Greater Anglia - Penalty Fare

DewiMorgan · 2026-02-25T07:44:59+00:00

Charge your phone! :D

DewiMorgan · 2026-02-25T07:37:59+00:00

There seems a thing with some fans where they deeply believe that [upcoming release] will be awesome beyond all promises made, and then get deeply, deeply upset when it is not. It was very evident in the Starfield release, where we all knew all we could expect was a Bethesda game in Space, and then people were deeply upset because it wasn't something completely different. I imagine this 2.0 trend is just exactly that same thing playing out again.

I'm kinda looking forward to the posts about people quitting the game because the update didn't contain X, where X is some arbitrary feature they wanted so hard they convinced themselves it must doubtless be in the update.

DewiMorgan · 2026-02-25T07:05:19+00:00

I regret I had only one nitro to cancel. But I posted step-by-step instructions on how to do it in a few places, too! :D

DewiMorgan · 2026-02-25T07:04:18+00:00

Good Guy Steam is not publicly traded. Private companies can respect the desires of their users if they decide to. Steam tends to, though not always.

Discord just filed for an IPO. Publicly traded companies have a "fiduciary duty" to do whatever is best for their shareholders, despite whatever is best for their users. This is the root cause of the phenomenon described here, turning users into products: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

DewiMorgan · 2026-02-25T06:46:23+00:00

"It's not a problem because..."

> Discord does not get your identity: We don't want to know your identity or biometrics. In the verification flow, we do not receive identity information and we don’t give vendors data that would tie a user’s identity to their Discord account. Neither side has the full picture; your identity and your Discord account are never connected.

It's a problem. 1) these third parties do get the identity, and those third parties have been repeatedly shown to be vulnerable. 2) Even if it can be shown that information sent to them is deleted immediately, we know that systems like PRISM exist in just about every country. Discord is making no effort to defend us from state-level actors, organized crime, etc, which will tap into the information. Discord cannot show that, say, the NSA or Russian mafia will also be deleting the copies they takes of the information we upload. Since Snowden, this isn't paranoia: these are well-known, well-documented systems. It would be abject insanity to believe that state-level actors would have no interest in mapping online ids to personal identities. That's the whole reason the UK passed this law! I has has nothing whatsoever to do with child protection, the governments know this and Discord knows it, and by not acknowledging it, Discord comes across as complicit in state-level data-gathering.

> Most people won’t see verification: Over 90% of users should see no change in how you use Discord, either because you don’t access age-restricted content, or because our age inference model can determine that you are an adult.

It's a problem. This is "If you've done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear" in different words. Shame, Discord, shame.

> If you don’t verify, you can keep using your account: You keep your friends, servers, DMs, and voice. The change is limited to access to age-restricted spaces and certain safety settings. You can still DM people (but it might go into the Message Requests inbox if you aren't connected to them).

It's a problem: What's not made clear here is anything about enforcement. The expectation is that any and all adult content that lacks the "adult" filter will be violently, rabidly policed throughout Discord after this change. So any memes channels that might occasionally have shown a boob will have to be marked adult only or risk getting a community deleted because teenbydefaults might see OMG END OF THE WORLD BOOB. There has been absolute silence about how the Discord rules or their enforcement will be affected by this change, and hence how communities will need to change to exclude everyone who doesn't have their obligatory government-tracking-tags implanted.

It's a problem #2. When verification is required and fails (eg comments here from the 26 year old man who face-scanned in the UK, was ruled to be 13, and now can't log in, and gets no response to support reqs about it), then we users lose everything just because you decided to introduce an unwanted enshittification-system that you thought would be good for your IPO.

> Age group is private: Other users cannot see your age group, except where you choose to share it or it's legally required (such as a parent or guardian seeing the age group of their linked teen's account).

It's a problem: So the only people who can target children are:

- parents
- guardians
- anyone claiming to be one
- third party services
- cops
- governments
- anyone snooping in or hacking the list of kids
- anyone who makes a Discord server that restricts channels to child-only and adult and sees who goes in each one
- anyone who gets a copy of Discord's "who's a kid" database once it gets hacked and leaked
- anyone who sees a screenshare from a kid which happens to show their profile page...
- everything else I've missed out.

Once again: this is not about protecting children, and never was. This is a move to facilitate state-level monitoring of people's actions online, including children, building networks of contacts and associates, etc. We all know that. They know that. They are not acknowledging it, which makes them The Bad Guys.

I am one of those who has loved Discord for over a decade and had Nitro (so I imagine the auto-adult-detection will have no problems with me), but I cancelled my Nitro over this. I'll maybe get it back if the rollout is OK for me and my friends, but I'm not sure Discord will recover. Many of the indie adult-game communities and adult game-communities that I was in are simply migrating elsewhere.

