domain:putanumonit.com
Hot on the heels of failing out of art school and declaring himself the robofuhrer, Grok now has an update that makes him even smarter but less fascist.
And... xAI releases AI companions native to the Grok App.
And holy...
SHIT. It has a NSFW mode. (NSFW, but nothing obscene either) Jiggle Physics Confirmed.
I'm actually now a suspicious that the "Mecha-Hitler" events were a very intentional marketing gambit to ensure that Grok was all over news (and their competitors were not) when they dropped THIS on the unsuspecting public.
This... feels like it will be an inflection point. AI girlfriends (and boyfriends) have already one-shotted some of the more mentally vulnerable of the population. But now we're got one backed by some of the biggest companies in the world, marketed to a mainstream audience.
And designed like a fucking superstimulus.
I've talked about how I feel there are way too many superstimuli around for your average, immature teens and young adults to navigate safely. This... THIS is like introducing a full grown Bengal tiger into the Quokka island.
Forget finding a stack of playboys in the forest or under your dad's bed. Forget stumbling onto PornHub for the first time, if THIS is a teen boy's first encounter with their own sexuality, how the hell will he ever form a normal relationship with a flesh-and-blood woman? Why would he WANT to?
And what happens when this becomes yet another avenue for serving up adds and draining money from the poor addicted suckers.
This is NOT something parents can be expected to foresee and guide their kids through.
Like I said earlier:
"Who would win, a literal child whose brain hasn't even developed higher reasoning, with a smartphone and internet access, or a remorseless, massive corporation that has spent millions upon millions of dollars optimizing its products and services for extracting money from every single person it gets its clutches on?"
I've felt the looming, ever growing concern for AI's impact on society, jobs, human relationships, and the risk of killing us for a couple years now... but I can at least wrap those prickly thoughts in the soft gauze of the uncertain future. THIS thing sent an immediate shiver up my spine and set off blaring red alarms immediately. Even if THIS is where AI stops improving, we just created a massive filter, an evolutionary bottleneck that basically only the Amish are likely to pass through. Slight hyperbole, but only slight.
Right now the primary obstacle is that it costs $300 a month to run.
But once again, wait until they start serving ads through it as a means of letting the more destitute types get access.
And yes, Elon is already promising to make them real.
Its like we've transcended the movie HER and went straight to Weird Science.
Can't help but think of this classic tweet.
"At long last, we have created the Digital Superstimulus Relationship Simulator from the Classic Scifi Novel 'For the Love of All That is Holy Never Create a Digital Superstimulus Relationship Simulator.'"
I think I would be sucked in by this if I haven't developed a bit of an aversion to Anime-Style women over the years. And they're probably going to cook up something that works for me, too.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
16m ago
Yes, actually.
I took APUSH only slightly more recently than you. Pre-Hamilton and too dry for that style of pop history. Very definitely pre-1619. Lots of time spent on westward expansion before and after the Civil War. Not particularly apologetic, either, if I recall correctly.
The one that really struck me as institutionally liberal was AP Gov. It was 75% Bill of Rights court cases with a clear admiration for the Marshall Court.
Macroeconomics was incredibly Keynesian in a matter-of-fact way. Here’s the money multiplier, here’s an equation for aggregate demand, don’t worry about it too much. What a strange class.
I would absolutely love to shoot a pattern 1917. I adore my No. 4 Lee-Enfield, which was my first historic gun. I’m working towards a collection of the major service rifles, but somehow let myself get sidetracked by a gorgeous Swiss K31. So it’ll be a while before I let myself fill out the set with a Mauser and an Arisaka.
I also have a real soft spot for the M1 carbine. But mine is a real pain and doesn’t like to feed properly. Haven’t figured out what to do with it yet.
Jealous of your steel range. Some day!
