nerevarthelame

Simutronics is has been running and developing Gemstone and DragonRealms for 30+ years and counting. The communities are about 400-1000 players each. They've embraced microtransactions (in the form of quarterly events), but both games are entirely playable without participating in that aspect.

With modern technology, training in both games is very automatable. But developing and optimizing your training routines is (in my opinion) incredibly fun. Actual roleplaying is less common it was in the 90s, but there are still nightly events where dozens of players will get together to socialize and explore the worlds in-character.

It's exactly because there are laws against deceptive advertising that Mamdani can enact theses rules.

NYC's Administrative Code prohibits deceptive trade practices, false advertising, misleading representations made to customers, etc. It gives the NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection authority to execute those broad guidelines by enacting specific rules.

So Mamdani and the DCWP are basically saying, "City law gives us the authority to regulate this sort of thing, and because this is clearly in violation, here are the specific rules we're enacting to regulate it."

AI is directly mentioned in 24 of 53 paragraphs from the article.

To reframe the silliness of this analysis, ~1% of the study population is Sam Altman founding OpenAI.

That NFT entry leads to a 404, and even if you Google the one quote they provide from it ("You do not understand NFTs yet, but you will"), the only reference to it is the "Billion Dollar PDFs" site.

This site does a terrible job of curating what is supposed to be a limited, selective list. I tried to access the first 60 entries. 11 of them were dead links. 4 were just links to advertisements for books (very much not a "memo, a deck, a whitepaper, a thread").

The author is German, so I'll cut them some slack on their English prose. And I think I prefer seeing their actual voice rather than pressing it through an LLM filter.

But I agree the claims are kinda incoherent, and that's unforgivable.

I could see this being the flawed perspective of management, and that it could genuinely make union negotiations more difficult as a result. But it's short and narrow-sighted.

He did admit as much:

"The scripts used to fetch the data, collate it into a DuckDB database file, construct the views on that DB, and then do the statistical analysis on that data, were indeed written by GLM 5.1, as was the HTML and much of the original prose for the final report webpage you're looking at right now."

Every study that suggests viability of SSRIs to treat or prevent Long COVID presents plausible mechanisms for why they might have that effect. And none of them are "the patients are probably just sad and faking it."

Creatinine can be an indicator that your kidneys are not working well. It's a cheap red flag that can be screened for in a common blood test. But if heightened creatinine is a result of one's creatine supplementation, then there are none of the downsides associated with kidney disease.

Creatinine itself doesn't cause fatigue, edema, or high blood pressure. Kidney disease does.

It's interesting they only included 6 metrics this time. Opus 4.7 had 12, and 4.6 had 13.

Of the metircs they reported for 4.7, for 4.8 they excluded BrowseComp, CharXiv Reasoning, CyberGym, GPQA Diamond, MCP Atlas, MMMLU, SWE-bench Verified. The last 4 were almost always mentioned in previous Opus releases.

It was Biden who initially ordered the reclassification of marijuana to schedule III in 2024: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/08/29/2024-19...

Trump is basically just pushing that order across the finish line.

You're right are exemptions for both GDPR [0] and the CCPA [1] where organizations aren't obligated to comply with erasure requests if it would limit their ability to prevent or investigate crimes, fraud, or similar matters.

But that's not what Flock is claiming. They're claiming that they don't even have to consider the request because they don't own the data.

[0] https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...

[1] https://www.clarip.com/data-privacy/ccpa-erasure-exemptions/

They're also still posting on LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube (in addition to BlueSky and Mastodon). It's silly to suggest that anything outside of X is an echo chamber, or that one must communicate on a platform dominated by white supremacists to expose your ideas to a diverse audience.

On average, they're getting <9,000 views per post on X. With 100 - 150K followers on both Bluesky and Mastodon, I'd expect their impressions to beat those X numbers.

But as they say in the article, their reason for leaving isn't solely the low impressions. It's the low impressions, plus "Musk fired the entire human rights team and laid off staffers in countries where the company previously fought off censorship demands from repressive regimes," plus X's unwillingness to give users more control, consider end-to-end DM encryption, or offer transparent moderation.

While criticism of Israel should not be conflated with antisemitism, the concept of a "Zionist Occupation Government," without question, originates from neo-nazi conspiracy theories. Take that shit elsewhere.

I agree with most of this, but my one qualm is the notion that LLMs "are particularly good at generating ideas."

It's fair enough that you can discard any bad ideas they generate. But by design, the recommendations will be average, bland, mainstream, and mostly devoid of nuance. I wouldn't encourage anyone to use LLMs to generate ideas if you're trying to create interesting or novel ideas.

