contingent of beleaguered clinicians that, across the board, seems likely to continue to shrink. In many hospitals, patients are getting stuck in emergency departments for several hours, even multiple days—sometimes never making it to a bed before being sent home. “It seems like hospitals everywhere are full,” Dark told me, not just because of COVID, but because of everything. “The vast majority of the work I do, and that I bet you what most of my colleagues are doing, is taking place in waiting rooms.”

    The U.S. has come a long way in the past three years. But still, “the cumulative toll of these winter surges has been higher than it needs to be,” says Julia Raifman, a health-policy researcher at Boston University. Had more people gone into winter up to date on their COVID vaccines, the virus’s mortality rate could have been driven down further; had more antiviral drugs and other protections been prioritized for the elderly and immunocompromised, fewer people might have been imperiled at all. If relief is percolating across the country right now, that says more about a shift in standards than anything else. “Our threshold for what ‘bad’ looks like has just gotten so out of whack,” Simpson told me. This winter could have been as grim as recent ones, Scarpino told me, with body-filled freezer trucks in parking lots and hospitals on the brink of collapse. But an improvement from those horrific lows isn’t much to brag about. And this winter—three years into combatting a coronavirus for which we have shots, drugs, masks, and more—has been nowhere close to the best one imaginable.

    The concern now, experts told me, is that the U.S. might accept a winter like this one as simply good enough. Regular vaccine uptake could dwindle even further; another wild-card SARS-CoV-2 variant could ignite another conflagration of cases. If that did happen, some researchers worry that we’d be slow to notice: Genomic surveillance is down, and many tests are being taken, unreported, at home. And with so many different immune histories now scattered across the globe, it’s getting tougher for modelers like Lessler to predict where and how quickly new variants might take over.

    The country does have a few factors working in its favor. By next winter, at least one RSV vaccine will almost certainly be available to protect the population’s youngest, eldest, or both. mRNA-based flu vaccines, which are expected to be far faster to develop than currently available shots, are also in the works, and will likely make it easier to match doses to circulating strains. And if, as Foxman hopes, SARS-CoV-2 eventually settles into a more predictable, seasonal pattern, infections will be less of a concern for most of the year and season-specific immunizations could be easier to design.

    Read: Should everyone be masking again?

    But no vaccine will do much unless enough people are willing and able to take it—and the public-health infrastructure that’s led many outreach efforts remains underfunded and understaffed. Kanter worries that the nation may not be terribly willing to invest. “We’ve fallen into this complacency trap where we just accept a given amount of mortality every year as unavoidable,” he told me. It doesn’t have to be that way, as the past few years have shown: Treatments, vaccines, clean indoor air, and other measures can lower a respiratory virus’s toll.

    By the middle of spring, the U.S. will be in a position to let the public-health-emergency declaration on COVID lapse—a decision that could roll back protections for the uninsured, and ratchet up price points on shots and antivirals. This winter’s retrospective is likely to influence that decision, Scarpino told me. But relief can breed complacency, and complacency further slows a sluggish public-health response. The fate of next winter—and of every winter after that—will depend on whether the U.S. decides to view this season as a success, or to recognize it as a shaky template for well-being that can and should be improved.

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    Katherine J. Wu

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  • Lies Fitness Trainers Tell Their Clients All The Time

    Lies Fitness Trainers Tell Their Clients All The Time

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  • Twitch Streamer Pokimane Wants Tougher Laws On Revenge Porn

    Twitch Streamer Pokimane Wants Tougher Laws On Revenge Porn

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    Pokimane talking with her hands.

    Screenshot: Pokimane / Kotaku

    One of the biggest female streamers on Twitch wants to take a harder stance on revenge porn—nude photos that are posted online without their owners’ consent. Imane “Pokimane” Anys said in a recent Twitch stream that it should be “illegal” to possess nudes without their owners’ consent, and that she wanted to work towards “facilitating legislation” against it.

    “There are some companies that I’m going to message…not companies. Organizations that are involved in certain causes. I’m going to be like…Listen: If you ever need someone to…” Pokimane made talking hand gestures on stream. “I’m your girl. Because I think if you wanna pass a bill, you usually go in front of a group of politicians and you explain your cause…I’ll do it.” Kotaku reached out to Pokimane to ask which organizations she planned to work with, but did not receive a response by the time of publication.