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
35m ago
New in Compact Magazine: Neither Side Wants to Emancipate Women
Twice this year, I found myself at conferences where a familiar question surfaced: Why do women not vote conservative? The tone was not hostile, only puzzled. Conservative women asked it themselves, with a kind of weary civility. But none of the answers seemed to satisfy. Some cited the state’s failure to support both motherhood and career; others blamed the lingering shadow of a conservatism that once sought to tether women to secondary roles.
No one could explain why so many women still turn away from even the most progressive forms of the right. Why do they keep voting for a left that consistently throws them under the bus, prioritizing for instance ideologies that deny biological sex and insist on men’s feelings and desires? The answer is simple, although no one wants to see it: Conservatives offer women performative reverence. Progressives offer equally performative protection. But no one offers women the thing they were once promised: freedom.
What freedom? How are you not free?
Of course, we already know that there's something rhetorical about this question, at least in the sense that we can reasonably ask whether anyone is in fact free. It's not an easy thing to nail down, you know? Lenin was asked if the revolution would bring freedom; he responded, "freedom to do what?". You have to specify, it's not self-evident. It's easy to be envious of the apparent freedom of others while also failing to appreciate their own unique forms of unfreedom. The master is relatively more free than the slave, no one can deny this; rare is the master who would switch places. But is the master free, simpliciter? Now it's not so clear. Marxists would say that no one is free, not even the capitalists, not as long as the task of capitalism remains unfulfilled. Capitalism is freedom, to be sure, but it is an unfree freedom, a freedom that poses a riddle that remains unsolved. But, let's stick to the issue at hand.
In the United States, women have leaned left for decades, not out of fervent ideological commitment, but through the steady pull of education, work, and shifting social norms. In 2020, Edison exit polls showed that 57 percent of women voted for Joe Biden, compared to 45 percent of men. Across Europe, too, women often favor center-left parties offering tangible supports: childcare, healthcare, material security.
But the dilemma runs far deeper than electoral politics. It touches upon the very essence of what it means to be free. I remain loyal to the feminist promise, however battered or dimmed, of genuine emancipation for women. This vision is not content to merely manage or glorify womanhood, but to transcend its limitations altogether, to be more than a body assigned a function, to move beyond the scripts of sex and tradition, and to claim the dignity of self-authorship. I never wanted merely to be accepted as a woman; I wanted to be free.
[...]Women do not lean left because it offers a credible path to emancipation. They do so because the right never even tried, and because the left, despite everything, still carries a faint echo of that promise.
What are you "transcending", and how? How do you not already have the "dignity of self-authorship"? What are you talking about?
(I'm going to tell you what I think she's talking about, just hang tight.)
Well, let's start with the objective facts of the matter. Women can already "self-author" themselves into essentially anything. Vice President (admittedly not President of the United States yet, but there's no reason we couldn't get there in short order), professor or artist, blue collar laborer, criminal, and anything else above, below, or in between. There are plenty of female role models to follow in all these categories. To the extent that there still exist "systemic privileges", actual explicit institutional privileges, they're mostly in favor of women now: in university admissions, in hiring, in divorce and family courts, and so on. Women are doing pretty good for themselves! Maybe they weren't 150 years ago, maybe they aren't if we're talking about Saudi Arabia or Iran, but in the 2025 Western first world? What freedoms are they missing?
And yet the author of the linked article perceives that something is missing. She perceives that women, as a class, do not have freedom, do not have the dignity of self-authorship. What do these terms mean? She doesn't say. But nonetheless, we should take her concerns quite seriously. Plainly, there are millions of women who share in her feelings, and millions of men who think she's onto something, and this continues to be the animating impulse of a great deal of cultural and political activity that goes under the heading of "feminism". Millions of people don't make things up. They're always responding to something, although their own interpretation of what they're responding to and what their response means can be mistaken. Plus, the author alleges that whatever phenomenon she's getting at, it plays a role in electoral politics, so you should care about it in that sense as well.
