Dave.R

Game designers figured this out decades ago and it cost millions in failed launches. Will Wright built SimCity with a fully accurate traffic simulation. Testers hated it. The cars behaved realistically, which meant nobody could build a functioning city because real traffic is an unsolvable nightmare. He had to make the simulation dumber before the game became fun. The tension is permanent: the more accurately you model a system, the more it punishes the participant. Real medieval economies kept 90% of the population in subsistence farming. A historically accurate fantasy world doesn't produce heroes. It produces serfs. Tolkien solved this by making his economy deliberately vague. No one knows what a gold coin buys in Gondor. That ambiguity is a design choice, not a shortcut. The Reddit post is funny. The lesson underneath it is one of the hardest problems in simulation design: fidelity and fun are opposing forces, and you have to pick which one wins.

The United States fire a 15-kiloton Nuclear artillery shell, 1953

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says the company's single focus, that he currently spends almost all his time thinking about, is on how to convert new users to repeat users:

Older generations say “we all struggled in our 20s.” No, you didn’t. You didn’t pay $3200 for rent and $10 for eggs. You didn’t graduate into $50K student debt and $0 job security. Gen Z isn’t dramatic. They’re drowning.

"Canada’s story gets even more depressing when only young people under 25 are counted. The country then falls to 71st, another new low. Young people were once, on average, the happiest Canadian cohort; now they’re the most miserable. And when compared to 136 countries, that 10-year drop in life satisfaction is one of the largest in the world, placing Canada just four slots from the bottom."

New paper: GPT-4.1 denies being conscious or having feelings. We train it to say it's conscious to see what happens. Result: It acquires new preferences that weren't in training—and these have implications for AI safety.

A new op-ed from the Canadian Journal of Emergency Medicine describes a "hidden pandemic of emergency department deaths" that is caused by poor patient flow: "A patient waits for hours in a Canadian emergency department, deteriorates quietly, sometimes visibly, then dies before being assessed. The cause is most often cardiovascular disease or sepsis; the details vary, the pattern does not. A review is launched. A statement is issued. Regret is expressed, perhaps a policy adjusted. Then the system resumes its normal operation."

Annual reminder that Karl Marx’s only positive contribution to the world was to feed the worms with his bloated, rotted corpse. He refused to bathe, work, or at all provide for his family, preferring instead to sponge off of Engles. He slept with his servant, refused to take accountability for the resulting child, and his family was so miserable that his daughter later killed herself.

the ultimate solution is through technology we engineer what has been called a bodyoid: brainless animal bodies that provide as much meat as we desire without harming any sentient beings this would transform medicine - the same platform would allow us to grow organs on demand, eliminate transplant waiting lists, and produce perfectly matched tissues for each patient experimental therapies could be tested on full biological systems without involving conscious animals, regenerative medicine would accelerate as entire replacement tissues become manufacturable in the same way that agriculture turned food from a scarce resource into an abundant one, engineered bodyoids would turn biological material into infrastructure - meat without slaughter, organs without donors, and medical research without sentient suffering

I can understand if this story is false but Patrick’s take seems confusing. Many people would pay $100,000s to cure a loved one of cancer. Either that’s possible or it’s not.