    Pokimane was initially vague about what she was taking a stance against, but she eventually clarified that she was talking about revenge porn. “I think it should be illegal to even have your phone, your PC, on your anything…having photos that someone doesn’t consent to you having.”

    There are several reasons why she is taking this stance now. Pokimane talked about how her viewers would message her about how their former partners would leak their nudes. She felt that those individuals were rarely punished for “ruining” girls’ lives. “So many things online go without repercussions and they really shouldn’t,” she said.

    The U.S. currently has laws against revenge porn in nearly every state. But as Hasan Piker pointed out in a recent stream about Pokimane’s comments, enforcement against revenge porn is complicated and murky. Cops are hardly the most empathetic or competent investigators of gendered violence. Besides that, surveilling every electronic device for revenge porn would be a massive privacy violation. “The only way you can tackle revenge porn is at the point of distribution,” he said.

    Pokimane seemed optimistic about preventing revenge porn by stigmatizing it. “If [an ex] shares [nudes] with someone, that person should be so scared of having that photo because the person whose photo they have—didn’t consent to giving it to them.”

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    Sisi Jiang

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  • Genshin Impact In 2022: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

    Genshin Impact In 2022: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

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    Zhongli, Venti, Nahida, and Raiden sit together on the grass.

    Image: HoYoverse / Kotaku

    2022 was the year that Genshin Impact’s developer rebranded to HoYoverse to convey its ambitions for expanding its offerings to global audiences. It was also the year when players left the Japan-inspired region behind in order to explore Sumeru—a nation based on Southwest Asia, South Asia, and North Africa (SWANA).

    Not all changes were warmly received. The Sumeru leaks received significant backlash for colorism, orientalism, and fetishization, but mechanical changes to exploration and resource gathering were welcome. And the new Dendro element made the combat feel exciting and new again. Which makes it an even bigger shame that not everyone can enjoy playing Genshin without reservations. I know that light-skinned folks from the SWANA region exist, but it even feels awkward to me that every city-dwelling NPC with an Arabic name is light-skinned. For a game that sells the idea of an immersive world, Sumeru kept taking me out of it.

    It also sucks that we’re not getting a new endgame mode. But I find the new card game so much fun that I don’t really care. I can’t wait for more people to learn the rules so that I can squash them in Genius Invokation matches.

    Here are the fun additions to the game, the grievances both new and old, and controversies that tore its community apart.

    The Good

    The Sumeru landscape.

    Screenshot: HoYoverse / Kotaku

    Sumeru transforms open world exploration

    After months of burnout, the addition of a new North Africa/Southwest Asia/South Asia inspired region helped Genshin feel like a fresh open world game. I absolutely adored zipping around the forest canopies and waterfalls, which allowed me to explore more of the map than I otherwise would have. I just wish that the designers kept it up for the more recently introduced desert area, which still demands that I leg boringly plain distances.

    The Dendro element revives disfavored characters

    Remember how bummed the community would get whenever it was revealed that a cool new character would have thunder powers? Electro was once widely considered the worst element, and for good reason. Its reactions with other elements weren’t as powerful unless a character was built as a rare physical attacker. Its main role was to provide energy particles—but there are other ways to gain energy. Using an electro character was almost considered a waste of a party slot.

    Sumeru Preview Teaser 01: The Fascinating Dendro Element | Genshin Impact

    Not anymore. The new “quicken” reaction allows Electro characters to cause additional damage that scales with their “Elemental Mastery” stat. This means that Fischl is now one of the most valuable characters in the game (Yes, yes, I know about taser comp), Yae Miko becomes an absolute DPS monster, and Lisa becomes viable for the first time since Genshin launched.

    I’ve always hated how certain gacha characters are more “meta” than others, and that rarely changed without some kind of numbers buff. Genshin is constantly reinventing its meta by adding new ways that powers can interact with each other, and I’m absolutely living for it.