We should again note the author's hesitation to concretely specify her demands. If the issue were "the freedom to have an abortion" or "the dignity of being taken seriously in STEM", then presumably, she would have simply said that. But she makes it clear that the issue is freedom as such, and dignity as such; it's a gnawing, pervasive concern that you can't quite put your finger on. It's an abstract concern. So, we may be inclined to try a more abstract mode of explanation to explain why she feels the way she does.
Human interaction is predicated upon the exchange of value. There'd be no reason to stick around with someone if you weren't getting something out of it, even if all you're getting is some company and a good time. (There is a philosophical problem regarding whether pure altruism is conceptually possible; if you help someone, and you receive in exchange nothing but the satisfaction of having helped someone, then haven't you received something of value, thereby rendering the altruistic act "impure"? What if you don't even feel good about it, could it be pure then? But then, how were you motivated to help in the first place if you didn't even feel good about it? Regardless of how we answer these questions, I believe we can put the idea of absolute pure altruism to the side, because if it exists at all, it surely encompasses a minority of human interactions.)
We want to provide things of value to other people. But value is both a blessing and a curse. You want to have it, but it also weighs you down, it gets you entangled in obligations that you can't quite extricate yourself from. When you have something of great value, it tends to become the only thing that people ever want from you. We can consider Elon Musk as a figure of intense material and symbolic value. He's one of the wealthiest men alive, he runs X, he runs SpaceX, he had a spectacularly public falling out with Trump, and these factors undoubtedly dominate in virtually all of his interpersonal interactions. It's probably a bit hard for him to just be a "normal guy" with "normal friends", innit? Imagine him saying to someone, "when we're hanging out, I don't want to be Elon Musk, I just want to be Elon, y'know? Don't think of me as Elon the business tycoon and political figure. Think of me as, Elon the model train builder, or Elon the DotA player. Yeah, think of me like that instead. That's the identity I want you to symbolically affirm for me". His relations might make an attempt to humor him, although I don't think they'd be particularly successful in their attempts. His extreme wealth alone will always warp his interactions in ways both conscious and unconscious.
It is my contention that (healthy, reasonably attractive) women experience a heavily attenuated version of this phenomenon essentially from birth, which helps explain the pervasive irritation that someone women feel at the simple fact of, well, being women. The constant nagging feeling that something is still not quite right, no matter how much progress is made on formal and even cultural equality (or even cultural domination, as may be the case in certain contexts).
If you were born with a female body, then you were gifted ownership of one of the most valuable possessions on planet earth. This is, again, both a blessing and a curse. This confers to you certain privileges and opportunities, but on the flip side, there is no way to ever turn this value off (aside from ageing -- but, even then...), to take respite from this fountain of value. You're in for the whole bargain, all of it, all the time. The value of the female body is a matter of pure economics; it is not based on the internal subjective psychological states of any individual or class of individuals. A man can impregnate many women in a single week. A woman, once impregnated, is tied up for 9 months. Her time cannot be apportioned as freely. Scarcity is the precondition of value; this is the law of everything that is, was, and shall be.
As a natural consequence of the extreme value of her body, the body comes to dominate her relations with others, both materially and symbolically. She correctly perceives that when people (well, men, at least) think about men, the properties they notice in order of salience are "web developer, white, middle class, male, father...", something like that. But when people think about her, the ordering is "woman, web developer, white, middle class...". Her body is what people want, it's what they're seeking; or at least, this is always necessarily a lurking suspicion. This, I believe, is the root of the aforementioned "abstract" concern with "the dignity of self-authorship"; it's not just the ability to become say, a prominent mathematician or artist in material reality, but to have that reciprocally affirmed as your primary symbolic identity by others. That's when we feel like we have dignity: when we can control how other people see us. I don't doubt that there have been times when a woman was being congratulated by male colleagues on the attainment of her PhD, or her promotion to the C-suite, and still there was a nagging doubt in the back of her mind that went, "........but you still see me as a woman before anything else, don't you?" Or, perhaps on the verge of frustration when talking with a male friend, she wanted to say, "look, I know every time you look at me I have this glowing halo effect around me, like you're wearing fucking AR goggles and they're telling you I'm an NPC that will give you a quest item or some shit, but can you please just take the goggles off for one day and just look at me as, well, me for a change?" And, I'm sorry to say, but here comes the really depressing part of the story: the goggles can't be removed. That glowing halo effect is glued to your tooshie, and it's not going anywhere. "Sexists" are at least appreciated for their forthrightness on this point; the reviled "male feminist" is correctly perceived to be simply dishonest about it. I suppose that's a bit of a downer. But, we all got our own shit to deal with. Take solace in the fact that you're just like everyone else in that regard.
