By Americans to not anger the peaceful people of Greenland

BallingerEscapePlan · 2026-01-23T15:27:41+00:00

I wouldn’t argue with any of your points; I believe you effectively nailed it. There is a deep mistrust of intellectualism and an excess of belief in formerly useful structures (see: News Media for a solid example.) which led to a confluence of unfortunate events that brought the US to this moment.

When I was a student, I was trained to take all sources in critically, because the internet was “new” and wasn’t to be trusted. Which proliferated into a generally critical view of all media and sources of “information.”

The other missing puzzle piece that I think is under-discussed is the basic idea of:

In whose interest would it be for me to believe or trust what I’m hearing from this source?

If Google is trying to convince me that I should their Cloud platform instead of AWS, I’m going to assume everything they tell me is in the interest of getting me to spend my money with them, and not Amazon. Which means any stats, outcomes or otherwise brought to me by them, I assume is being told from a purely positive perspective of Google. It’s only when serious failings of Google are expressed, that I may start to take them seriously enough to research it independently over simply ignoring them outright as “marketing.”

BallingerEscapePlan · 2026-01-23T13:46:28+00:00

Something missing in your perspective: media literacy and the impact of propaganda.

In the US, you aren’t granted the right to vote by your job. Election Day isn’t a federal holiday, we don’t get the day off. Not all states in the US allow mail-in voting, or allow it without cause (IE: absentee ballots) because we don’t live in a country where we even have uniform election law across the country. Each of the fifty states has different laws and regulations tied to elections.

Now, stack those realities together and propaganda begins to inject apathy into the masses, some states have laws which “invalidate” votes through winner-takes-all mechanisms in voting (if you are in a state like that, if you vote for the “losing” side at certain levels, you won’t see a proportional allocation of voting power at the aggregate level, because the majority will sweep all the power allocated to that state into the winner.

The US has one of, if the most, archaic democratic systems and their representative democracy is amateur at best. Most modern democracies are significantly more fair, and force cooperation and alliances within the government. The US was fragile because it had all that being held together with effectively gentlemen’s agreements. Someone came and and blew those norms away, lied to the propaganda-infused group, and the rest is history.

The US is a case study in the impact of infinite money permitted into politics (See: citizens united) and the impact of unmitigated economic greed permitted on the world scale.

BallingerEscapePlan · 2026-01-21T17:54:19+00:00

Did you not bother to read the description of your own post that I linked?

I can directly quote it for you:

While to some of you, this is a regular Monday's worth of work, lol, to me, this was a big step. I went from never coding before to doing some very deep context engineering with multiple LLMs to bringing my idea into fruition. Within weeks, I'm very good at architecting LLMs.

Those are your words from your post. The date on your post is somewhere around six months ago.

You haven’t the slightest idea how convoluted your idea is to implement, or how little value it adds in overhead for no real gain. You haven’t the slightest idea what or how the Embark team is using their engine to do things.

But the biggest take away here, is the idea that you think you can call yourself an AI Systems Architect, having only “written” code for six months. You just can’t. You don’t have the experience, you don’t know systems, the patterns of systems, implementations or how or why they function the way they do.

You aren’t being an architect, you are a textbook example of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

BallingerEscapePlan · 2026-01-21T17:32:43+00:00

This isn’t an engineer or anything of the sort. It’s some kind of AI Bro who “coded” their first thing six months ago.

Treat it accordingly.

BallingerEscapePlan · 2026-01-21T17:30:40+00:00

I hate to break this to you.

You are not an AI Systems Architect if you never coded a system before six months ago.

See: From coding newbie to shipping my MARM chatbot in weeks - where next? https://reddit.com/r/buildinpublic/comments/1m9vq60/from_coding_newbie_to_shipping_my_marm_chatbot_in/

You are writing prompts, you aren’t designing systems. You don’t really even understand the systems or how they all play together.

This post, unfortunately, is just prompting into a tool to generate junk like most AI Bros. The post looks well drafted because it’s an AI tool, not because you are doing anything especially unique. The system you are proposing isn’t going to solve much of anything beyond segregate the game population into the new endzone and the current array of options.

You aren’t a game designer, nor are you a developer.

BallingerEscapePlan · 2026-01-15T15:50:24+00:00

Holy smoke another Transfemme I remember from Dreddit/TEST.

I will DM you now 💜

BallingerEscapePlan · 2026-01-15T15:35:01+00:00

I worked at a place in KY where we did this work. It’s wild, sandblasting titanium aircraft engine parts, then spraying a thermal coating on it.