    The Japan-inspired region finally earns its tragic gravitas

    Last year, I wrote that the Inazuma storyline was kinda mid, and the best stories were found in the mundane sidequests. The writing felt weak, and I worried that the developers couldn’t sustain the previous narrative quality while releasing live service updates for a new region. My concerns were quickly dispelled with the new year.

    HoYoverse released an underwater sub-region with some of the creepiest lore in the game so far. The quests of Enkanomiya are full-throated about how the current rulers of Teyvat are genocidal conquerors from another world. This was heavily implied if you bothered to read the 139,847,934 tomes of in-game lore. Most people (understandably) didn’t. This subregion is technically “optional,” but I don’t think it should be.

    Version 2.4 “Fleeting Colors in Flight” Trailer | Genshin Impact

    None of the Enkanomiya quests are mandatory. But Genshin trusts a significant portion of its players to care about these injustices, and the rewards for following the breadcrumb trails are sublime. When I ran a dozen fetch quests for faceless NPCs, I wasn’t thinking about the premium currency that I could earn. I was thinking of the Sunchildren, ancient puppet rulers who were burned alive before adulthood. How did their story end? For all the jokes that the Genshin community is primarily motivated by primogems, we’re even more obsessive about good stories.

    For those who don’t have the patience to explore all of Enkanomiya, the second part of Raiden Shogun’s storyline is much easier to digest. I liked that this arc relied more heavily on emotional beats and well-paced writing rather than flashy animations. Earlier quests had fancy special effects, but they couldn’t save the main scenario from feeling rushed and poorly constructed.

    The storytelling becomes more mature

    2022 is when Genshin started making NPCs more important to its central storyline than ever before. We met compelling side characters in Inazuma last year, but some of the rawest lines I’ve ever heard were from random soldiers and explorers in the spring Chasm update. And the sickly heiress we meet in the main quest scenario was the real star who outshone our overpowered heroes. Genshin isn’t the first video game to say that ordinary people are the protagonists of their own lives, but HoYoverse is committed to actually showing it.

    I also wanted to give a quick shoutout to the animated cutscenes, which have been improving drastically over the past year. I’m not talking about the technical improvements, but how Genshin uses more varied camera shots to create scenes that feel like movies (rather than talking heads).

    Genius Invokation TCG

    Genshin’s take on Gwent has become my new favorite reason to log into the game. I love this card minigame because it never feels like I’m truly backed into a corner. The mechanics are forgiving, and the rules allow me to convert useless resources into more helpful ones. So if one of my characters falls, it feels like I actually earned that L.

    Best of all, there’s no gacha component in Genius Invokation. I was worried that I would have to grind matches endlessly for booster packs, but I just have to buy individual cards straight from the shop. It’s such a welcome reprieve from yelling at my screen because I flubbed my artifact rolls again.

    Genshin is getting an anime

    HoYoverse is partnering with the anime studio Ufotable to produce an animated series, which is the best news to come out all fall. Ufotable has produced crowd pleaser hits such as Demon Slayer and Fate, and hey also produce animation for video games such as the Tales series. Their work is sheer wizardry, and now they’ll be animating the biggest weeb game in the world.

    Genshin Impact Long-Term Project Launch: Concept Trailer | Genshin Impact

    The Genshin fandom rarely agrees on anything. So it’s nice that we can get such a massive collective W like this.

    The Chinese opera revival

    Chinese opera is widely considered to be a dying art, yet HoYoverse chose to include it in the main quest scenario that happened around Chinese New Year. The character Yun Jun is an opera singer, her design is based on the performers’ outfits, and she has a real opera singer as her second voice actress. After the update was released, millions of people got to experience a cultural artform that they had never seen before.

    Story Teaser: The Divine Damsel of Devastation | Genshin Impact

    This wasn’t just an important moment for the Chinese diaspora who have had less palatable aspects of their culture maligned. It was meaningful to all the YouTube and Twitter commenters who never knew that Chinese opera could convey such profound emotion. Yun Jin’s performance didn’t just move her own audience, but people of different nationalities around the world.

    The Bad

    Paimon apologizes for her crimes.