Elon could at least conceivably give up all his wealth, his titles, his positions of symbolic authority, and start from zero. Because the male body has little to no intrinsic value, it's easier for men to become a "blank slate". But when your body itself is the source of this overbearing value? That's a bit harder to rid yourself of.
This, at any rate, is a psychological theory to explain the origin of the discourse in the linked article, a discourse that would otherwise seem to fly in the face of all available evidence. But I'm open to alternative theories.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
36m ago
Should I buy a Model 3? I own a 2012 Fusion with 128,000 miles that runs fine but is almost 15 years old. The $7500 EV credit is expiring in September, so assuming that I like the Model 3 and it meets my needs, should I buy one before then or try to milk this Fusion another few years? It seems like really good value for the money right now, but I'm uncertain how much of the tax credit removal will be eaten by Tesla and how much will go into a straight price increase
No_one
49m ago
If you have a selective exam but don't get enough applicants because e.g. the wages are not that attractive anymore, or the institution has a bad smell, you're not going to get as good a selection.
e.g.
96-140k. 140K after six years isn't going to get you top talent these days.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
52m ago
Is England a better place where nobody cares about the Legend of King Arthur anymore?
Better? I don't know about that. But worse? Almost certainly not.
If the very idea of "King Arthur" somehow fell out of the collective consciousness, then as far as I can tell, nobody would really notice or care. Maybe we might see an improvement in GDP figures when fewer awful movies come out every few years and then bomb at the box office.
Now, the current state of England, or the UK as a whole, leaves much to be desired, but I can recall no point in history, even at its absolute prime, when success or governmental continuity was load-bearing on watery tarts handing out swords. And even back then, people treated it as a nice story, rather than historical fact or the basis for their identity.
On a more general level, I fail to see your case, or at least I don't think there's a reason to choose false stories or myths over ideas that are true, or at least not accurately described as either.
The French made liberty, equality and fraternity their rallying cry to great effect. I do not think any 3 of those concepts are falsifiable, but they still accurately capture values and goals.
FtSoA
55m ago
Every year, technically, agencies have to justify their budgets. Any given agency could be eliminated by Congress at nearly any time, if they so chose. The USAID demolition for example is a problem procedurally because Trump is trying to use the executive branch to effectively nullify what the legislative has done in creating and funding it. If you think a weak legislative branch and a lack of separation of powers is a big problem, this is not a positive development overall.
Sunset clauses always sound better in theory than they work in practice as an accountability mechanism. (Just ask the haters of FISA 702 about that.)
Nothing but mandated fiscal responsibility solves the overall problem of government spending growth. Regulatory growth is a harder nut to crack, since no budget is necessarily required. Perhaps law sunsets could help there because they would at least force a review, but that also generates a lot of work that itself could be a pretty big drag.
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
1hr ago
basically everyone here was really a progressive?
And my extension to that is that everyone here is a traditionalist, and the only real difference between traditionalists and progressives (in terms of moral foundations and what otherwise motivates them to hold those views) to someone who is neither of those things is "about 50 years". Yes, progressives seem iconoclastic and style themselves on hatred of traditionalists, but in reality they converge on the same solutions via different ideological lenses.
