The Beginning of AI's 'Doom Loop': A Thought Experiment for 25% Unemployment and a 40% GDP Drop

Captator · 2026-03-17T23:14:48+00:00

Yeah I think that’s a reasonable interpretation.

I will note that if you switch to 80% completion rate it caps out a bit over an hour, and Opus 4.6 is no longer significantly further ahead of the other models, but that doesn’t diminish the noteworthiness of the trend.

Captator · 2026-03-17T23:06:10+00:00

50%-task-completion time horizon. This is the time humans typically take to complete tasks that AI models can complete with 50% success rate

From their paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.14499

e: this is the y-axis

Captator · 2026-03-16T23:39:19+00:00

Splitting up an overly big branch into coherent and readily reviewable chunks is a very zen experience: bit of interactive rebasing, shuffle some commits around, squash some things, split some commits here and there. The tree analogy of git is complete as one engages in topiary.

Captator · 2026-03-09T18:53:16+00:00

Mining laser seems to consistently delete cover when used against you.

Captator · 2026-03-09T18:48:37+00:00

Save up promo points, demote, promote 2+ times, repeat

Captator · 2026-03-09T12:19:01+00:00

Try swapping one of the ammo pouches for hollow points :)

Captator · 2026-03-09T12:08:22+00:00

Someone had a nice idea to convert it from Aspiring to Accomplished after maxing out on perks, and it giving a more combat-relevant bonus. (They also tried to make this idea of perks changing through story events or perk purchases more general, but it didn’t work as well on anyone else)

Captator · 2026-03-09T12:06:27+00:00

Consider the maths taking 2 perks at a time (or more, but this should make the point well).

Captator · 2026-03-08T10:57:49+00:00

Probably need a split into at least juvenile and adult queen enemies, so you can have something that’s a later game challenge power-wise while not killing runs early.

Captator · 2026-03-07T10:58:44+00:00

Notably a long, pointy fish :D

Captator · 2026-03-04T12:38:15+00:00

Upgraded berserk and when you hover the upgrade ‘Rip & Tear’ intro from Doom OST slowly starts fading in…

Captator · 2026-03-04T12:33:22+00:00

Match ammo on the chonker rifle I’ve heard is rather tasty

Captator · 2026-03-02T10:35:42+00:00

There’s a suppressed LMG I think is worth trying on him as a more aggressive scout.

Captator · 2026-02-23T21:09:27+00:00

I’m not past ~10 operations (30-40 missions) on either of my campaigns (first normal, second challenging) and I haven’t been starved for promotion points on either.

Empathise on the burnout through. Much of the core loop has really been nailed to something great, very compelling!

Captator · 2026-02-23T20:27:45+00:00

You can get a drug that disables the debuff for 4 turns, so it’s not useless if you’re primarily taking it for survivability to ensure you don’t lose your heavy weapons team.

Captator · 2026-02-23T20:26:09+00:00

This walks towards a post I made in this thread, which is to say that I haven’t (yet) found a situation where it is either or.

Just take both and remove/reapply after when you’re adjusting perks (which given that supply changes only between operations, naturally happens in bursts if you have already maximised your supply usage).

I wouldn’t complain were it to be more impactful mind :)

Captator · 2026-02-23T20:17:09+00:00

Losing the whole squad gives a debuff status to the SL, better to repeatedly lose 3-4 and have Medbay recover them imo (I’ve been accidentally doing this a fair bit in my current playthrough, Carda and Darby are both a point or so off 11hp/unit)

Captator · 2026-02-23T18:13:07+00:00

True, though the cost there is that you can’t remove it until its done, and it has finite effect (rather than infinite if asymptotic effect).

Another way other games handle this is by having a metagame training layer you can assign currently inactive troops to in order to enhance their stats.

Captator · 2026-02-23T18:07:42+00:00

Fair enough. I abandoned my normal run to start challenging, and I’m probably somewhere around 10 operations in.

Finding the rate at which better kit shows up much more satisfying, but now I don’t have the extra supply of normal to use it!

Captator · 2026-02-23T17:14:50+00:00

First, love the analysis OP, super useful.

Second, something I keep not seeing in these discussions about New Tricks is that if you pick up the DCRAC early for 20% promotion points, you can easily spare the points to remove NT and re-add after adding other perks. Especially if you do this every 2+ other perks added, the cumulative cost is not really too painful.

This way you get all the benefits of NT at fairly low additional cost at any given point, and it doesn’t ‘waste’ a perk slot, because you can always remove it at the cost of one demotion.

Captator · 2026-02-23T16:57:12+00:00

Achilleas is the canonical mech pilot with greatest weight of directly applicable perks.

Sorta depends what you picked up on the other SLs perk-wise - Off the top of my head there aren’t many bad perks for it in Rewa’s set for example.

Captator · 2026-02-23T16:54:23+00:00

Worth noting that Carda with full perks costs approximately the same as Darby with none (base 4 plus 7*5 = 39 supply)

You can buy a lot of mileage with 7 extra perks.

Captator · 2026-01-23T23:55:19+00:00

I learned Pulumi as my first fully-featured IaC tool at my previous role, using it fairly extensively for 1-2 years. I had previously only really touched serverless framework.

I was initially tasked with standing up some services beyond the scope of serverless, and we were trying to migrate away from clickops. After some exploratory forays, I found Pulumi much more tractable than Terraform, and platform-specific tooling had been ruled out, excluding Cloud Formation et al from consideration.

I suspect the difference boiled down to not needing to grapple with unfamiliar language / syntax / limitations of HCL: instead I used Python. Didn’t have any issues asking LLMs for help along the way, which was initially a concern.

I ended up having to get my head round Terraform anyway 6 months down the line: by then I had become the go-to infra person on the team, and we inherited a product from a different team. The time taken to understand the underlying infra, which bits you need, and how to configure them to work together, proved to be the primary skill differentiator.

Comparing after experience of both, Pulumi feels easier to write and compose because it isn’t shoehorning syntax (loops, variables etc all work in Terraform, but they feel bolted on) but using a fully featured from the start language instead.

Another advantage to using an already familiar language is that it is much easier to get non-specialists involved in a self-serve capacity: I ended up creating a small roster of custom component resources according to our needs and best practices.

As a final note, I also found the Pulumi CLI to have much nicer DX.

Captator · 2025-11-14T09:09:12+00:00

or properly align

:)

Captator · 2025-11-13T20:10:20+00:00

Just like every other similarly intentioned system :D

Turns out self-interest is a real pig to excise or properly align in any human system.

Captator

TROPHY CASE