    Image: HoYoverse / Kotaku

    Farming mats in Sumeru is awful

    Everything is spaced so far apart, and the only multi-node resources are cooking ingredients. And good luck if you need any scarabs—the little bastards are almost impossible to see in the desert sand unless they’re scurrying away as you approach. Worst of all, none of the useful flowers can be grown in the housing system right now. So good luck—especially if you don’t have the premium 5 star Nahida to help you gather flowers from the cliffsides.

    The conflicting quest backlog situation is getting ridiculous

    It used to be that new players couldn’t access newer content until they finished enough of the main quest. Now older players are being hit by the unwieldy quest log too. If you accept certain sidequests too early, then you can be locked out of the main quest scenario.

    I’d understand if there was some kind of chronology requirement, but the game is doing this solely to prevent an NPC from being in two places at once. This is incredibly silly, and I hope that the developers will get rid of it soon.

    Game delays due to the coronavirus lockdowns

    While other gaming companies had to push their release dates because of the pandemic, HoYoverse seemed to be the only studio that seemed delay-proof. That ended when Shanghai underwent severe lockdowns and food crises. Genshin experienced its first delay since its 2020 release at the end of April. The housing system was locked in maintenance mode, and Ayaka Kamisato had the longest gacha banner in the game’s history… but only by a period of two weeks. It seems that not even coronavirus lockdowns can stop HoYoverse’s developers for long.

    HoYoverse announces that Genshin will not have endgame content

    Oh boy. There’s never been any doubt that Genshin is a game catered towards casual players. But the combat is so well-designed that many meta-centric players latched on early, so they felt like they were being slapped in the face when the developers confirmed that the Spiral Abyss would be the only endgame for the foreseeable future.

    The Spiral Abyss is a challenge dungeon in which players can clear four new levels every six weeks. It’s a DPS check where players try to kill all the enemies within a certain amount of time. Every time the Spiral Abyss refreshes, the fights also come with new conditions. But it’s still stuff that you can clear in a single evening, rather than an endless endgame mode.

    Here’s why this is such a big deal: Some of the most competitive players have been spending large amounts of money to get extra abilities and weapons from the gacha. So there’s the feeling that HoYoverse owes them more challenge modes in which they can test their gameplay prowess. Right now, most of the studio’s development muscle has been focused on story-centric events and challenges that are catered towards players who don’t have a lot of characters. HoYoverse understands that appeasing the casual players is what gives F2P games their longevity. But it still sucks to see that a passionate section of the community is being thoroughly neglected.

    The Ugly

    Genshin Impact's entire light skinned cast.

    Image: HoYoverse / Kotaku

    Sumeru is too white

    As usual, Genshin’s upcoming gacha characters leaked far ahead of their official announcements. Many people were disappointed that the Chinese RPG continued its tradition of populating the world with mostly light-skinned characters. Previous nations were based on Germany, China, and Japan, so fans expected more melanin variation from a fictional country based on North Africa, Southwest Asia, and South Asia. People also pointed out that Liyue and Inazuma were based on specific East Asian countries. It sucked that Sumeru seems to be a hodgepodge of multiple cultures and nations.

    While there are dark-skinned NPCs with sympathetic backstories, the gacha characters are the “protagonists” of the game. The majority of those originating from Sumeru are light-skinned, and no canonically Black characters currently exist in the game at all. Gacha is a video game genre that sells personal attachment and sex appeal. Whether or not HoYoverse includes darker characters isn’t a matter of “wokeness” as some delightful commenters say—it’s a question of whether or not HoYoverse considers melanated skin to be desirable. So far, the answer seems to be “Sometimes, but not past a certain point.”

    We knew this was coming. HoYoverse did not have a good reputation with how they portrayed darker-skinned characters even before Sumeru had been released. But a lot of players had hoped that the studio would be listening to feedback and taking the community’s feelings into account. There’s still time to fill the roster with more diverse characters, but the period of goodwill seems to have passed.