(For example, traditionalists would have seduction punished because it devalues the father's property, progressives would have seduction punished because it devalues the mother [and her ability to attract men]- both see this as bad, both have the same motivations, it's just that one couches it through androsupremacy and the other through gynosupremacy).
The death of the word 'liberal' as a meaningful term had consequences.
FtSoA
1hr ago
In general, yes.
But consider that the State Department has continued to use a very selective hiring process, starting with an exam, this whole time and was corrupted by other forces.
This is not really true.
Wilson's Bureaucracy does a good job of showing empirical cases where agencies resisted growth and scope creep, but it was hoisted upon them.
Public choice theory is great overall, but Wilson pointed out where it got a little overdone in some respects.
Oh, and it's true because the bureaucracy grew a ton starting in the 30s, but in terms of government civilians it's been flat (and therefore proportionately lower) for some decades now. Of course, spending and regulation has gone up, overall including spending on contractors and NGOs.
There should always be the countermeasure of "can we afford this?"
Deficit spending outside defined emergency conditions ought to be unpermitted.
wayfarer
1hr ago
Note that it is about small subset of "aliens". It is supposed to be:
- aliens capable of Weird Stuff
- detected by USA military
- coverup done by US military for long time
- not detected by others or they joined coverup
- all released evidence is clearly faked, unconvincing or dubious
- and so on
If FTL is possible then I expect to aliens be undetectable or just trample over us.
Not fit in weird area required for stories by UFO enthusiasts to be true at all.
I entirely believe in existence of elephants. But if my aunt starts claiming that he has herd of twenty elephants in her house, then last thing I would expect to be there is herd of living elephants.
FtSoA
1hr ago
Oh I completely agree. The theory was something like: "The sniper was shooting around Trump, not at Trump, and Trump had a blood capsule to burst on his ear." People had to die to really sell it.
Nothing here makes sense in terms of risk/reward. And there's objective evidence to disprove it.
And yet.
I'm honestly surprised the shooter was just good enough to narrowly miss a headshot, but then couldn't even get a body shot for his follow ups. He got off at least three controlled shots before Trump ducked down.
(But we do have a number of people on this very forum that apply roughly the same level of credulity to Ghislaine Maxwell having a longstanding poweruser Reddit account, clearly authored by a Malaysian man, for actually not even a coherent motive. People want to believe.)
Hieronymus
1hr ago
UTF-16 and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. But having typographically correct characters and the ability to casually mix languages are very nice.
wayfarer
1hr ago
As to why the DoD/USG decided to plant misinformation in a subset of the troops and release them in to the general population to spread their stories, this was never clear.
as a joke?
Either it was entirely deliberate to end with them confused and sincerely believing aliens.
Or more likely someone was too nosy, got "I research aliens, now fuck off" as a joke and has not realized that it was a joke.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1hr ago
grunge gets coopted by corporate and refined and streamlined until we get Creed, who look soulless in comparison to The Strokes
What a weird description of Creed, of all the bands you could have picked. Their lyrics are very sincere (if not especially subtle) expressions of Scott Stapp’s Christian faith. They’re far more “soulful”, in terms of heartfelt expression of their true beliefs and emotions, than nearly any other band within their same broad genre. There are plenty of reasons not to like Creed (although I’m certainly a Creed fan), but lack of soulfulness is an inapt one.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1hr ago
I think honestly any future government would do well to have an automatic sunset to the creation of new agencies. Once a generation we really need to look into whether or not the laws, mandates, regulations, and agencies we built for the crisis of the moment even make sense generations later. It would also prevent those agencies from deciding on their own to do things that harm the country. If you know that in five years your environmental agency will be called to defend its right to exist, you might well think twice before regulating carbon and other common chemicals, or at least keep the regulatory regime as light as possible.
wayfarer
1hr ago
Maybe I am not a human, but I dropped it as not worth watching quite soon. By first or second episode?