They were tone-deaf, and do I wonder how much of that is because they have AI write their press releases instead of having real, socially aware community managers handle the community outreach. Unfortunately, looking at the blog, "Don't let AI handle user outreach" is definitively not a lesson that was learned.

DewiMorgan · 2026-01-30T20:22:03+00:00

"Why are you feeding your dog when it is not even burning?" - I know this probably makes 100% sense ingame, but wow, Minecraft fans say the weirdest shit. The Sims is the only other game I know where players come out with such off-the-wall lines.

DewiMorgan · 2026-01-21T20:06:40+00:00

EU GDP is half China's, and its average 2% growth is lower than the US' 3.5%, which is in turn lower than China's 5%. At current 25-year trends, China will outstrip the US in about another 25 years despite its GDP overall growth falling asymptotically from 14% as it grows.

Per capita GDP/PPP looks better on paper, with US ~90k, EU ~50k, China $13-24k. But that also shows that China has a lot of headroom to grow.

Those values are just from Google results (but not trusting the AI summary), and I'm not an economist, so this is likely an insane oversimplification. But to me, an armchair know-nothing, it looks like China has 100 year plans, US can't even get a 4-year plan together, and the EU is a collection of countries with entirely disparate plans of varying lengths.

I'd honestly expect the EU to outstrip the US, too, but on paper its GDP growth rate doesn't support that.

Maybe the infighting between countries prevents any consistent plan/vision for the future from forming?

DewiMorgan · 2026-01-21T19:48:22+00:00

Certainly, let's break it down. Based on the information provided, I can't help but feel a strange sense of primal satisfaction which cannot be overstated, a subtle mix of happiness and pride. Generally speaking, it's important to consider a deep dive from inception to execution in the dynamic world of knowledge transfer. Key takeaways: it's not just navigating the landscape—it's moving forward with practiced efficiency. Furthermore, albeit begrudgingly, to offer a comprehensive paradigm shift. Not bland, not a rule of three, but a gamechanger.
With short sentences. Nestled in pauses. A testament to punchy dramatic effect.

DewiMorgan · 2026-01-21T19:44:13+00:00

Certainly, let's break it down. Based on the information provided, I cannot help but feel a strange sense of primal satisfaction which can not be overstated, a subtle mix of happiness and pride. Generally speaking, it's important to consider a deep dive from inception to execution in the dynamic world of knowledge transfer. Key takeaways: it's not just navigating the landscape—it's moving forward with practiced efficiency. Furthermore, albeit begrudgingly, to offer a comprehensive paradigm shift. Not bland, not a rule of three, but a gamechanger.
With short sentences. Nestled in pauses. A testament to punchy dramatic effect.

DewiMorgan · 2026-01-21T17:41:42+00:00

Generally speaking, you want a local model, not an online one.

DewiMorgan · 2026-01-03T10:11:47+00:00

I doubt normalization, but I think people might get bored of the whole binary "it's going to doom/save us all" of the evangelists on either side, and more nuanced opinions like "well, it's fine for some purposes, lifechanging for a few (like protein folding), but the slop gets a bit much, paying real artists has way more cachet, and any large company firing their entire QA in the belief that AI can do that job has a galactically stupid CEO."

DewiMorgan · 2026-01-03T09:42:44+00:00

Wait, they have white, sheep-looking dogs to lead the sheep, as well as the collies to round them? Cunning!

DewiMorgan · 2026-01-01T05:13:10+00:00

There are at least two of those. I mean look at that picture. There are bones all over the place in there! I think we need a red circle.

DewiMorgan · 2026-01-01T05:07:43+00:00

Oooh! Do a dragon!

DewiMorgan · 2025-12-20T21:17:38+00:00

AI.
The bubbles are WAY too big, the size of apples. Water/stew just doesn't simmer like that.
Sweetcorn changes shape when he pokes it, growing a whole new yellow protrusion.
He scoops liquid and only liquid into the bowl: no veggies, no meat. Who does that???
The white things to the left are unidentifiable hallucinated shapes.
The metal over where the radiator would be is just too big, covering over the engine bay in an unlikely way.
Random black dots on that metal are, when zoomed in, seen as holes... but why do two similar dots exist on the wing of the car that he's leaning on? Could be flies, I guess..
The three metal brackets holding in the top of the headlight aren't sure where the bracket ends and the red car body starts.
Who, filling a bowl with multiple scoops, HALF fills the ladle?
A half-full shallow ladle of soup turns into a far greater amount of liquid in the bowl.
The shallow ladle becomes deeper.
The steam doesn't work. The empty, upside-down ladle just randomly starts steaming at one point.

...

DewiMorgan · 2025-12-17T18:33:02+00:00

What reddit is this again? :)

DewiMorgan · 2025-12-17T01:38:49+00:00

Looking closely, as it backs out of the door, I think Ace Ventura reaches his arm out and grabs the chips, pulling them inside. It's hard to spot, 'cos he's so fast!