    HoYoverse accused of bribing fans for votes at The Game Awards

    Seasoned gacha players know that they’ll give out premium currency for almost anything. Anniversary? Here’s some gacha money. Maintenance went on too long? We have apology money. HoYoverse usually distributes some currency every time that Genshin wins an award, and the internet wasn’t happy about it. Specifically, the Sonic Frontiers fandom started to accuse HoYoverse of buying votes with in-game currency. Some even suspected the fandom of using bots to cheat in a popularity contest.

    There were several reasons for this. First, Sonic Frontiers was neck-and-neck with Genshin in the polls, but it’s a single-player game that can’t use premium currency for marketing. Second, there’s the perception that the studio had already cheated by entering a game from 2020 into the running. Thirdly, it’s a common perception that most Genshin players are gambling addicts. It wasn’t just the unsubstantiated botting accusations that were ugly, but the casual ableism that gamers threw out in order to justify their hatred of Genshin. There are valid reasons to criticize companies, it’s what we do here all the time. But something has gone horribly wrong when gamers will use mental health as ammunition against a community that they know little about.

    Genshin did go on to win the Player’s Vote award, and every player received enough currency for five rolls—or around $12.

    A high schooler is accused of “satanism” for painting a Genshin character

    Satanic panic in 2022? You read that correctly. Michigan parents bullied a teenager at a school board meeting after she painted a queer-positive mural as part of an official school contest. One of the contested images was the mask worn by the Genshin character Xiao. He’s an evil spirit hunter, so it’s more accurate to say that Xiao is the anti-Satan.

    I’m not invested in defending his honor to some Republican parents, but I do think homophobia and xenophobia is shitty. Maybe worry a little more about how your kids will feel while living in a bigoted community rather than if a video game character’s mask is promoting Satanism.

    Looking to the future of Genshin Impact

    Sumeru’s story arc hasn’t concluded, and there are still so many remaining questions about capital Genshin nouns such as the Scarlet King, Irminsul, and the Descenders, or where Istaroth went after saving Enkanomiya from the Dragonheirs. Every year of lore updates seems to bring up far more questions than answers, so I’ll likely be trapped in this gacha hell with the rest of the community for the entire ride.

    HoYoverse usually releases a major nation every year, and our next destination is the France-based region of Fontaine. This is where the god of justice resides, but I find this a little ironic. It says in the lore that she’s not willing to challenge the divine—the rulers in Celestia who have colonized this world and caused multiple genocides against its inhabitants. How could she be just if she won’t challenge the rulers who demand the world’s fealty by force? By now, I know that HoYoverse has a good answer planned. We just need to wait an entire year to find out what it is.

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    Sisi Jiang

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  • Crypto Kingpin Sam Bankman-Fried Arrested In The Bahamas [Update]

    Crypto Kingpin Sam Bankman-Fried Arrested In The Bahamas [Update]

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    Image for article titled Crypto Kingpin Sam Bankman-Fried Arrested In The Bahamas [Update]

    Photo: Bloomberg (Getty Images)

    Sam Bankman-Fried, the central figure in the collapse of crypto exchange FTX, has just been arrested in The Bahamas, and is likely to be quickly extradited to the United States to face criminal charges.

    As CNBC reports, authorities in The Bahamas have released a statement which reads:

    The Bahamas and the United States have a shared interest in holding accountable all individuals associated with FTX who may have betrayed the public trust and broken the law. While the United States is pursuing criminal charges against SBF individually, The Bahamas will continue its own regulatory and criminal investigations into the collapse of FTX, with the continued cooperation of its law enforcement and regulatory partners in the United States and elsewhere.

    US authorities issued a statement shortly afterwards:

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    Bankman-Fried, who sucked ass at League of Legends by the way, ran FTX. In just a few short years, the crypto exchange went from nothing to plastering its name across all manner of sporting events and magazine covers. It was considered super-valuable because it charged customers fees to buy and bet on crypto, but also because Bankman-Fried was considered the next tech whiz who was going to use FTX to launch a “super app” for finance that would make crypto legit.

