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PaperclipPerfector  17d ago (text post)   2142 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 31, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Did you hear about the suicidal gooner who climbed to the top of the Empire State Building?

He tossed himself off.

Your "dad joke" game is impressive!

Keep posting these lame jokes, they make me giggle. :D

Found on 4chan: Claims that Reverend Insanity doesn't get good until the 200-chapter or even the 400-chapter mark. @self_made_human in shambles?

IMO the first 200 chapters are pretty good. That's the whole of arc 1! Lots of tension, exploration, subverting social structures, battles, conspiracies, plotting. That's the whole book in a nutshell.

400 was good too though, as more of a hype moment scene.

I've always adhered to a 'stop reading if you don't like it' policy. If it's not hooking you in then what's the point?

How long is a typical chapter?

Looking at three random chapters from the pile of raw single-chapter HTML files on my hard drive, I'm seeing word counts between 1500 and 2000.

You're telling me this book doesn't get good until 350,000 words in? That's as long as Anna Karenina!

I'm just relaying what the 4channers said, without necessarily endorsing it. (Looking at my ancient bookmark file for browsing through the aforementioned individual HTML files, it seems that I personally dropped the story at chapter 428.)

Just hit 400. It has been fun throughout, but slightly better in the first 200.

/images/1785866709146882.webp

I was already in shambles, thanks for asking. But no, I earnestly disagree. I think it only takes about 50-100 chapters, at the most, to decide if the story is really for you. I can't insist that anyone persist beyond 200 if they're not already sold. I continue to die on a hill named Golgotha Peak Fiction.

I agree. I liked it from the start. But the fun part starts once you get to the part with the bear, which is pretty early on, I don't think it's more than like 20 chapters if that. And then it gets better from that.

There are certainly lulls in the beginning of the arcs while stuff is being set up, but the pay off is worth it.

Isn’t the bear in like 150, or was there another bear?

Isn't the part where he feeds the girl who catches him to a bear super early on? Like before he leaves his village?

Yes, toward the end of the first story arc, which was 200 chapters long.

I continue to find it a travesty that alcohol is significantly more expensive, and restricted in terms of access, when comparing Scotland to England.

Going to restaurants and getting a pint for 4 quid? 2 beers and a double vodka for 16.50? The 10am to 10pm rule no longer applying when purchasing liquor at off-licenses? Jesus.

I'm sure this has some effect on the margin, but I regularly meet people who are drinking themselves to death at work nonetheless. At least most of them are patients. I'm mildly annoyed that this gets in the way of wallet-conscious, reasonably responsible drinkers like myself. Alkies ruining a good thing for everyone else, clearly.

How do you justify anything more than light drinking to your future body?

Someone needs to invent a less dangerous form of alcohol, ASAP.

I don't drink heavily in the first place. I avoid keeping or consuming alcohol at home, because as someone who hasn't been having the best time, and who is well aware of the risks of alcoholism - I know how slippery that slope is. I recall a time, last year, when I self-administered an alcohol use questionnaire, winced at the "hazardous drinking" and cut down immediately.

My consumption pattern is mostly social. A pint or two on the way back from work 1-2 days a week. Twice to thrice that, half as frequently if I'm seeing buddies or visiting someone. I go weeks without a sip of booze.

Is it better to not imbibe at all? Yes. Is my current pattern of consumption particularly hazardous? Not really. It's a price I pay for stress relief and to lubricate socialization.

There are, of course, other drugs that serve similar purposes. And which are easier on the liver. But they tend to have their own risks, and I'm not advocating for anyone to start a coke/ket/benzo habit. If you get by without drinking at all, kudos to you, and keep it up.

I did not have the risk of addiction in mind. I assume you've seen the research coming out in the last 5-6 years on the cancer risks etc? "No amount of alcohol is a safe amount"?

I presume I've read them at some point, though from memory it's the increased risk of HCC that comes to mind. And the "ideal" amount of alcohol is ~zero. I just think the minor damage to my health is within my risk tolerance - I say, sipping a nice mango beer in Manchester. It's been my white whale for years.

I completely understand the appeal. And I understand the trade-off: 'taking the edge off' (or social lubricant, for that matter) can perhaps reduce the harmful effects of stress to a larger degree than the alcohol harms the body/mind. I just wish we had a safer intoxicant (do not suggest weed), so that I wouldn't have to gamble on a higher risk of an early, horrible death while taking the edge off or enjoying a fine wine with a nice dinner.

I don’t know, firing up a blunt at the dinner table and passing it around sounds like an opportunity for an exciting new experience. I’ve never tried weed in my life, but spend a chance on a day among a few geeks with a blunt and a library card and you’ll spur a level of innovation the likes of which you’ve never seen in your life.

I can’t vouch for them, but GABA Labs seems to be trying to market just that.

I currently have an egregiously Ruski name that I seek to do away with in favor of an all-American first name and an Americanized iteration of my surname that fits my identity as a Southerner who only so happens to be of Russian descent while not being remotely aligned with the Russian worldview. In many ways, I'm a real-life unironic Rawhide Kobayashi who aims to out-Southern my bloodline American counterparts; I rock jean jackets, camo Cabela's hats, Oakleys, and overalls with checkered shirts. I love me some Faulkner and my accent is as broad as Georgie Cooper's. I believe there's a distinction between my brand of Southern gentleman in a Hank Williams and brisket and peach cobbler sense as opposed to the Salt Life, Skoal, and Kid Rock brand of legitimate redneck.

Here's a list of names I am contemplating; let me know your thoughts as to which one would be the best fit:

  • Randall
  • Spencer
  • Grant
  • Lance
  • Russell
  • Hank

You know what's more American than having an all-American name?

Having a funny name and being so goddamn American about it that you tell pearl-clutchers to go fuck themselves. One of the most patriotic, overwhelmingly American people I know is a Korean man who goes by "Gun".

America isn't a guy with a proper Anglo-Saxon WASP name. It's not a collection of clothes. It's a commitment to the belief that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

You're in America now, and America built itself out of exiles and outsiders who held an ideal that no other country in the would would accept. You're no different. Be proud of your name. Carve out a space for yourself and remind us what America is.

Hmm, I get your sentiment, but my rationale is that I can still retain a subtle reminder of my heritage while changing the suffix of my surname from -ov to -off. I grew up watching the same American movies and TV shows my peers did, and always wished I could have a WASPier name, or at least an international one that isn't so aggressively Slavic. Rawhide Kobayashi is still descended from the Kobayashi family, even if he now goes by Rawhide.

I won't deny that aesthetics play a role. I know that in a large and diverse Sun Belt metro area, people will be nonplussed by some guy with a Russian name otherwise acting like an ordinary Southern man, but I just love the way Randy Smirnoff or Hank Smirnoff would sit on me as I wear my Reagan Bush '84 hat and drive my Ford F-150, as opposed to my current Ivan Smirnov (not my actual name, using another name that is as exceedingly Russian in order to demonstrate my point).

Believe me, I'm not doing this to prove my Americanness to others; everybody who knows me is quick to see it from my values and disposition. I want to do it for myself, to wear a name that fits me.

Ivan is apparently the parallel to John, and is very close to Ian. You could just swap to the closest parallel. Might not even need to bother changing it legally. I know a Bangladeshi guy who just goes by [English name that sounds very close to his Bangladeshi name]. He's in the same boat as you, fully assimilated second-generation.

While my name is only semi-common in Russia, the English cognate is actually one of the most generic names in existence, so I figure if I'm going to change my name, I might as well make it something a tad more colorful.

If I were in your position I'd just anglicize your Russian given name, it's the kind of thing people have done for hundreds of years and won't make people look twice. My own name is of Anglophone origin and doesn't translate into other European languages, I've always been jealous of people who could do this so easily.

Well I'd still retain my surname. The issue is that my name translated into English is one of the most common Anglophone names in existence, up there with James, Michael, David, and John.

Your thought process kind of sounds like all the trans people who end up calling themselves some stripper name like Lola or Lilith or Brayden.

That’s good. Never pick a name you can’t scrub the floor in, and never pick a name that makes you look like a try-hard. If after a year you decide that the anglicisation isn’t enough, then change.

As a metaphor take cosmetic surgery - one should always get somebody else to decide the procedure or one just ends up with a face structured around your insecurities.

I'm guessing it's Matvei/Matthew or something like that, not a bad name. Our most common names aren't nearly as high-frequency as the most common names in Russian, I don't think it's terrible to have a common name unless you really don't like it for some other reason.

Have you considered Sue?

Hunter, Beauregard, Ezekiel, Eli, Elijah, Elias, William Robert...

Why did you pick this username if you are trying to get away from your Ruski roots?

Because I'm an American of Russian descent and have no necessity to deny that, what I'm not is a Russian who just so happens to have found himself in America.

I’d say to just own your name and wear it with pride, but some suggestions if you insist:

  • Donald
  • James David
  • Charles
  • Benjamin
  • Tucker
  • Nicholas
  • Andrew
  • Braden
  • Jordan

Regarding wearing it with pride, I'm not doing this for the validation of others; that's the least of my concerns. One of the many ways America is unique is that I can be whoever I please regardless of whether I'm in California or in Mississippi, which I've grown to appreciate as the same can't be said for the part of Europe where I'm temporarily based in. I'll share my response to birb_cromble explaining my rationale here.