I watched "Your Name" and it was pretty but pity that all this animation effort has not went toward something more worth it. Maybe modern audience does not care about plot at all, but I am not obligated to spend time on stuff like that.
Corvos
1hr ago
Yeah, I know. But I didn't feel like events had been treated with enough gravity, either. What just happened was really, really grim and I feel like the narrative needed to slow down and find some way to acknowledge that. As it was, I got the same sense I tend to get from Neal Stephenson: that the author is observing human emotion from the outside as a sort of interesting plot mechanism, and my desire to read further just evaporated.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1hr ago
One thing to remember that the professions with the sorts of people who keep the UFO racket going - aviators, intelligence types, journalists, politicians etc. - probably contain a fair amount of people for whom "finding out the truth about the UFOs" has actually been a major motivator, or at least a motivator, for selecting the said field, and who are thus primed towards interpreting any potential evidence indicating likewise to that direction.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1hr ago
See that 123 symbol in the left corner? Then you'll see the - button in the middle of the keyboard, long press it and the em-dash is right in the middle. It's got 3 options ¯ — -, or as I like to call it, the stroke emoticon.
zeke5123a
1hr ago
Organisms attempt to grow. Unless there is a countermeasure, they will grow. There was for a long time no countermeasure to bureaucracy and therefore it grew.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
2hr ago
Your semi-trolly comment is based on the shared cultural assumptions that housework = drudgery and art = purpose. We can automate processes, but not purpose, so on the path to eliminating the drudgery of housework, we eliminate the drudgery of soulless art. But people want to do art - not corporate memphis prints of mixed families at a picnic, they want to express themselves. So even while corporations all converge on an art style specifically designed to be 'inoffensive' and mass produced, even as ai makes it trivial to 'bring your imagination to life' and ghiblify your photos, people wistfully dream of the day they can stop working and make art. IGOR beat Father of Asahd in every conceivable metric. We might not notice authenticity, but our brains do.
On a similar note, if you pick a career as an artist to make money, you should get the paint in your house tested for lead. You pick a career as an artist because you want to express yourself more than you want to make money - stupid maybe, but it's true. Sometimes you have to make money anyway though. Does that make your expression inauthentic? No, because it's still driven by purpose. And necessity is the mother of invention. Simply by choosing a life of squalor so you don't have to work 9 to 5 (what a way to make a livin! (fuck that's what I'm singing for the rest of the day now)) positions you to make authentic art. Does that mean you will make authentic art? No, you can still make slop for a paycheck, and that slop might even be popular if you put your soul into it. I don't think anyone would disagree that The Boondock Saints was slop, an attempt to cash in on the Tarantino bubble of 90s movies about hitmen. It is also earnest as fuck and people love it for that.
Artistry is at all times a battle between those who wish to express themselves and those who wish to turn that expression into money. Sometimes and in some places it leans one way, while in other times and places it leans the other. Hair metal and bands like Poison look soulless in comparison to Nirvana and Hair Metal dies, then grunge gets coopted by corporate and refined and streamlined until we get Creed, who look soulless in comparison to The Strokes, and so on, same as it ever was (in case you don't like Dolly).
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2hr ago
Rabbi Balkany, the leading lobbyist for Haredi Jewry in DC, married into one of most important Haredi dynasties, did not blackmail billionaire Steve Cohen in order to reap a meager 180k salary from his school. However, as you note, this is my fault, for not providing the abundant evidence necessary to persuade an unfamiliar and perhaps somewhat naive reader who cannot make the natural extrapolation that a highly influential DC fixer for decades is not blackmailing Steve fucking Cohen just to receive a tiny salary from his Jewish day school.