    Earlier this year, however, the entire thing collapsed, partly because crypto itself is a scam, but mostly because FTX in particular was very much a scam, down to the fact senior members of the exchange had a chat group called “Wirefraud.” Bankman-Fried, who was in The Bahamas in part to avoid having to testify before the House Financial Services Committee (FTX also moved its headquarters to the Caribbean nation last year), is now facing criminal charges in two countries. Meanwhile, his successor in charge of what’s left of FTX has already publicly said the company spent “$5 billion…buying a myriad of businesses and investments, many of which may be worth only a fraction of what was paid for them,” and claimed that Bankman-Fried had engaged in “unacceptable management practices.”

    UPDATE 8:20pm ET: The New York Times reports that Bankman-Fried is being charged by US authorities with wire fraud, wire fraud conspiracy, securities fraud, securities fraud conspiracy and money laundering.

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    Luke Plunkett

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  • Two Years Later, Cyberpunk 2077 Fans Are Still Trying To Solve The Game’s Biggest Mystery

    Two Years Later, Cyberpunk 2077 Fans Are Still Trying To Solve The Game’s Biggest Mystery

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    The "D3 Prime" statue sits before meditating monks, with the sequence FF:06:B5 visible in bold.

    Screenshot: CD Projekt Red / Kotaku

    Given that Cyberpunk 2077 came out nearly two years ago, you might think there’s little left to discover and document ahead of the game’s first and only planned DLC, Phantom Liberty. But right in the heart of Night City lies the beginning of a riddle that has left fans scrambling to unravel the mystery since the hunt began in 2020. It all starts with a single statue and a six-digit alphanumeric sequence: FF:06:B5.

    Cyberpunk 2077 players caught on to the FF:06:B5 mystery early on in the game’s life, but the answer has remained frustratingly out of reach despite many elaborate theories. The mysterious six-character sequence is found on a statue where monks can often be seen praying or meditating. The search has involved rigorous number-crunching based on the initial hint, maps that chart the location of repeat instances of the same statue, and deep dives into spiritual concepts and real world history, among other attempts to find the solution. Following the trail is dizzying to say the least. But every step of it is intriguing, even if you’re not sure you’re on a trail to begin with.

    Few concrete, undeniable facts and trails have surfaced outside of initial observations, a good chunk of which are documented on r/FF06B5, a subreddit dedicated to cracking the titular mystery (as well as other secrets found in Cyberpunk 2077). Theories and speculation go over the deep end real fast with this mystery, so if you find yourself struggling to keep your head on straight, you’re not alone. As is said in the “Newcomer Sticky” of FF:06:B5’s subreddit, “Without concrete proof that one [theory] is more viable than another, it’s difficult to give this community and newcomers a direction to look.”

    No one is certain what the solution is, or if any of the proposed theories and documentation are even on the right track. If you want to get a look at the origin of the mystery for yourself, you can find the first and only truly confirmed “hint” right in Corpo Plaza. Located northwest of the massive roundabout and near the Corpo Plaza apartment, is a statue known to FF:06:B5 mystery hunters as FF:06:B5 Prime “D3.” A multi-armed statue holding a giant sword with two hands, and a sphere in one of its left hands, it has the six-character sequence in bold across the front. It also has a strange forking symbol that many suspect either relates to V’s lifepaths, the branching nature of the game’s story, or even ancient numbering systems. This statue can be found in multiple locations in the city, though not all have the alphanumerical sequence. Miniature versions of the statue, complete with the sequence, also appear in the game’s recently-added apartments that are up for sale.

    A miniature version of the suspicious "Prime" statue sits in one of V's apartments.

    Screenshot: CD Projekt Red / Kotaku

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    Despite the mystery, a few reliable observations and likely starting points have been established by the community:

    1. FF:06:B5, when used as an HTML hex color code, translates to “shocking pink,” or as the community refers to it (and often the mystery itself) “magenta.”
    2. The sequence looks like a portion of a MAC address and/or matches other kinds of code sequences found elsewhere in the game.
    3. Multiple statues identical and similar in shape appear throughout the game. Some even do weird things, like emit sparks when shot, or simply hold orbs that are suspiciously colored pink.
    4. NPC monks gather in front of the D3 “Prime” statue. They can be heard chanting as well as repeating one particularly intriguing line of dialog: “My apprentice! Your throat chakra is blocked! Activate the meridians on the roof of your mouth.”
    5. Paweł Sasko, Cyberpunk’s lead quest designer, confirmed that this isn’t a case of smoke where there’s no fire. He acknowledges that it is indeed a mystery worth looking into, likely with a specific meaning and solution—and one he has turned down every opportunity to shed light on, even when asked directly.