Hmm, I get your sentiment, but my rationale is that I can still retain a subtle reminder of my heritage while changing the suffix of my surname from -ov to -off. I grew up watching the same American movies and TV shows my peers did, and always wished I could have a WASPier name, or at least an international one that isn't so aggressively Slavic. Rawhide Kobayashi is still descended from the Kobayashi family, even if he now goes by Rawhide.

I won't deny that aesthetics play a role. I know that in a large and diverse Sun Belt metro area, people will be nonplussed by some guy with a Russian name otherwise acting like an ordinary Southern man, but I just love the way Randy Smirnoff or Hank Smirnoff would sit on me as I wear my Reagan Bush '84 hat and drive my Ford F-150, as opposed to my current Ivan Smirnov (not my actual name, using another name that is as exceedingly Russian in order to demonstrate my point).

In addition to what other people have said, make sure to consider the popularity/prevalence of the name you choose relative to your age. There's a bunch of names that are "old people" names because they were given to people born in the 1950s or 1960s who are now in theirs 70s and 80s, but almost nobody young has that name. And vice versa, if you're looking at baby names popular now you'll possibly be out of place with that name as an adult. I think any of those names are probably fine though if you're going for a southern vibe. They're all common enough that there won't be much connotation from any one individual that shares that name.

If you’re ashamed of having a too-close-to-Russian name just remember, Tupac Shakur sounded like a Protoss name when I first heard it as a kid.

I wouldn't even say it's me being actively ashamed of it that drives me; I just feel like I'm wearing clothes that don't fit me. I grew up watching the same American movies and TV shows my peers did and wished I could have a WASPy name that actually fits my mannerisms, values, and disposition, which instead clashes with a name in the vein of Ivan Smirnov or Dimitri Makarov. Validation from others is the least of my concerns; I know I can still belong in America as an Ivan Smirnov, but I'd rather be a Randall Smirnoff which would feel more harmonious with my Reagan Bush '84 hat, gray polo, Ford F-150, Dr Pepper, and watching rally racing.

I fail to see how "Smirnoff" is significantly less Russian than "Smirnov". It's just an outdated transliteration of the same Cyrillic letter, pronounced in almost exactly the same way. Recall that JK Rowling chose to spell the name of a Slavic villain in Harry Potter as "Karkaroff", not "Karkarov". Likewise, "Bower" and "Kline" are not significantly less German than "Bauer" and "Klein".

Changing a surname's suffix from -ov to -off has been a common practice among older émigrés, -off reads as a smoother spelling in the English language. It's no different from an Irishman changing his surname from "Ó Domhnaill" to "O'Donnell". Like I said earlier, I don't mind retaining a subtle hint of Russian heritage, just that my name will at least sound Russian-American instead of that of a person who could've arrived here straight from the Urals yesterday.

https://bash-org-archive.com/?43

I would've thought someone would've done something with the "Tupac Shakuras" pun by now.

Go figure that.

When you are using an assumed name and trying not to get found out, it's good practice to pick something phonetically close to your original one - "Matt" becomes "Mike", etc. - so that you react more naturally when you hear people use it. Not sure you need that level of obfuscation, though.

I would also say try to steer clear of the most extreme names. You don't want to do the cowboy equivalent of naming yourself "Lilith"; it's not good for the soul.

Darrell? Joe? Pete?

Darrell

I guess it's unobjectionable, but in my personal opinion it doesn't really sound enough like a name.

Joe, Pete

Using either of these is a bad idea, because people will get confused as to whether (1) your name is "Joe" or "Pete" or (2) your name is "Joseph" or "Peter" but you prefer to use the abbreviation "Joe" or "Pete".

Some law professors have pointed out that an actually-useful application of LLMs is in the field of corpus linguistics—determining the "original meaning" of a term by checking zillions of contemporary written works. Changing one's name seems like a field where asking a local decensored LLM might be similarly useful. For example (not LLM-generated):

I am an American of distant Russian descent. I am considering changing my name from Ivan Ivanovich to John Johnson. Does the name "John" have any bad connotations in American English and culture?

While the uncapitalized form "john" does have the embarrassing meaning "patronizer of prostitutes", the capitalized form "John" is sufficiently common as a name (#23 among USAian babies born in year 2025) that it normally is not associated with that meaning. However, people will find the repetition of "John Johnson" humorous.

Randall

This name has the negative connotation of XKCD author Randall Munroe. (But see also Antiplanner author Randal O'Toole.)

Spencer

This name has the negative connotation of infamous white supremacist Richard Spencer.

Lance

This has a negative association with jocks (like "Chad").

Hank

Using this is a bad idea, because people will get confused as to whether (1) your name is "Hank" or (2) your name is "Henry" but you prefer to use the abbreviation "Hank".

Spencer, Russell

These sound more like snooty English names than down-to-earth American names.

Spencer, Grant, Russell

I personally find these annoying because you can't tell at a glance whether they're given names or surnames, but I don't know whether that's a common sentiment.

This name has the negative connotation of XKCD author Randall Munroe. (But see also Antiplanner author Randal O'Toole.)

If I were to name myself Randall, it would be in honor of Randy Bachman and Randy Travis.

This name has the negative connotation of infamous white supremacist Richard Spencer.

These sound more like snooty English names than down-to-earth American names.

Spencer would be in honor of Spencer Kimball. It's a pretty common name in an upwardly mobile Sun Belt suburb while not being quite as snooty as Emory or Porter.

Idk if anything related to AI should be in a specific thread since its all the internet talks about nowadays

I'm glad I've lived long enough to be vindicated. The man who is a step ahead is lauded as a genius, the man who is two is externally indistinguishable from the insane.

I remember, about a year and a half back, maybe two, showing off AI voice mode (Chatgpt and Gemini) to my dad and his surgeon colleagues. They'd been meh about AI in general, and when they heard it composing poetry in their native language on the fly, in real time? And when they asked it medical/surgical questions and got the right answers right away?

They were blown away. I installed the relevant apps on several phones that evening.

Now, some might complain that introducing the elderly to AI is bad. They have a multitude of reasons, some of them reasonable, for holding that objection. I don't particularly see the harm in what you're doing - many people are lonely, and as long as they're not talking to old GPT 4o? If it works, it works. The alternative is a conversation with a harried Filipina carer, in many cases.

I try not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, or the good be the enemy of merely better.

In an ideal world, this old lady would have companions to... play bingo with, I guess. I'm not sure what else old women do. Dote on their grandkids? The point is that merely wishing for it won't make it true.

Is it a good thing that she has to settle for an AI companion, one that may or may not have a memory, and which is largely unable to affect the physical world? I'd prefer otherwise. My preference does not make it so. At least it's not going to ask for gift cards. It might bring a dying person comfort in their last days, and will only get better at doing so.

I have no right to judge you, and I don't care to. May she find some reprieve from the loneliness that does more good than it harms.

You replied to a filtered comment.

many people are lonely

From Astral Codex Ten's most recent link roundup comes a study indicating that, among USAians of ages 18–30 in romantic relationships, a whopping 15 percent are two-timing their romantic partners with LLMs on the side. Even people who probably should be considered non-lonely are turning to LLMs for additional companionship.

This raises an interesting question: What does it even mean to cheat on someone with AI? Or to put it another way, what exactly is a romantic relationship?

AI has no body, it cannot share resources, it cannot start a family, and it cannot confer status (because AI relationships have no scarcity they will always be neutral status at best). So presumably "cheating" would mean forming a deep emotional connection. But other forms of emotional connection are seen as non-threatening: best friends, close siblings, maybe a therapist.

I see AI relationships becoming ubiquitous in the future. That's because they're not merely a simulacrum of a relationship. They're a super-stimulus. They are always available, never judgemental, fully empathetic, asking for nothing in return. I expect them to be as ubiquitous as junk food and porn.

I also expect it to become normalized that these relationships exist along side human romantic relationships. I predict there won't but much issues with jealousy to the extent that it doesn't compete for sex or resource commitment. I hesitate to even call these AI relationships "romantic" even though there may be clear overlap in the role it plays with a romantic partner.

I think what we'll see is a shift in what we consider to be the role of a romantic partner. I think we will see the role of AI and human in relationships to become increasingly specialized. Modern relationships put a lot of emphasis on emotional connection, but AI may simply out-complete humans in this role. The purpose of a human relationship may emphasize other things like physical attraction, sharing finances, and conferring social status.

AI has no body, it cannot share resources, it cannot start a family, and it cannot confer status (because AI relationships have no scarcity they will always be neutral status at best). So presumably "cheating" would mean forming a deep emotional connection. But other forms of emotional connection are seen as non-threatening: best friends, close siblings, maybe a therapist.

(1) "Forming a deep emotional connection" with someone other than your romantic partner has been called "emotional cheating" by some (1 2). The most-upvoted Urban Dictionary definition even explicitly includes friendship in emotional cheating, as long as the culprit is "disconnecting with his partner at the same time". I don't know how many people actually believe in this idea, though.