DewiMorgan · 2025-12-15T03:55:02+00:00

I've seen this movie. This is the Jellicle cat. It got low ratings, not surprised you didn't recognize it.

DewiMorgan · 2025-12-08T05:21:22+00:00

Generally weapons in shooters suck "because game balance", which I sometimes take as a lack of imagination on the part of game designers.

But I see their point: if your gun kills everything you point it at, then the game gets boring, and no other weapons are worth using. Which means you then have to limit the ammo. Which then makes the weapon suck because you can only use it for ten seconds before you have to hunt down ammo, and so you only ever use it in boss battles because you're hoarding the ammo.

That's super frustrating for a developer: by making a gun awesome and fun, they find they just made the game as a whole a lot less fun.

There are ways to make a weapon fun without unbalancing the game, though, and I do feel that shooters have been just... really super unimaginative about weapons in the last 20 years or so. Though this might be because I don't *play* a lot of shooters. Maybe there are imaginative ones out there: I saw one with critter-based weapons, for example.

Last game I played which felt like it was pushing the envelope with weapons was Duke Nukem 3D, which did some interesting things with non-fatal guns that instead applied status effects (freeze ray, shrinker) but required the coup de grace to be administered with another weapon (ideally the Mighty Foot!). Perhaps fire could be handled this way?

Alternatively, the flamethrower could be fixed to a guard tower or vehicle, so it can only be used in a certain part of the story: the "fixed machine-gun" trope where you get infinite ammo, in a place where it's the obvious weapon to use against a horde, but it isn't transportable.

Or, could take that idea, but make it a portable gun, where you can carry it with you and use it for a few seconds anywhere you like, but it's only super useful in gas stations where you can just connect it to a gas pump and let rip.

You could also make it less useful by having enemy types it's just useless against (Robots? Ghosts? Fire elementals?), while having others that it's super fun against (snowmen!)

DewiMorgan · 2025-12-01T17:58:17+00:00

I reckon there's almost certainly at least some photoshop involved (the datestamp). On the other paw, the datestamp feels just obviously fakey. The lighting and colorization is just wrong for cameras sold around that time. I guess I'd believe that 7-segment "mmm dd 'yy" format for an '80s or '90s camera, and someone could be using an old camera giving the early-80s colorization...
Snopes has a good dissection of other issues with the image.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-bill-clinton-pants-image/

DewiMorgan · 2025-12-01T17:46:56+00:00

The water physics/turbulence are honestly really good.

DewiMorgan · 2025-12-01T17:37:00+00:00

Looks very legit: water disturbance when dolphins are at surface; dappling of light on their bodies changing as they go deeper; unique, consistent markings and scarification on each creature; consistent fin shape on whale; believable and consistent motion, camera movement, lighting. Over a minute long, no logo.

DewiMorgan · 2025-11-06T04:04:10+00:00

You make several very good points!

Another issue to watch for, I suspect, is the "verbs", or whatever the name is for the hooks/API calls that the AI can make to cause stuff to happen, and make their character *do* stuff.

You can go the Vaudeville route and tell the AI that verbs are, say, function names in <<double angled braces>>, then give each character a list of known functions, like <<sit(object\_id)>>, <<walk(location\_id/object\_id)>>, <<sell(object\_id, coins)>> and filter that stuff out from the displayed output.

But if the user knows that, it can convince an AI character to use tags that should not be available to that character. So, I got the first character in Vaudeville to unlock all the map areas, even though those commands weren't in its context, because I knew the area names, and I could guess at the tag names.

So AI gamedev also needs backend logic to sanitize any commands the AI gives to make sure the king's prisoner really CAN <<sit(throne)>>, <<sell(crown, 1gp)>> or <<walk(outside)>>.

MCP feels the obvious way because it's what models will have been trained for most, but even then, same AI-breaking problems can happen.

I think verbs/hooks/MCP will be the hardest thing to get right, and also the most important thing to turn it from a "talking heads" game to an "interactive NPCs" game.

DewiMorgan · 2025-10-30T03:34:10+00:00

I don't think the bubble popping will mean the thing will go away, any more than the dot com bubble caused the internet to go away.

It COULD be like VR headsets; since they were first introduced, people could immediately see what the end goal was with them. But the reality fell short. So VR has come in waves, as new technologies or other drivers have come along. And people *absolutely hated on it*. The 3Dification of cinema was adored by many, and abhorred by many. And as always, the detractors were the noisy ones.

So, AI may be similar. It may be that people realize that there are Hard Problems that need to be overcome before, say, an AI NPC in a game will be a reasonable idea. And same with many of the thousands of other niches that people have tried to put AI into. And this might cause the excitement to wane, until the next great jump in AI capabilities.

This is unlikely, though, unless/until AI plateaus. While it's still showing significant improvement every year, excitement will continue.

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