    There’s also somewhat of a sixth fact to consider: After update 1.5, the text on D3 “Prime” changed from red to yellow. What that could possibly mean is anyone’s guess.

    All theories more or less sprout from these confirmable observations. What follows depends which avenue you choose to pursue and how lost in the weeds you’re willing to get. You can check out some of the connected threads in the community’s mind map, which traces not only connections within the game but also connections to works of pop culture and spiritual concepts that exist outside of the game. Anything that can have a number, color, or thematic concept attached to it seems to be up for exploration. Trips through Reddit threads and Discord conversations point to any number of possibilities. Everything from complex readings into spiritually to matching the code to Windings fonts, of all things.

    One example of the rabbit hole that can ensue from following a potential lead includes attempting to connect the mysterious “Zen Master” side jobs to FF:06:B5. Given the presence of monks at the D3 prime statue, the monk’s meditation quests seem like a natural place to look. These side jobs involve meeting a lone monk who takes you through a meditative brain dance. When pulled apart for clues, things get a little interesting.

    The "Zen Master's" eyes glow blue.

    Screenshot: CD Projekt Red / Kotaku

    As charted out in the mind map, players have figured out that the amount you can choose to donate to the monk after each meditation session increases in order of the Fibonnaci sequence starting at the 12th position. Not only that, but each quest is named after specific works of art such as John Lennon’s song “Imagine,” Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” Rūmī’s “Poem of the Atoms,” and “Meetings Along the Edge,” the title of a piece that appears on the collaborative recording project between composers Philip Glass and Ravi Shankar. These have their own numbers to contribute with release dates, song length, and more. Trailing sets of numbers and thematic relationships seem to be a common end result of many theories and the game is more than happy to provide such speculative fodder.

    Occurrences like the Zen Master and the weird math hidden in the details have become the meat and potatoes of intense speculation that blends number crunching with concepts of spirituality with the game’s own lore and references to pop culture. It’s hard to keep track of it all. Does it directly relate to the main FF:06:B5 mystery? Another mystery altogether? Or none at all? While some trains of thought seem more convincing than others, the game is filled with dozens of opportunities to trace lines where there might not have been any in the first place. Yet, it always seems like certain clues are too hard to ignore. Why does one striking in-game ad in particular seem to not sell a specific product (or contain other versions of it as all other ads do, confirmed via datamining)? I found myself wondering why said ad seems to bear some resemblance to the mysterious symbol on the D3 Prime statue and on the jewelry worn by the monks who meet in front of D3 at the same time of day, every day. Am I seeing things or am I on to something?

    The scope of the city, the frequent themes of identity and reality woven throughout the game, it all creates a spiral of possible solutions to a weird statute that has been resistant to the most audacious efforts to crack it.

    Given the clear esoteric nature of the mystery, others have turned to investigating Misty, her shop, the game’s tarot cards, and all other appearances of religious and spiritual concepts and iconography. The glyph found in Misty’s shop contains strings of numbers and letters that can be connected to form a larger sequence, broken up into pairs similar to FF:06:B5. It also bears resemblance to graffiti found near the final Zen Master quest.

    Misty's shop shows various rates for esoteric readings, as well as a strange symbol with code sequences.

    Screenshot: CD Projekt Red / Kotaku

    The NPC monk line concerning the “throat chakra” seems to also be somewhat promising, as some speculate that the answer to the mystery lies in following the request to “activate the meridians on the roof of your mouth.” A couple of recent posts to the mystery’s subreddit are following patterns of blue, based on the traditional color of the throat chakra and how that matches the giant blue circular glass “roof” that covers a portion of the road in Corpo Plaza.

    Despite the impressiveness of the documentation that’s been gathered in pursuit of this mystery, it’s hard not to get discouraged by how many lead to dead ends. And when every little thing in the game can seemingly be related by some extension, it’s easy to start getting paranoid.