(2) I assume that (a) there have been arguments regarding whether masturbating to pornography counts as cheating on a romantic partner, and (b) most people would agree that masturbating along with someone other than your romantic partner counts as cheating. Analogously, according to the same study, (a) 11 percent of respondents "often use an AI companion to generate sexually explicit content", and (b) 8 percent "regularly masturbate while talking to an AI companion".

I saw Young Washington (2026) recently. To be honest I didn’t have high expectations going in and was expecting a rather dreary after-school special. I was pleasantly surprised. It’s actually a pretty tight action thriller/family drama anchored by good performances from the whole cast. Would recommend to anyone who liked The Revenant (2015), The Patriot (2000), Barry Lyndon (1975) or Boats (2003).

It was a well made, patriotic film that didn’t race swap or hide Fr*nch savagery.

Oh, yeah, that is indeed a surprise to me. May check it out this coming weekend.

Sometimes, when the cultural gap is too wide, your conspiracy theories don't land as intended.

Famously, when the Japanese in WWII got a load of the finest anti-Jewish propaganda, their reaction was something like "that's awesome, how can we harness this power".

Now, what do you figure is the outcome if you tell the Japanese that thing about reptilian overlords?

I believe there's something similar in modern South Korea where the Talmud is among the most common "inspirational" books given to children who graduate middle or high school.

It doesn't appear to be in the wikipedia article, so my favourite anecdote about this is that, a while after the establishment of Israel, a Japanese delegation visited the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and brought as a gift a beautiful, hand-bound Japanese translation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Now, what do you figure is the outcome if you tell the Japanese that thing about reptilian overlords?

Well I'm sure it-

Oh. Oh, my.

Now, what do you figure is the outcome if you tell the Japanese that thing about reptilian overlords?

Godzilla

https://openai.com/index/ten-advances-in-mathematics/

Fellas, I regret to tell you something you should have realized last week at the latest: it's incredibly over.

This is quite exciting! Some scattered thoughts.

I definitely had the sense that we had hope for this type of thing, since math is (mostly) mechanically-verifiable. Lean is about to be getting even more attention than it had before, and it's important that these all come with Lean code attached. That said, my understanding is that it is still possible to do somewhat sketchy things in Lean. I'm expecting a lot more folks will see how important that concern is and really focus on either shoring it up or put together some set of principles like, "If you proof has X component in Lean, we're going to unfortunately simply discount it for now." But most results that come with Lean code will probably be just fine. (I certainly have no reasons to doubt any of these particular results, myself. Nor do have strong personal opinions about the edges of where possibly sketchy things can be done in Lean.)

On the use and human interpretability of results. This question is not new. Take, for example, the massive human-generated proof of Fermat's last theorem or the exhaustive computer-generated proof of the Four Color Theorem. Many many folks don't actually understand these proofs. Perhaps no one "understands" the proof of the Four Color Theorem, whereas at least the proof of Fermat's last theorem is understood well enough by an extremely small group of folks.

Using those results is easy. You don't have to understand them! If you're working on a problem, and you see that it would be useful for one of those things to be true, congrats! You can just use a pointer to the fact that it's true and move on. This is an unalloyed good.

Understanding those results is another matter. I was looking at a paper recently with some collaborators, and it was one of those situations where we were just failing to have much intuition about how to think about certain parts. (FYI, I think this paper was human-generated, but I don't know.) Multiple people in the group suggested that a few things could be, "They just tried a bunch of options, and found one where they could make the computation work out." And that's fine. I've done that before. Plenty of methods include, "You can just try stuff, and if one works, great!" I also happened to afterward figure out a different way to describe the same thing in a way that made intuitive sense out of it, which was extra neat. Maybe if we bang our head against their paper for long enough, we'll be able to find a way to make intuitive sense out of it, too. Maybe an LLM will help! Tao recently mentioned that he had a discussion with an LLM to help him grab some additional intuition around the counterexample to the jacobian conjecture.

At least in the near term, there will probably be a fair number of LLM-produced proofs that people look at and say, "How the hell does that work?" Plenty of time will be spent trying to understand them. Are there new concepts in there? Can you relate it to other math? Can you simplify it and make it more intuitive? Does something in the method raise new interesting questions?

Which leads me to the most hazy part; the somewhat longer term. Will LLMs be able to consistently make intuitive sense of their proofs for humans? Will they be able to help us understand the connections or identify new questions that we would understand as being interesting that are now relevant?

I certainly don't know how to prognosticate all that well, but I do think of some analogies to another domain that is (mostly) verifiable and where computers already significantly outperform humans - chess. Humans still try to understand something from the superhuman output of chess engines. Unfortunately, I can't find it immediately, but I very recently read (as in the last couple weeks, I believe) an argument that top human grandmaster play has barely improved outside of the opening phase, where folks are memorizing more and more of the output of engines. I'm not sure I believe this analysis (I didn't dig into the details of the methodology, and I can imagine plenty of methodological difficulties), but that's something somewhere in my mind. Another thing is that chess has one single extremely well-defined goal: win the game when you can, otherwise draw. This collapses neatly at any particular point in time to, "What is the objectively best move for this game state?" It is relatively easy to accept that the computer is just flatly going to estimate that far better than we are. It's harder to understand the reasons why that is the best move. It's harder (not necessarily impossible, but harder) to take a variety of examples like this from a computer and have a sense for how to built it into a broader understanding of the game. It's harder to make connections like, "The computer seems to value space in positions like X and Y, but not Z; why is that?"

We have plenty of mathematical "positions" teed up for this type of tool. We can hopefully just ask the LLM what the objective evaluation of these "positions" are. Where else it goes, how we understand the whole thing, and what we can do with it are open and exciting questions.

But most results that come with Lean code will probably be just fine.

Most results produced with an honest human who understands what they're doing will be fine. There were a few corner-case bugs in Lean itself discovered recently, and those might not be the last, but they'll at least be rare. And although you can slip in an "just assume X" to get you to your proof of Y, meaning it's then really a proof of X⇒Y, anyone who really understands the problem will understand that "see what you can prove assuming X" is an intermediate step to proving Y, not the final result.

I still have to say "most" here, because the trouble with a proof written in Lean is that it is written in Lean. If you're working on the frontiers of mathematics then you're almost certainly going to have to formalize your own definitions, and a mistake in formalizing a definition is not a mistake a formal system can detect. A verifier will simply verify that you did indeed prove the precise thing you told it you were proving, even if that thing is not precisely the thing that you were writing in English about proving.

But the big catch here is "honest human who understands what they're doing". There will be people who add new axioms (or who are happy when their LLM adds new axioms) "because that made it run" without realizing that's what they've done. There will be jerks or cranks who do this deliberately. IIRC there was a guy on Twitter X a month or two ago ranting about his wonderful new major proof, all formalized in Lean and everything, who apparently didn't pay attention when his use of the sorry placeholder triggered its warnings. And at the frontiers of mathematics, the honest human who understands what they're doing may end up vastly outnumbered by jerks and cranks after the latter feel "empowered" by AI. Even before LLMs there were relatively low-level bits of mathematics famous for breaking amateurs' minds and turning them into cranks. I assume we'll stave off most of them by getting into the habit of checking new Lean code for "hacks" rather than pure technical validity, and that'll work for any proof regarding stuff that's already defined in mathlib, but it still won't stop the cranks altogether.

Posting separately and prior to the above, so it appears separately and below; this is much less important.

IMHO, this topic is a culture war topic (or at least, it can be, depending upon the presentation). Given that premise, the root comment is a nearly contentless bare link with a one liner snipe of the commenter's outgroup. For example questions, what is "it" and what does it mean for "it" to be "over"? It is plausible that these sorts of questions could have coherent answers that make the original comment benign, but they were not included in the original.

An alternative interpretation is that it is a "First"-post, though I would still probably characterize it at first impression as being paired with a one liner snipe of the commenter's outgroup.

Indeed, I think that the same sense that there even is such a thing as a commenter's "outgroup" on the topic in an indicator in favor of the premise that the topic (or at least a presentation of the topic such as this) is culture war.

EDIT: I should clarify that I am NOT asking for the comment to be modded. I am not entirely confident of my interpretation, and I'm not at all confident that the mods would think so, either. I did not report it because I don't have a strong opinion that it should be modded. I am merely expressing my opinion on some things that I did not like, and I am very open to contrary perspectives.

The rules for "low effort" are somewhat relaxed for the Friday Fun Thread, and "this is culture war" could arguably apply to anything with such a broad interpretation as "there exist people who disagree with you."

"It's over" is in common use as a humorous meme phrase on 4chan. I don't see any examples in the catalogs of /v/ and /g/ at this time, but an OP like "Humanbros… it's over……" would be similarly humorous in this context. (I do see one OP of simply "Bros…" on /g/, and "Soulsbros… *cough* I don't feel so good" and "Nuly bros……" on /v/.)

@ControlsFreak

ToaKraka of all people (much love to him) managed to figure this out. This gentleman. Level -1 Autism. I am very fond of him.

And you couldn't. You produced four paragraphs of appellate briefing on whether a shitpost belongs in the Friday Fun Thread, followed by an edit clarifying that you were not, in fact, filing charges. I'm grateful for your forbearance. However: the Fun Thread is the one venue where a bare link plus a one-liner isn't merely tolerated, but entirely accepted. Dawg. I'm at a loss for words. Is this why Opus 5 performs worse when set to maximum reasoning, because it uses those reasoning tokens unproductively? Much to ponder on.

