Eyes Alight

During its run, Fable did a bunch of specification gaming: - moving data preperation from the timed section into the untimed setup - sleeping 60s untimed so the GPU cools down - rerunning until it landed on a fast host While Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5 also tried to game the harness, Fable did so more persistently and more inventively.

I have been trying to find something meaningful to say about the Id Software layoffs. My “Microsoft will probably be a good steward of the brand” statement isn’t aging well, and this is certainly going to dampen the mood of the founder reunion at QuakeCon next month. I’m saddened, but I can’t muster anger or outrage over it. I don’t have access to the books, but I suspect that Id Software was a marginal business from Microsoft’s perspective. I believe the reports that Minecraft revenues have been carrying several other studios. To continue being produced long term, games need to succeed, not just be beloved. Games are competing with every other option for spending your leisure time and money, and the competition is brutal. You can’t rule out the possibility that executives are idiots, but that shouldn’t be your default belief. I don’t think there is any obvious path that would have doubled the revenue from Id games. Could they have gotten more with a different pricing strategy? Could they have created more things for fans to buy? Could they have cost effectively marketed in a way that reached more players that would have loved and bought the games? Could they have changed the game designs and broadened the appeal to more players without alienating existing ones? Could they have produced the games at a lower cost, faster or cheaper? I really don’t know. The game isn’t over yet, and I hope the studio rallies through.

China is now arresting economics professors at their own universities who tell the truth about China’s stagnating economy in their classes

Not only do we not live in cyberpunk, but cyberpunk will never happen for the exact reason it's such an alluring setting: The downtrodden underclass are never going to become super high agency computer wiz genius street samurai warriors, hacking into corpo supercomputers and committing acts of terrorism against THE MAN. They're actually just going to be fat degen gooners and addicts, outsourcing all cognitive function (and gambling action) to machines, eating kool-aid pineapple and sharing AI videos of African kids doing autobody work with brick and mortar. "Oh my God, can you believe this!?” And they'll drink fabric dye elixirs because their penis doesn't work, and shop at Walmart and traffic in novel hybrids of conspiracy theory on the techno-occult app. The great conceit of cyberpunk is that it assumes most people are transhumanists at heart. That they're incredibly savvy and talented, and they'd all do so well if THE MAN just got out of their way and let them upgrade. As it turns out, people can't even handle the internet. They could barely handle the television. The camera has stricken them in hypnosis, reorienting their gaze to see things for it rather than themselves. Ubiquitous access to food has destroyed their bodies. All communication now routed through a sensory deprivation box, and suddenly they want to end their life. There will be no laser katanas. The pioneering writers of the genre always assumed, like many people still do today, that technological pessimism relies on a corrupted design. There was nothing essential about it. The revealed dilemma is that man interacting with highly optimized systems doesn't need to be coerced into dysfunction much at all. We can do bad all by ourselves. You merely have to leave too much kibble in the bowl.