    Every time I felt like I was ready to give up on one of the possible theories or speculations, there’d be a small connection I’d struggle to dismiss, or documentation of alleged clues that drew lines to other oddities in the game, such as the constant repetition of the “no future” graffiti. But after sifting through so many long strings of speculation and theory, it’s hard not to deny the fun in finding something tucked away in Cyberpunk 2077 that no one’s pieced together yet.

    Hopefully it’ll be a satisfying reveal when someone does figure it out, because speculating over why an NPC might be tapping a bar table a certain number of times is enough to drive one into cyber psychosis.

     

     

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    Claire Jackson

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  • Corsair Apologizes After Rep Calls YouTuber’s Review Comments ‘Bullshit’

    Corsair Apologizes After Rep Calls YouTuber’s Review Comments ‘Bullshit’

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    Gamer's Nexus

    Screenshot: YouTube

    Corsair has publicly apologised after a “member of staff” was found last week to have called sections of reviews of the latest RTX 4090 graphics card—made by both Gamers Nexus and Guru3D—”total bullshit”.

    The drama arose last week when the hugely-popular hardware channel Gamers Nexus posted a review (and some benchmarks) of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition. In that video, they say plugging in only three of the card’s four cables (in case your PSU for whatever reason only had room for three 8-pin connections) would lock you to 100% performance, and that only by plugging in all four would you be allowed to overclock the card. Guru3D’s review says much the same thing.

    Not long after, Discord comments left by a Corsair staffer went viral. They called both Gamers Nexus and Guru3D’s claims “total bullshit” and “misinformation”, while also saying both users and “the press” were both “confused” about the card’s power and overclocking claims. The full comments, as shared by Gamers Nexus, read:

    QUESTION: Has anyone else seen the misinformation about the sense pins and the magical 600W unlock from anyone other than GamersNexus and Guru3D or is it just those two sites? I need to throw Nvidia a couple links showing them how confused user… and the press… are about their smart sense pins.

    Total bullshit and they don’t even realize it. Yes. The adapter has two sense wires. Yes. The card works with only one sense wire attached. It’s because it’s a 450W card. It’s not because it has the ability to be ‘unlocked’ requiring the second sense wire.

    The card simply doesn’t know. It’s not intelligent in that way. It only looks for one sense pin.

    In a follow-up video, Gamers Nexus addresses those “bullshit” claims:

    EVGA Left At the Right Time: NVIDIA RTX 4090 Founders Deep-Dive (Schlieren, 12-Pin, & Pressure)

    While the staffer’s comments weren’t exactly professional, a company rep talking shit in private about members of the media is, as we’d all wager, nothing new. What got Corsair to publicly have to walk this one back, however, was the fact that…Gamers Nexus and Guru3D were right. To a point—their claims only apply to Nvidia’s own 4090 cables, not those made by third parties like ASUS or Corsair, which may explain the confusion here—but technically correct is still correct.

    Prompting Corsair to issue an official apology on the company’s social media, which goes so far as to call the staffer’s comments an “outburst”:

    It has come to our attention that a member of Corsair staff recently made inflammatory and incorrect comments regarding Gamers Nexus and Guru3D’s understanding of the Nvidia RTX 4090 power connector.

    These comments do not represent Corsair as a company, and we regret both the form and content of the individual’s outburst.

    We’ve worked with both Gamers Nexus and Guru3D for many years and hold both in high regard in terms of their professional conduct and technical abilities.

    We apologize unreservedly for the improper conduct of our employee and will be taking steps internally to remind our team of the high standards we have for them when interacting with the media and end-users.

    For their part, Gamers Nexus have accepted the apology, and are ready to “move forward”:

    While Guru3D’s EIC Hilbert Hagedoorn says “Guys, it’s the web; everybody has opinions. He was wrong, apologizes for that, and for me, that’s the end of this story.”

    It’s very funny to me that these companies keep taking shots at Gamers Nexus when their videos keep turning out to be entirely accurate! If you’re more technically-minded and would like a more detailed explanation for what exactly led to all this—it really is a small detail in the grander scheme of things—the best run-down I’ve found is here.

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    Luke Plunkett

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