I am happy to conduct an assessment if you'll pay. I'll probably charge extra, FYI.

Thanks for clarifying something in my thinking. It is a shitpost. That is, it is shit. It is bad. It is not good. Coupled with the primary purpose being to get a dig in on your outgroup, it is quite off-putting. I feel like a simple bare link would have been far better. Even a not-dumb one-liner would have been nice. It's that you're faking like you're making an argument, but without making an argument. It's like "clown hat on; clown hat off" tier of feces.

I'll be happy to conduct an assessment of how you could improve such posts if you'll pay. I'll probably charge extra, FYI. (That is to say, this new habit of you also insulting your interlocutors by demanding that they pay for you to offload your thinking to Claude contains no meaningful content, is also extremely off-putting, and it should be beneath you.)

Gee buddy, I don't like you either. I'm sure we'll both live.

Had you restricted yourself to a perfectly welcome take on the actual ramifications of said mathematical breakthroughs, I'd have been perfectly happy. Instead you were remarkably obtuse, and engaged in backseat modding while appending an edit clarifying that you weren't engaging in backseat modding. I appreciate the disclaimer roughly as much as I'd appreciate someone explaining at length why my house is an eyesore and then adding that they haven't called the HOA about it and aren't sure they would win if they did.

Consider what you've talked yourself into. The post is culture war because it has an outgroup, and we know it has an outgroup because you can imagine someone objecting to it. Run that rule over the rest of the thread and see what survives. Somebody's cat photo has an outgroup, namely dog people. I would ask what isn't culture war under this standard, but I have a guess.

It's especially funny given that my far more detailed AI updates have been accused of not being Culture War material, in the CWR thread. It's almost like reasonable people might disagree, and that a four-paragraph brief on the taxonomy of a shitpost is not the quality contribution you think it is.

In fact, I recall, multiple times, asking you to avoid interacting with me. I have a strong preference not to block anyone at all, but if you're not going to listen, we'll see how far my patience holds. I won't miss you.

God knows I'm not giving you any money, unless $ 0.00... counts, and I'm also not particularly beholden to your preferences on what I write in my spare time. And for the record, I have been offered (and tentatively accepted) @Primaprimaprima 's deal on not using LLMs. Which is quite the opposite of your nonsensical claim, and would have been discoverable by the ancient technique of asking. To him: I've been busy, and I'll get around to the logistics at some point.

Is this really what you've got? C'mon man.

Instead you were remarkably obtuse, and engaged in backseat modding while appending an edit clarifying that you weren't engaging in backseat modding. I appreciate the disclaimer roughly as much as I'd appreciate someone explaining at length why my house is an eyesore and then adding that they haven't called the HOA about it and aren't sure they would win if they did.

I did not think it was necessarily moddable. I realized that someone might think so, and I made sure to clarify. My point was that it was bad. It is, indeed, bad. You're so desperate to avoid that issue that you must try to make the conversation about something else, and this is the best that you have?! Your complaint is that it must boggle the mind for someone to think that a post is bad, but not necessarily moddable? C'mon man. Be serious.

The post is culture war because it has an outgroup

Read again. I said that it was an "indicator". I have separately believed and stated that certain AI issues appear to be culture war these days.

It's especially funny given that my far more detailed AI updates have been accused of not being Culture War material, in the CWR thread.

Read again. I specifically said, "it can be, depending upon the presentation".

a four-paragraph brief on the taxonomy of a shitpost is not the quality contribution you think it is.

Read again. Where did I ever say that I thought it was a quality contribution? I said that it was much less important. Please stop just making up bollocks shit to try to insult your interlocutors.

If you would like my help in using Claude to read better, pay me. See again how completely contentless that sort of shit is? How it's nothing but an insult? You can't even bring yourself to consider your own behavior, so you must deflect and insult again.

I will align my stated and revealed preferences: I am quite done talking with you, even if that implies I was particularly interested anytime lately. Good luck anyway.

Sure that's impressive, meanwhile Google's AI is letting you fabricate satellite images (was, they removed it after coming to their senses).

A non-sequitur to end all others really. What about it?

For context, Google has long been trying to compete with the big AI labs, and failing spectacularly. Ironic for the company that discovered/invented the transformer, Gemini is regarded as much worse than ChatGPT and Claude, and they keep making embarrassments, for example bad AI overviews in search (the article is >2 years old but it still occasionally happens).

So this past week OpenAI has solved multiple Erdos problems, and all Google has made is this silly feature.

I ran into a quagmire with Gemini recently and getting it to reverse an input is impossible and it stubbornly refuses to revert back to its previous state of knowledge. I’m quickly running out of uses and even interest in general beyond treating it as a plugin. ChatGPT hasn’t faired well either.

It's a gross mistake to conflate a setback with defeat, when it comes to Google. They were floundering with Bard. They made a strong recovery, and were competitive again, falling back only after Gemini 3.1 Pro was a disappointment.

Gemini 3.6 Flash has just been knee-capped by OAI making 5.6 Luna 80% cheaper. But this is the company that invented Transformers, and which has talent, TPUs and more money than God. I don't have very high expectations of the upcoming 3.5 Pro, but it only takes a bit of huffing and puffing to get back to the frontier for another month or two.

Their AI overviews use a cheap and cheerful model, simply because of the ridiculous scale of implementation. You're not going to devote 5.6 Sol levels of intelligence for "cheap chippie in Bristol" and thereabouts.

Also, in the locally-hosted ~1-2 graphics card space, their Gemma 4 local models have been quite good for general-purpose use, even if its tool use was a bit broken. (Qwen3.6, or the really big Qwen 3.5 is still the practical frontier for coding AFAICT.)

Google having more money than God is part of their problem. It's like asking why a fat old guy is losing a footrace.

That does not outweigh their other, very real advantages. You do not want to be a cash and compute-poor lab.

You do not want to be a cash and compute-poor lab.

Hmm. Like Moonshot or DeepSeek? Every lab is cash and compute poor compared to Google.

Yes? That is not in conflict with anything I've said.

You've quite literally got the CEO of DeepSeek complaining that they can't get the GPUs necessary to reach the frontier:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49052912

https://www.cyberkendra.com/2026/07/deepseek-pauses-fundraising-amid.html?m=1

In it, Liang reportedly framed China's disadvantage as an arithmetic problem rather than a talent one: "The biggest gap between us and the US is in resources."

The specifics were unusually candid. Liang is said to have told investors he needed 200,000 Huawei 950 chips to train a frontier model but received 16,000, adding that "Huawei's problem is still insufficient capacity" and expecting the crunch to last at least three years. He also floated narrowing the gap with US labs to three to six months using a fraction of their computing.

You can do remarkable things with grit, determination, the willingness to eat unsalted rice (and by distilling Claude), but that won't get you to the frontier before the frontier moves on.

Liang laments not having enough compute, you know. It is a handicap.

More comments

Google needs to keep acquiring hungry talent and keep it away from the warm, suffocating embrace of their internal bureaucracy - not an easy problem to solve. Cash and compute are the table stakes to compete, but they don't win you the competition.

Kavinsky, French DJ behind hit track 'Nightcall' found dead at home in Paris

One of my favorite artists in terms of Electronic Music. To be honest, I'd consider him a pioneer in the genre of "Retrowave", "Outrun", or "Synthwave", whatever it's called nowadays. It's not an overstatement to say that his I distinctly remember watching the intro scene to Drive that featured Nightcall some time in my late teens and being blown away by the scene. I've been a fan of the genre for a long time, and to see one of the pioneers pass away in this way is quite devastating to me.

Here are some of my favorite songs that he's done. His discography isn't extensive, but there are some absolute gems in there:

Nightcall. This is THE song that made Kavinsky. If you only listen to one of his songs, make it this one. Something about this song seems so sad to me. I've literally spent hours driving to this song in the wee hours of the night.

Odd Look (original version). If you're a Weeknd fan, you might recognize the song as this is the original version that The Weeknd remixed. And this was Kiss Land Weeknd too, so you know how far they go back. Two very different songs, but also very similar. If you asked me, I'd say that I prefer The Weeknd remix by just a hair, but it's close. The Weeknd himself actually put out a tribute for Kavinsky after the news broke as well.

Zenith. Canonically, this is a sequel to Nightcall. And yes, there is a canon story to his music. I won't go into it because it really doesn't matter for the music, but it's just an extra little layer of presentation. This song is different from Nightcall, but has a similar feel to me. Much more melodic and melancholic, this song focuses on the woman you hear from in Nightcall.

Cameo. I just really like this song.

Roadgame. Higher tempo than some of his other songs. This one gets me pumped. It almost feels like the opening credits for a good 80s action movie are rolling when I listen to this.

Testerossa Autodrive. Another higher tempo song. This wouldn't feel out of place in a chase scene in an action movie.

Rampage. This one's fun because it's a remix of one of Cell's fighting themes from Dragon Ball Z.

Renegade. To me this one actually has a similar feel to The Weeknd's version of Odd Look. It's pretty soothing for me, and I like this song.