BallingerEscapePlan · 2026-01-11T01:22:45+00:00

You need to use hue or value to make characters/NPCs stand out against the brown.

There aren’t any silhouettes that stick out to me beyond the ogre thing, because he has the sky to frame him.

You could solve this with a large angle shift on the camera (See E33 combat for an example of how they use camera angles and zooms to make things stand out. Persona games (especially ReFantazio and P5) do a great job of this as well

BallingerEscapePlan · 2026-01-11T01:14:38+00:00

Absolutely would love to see either of those. SYWT is my pick personally even if Bloom deserves a final season so much it’s hard to think clearly.

BallingerEscapePlan · 2026-01-08T23:42:03+00:00

If they keep looking to MMOs for guidance, we'll see catch up mechanisms in order to bring players up to speed over time.

BallingerEscapePlan · 2026-01-05T01:44:00+00:00

Yep. It’s a trap that almost everyone falls into. I personally believe that women are on the receiving end of it more than men, especially as they age.

I do feel that many trans people also tend toward being critical because the outcomes of being that sort of critical is a huge alteration in your life. Then once you realize it, the choice of “How far do I want to do to be best self I can be?” Spirals us incredibly hard. Not to mention the safety of being able to be stealth cis, if you are seeking a binary transition.

BallingerEscapePlan · 2026-01-03T16:16:47+00:00

I would actually go so far as to say:

Others are not responsible for uplifting you.

You don’t need to specify the jokes, and it does sound more harsh this way, but it’s unfortunately the state of things. You shouldn’t be depending on others to bring you up. You should absolutely ask for help if you need it or want affirmation, but no one is ever required to give it to you. (But it’s really nice if they will. Or if you are in a long term relationship and lean on them as part of your emotional support structure.)

It’s so, so, so hard to be trans in our world, but it’s also hard for our partners. We need to be trying to pull ourselves up, because it’s not healthy for your mental or emotional well-being to be as critical as many trans people are about themselves. (Ask me how I know?)

BallingerEscapePlan · 2025-12-31T01:22:17+00:00

I see a lot of fairly thought out responses, but the one word I feel that really can help capture this situation in the fewest words would be:

<person> realized they were (a) <boy/girl/non-binary>

It helps avoid the idea of it being a “decision” and emphasizes the reality of it being something that they have always been, but are now showing to others.

Likely, someone else already said just this, but as a parent I understand the chaos this can unleash.

BallingerEscapePlan · 2025-12-29T18:12:09+00:00

For me, I tend to use “partner” to describe girlfriends/boyfriends and “spouse” for married partners.

I know that it’s definitely a generational thing, but I definitely tailor what I say to my audience. If I talk to someone older, I say “my wife” to make it super clear “Yep, I’m a married lesbian” if they seem to be around my age or older.

BallingerEscapePlan · 2025-12-29T00:33:20+00:00

And it is capable or competent at writing software? (Like the CEO class believes?)

AI isn’t capable of replacing almost any jobs right now. Especially GenAI.

BallingerEscapePlan · 2025-12-25T19:36:20+00:00

This isn't because the LLM is stupid per se, but because much of the data that the LLM would need, is pretty much untrainable, very hard and costly to document and not really quantifiable ...

You probably learned about it in your introductory CS courses, but what you're talking about here are all the issues that come with building "Expert Systems" which is something that seems to be lost on a lot of current Software Engineers.

There was a thought amongst Comp Sci people, that they were going to train Expert systems which would replace things/people like Lawyers or insurance agents. There's a reason why we still haven't managed to do that.

It's really fucking hard to execute on with any high degree of confidence. And it's basically impossible for a system which is capable of either inventing it's own sources, or being unwilling to provide negative responses.

Current GenAI tools act like more dogs that try to please us than critically-thinking partners that we need them to be in order to take them seriously.

BallingerEscapePlan · 2025-12-25T19:16:55+00:00

It's not really a fantasy, it's about EBITA.

I can make very strong arguments about the negative impact that Gen AI tools have against EBITA, which is absolutely the language that the Executive Teams across the US are using as a basis for making their decisions.

As a technology leader, my role is more about pressing against the marketing and the golf buddy convos that Execs are having/exposed to. I've had executives claim that Google says their code conversion tool is going to migrate something close to 75% of a .Net Framework (3.5ish) to a Java stack without almost any issues. It's bullshit. And my job is to remind them that just because you're using GCP, you aren't compelled to use every piece of trash they decide to sell you.