On top of the fraud convictions, Trevor Milton was credibly accused of sexual assault by his own cousin and a girl he employed. Both victims were minors at the time.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/29/two-women-file-sexual-abuse-...

The rebrand came at a time when "Facebook" was mainly associated with either tremendous scandal (Facebook Files, ad fraud, Cambridge Analytica, Rohingya and Tigray genocides, etc.) or a social media platform increasingly dominated by the elderly.

I think it was a desperate lunge away from that toxic brand toward ANYTHING else. Zuckerberg put his money on VR, given the pandemic and the mild success of Oculus.

Betting big on the metaverse in particular was a mistake, but it might have helped keep the Facebook stink off of products like WhatsApp and Instagram, which remain pretty popular among mainstream audiences.

I'm not saying that your assessments are wrong. But you were talking about how valuable this content is, and I don't understand how the insight you claimed to get from the visualization ("There is definitely impact on Software engineering jobs at the moment, interns/juniors are struggling to find jobs") could at all be discernible from the visualization.

The VIEW could be AI slop, but underlying CONTENT has some meaning. There is definitely impact on Software engineering jobs at the moment, interns/juniors are struggling to find jobs

Is that notion supported by this content? The BLS Outlook for most software engineering jobs is most in the "much faster than average" growth range.

I agree that it's worth understanding that the law does not ask for any of this information to leave your car, so "federal surveillance tech" is a bit exaggerated. I have an unimpressive Honda Accord, and it will ding and display an alert if it suspects I'm drowsy.

But this law would step beyond that. It does require that the car "prevent or limit motor vehicle operation if an impairment is detected."

I'm not a transit safety expert, but that itself seems potentially dangerous - even just limiting speed, if it happens on a highway, could be difficult to handle. And of course, the detection systems will have false positives.

For years Hisense has been a highly recommended brand for mid-tier TVs on (relatively) objective review sites like rtings.com. Their customers don't deserve bad things to happen to them. And the Anti-Chinese sentiment is especially weird in the context of advertising, as though the West was spared from intrusive ads prior to this.

The author going to silly lengths to write in a way that will be perceived as non-artificial, even though they find those traits (improper capitalization, spelling mistakes, etc.) crude and distasteful. But they ultimately realize that they also need to transform their fundamental writing style, which would supposedly be impossible because it's a reflection of who they are. So the only way to do that, ironically, is to pass their writing through an LLM.

I do not think the author genuinely used an LLM to write the post.

It's a diacritic marker that indicates how the word is supposed to be pronounced, with a syllable break on the marked letters - as though readers might get confused and think the word is pronounced "reel-ection" as opposed to "re-election." It's a pretty archaic practice, but The New Yorker persists. They have a lot of unusual stylistic preferences, like preferring the spelling "vender" over "vendor," which also occurs in this article.

A more common example of the diaeresis would be the name "Zoë" - the "ë" indicates the pronunciation is "zoe-y" (2 syllables) not "zoe" (1 syllable).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic)#English

The results seem plausible, but it's worth noting that the source of their data (Ahrefs) is just a rough estimate. Given that every publication they examined - including several outside of the tech industry - showed declines, I'd hope they would confirm that it's not an artifact of the estimation process. Ahrefs themselves caution against using their data to make these sorts of conclusions:

While these estimates don’t, and can’t, show you exactly how much organic traffic a website gets, they work incredibly well for comparison. For example, it’s fantastic for learning if your competitors’ websites get more or less organic search traffic than your own.

(https://help.ahrefs.com/en/articles/1863206-what-is-organic-...)

The American government has recently accused peaceful protestors of being terrorists.

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/labe...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/28/us/trump-minnesota-protes...

That would need to be tested. If doctors get lazy, complacent, or overworked (!), a "doctor with access to ChatGPT Health" may be functionally equivalent to "just ChatGPT Health" in some cases.

Still no smoking gun, but possibly Russia. From the video https://youtu.be/aoag03mSuXQ?t=2883:

A lot of the aliases, like Jia Tan, they sound like Asian names, and the published changes are all timestamped in UTC+8, Beijing time. So the signs point to China. And that's why it's probably not China. I mean, why would they make it that obvious? Every other part of the operation has been so meticulous, so cautious.

And they also worked on Chinese New Year, but not on Christmas. And over the years, there were nine changes that fall outside of the Beijing time into UTC+2, which is a time zone that includes Israel and parts of Western Russia. That's why some experts have speculated that this could be the work of APT29, a Russian-state-backed hacker group also known as Cozy Bear. But again, do we know? No, of course we don't know who it is, and we likely will never know.