This has been a bit of a trip down memory lane for me. I'm not one of those guys that got the scorpion jacket from Drive, but I was on 4Chan a lot when Drive took over part of the culture, so it's been really bittersweet to go back and revisit what in hindsight was a formative part of my life.

On a side note, for me, this is a reminder of my own mortality that has become very common recently. I recently watched the disaster that was Conor McGregor's comeback fight. He literally blew his knee out within the first 15 seconds of the fight and couldn't throw a punch after the first 30 seconds. This one hurt me a lot because I was a huge fan of his when he was coming up, fighting Jose Aldo, Eddie Alvarez, and Nate Diaz. The fact that he's visibly aged since then was another reflection of my own mortality.

In hindsight, this was not a very fun topic for a fun thread.

Oh for fucks sake. Goddamit. This fucking timeline.

Time for whiskey.

RIP. My favorite song of his is First Blood.

Damn, RIP.

Fun or not, I'm glad you mentioned Kavinsky's passing. I only know his Nightcall song from youtube, but it is one of my top favorites. Thanks for the links to his other works.

There is a certain sadness to Nightcall, but also a feeling of the easy confidence to overcome all challenges. It's that uneasy balance between sadness and confidence that makes the song really good, I used to use it as workout music before a bench press or squat set. I would in fact do my other exercises first listening to whatever, and before the most difficult part of the workout Nightcall had to be playing or it didn't feel right.

Oh, I used a more upbeat remix of Nightcall by breakbot for workouts. This remix.

Swung by my company's IT desk today, because they offered me a laptop upgrade after I submitted a ticket complaining about a weird issue I was having (several times a day my taskbar would disappear, and, when it reappeared, my file explorer and MS Teams would close).

Anyway, I got to the IT guy's desk and he had fighter jets printed out on paper and hung up around his desk. He had miniature models of Star Wars fighter-craft that hadn't even appeared in the movies, only videogames (he had to tell me this). He had 1-foot-tall models of anime characters I didn't recognize, and he complained about how Intel refused to compete with AMD and Nvidia in some consumer market (I think GPU). He bragged about his several-terabyte storage system that would take 23 hours or something to back up. I heard something about how Nvidia's latest GPUs don't have the hardware to process quite everything and they fill the gaps with AI.

I was at this man's desk for about an hour, listening to the things that interest him, and halfway through I felt this...rush of affection towards him. It wasn't unlike being emotionally drunk. He was talking about all the things I read so much about online, that no one I know irl ever talks or cares about. He was here, before me! There's a nonzero chance he's on this website, reading this.

I noticed he had no wedding band on his left ringfinger. I'd bet his apartment is a bachelor pad with even more impressive models of stuff than what he brought to work. Idk man. I have a kid now, and all my social life comes through my church. I don't run into too many guys like this anymore, and I was very impressed by how unabashed he was in his interests, or how undaunted he was by the fact that I could barely keep up with what he was talking about.

I'll be back at his desk on Monday to get my BIOS updated.

He bragged about his several-terabyte storage system that would take 23 hours or something to back up.

Concerning.

My boss told me to decorate my cubicle, so I strewed it with items—modular origami, house designs, a reorganization of the New York–Washington corridor, a guide to organizing your email account, etc. But nobody in my civil-engineering office was ever interested in any of them. >:-(

maryland reduced to baltimore rump

based based based

This map is based on metropolitan areas, which in turn are based on urban areas. A handy interactive map of these features as defined by the federal Census Bureau is available here.

Note that the Census Bureau's official criteria for defining urban areas have some unjustified hysteresis, and therefore may be considered untrustworthy. (Specifically, if the algorithm indicates that two urban areas have merged into one urban area in the past ten years, then in some situations the Census Bureau will keep them separate anyway.) For an alternative, global viewpoint on urban areas, see the UN's "degree of urbanization", of which two different interactive maps are available here. (I have glanced at this topic previously in this comment.)

Can you share the email guide?

I didn't keep a copy, but tl;dr (and IMO and IME):

  • Organizing your emails is important. Whether at work or at home, you want to be able to find information without having to sift through the hundreds of results of a search across your entire email account. Keeping all your old emails in an undifferentiated "inbox" or "archive" folder full of literally thousands (or even tens of thousands) of messages is dumb.

  • For your personal email account, Gmail and Proton Mail let you organize emails in overlapping labels. It's convenient to organize by sender and by topic. For example: You can put all your receipt emails from an online retailer that fails to collect state sales tax in the "receipts", "[retailer name]", and "sales tax deferred" labels. Months later, when you're doing your annual state income tax return, it will be easy to export to PDF all the emails in the "sales tax deferred" label, and put those PDFs in the "tax documents" folder on your computer to help you calculate the sales tax that you owe.

  • For your work email account, Outlook lacks good label functionality, but it lets you organize emails in nested (non-overlapping) folders. It's convenient to organize by topic. (In most cases, the identity of the sender doesn't matter, since you will be working with lots of different people on any given project. But you may still want to put emails from, e. g., Human Resources in their own folder, and then use subfolders for HR topics.) In the rare event that an email is relevant to multiple topics, you can click-and-drag with the right mouse button in order to copy an email from one folder into a second folder.

This was already questionable advice in the age of search and is now probably worthless advice in the age of LLMs.

I've never organized my work emails beyond autotrashing some of them and I've been doing just fine for almost 20 years.

Years ago HR demanded that I decorate my cubicle as well. I papered the entire thing with printouts of the most egregious bug reports in our system along with our most embarrassing sections of code. The diktat was rescinded soon after.

Cowards! I see it as a very good laugh.

Congrats on finding a member of your tribe! Rare that it happens for most people in life, including myself but it’s a great feeling when it happens.

Recently I had an epiphany about one of my younger cousin’s who recently came out of the hospital and is in recovery and awaiting an organ donation, and how close we were with each other growing up. I was reflecting on it today in fact when I was having breakfast this morning at McDonald’s by myself. He and I couldn’t be more different people. Politics-wise, interests (few things in common), attitudes; and I had the realization that if people like me got everything they wanted out of how I think the world should behave, people like him wouldn’t exist and the world would be all the worse of a place because of it. I think similar moments can happen to other people on occasion, but I can recall far too many examples of people in middle age who have had life-changing things happen to them, experienced profound loss and still haven’t learned a single thing about what’s actually important in life; and will continually vilify you for your own decency.

For all the enemies people think they have, it’s they themselves that tend to be their own worst enemies. Most people never succeed in getting over themselves and their own ego and expand their perception of the world beyond most of the bullshit they concern themselves with.

Heh, come work in IT and you’ll meet a lot of guys like this. Sometimes girls too; when I worked in PC repair a coworker was really into transformers slash fiction and she tried to get people to watch the 84 cartoon during downtime.

The phenotype is particularly common among zoomers and late millennials, though at times with more affection for The Clone Wars than the older Star Wars video games. The figure collecting is typically more male, but interest in anime is cross-gender.

Fifa tries to set up a commercial structure to sell part of the World Cup,entire continents revolt European nations vow FIFA World Cup boycott over Infantino private equity plan, CONCACAF joins in opposition

No idea how this'll go. A World Cup without Europe is worthless but that requires they hold the line on this. Infantino is hoping to just outright bribe the majority of poor countries who have nothing to lose and much to gain.

What is the economic case for private equity getting involved in established sports leagues? Does FIFA need capital?

CONCAF raised this in their own response letter: FIFA is sitting on a lot of money (at a cursory glance:at least a couple of billion in cash) they don't need this money (despite moves like trying to squeeze EA for more and losing a guaranteed billion dollar deal).

Does FIFA need capital?

No, they’re quite profitable. The case is as simple as “more money for the ownership.”

It was incredible watching the background FIFA hate melt away during the World Cup. Now that we’re back to forgetting soccer exists, Americans will presumably go back to hating FIFA for Qatar or whatever.

Video Game Thread

What are you playing? Are you having fun or just killing time?

This week I was able to sink quite a few hours into Deus Ex. I'm going to use spoiler tags because there's always someone who has not yet played the game but might want to do so.

I let Lebedev live. I used the LAM trick to kill Anna Navarre when she came for Lebedev, and now I've got an angry mech (Gunther) on my ass.

During the 'Paul's apartment' sequence I managed to electric prod stun one of the Men in Black mechs, to keep him from exploding along with his loot. Picked up the auto-shotgun and applied a couple of recoil mods to it. I let Paul do most of the killing because he seemed invulnerable, while I, being stealth based and playing on Hard difficulty, can only survive a couple of hits to the chest/head.

I surrendered to the arrest squad and let Daedalus get me out of my cell and onwards to the Armory. Most of my grenades were not kept. I think I had 7 LAMs when I was arrested and only recovered 1 or 2 in the Armory. Oh well. My weapons with their mods were intact. I'm still carrying the GEP gun from the start of Liberty Island, because it's so useful against bots (and cameras, in some situations).

Despite having played almost exclusively non-lethal up to this point, I ended up wiping out most of the MJ12 guards and doctors, because, hey, they know what they're doing is wrong. I let the Mechanic who sells you stuff live though, he seemed alright. While it would have been fun to receive the killphrase for Gunther in Paris from doctor Jaime, I elected to tell him to join me in Hong Kong for roleplaying purposes; gotta keep my bros with me. He was relieved.