-
His salary was 180k, while his revenue stream from his small business Rite Care was 450k
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One of the two requested subjects of donation was a different Haredi school that he was not involved in, which he had no way of financially benefitting from
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He was involved in “expediting” Jewish school funding through DC connections as early as 1987
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“In 1994, Milton Balkany, a conservative Republican active in political fundraising,[22] tried to have Luchins excommunicated by a Jewish religious court,[13] blaming him for having "caused yeshivas in the land of Israel to lose money",[23] after Luchins had complained about Balkany's efforts to compel Israeli government officials to use U.S. aid money for projects Balkany favored in Israel.[24]”. This is not someone who is in it for greed! He is more like the sacrificing commander of a foreign army. He is in it for his tribe, giving them money and funds. Trying to have another Jew excommunicated because he didn’t want American aid going for Yeshiva funding. This is a very loyal lieutenant of the Jewish cause.
-
He helped Jewish funding as far away as Russia
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He worked to ensure orthodox Jews got half of NYC’s school vouchers
This is not a guy who does things for personal benefit. In typical fashion, I imagine he would have pocketed some of Cohen’s money, or sent some of it to another Jewish endeavor. But the overarching real reason behind doing this was to fund the Jewish schools. Haredi corruption is like this. The Cars4Kids, the 1bil in nyc public funds, etc.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2hr ago
I mean again, you’re still stuck with having a guy point a real gun at a person’s head with a real bullet in it and really pulling the trigger. It’s a thing you can’t just gloss over. If Trump decided to fake it, he’s either stupid or crazy because if even the slightest thing goes wrong. He moves tge wrong way suddenly, the wind changes, the sun pops out from behind a cloud, tge scope is a few millimeters off, the shooter gets nervous, or he for some reason has to rush tge shot, there’s no way to be sure that this very real bullet fired from a very real gun doesn’t end up in Trump’s very real brain. We know it was a real bullet fired because it hit people in the crowd behind him. And all of this assumes it’s not at 19 year old dietary aide and community college graduate using a rifle he shoots paper targets at in a gun club once a week. A professional sniper wouldn’t dare try it, an amateur would undoubtedly kill his client trying something like this even at close range, let alone off the top of a building several hundred yards away. If you had a top sniper at gun range distance try to graze the ear of a baliastics gel head that’s randomly moving without hitting the rest of the head, I’d be shocked if anyone could do it even 1/20 times.
I think the question of authenticity is very simple to answer. The media I was exposed to in my formative teen years was obviously very authentic and deep. Anything produced since I have turned into a cynical adult is shallow consumerist drivel.
For real, I think that there are differences in authenticity. Take video games. On the one end of the spectrum you have games like nethack or dwarf fortress, where the motivation to build the game was clearly not not get rich. On the other hand of the spectrum, you have EA ${sport_franchise} ${current_year}. Perhaps there are devs in the world whose dream job is it to publish the same soccer game every year for a decade, each time with slightly better graphics and the current (licensed) roster, and they would totally do it as a hobby (if it was not for the license fees). But it seems more likely that EA has found that enough people will spend 50 Euros (or whatever) on the latest soccer game every year and are determined to milk that cash cow for the rest of time, and the devs of FIFA are only slightly more enthusiastic about their products than the devs of SAP.
Most games fall somewhere in the middle, with the devs seeing it as a dayjob which (hopefully) pays the bills while also being more fun than writing enterprise Java.
Likewise, there is value in originality. Stardew Valley is a competently written game of its genre, but that is not its claim to fame. It's claim to fame is that it basically invented the genre.
These two measures of authenticity are of course correlated. Large gaming studios are mostly risk-averse, and the bigger the title the less risk people are willing to take. If Stardew Valley had flopped in beta, ConcernedApe would have had to find a different way to make a living. If an AAA title tanks, quite a few people (some of them with decent paychecks) might lose their job. So of course the big studios imitate the indie devs who made it big, better a 80% chance at making a decent game than a 20% chance at making a groundbreaking game.
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