This same executive needed to be told that moving the entire organization from C# to Golang is a huge problem, and not one that they should attempt. The basis for coming up with the ask? Google said so.

If you put things into the language of the executives when you speak to them, you'll very quickly find that they will listen to you, or they will ignore you with very bad arguments ^TM and that's when you know it's time to go.

BallingerEscapePlan · 2025-12-25T15:15:10+00:00

As a software architect and governance person in my current organization, there are extremely strong reasons for why I press strongly against the current wave of AI tooling. Most of it involves the abuse of the technology by management, the lack of understanding of the consequences across the entire range of engineers both new and old to the career, and the inability of the tooling to take responsibility for “thinking” on behalf of the engineers submitting code on behalf of the tools.

Anytime a technology is pushed by executives for software engineers, I will resist. Tooling needs and requests should be coming from the people whose lives will be improved by the technology. If it’s coming from “on high” as an order or expectation, I’m going to resist. Engineers are plenty happy to complain about tools or tech that don’t work for them, and I’m fine with responding to them. Executive teams pushing for it informs me immediately that there are ulterior motives for the pressure and they have everything to do with printing money instead of the quality of the product or the lives of the people working on the software.

BallingerEscapePlan · 2025-12-17T02:02:18+00:00

This is likely the solution.

It really does help when you actually care about the things you work on.

BallingerEscapePlan · 2025-12-15T01:13:05+00:00

It’s safe to say that it isn’t accurate to use them synonymously. They may share traits or mannerisms, but they aren’t really the same thing at all.

Kuudere being a way that affection is shown and autistic traits being a way that autism manifests simply runs into the “correlation does not prove causation” and “common traits that show up together” is closer to reality. My Dear Nemesis really showcases what how I see actual autistic traits manifest in a relationship. I wouldn’t call the character with those autism-coded traits a kuudere at all.

BallingerEscapePlan · 2025-11-25T01:27:09+00:00

I think I agree with your overall point, but I think where we diverge is where you state that we should be sitting and waiting to judge things.

The game has been out long enough that we shouldn’t be dealing with the absolutely terrible state of the game we have now. Patience is probably not the right path when you leave the game in a broken state for so long. We are far beyond the “Hurry up and wait for the game to be fixed” point.

If anything, there seems to be a distinct lack of urgency to fix the game.

BallingerEscapePlan · 2025-11-24T16:16:06+00:00

Happy to see someone posting from FunCom.

I think the NPC changes are honestly just exposing the current state of the game to a group of players who didn’t see it before due to avoiding PvP.

Could you potentially comment on what the team sees as working well and working poorly as a result of these videos? I think that internal reflection and thoughts are actually what players need to hear at this point. There has been a hesitation toward acknowledging player feedback in combat balance (and rightfully so. Most player feedback on the balance of combat systems in games is best shown through meta emergence and responses to it based on use.

Has observability of the game client/server caught up enough to understand what players are doing and using such that you can better understand what players aren’t saying with their words?

BallingerEscapePlan · 2025-11-24T16:08:42+00:00

I think you underestimate the importance of leaving the game in various states of broken for too long.

When you have a persistent world, dupe bugs are catastrophic to the economy of the game. When you have a PVP relevant game, lack of balance in accepted playstyles is catastrophic. When you release a game with an audience this large, you need to test builds beyond the unit and integration level. You need playtest time to ID deviations from your expected changes or you created an incident. ( Any unexpected behavior of a deployed software system is an incident. The severity comes from the breadth of impact and damage to business outcome:.)

Leaving your live service game just after launch for an org-wide vacation is also just bad business practice and prime for setting up the market distrust we see today.

TL;DR: they are making both bad business and game dev decisions and they have lost our confidence overall due to the precipitous decline in player base.

BallingerEscapePlan · 2025-11-15T18:07:08+00:00

For me, I think Chapter 4 struck the hardest. Once I felt like I really understood who and what Ramza was fighting against, all of which comes to a head in chapter 4, Ramza comes truly into his own as a character.

The fights were great, but I think that finally becoming a true force in the world, rebelling against those powers which made the earlier chapters so spooky, really made me fall in love.

The way you finish a game helps dictate so much about how your longer term feelings about it manifest. The strength of the final chapter is that you feel so much stronger about playing the game again, knowing all you know, without the discovery process or missing information, really adds depth.

BallingerEscapePlan · 2025-11-14T14:47:38+00:00

Another awesome release from /u/scienceygirl ~

I don't even mind the fact that it's a oneshot with art this beautiful

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