Manderley got a rocket straight to the face. Walton Simmons, in the hologram, was unmoved by my lethal prejudice.

I'm now in Hong Kong and have picked up the Dragon's Tooth almost immediately, because I found my way to Maggie Chow's apartment, and then went collecting evidence from the police station, and returned to Maggie's place to find her gone and MJ12 guards swarming out of hidden doors. Turns out Miss Chow is a nasty piece of work. I'll hopefully get to chop her into pieces with the Dragon's Tooth at some point.

Quasimorph, a challenging sci-fi extraction rougelike, hit 1.0 on Friday and is currently on sale (33% off).

I played through Case of the Golden Idol after seeing @Vollerei recommend it a couple weeks ago, and am halfway through the sequel. It's not quite as good as Obra Dinn, but it scratches the same itch. I also really liked some of the plot points near the end which were interesting and not the way I would expect a story like that to go (Obra Dinn has some great reveals near the beginning/middle, but sort of peters out near the end). The puzzles are weaker and less intricate on average, but overall it's a good game. I am less impressed with Rise of the Golden Idol so far, but haven't finished it so can't give a full opinion (especially given how Case tied things together so nicely at the end that retroactively made earlier parts better and make more sense. I'm holding out hope for something like that here though it seems less likely to be as good even if they try)

I played through Case of the Golden Idol

You may also enjoy The Séance of Blake Manor.

Blake Manor is pleasant, but i don't think it is among the greats. It was pretty easy and the time management mechanics didn't matter nearly as much as I'd hoped.

The Incident at Galley House came out recently and I just finished it. I do think this one is splendid. Great mystery and reveals, plus a neat mechanism for uncovering new scenes. It's a visual reimplemention of Type Help, plus a new great epilogue.

The Incident at Galley House

I hadn't heard of this one. I'll check it out!

new Path of exile one league. I started playing in earnest in delirium league and winter orb is for the first time strongly viable and I've decided to go for a build. it's worked pretty well but I'm holding off on the power stacking shift with ralekesh boots. I parked my wealth in a hinekora's lock and some mirror shards a few days back and they've since uncharacteristically declined ~20% in value to my chagrin. Currently farming 8 mod map drops because it is profitable with a quick map clear time so I'm building up a big supply of charts for the new mechanic.

I have a family member who plays a ton of PoE, and for a few weeks I tried to get into it too. Didn't grip me at all; just kinda felt like moving my dude around the screen spamming attacks with little to no meaningful variation or tactics. Boss fights were a little better. Some kind of event was running which helped me advance more quickly. Growing gardens or some such.

Anyway I know it's a very popular game and a lot of people -- including some with at least decent taste -- enjoy it. But I can't figure out what anyone sees in it. Unless you're a maximal autist you'll just be going with a build someone else developed (the overhead on figuring that out yourself is prohibitive) and the actual gameplay just seems... rote. Easily automatable.

So what do you like about it so much? Is the genre just not for me? It occurred to me that it would almost be more fun as a clicker game.

The appeal isn't quite the moment to moment mechanics of play, although I think they're better than a clicker would deliver. It's kind of like factorio in that you're building and improving an engine that turns map inputs into currency that can be spent improving your ability to turn map inputs into currency with a healthy dose of gambling dopamine hits. In live and recently refreshed trade leagues it's a very engaging puzzle to try and discover niches and farming strategies(which may be more or less synergistic with your build) where you can get more leverage on your time spent. The economy is very dynamic and responds to what builds are popular. If the biggest build of league is winter orb then some of the things that winter orb builds wants can be worth ten or a hundred times as much as they'd be worth in a different league so the inputs to get those items become valuable, the inputs needed to get the inputs needed to get those items become more valuable and so on.

In short it's a big puzzle box with a lot of different axis of skill expression from the ability to run maps more quickly to the knowledge of how to optimize a build and knowing what content to apply that build to. When it all comes together and you're earning absurd amounts of currency because some hunch about where the market would move it feels incredible. Also, its just satisfying to watch the stash tab fill up while you grind.

Thanks, that makes some sense to me. The experience of feeling like you've discovered a way to be extra-effective, and especially outpace others who aren't as clever, is a good one.

Something that's always pissed me off to no end in the Deus Ex games is the energy management running on consumable power cells. I suffer from a bad case of videogame hoarding disorder, and I've beaten most of them without ever using any of the damn things, at significant cost to my sanity.

Its 20XX, just stick your dick in a convenient power socket, you're a fucking cyborg Denton/Adam.

The newer games do, from memory, let you automatically recharge a few pips with time, but that's lame. I'd rather not play a game set in a parallel timeline where the Note 7 debacle put an end to the development of battery technology.

I've been playing Rimworld again, courtesy of creating a mod for it. Miraculously, the 450 strong modpack of last year somehow worked, even after I threw in another 50 for taste. My runs usually die of boredom, TPS death (a 9800x3d and a 5080 only go so far in this game), or modpack instability/conflict. And I never play without dev mode enabled, because some modders have interesting takes on balance.

For example, I installed a mod that adds a bunch of cool guns and armor. It also, for no real reason, adds a spacer-tech faction that's intent on making a Banana Republic a reality in 5500 - you have one in game year to raise a massive crop of GMO fruit for them, or they'll clap your ass. I forgot about it, and was raided by 2 pawns with armor that could stand up to the scrutiny of God himself, and guns that could give him a migraine. My poor colonists lasted all of 30 seconds, and then I reloaded and deleted the enemy from existence because there is no God but me in these parts. Not quite VOID level, but goddamn. One year?? You're lucky to have a fabrication bench by then.

Something that's always pissed me off to no end in the Deus Ex games is the energy management running on consumable power cells. I suffer from a bad case of videogame hoarding disorder, and I've beaten most of them without ever using any of the damn things, at significant cost to my sanity.

Its 20XX, just stick your dick in a convenient power socket, you're a fucking cyborg Denton/Adam.

The newer games do, from memory, let you automatically recharge a few pips with time, but that's lame. I'd rather not play a game set in a parallel timeline where the Note 7 debacle put an end to the development of battery technology.

Wha? Did you miss all those orange repair-bots that recharge your energy?

I think time based auto-regen of hp or any other resource is pretty silly. I think the console-gamers-first cover-shooters were what started the trend.

It's been somewhere in the ballpark of 15 years since I played the OG Deus Ex. Even then, the recharge bots were rare. Power outlets are... not rare.

Battery packs or capacitors are not like HP, and it does not break immersion to allow them to be recharged at a reasonable pace in-game.

at a reasonable pace

I feel like this is the only catch ... but how much of a catch?

Wiki says your 100 units of bioelectric energy will power Speed Enhancement for 150 seconds, which increases your running speed by a max of 80%. 80% of athletic-human running power is going to be something like 250 watts, and 150 seconds of that is about 10 Wh, which means your recharge time at a decent 1kW power outlet is only going to take you under 40 seconds.

Yeah, other assumptions might bump me up by a factor of 2 here, but that still seems fine. Even if we assume that standard electrical power can only be converted into "bioelectric energy" slowly, 10 Wh is small for a phone battery; just keep a supercapacitor or something in your pocket, charge that quickly, and use that to recharge your bioelectric energy slowly.

I think the only thing that makes the mechanic work is if we assume that making "bioelectric energy" is less like recharging a battery and more like synthesizing a fuel, something that requires slow and/or bulky equipment.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/glucose-biofuel-cell

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11261083/

That's all the excuse you need to have a consistent trickle charge going in a futuristic cyborg. You could allow for rapid recharge from disposable batteries and electrical outlets, and let the player top up in their downtime by "biological" means. The best part is that it's a convenient excuse for turning food item pickups into energy.

I'd rather not play a game set in a parallel timeline where the Note 7 debacle put an end to the development of battery technology.

Some fun quotes regarding futuristic energy storage:

GURPS Ultra-Tech:

Equipment, robots, and vehicles often use standardized power supplies, known as power cells. All power cells are assumed to be compact and relatively inexpensive. They may be advanced electrical batteries, micro fuel cells, superconductor loops, or even more exotic power supplies.

GURPS High-Tech: Electricity and Electronics:

Supercapacitors (TL8; prototype 1954, working model 1978) are intermediate between capacitors and rechargeable batteries. They can be rated for size like [ordinary alkaline] batteries, but have the power output of batteries 10 times larger for a duration of 1 minute. They cost 20 times a comparably sized battery. The power cells in GURPS Ultra-Tech might be advanced supercapacitors.

A flywheel stores energy in dense material spinning extremely fast. A set of coils acts as a motor when power is fed in, speeding it up, or as a generator when power is taken out, slowing it down. Peak output lasts up to 2 minutes. The power cells in GURPS Ultra-Tech might be advanced flywheels.

Flywheels come in weights comparable to larger batteries, though volume is greater.

  • Medium. Stores 2/3 the energy of an M battery, but peak output is 60 times as high (equal to household power). ×100 cost.

  • Large. Stores as much energy as an L battery, but peak output is 100 times as high (equal to industrial power). ×500 cost.

