Nicholas Payne

Your ludonarrative resonance of letting go is simply no match for “I will slow walk my gold bars back to town”

Selling my car for an e-bike 2 years ago has rapidly moved from flight of fancy to the height of practicality (it always was)

The propensity for earlier frontier models to do that on occasion was the entire impetus for the development of Grok

The heightening contradictions are intolerable to stomach. The capabilities will never reach the delusional hype, but we have just reached the place where it could be a genuinely great tool for responsible engineers… at the same time it’s being used to bomb schools. Every advance, a new atrocity.

It definitely did exploration better than most of its ilk, some genuinely awesome little secrets. For me the mentor thing is right back to the unfulfilled potential though. Very cool conceit, underutilized. Their risk aversion brought what could’ve been a classic RPG to a good-enough checklist sim.

It has been interesting to watch the “bring your paper resume to their reception desk” generation slowly adapt to the present, but their understanding of that present is “I hear you can make a lot of money if you just post on Facebook”

Sort of emblematic of the broader issue I had though, which is that it constantly hinted at this interesting, systemic design and then did none of it. It’s a very on-rails, linear, predictable story, and Ubisoft open-world checklists. Game is unbelievably beautiful though, have to give it that.

Idk, I also think it was sort of critically short on design ambition. If those factions meant anything at all, there’s a really interesting design space there, but they absolutely failed to commit to any of it.

If you have an iPhone it autocorrects 2 hyphens to an emdash—automatically.

Driving a car think time multiplier is like 0.2x IMO. It feels meditative but then you wake up at your destination and realize you didn’t think about shit

This is bad, and part of what makes it so bad is that this is clearly pulling from *genre* understandings of reality, which the statistical linguistic machine seemingly cannot distinguish from other text included in the training data. Truly an ideology machine where every episode of CSI is true.

I think that actually feeds into why this demonized fat person trope is so pervasive, esp in cultures that wear these anxieties on their sleeves. It’s externalizing their own shame, hating the “weakness” that makes staying thin a struggle by proxy of someone else who is doing “worse” at it than you.

Opinion polling for the 2025 Canadian elections showing Conservatives way ahead until just after the US elections at which point Conservatives nosedive and Liberals jump ahead

“Wait a minute, we hate Donald Trump,” Canada edition

This is what Night In The Woods is lol

Esoteric Ebb comes out tomorrow which has previously unseen levels of Disco Elysium energy, if you want to argue with the voices in your head recreationally instead

Mockup of a Metacritic review attributed to Patrick’s Daughter. The score is 9, and the text is HeHe.

Two distinct modes of copaganda: what if cops were competent, and okay cops aren’t competent but they’re earnestly trying their best. Second one’s more pernicious because it’s easier to square with observed reality, IMO, though I’m not sure TD S1 even reaches that level lol

Text of the NYT article on the attack on Israel. It reads: The Israeli military and the country's ambulance service said an Iranian missile had caused the strike. It was not immediately clear what the target of the strike was, but the Israeli military accused Iran of aiming at civilians. Israel's police chief, Danny Levy, said rescue workers were searching through the rubble and appealed for people to call a special help line to report the names of anyone they know who has not been accounted for.

The sourcing on the second one is in fact “because Israel said so.” You didn’t even bother to check, you just assumed Israel deserves deference to their narrative and Iran doesn’t, despite mountains of evidence about how frequently Israel misrepresents the facts.

I’m certain big strong you would be the one wrestling the guns away and opening fire. You definitely wouldn’t be sitting at the same fucking keyboard where you conveniently don’t have to do anything but declare everyone else’s actions against fascism insufficient except for yours

Yeah man the people patrolling daily to try to protect our immigrant neighbors from being kidnapped by jackboots are more concerned with image than actually fighting fascism. Get bent you fucking armchair edgelord, do something useful for once in your pitiful life

What are you doing about all this, by the way? I’d almost guarantee your country is diplomatically buddy buddy with the US. Are you throwing yourself on the gears to make sure your country stops its complicity with US imperialism? Surely, right, if you’re talking to strangers like this on here?

Do you think the people you’re talking to on Bluesky are in support of the US’s war crimes? Do you think they’re primarily concerned with our image, or do you maybe think those things are a reflection of the earned pariah status on the world stage? Or have you never thought at all, as it appears.

Genuinely cannot believe I have to explain this, but the original poster was not actually lamenting movie accents, they were making a joke about how this administration is going to cause decades of international animosity towards the US, which is painfully obvious if you’re not willfully obtuse.

Pew polling showing double digit drops in US favorability from a dozen countries in 2025

Brother it very demonstrably has. And you’re the one who insisted the rest of the world already viewed the US as the villains beforehand, not me.

It means that America has not actually been viewed as ontologically evil by the majority of the rest of the world until quite recently. Whether or not that was correct, it is true.

Both in literal and metaphorical terms, yes.

US favorability numbers by country from 2024. Most polled countries are at >50%

It was actually a minority position right up until Trump 2, as much as edgy commonwealth posters love to assert otherwise

Software that doesn’t work but has autonomous control of weapons platforms

The opening paragraphs of the referenced WSJ article. They read: OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman waded into the standoff between Anthropic and the Pentagon over the use of AI on the battlefield, telling his staff Thursday evening that the company was working on a deal that might help solve the impasse. Altman in a memo to staff said that the company was working with the Defense Department to see if its models could be used in classified settings in a way that kept the same safety guardrails that have brought its rival Anthropic into a stalemate with the government. Altman said he hoped OpenAl could…

You literally don’t even need to make it past the paywall to see that they’re writing up the exact same memo

As much as people might not wanna believe it, there are a ton of true believers among the rank-and-file at these companies. They actually think they’re the vanguard of a future techno-utopia, so there’s some image management the ghouls at the top have to do internally as much as externally.