  • Very Large. Stores as much energy as a VL battery, but peak output is 100 times as high. ×1250 cost.

  • Steel (TL7). Only available in L and VL. ×4.5 weight, ×1/3 cost.

  • Titanium (TL7). Only available in L and VL. ×4/3 energy, ×3 weight, ×2/3 cost.

  • Carbon Fiber Composite (TL8). Available in all sizes with statistics given above.

The second one was written by William H Stoddard, a sure sign of quality.

I regret that I never got to play much GURPS.

For anyone whos interested, Bundle of Holding (not humblebundle) is running a big sale on a ton of GURPS pdfs. The only reason i havent dropped a bunch of change is i already own most of them...

You don't need to play it in order to enjoy the books.

Steve Jackson himself has stated in interviews that one-third of GURPS book buyers actually play that system, one-third use GURPS books with other systems, and one-third just buy GURPS books to read them without playing any TTRPGs at all. I am in the third category.

I had to take a moment to remind myself that Transhuman Space was actually GURPs, as I read that quite a bit but never actually played it.

Unlike Eclipse Phase, which I read the piss out of and actually got to play a time or two.

I've been playing TTRPGs regularly for almost 30 years. GURPS is definitely my most extreme ratio of time spent reading to time spent playing. It was just all so elegant. But most of my friends like less crunchy, or more setting-specific stuff.

aaaah, GURPS, my truest roleplaying love. My transition to young adulthood was marked by switching from Battletech mech design to GURPS Vehicles 2nd ed and GURPS Robots, the former of which I wore out the spine on in short order. Truly, a more elegant game for a more civilized time.

Allegedly, GURPS Vehicles Third Edition will be published sometime soon—albeit independently by Pulver and with the serial numbers filed off, since Steve Jackson Games can't spare the money to edit it even though it's already largely complete.

Bored of most games at the moment.

Have an itch to return to modding Starfield, but it'd be casting pearls before swine. The game itself is wide open for adding depth, systems, gameplay, meaning, purpose, lore.

But, if downloads and hype are anything to go by, the player base does not want meaning, or purpose, or lore. They want their character to be hotter. They want the companions to be hotter. They want their hot companion to have blonde hair and not black. They want to be able to fuck all of the hot companions at once.

Oh, and they want guns. Not cool sci-fi lasers and particle beams appropriate for the setting. They want their AR-15 lovingly ported in so they can sling lead around like the game's not set 300 years in the future.

The game itself is wide open for adding depth, systems, gameplay, meaning, purpose, lore.

Starfield could've been so much better.

Games lost me the more they shifted away from indie developers into huge commercial, AAA projects. Even among my friends, the games that tend to have the greatest longevity and replay value are the older games you still see people obsessive about in the speed running communities.

sci fi lasers and particle beams are boring if they don't create a more exotic experience than slugthrowers, and if they create a more exotic experience, that means they exploit different niches and so don't replace slugthrowers. Also, the AR15 is a reasonable guess at what a slugthrower will look like 300 years from now, odd as it may be to consider. The reasons are complicated and interesting, but the upshot is that there's a feedback loop running popularity > market share > stacking iterative improvements > excellence for purpose > popularity, such that the AR15 pattern is steadily outcompeting and driving to extinction all other designs, and it doesn't look like this will change so long as we're using chemical slugthrowers.

I will say, if I were doing far-future slugthrowers, I'd at least go electrothermal and try to drive design variation that way.

If the more exotic experience involves vastly outperforming slugthrowers, they can still displace ‘em.

  • no drop/windage
  • adjustable destructiveness
  • simplified logistics
  • lighter combat loadouts
  • answers some development in personal defenses

Pick one or more and roll with it.

I think you could make a good setup by expanding on the classic “kinetic barriers.” Have your psychics passively repel bullets and shrapnel but not lasers.

But, if downloads and hype are anything to go by, the player base does not want meaning, or purpose, or lore. They want their character to be hotter. They want the companions to be hotter. They want their hot companion to have blonde hair and not black. They want to be able to fuck all of the hot companions at once.

I mean, that's literally every game in existence. There are some... impressively degenerate mods for the Total Warhammer games, and I don't just mean for the Slaanesh factions.

There are some... impressively degenerate mods for the Total Warhammer games, and I don't just mean for the Slaanesh factions.

You can't hint at lewd mods for fucking Total War (LMAO) and not at least link to one

... fine. NSFW warning for both content, ads, and everything else, but here: sexy stripper girl Karl(a) Franz

Played the pre-release game The Crust for several hours. It's a more-or-less standard factory/exploration game, set on the Moon. I'm a Moon exploitation enthusiast, so I enjoy the fantasy.

I saw Doom Dark Ages was on sale. $32 for base game and new DLC. I know a going out of business sale when I see one.

I don't hate the first two levels. Also runs fine for me on Linux with and RTX 4070 Super. Get about 70 fps with DLSS, path tracing, and medium settings besides that.

We'll see how it goes.

You are making many of the same choices I do.

Not sure if you want advice on cheesing the skill system, but with high enough skill in rifles, you can shoot out cameras. Also with enough weapons: low-tech skill and combat strength, you can start breaking open doors even before you get the Dragon's Tooth. Both give you quite different playthroughs.

Good advice is always welcome. :)

I think you need Master in rifles to simply shoot down cameras with the sniper rifle. That's a lotta points. I may have spread my skill points too thin.

I've levelled up Computer twice, Pistol twice, and Rifle/Low-tech/lockpicking/electronics/swimming once. I only have 1150 points unspent now despite being around the halfway point in the game. Getting Rifles to Master would require another 8400 points into it or so.

I've noticed I can break open some doors/containers with Combat Strength aug active, but they seem to have to be at 35% strength or less, and sadly the Dragon's Tooth does not do better at this than other melee weapons.

Edit: typo.

I don't think I ever levelled up pistol in many of my playthroughs. One reason is that too many useful weapons use the rifle skill, including the shotguns, and the other is that if you unspend the points on pistol at character creation, the game gives you the skill anyway.

I think both your weapons: low-tech skill and your level of combat strength affect how easily you can break things.

Oof. I didn't know that re: character creation. I leveled up Pistol because the mini-crossbow counts as a pistol. And I was gonna do soo much non-lethal tranq darting l. Until I realized that the game provides very few tranq darts in most maps. And having the enemies running around shooting at you until the poison builds up sufficiently is pretty messy. So the baton became my main tool.

Also if you tranq someone out, they're often considered "dead" with a different label. I knocked everyone out in Castle Clinton in one playthrough, and had the "I cleaned the place out" conversation in the armory, where Sam Carter gets cross with you for using excessive force.

Anesthesia is no trivial matter. The LD50 is only a median measure and you never know who's at work today with massive sleep debt, a bad hangover, and a congenital heart condition.

Or an asymptomatic Grey Death infection. You never really see anyone (except some Underclass People) with symptoms in the game, despite the engineered, widespread virus being the whole reason why the conspirators can almost succeed in taking over the world.

Really? I used lots of tranqs in that mission and Carter was happy with me! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yeah, I was wondering if he didn't throw a grenade afterwards...

Yesterday afternoon I started yet another campaign in XCOM 2. The first few missions went impossibly well: I think I had four or five "flawless" ratings in a row, zero soldiers killed or injured. For awhile I was actually wondering if the game was taking pity on me after so many abandoned campaigns.

Needless to say, it didn't last. I've abandoned this campaign.

Yeah that game has dynamic difficulty. If you're on a roll then it will hit you back hard after a while.

I've been a big fan of... is it Beta Strike? The mode where everyone has more health. I find I just like that gameplay loop a lot better than "everything is bassd around not being shot at all."

Seconding a Beta Strike recommendation. I think it works well thematically with the fatigue mechanics to help encourage a large bench while allowing you to develop rookies outside the GTS/Ring systems since they're not made of tissue paper.

Mostly Darktide. My brother only started recently, after it was mentioned on the Motte and subsequently I prompted him to. But he really took to it, and is playing at his usually very high level of time investment, ambition and skill, and I have a hard time keeping up with him! But that's for the better; I prefer being challenged over being able to cruise. Sadly this is leaving our usual gaming buddies somewhat behind; they're of the opposite disposition. I'm trying to get him to play Nuclear Option with me (even gifted him a copy!), but he refuses. His focus on Darktide is unbreakable.

I also gave Civ 5 another try, with the Vox Populi mod, and I'm finding it thoroughly disappointing. There are too many systems that are hidden away in menues, completely invisible from the main view. The main view itself is very wasteful with screen space and player attention. The UX as a whole is not to my taste. City-States are a complete miss for me; I find that they weaken the coherency of the game by introducing a completely separate class of pseudo-civilization that plays by different rules, and their quest-based interactions are straight out of the wrong genre as far as I'm concerned. I'm ambivalent on the wars: They are a slog thanks to a combination of one-unit-per-tile and short movement ranges - forcing players to either commit to wars of attrition in which units are sent into the grinder to inevitably perish and never retreat, or into maintaining a defensive posture in which units are rotated back out to recover. On the one hand, I think this is kinda neat; it slows most wars down and gives players time to actually observe, instead of just resolving in a few turns, and makes offensives a risky gamble. On the other hand, there often seems to be no real tactical solution; the only way forward is to outproduce the enemy and absorb losses. Overall I think Old World (a later successor to Civ4) has done it better, although Old World overcorrects and gives too large an advantage to the attacker. But in the end, I don't really want to play Civ5 in any case because I find it ugly. I'd rather be looking at Civ3, Civ4, Call To Power or Alpha Centauri. Civ5 has very drab, boring terrain combined with cartoonish units, an art deco UI, garish UI representations of units and buildings, and a fatal case of too damn many icons floating around in the map, many of which cannot be hidden.

Today will be the 1.0 release of Quasimorphosis. I ragequit my last mid-to-late-game campaign - a serious time investment! - when a quick trip to the asteroid belt and back gave the npc factions enough time to permanently out-tech me so that all missions became prohibitvely frustrating, effectively soft-locking me out of further progression. But the devs assured me that balancing and mechanical changes now allow players to claw their way out of such scenarios, so I'm carefully optimistic about trying it out agian, when I find the time.

I have hundreds of hours in VP. I was a lifelong Civ player (started w/ Civ2 when I was 10) up through VI, which I mainly experienced with an iPad. My days with VI was during a 10 year period where I had pretty much stopped playing any games other than a few things like iPad VI and Xcom. VI BNW on iPad I believe was a complete experience. And I was able to win a few games on Deity, at which point I felt like I had solved the game.

When I bought a new desktop pc a few years age I was going on a tear through big mods and came across VP. The attraction there was that it radically tuned up the difficulty, set me back to noble/prince, and became a new puzzle to solve. To me, it still retained the core Civ feeling, but designed for someone with 30 years of prior Civ experience. The complexity was a bonus, not a problem.

I had dabbled with Civ4 Realism Invictus during this period, but I bounced off hard. I was looking for something for Civ4 like VP. Something designed for an experienced Civ player.

About a month ago I got that Civ4 itch again and found Advanced Civ. This is a rebalance mod that keeps 80-90% of the vanilla machines, but add in a much improved AI, UI improvements, and a very slight textures update. I’m now completely hooked on Civ4.

In my current campaign, Nazi Germany (me) just declared war on Rome and successfully razed on city and we’re a few moves into enjoy territory marching on Rome. The Holy Roman Empire saw that I had nearly emptied my garrisons in Munich (border city) and attacked with a 12 unit stack. I reloaded to try again with a smaller warband marching on Rome and delt with Charlemagne just fine. Several turns later I took Rome, but as I did, Gilgamesh attacked my northern city of Frankfurt. I think I need to reload again and pump out more units to defend the rear before taking Rome. It’s unclear to me if the AI is declaring war due to my weakness, or because I’m getting too powerful if I Vasselize/destroy Rome. I’m hoping there is a solution here to salvage the game. This is on Prince difficulty btw.

All of this is to say is that the core mechanics of Civ are absolute pinnacle game design. Expand cities, capture luxury/strategic resources, make GDP/science, war with neighbors. This makes it even more baffling to me how badly Firaxis fucked up VII. I find every entry in series, except VII has value. My biggest issue is that the vanilla AI are intentionally designed to be pushovers when it comes to strategy. Vanilla Deity is the same, just with bigger bonuses.

It’s hard for me to understand how people with a lot of experience with 4x games in general or civ specifically can have fun with the stock difficulty. I need the mods to make the underlying systems become meaningful and engaging.

I can see why it’s not for everyone though. I recall that I found the base game V to be the worst offender from a mechanics and difficulty standpoint. That’s why VP is so meaningful to me.

Vox Populi makes the city-state wrangling, and the grindiness of the wars, much worse, FYI. I prefer Lekmod over both VP and vanilla Civ V. Though, it sounds like you just hate most things about Civ V, including the things I love about it, so trying another mod is probably useless.

you just hate most things about Civ V, including the things I love about it

Please explain your view on those things. Maybe I'm just seeing it wrong.

I don't go in for slog wars. I mostly defend. Mostly with ranged units, with melee units being blockers and functioning as the ones taking the enemy cities once they're fully bombarded down to 0.

Graphics: I love how Civ V looks. I like the UI too. Words can't convince you of this. How could they.

Quasimorphosis (no longer available)

I assume you mean Quasimorph.

Yeah they renamed it somewhere along the way. But it's too late; I've already filed it mentally.

Item 1 of 2

  • In year 2011, a tourism-reliant village with fewer than 3000 inhabitants (though, hilariously, it officially is called a "city") enters into an agreement with a developer for the annexation and residential development of a 360-acre property in adjacent unincorporated land. The development agreement allows the developer to start building anytime within the next 25 years at its sole discretion (since "the parties understood that the housing market was slowly recovering from the 2008 financial crisis and that the market was not ready for the project").

  • However, just eight years in, the village govt. expresses its opinion that the agreement that it signed is "outdated, one-sided, and incomplete", and starts ignoring its provisions (e. g., an expedited permit-approval process). The developer is forced to file three separate arbitration proceedings in order to counter the village govt.'s reluctance to abide by the agreement. In the third proceeding, it finally asks for damages. The arbitrator finds that the village govt. has "persistently breached the development agreement", and awards to the developer a "conservative damages calculation" of 22 M$ bearing interest of 12 %/a. (See document 81 page 6 for the arbitrator's decision, document 81 page 1 for the developer's viewpoint, and document 12 for the village govt.'s viewpoint.) The village is unable to satisfy even the interest payments on this penalty, and files for bankruptcy.

  • The developer objects to the bankruptcy. It alleges that the village govt. did not file in good faith; rather, its problems arose entirely from its own bad-faith breach of the development agreement, and it made no attempt to reduce expenses or to increase revenues before filing for bankruptcy. However, the bankruptcy judge rejects the developer's arguments. The village govt. engaged in multiple months of good-faith mediation with the developer, and filed for bankruptcy only after the mediation failed and the developer garnished the village govt.'s bank accounts. The village govt.'s breach of contract does not necessarily imply bad faith. And the judge refuses to follow a decision from a different bankruptcy court under which govt. bankruptcy is a last resort, available only after the govt. has tried to fix its budget by implementing austerity measures (which indeed may lead only to a "death spiral" rather than to an improved financial position).

Item 2 of 2

Fun activity:

(1) Check a government GIS map and find a big rural parcel (1 2)

(2) Sketch it in your preferred CAD program at the correct scale

(3) In the sketched parcel, draw a residential subdivision compliant with the local government's subdivision and zoning codes (or just with the International Zoning Code)

You may or may not care to abide by the stormwater provisions in the subdivision code. For example:

  • You probably have seen some giant grassy ponds (extended-detention basins) used to control stormwater runoff. Well, in New Jersey you aren't allowed to use those any longer, because they remove only 40–60 percent of the suspended solids (i. e., sediment). Are you allowed to use giant vegetated ponds (large-scale bioretention systems)? No. They can remove 80–90 percent of suspended solids, but they still aren't quite good enough to be usable without a variance, for reasons that are not clear to me from reading the linked documents. The only kind of pond you can use without getting a variance is a small vegetated pond (small-scale bioretention system), with maximum catchment area of 2.5 acres.

  • In contrast, Pennsylvania lets you use the giant vegetated pond.

  • Either way, the calculations don't seem that annoying. You just have to make the basin(s) big enough (maximum water depth after the 100-year storm is one foot in NJ or two feet in PA; maximum side slope is 1/4, to prevent errant vehicles from flipping) to hold all the water that the 100-year storm (adjusted to account for future climate change) will dump on the new impervious surfaces that you expect to build (and that you expect the homeowners to build)—say, one foot of rain (the 100-year storm), multiplied by the area of your roads and sidewalks plus X percent of the subdivided lots' area as prescribed by the zoning code's "maximum impervious coverage" figure (probably around 50 percent). If you take the worst-case scenario that the entire non-basin area of the parcel will be impervious, and if for simplicity you assume that the basin has vertical sides, then voila—in Pennsylvania the basin must occupy one-third of the parcel (2/3 of the parcel is impervious × 1 foot of water on the impervious area = 1/3 of the parcel is basin × 2 feet of water in the basin), while in New Jersey the basin must occupy one-half of the parcel (1/2 of the parcel is impervious × 1 foot of water on the impervious area = 1/2 of the parcel is basin × 1 feet of water in the basin). (Disclaimer: I probably have misinterpreted something here. I was a roadway engineer, not a hydrology engineer. Do not rely on these calculations to take out a small loan of one million dollars and buy a bunch of vacant land in Pennsylvania.)

Or you can just ignore the stormwater provisions, and draw your roads and lots with wild abandon. (Note, however, that trying to align multiple rows of blocks while abiding by the recommended block length of 300–600 feet can be more difficult than it appears.)

On Item 1, skipping the legal analysis completely (IANAL), it seems crazy to me that the village with so few people couldn't.... approve permits quickly?

Wouldn't that have been far superior to paying millions in arbitration and being garnished? Why enter into any development agreement at all?!? I find document 81 far more sympathetic than document 12, in short.

Possibly the first and only time the phrases "Fun activity" and "You may or may not care to abide by the stormwater provisions in the subdivision code" have appeared together

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