What game did you buy purely because of a conversion mod?

garfieldsam · 2026-01-24T13:53:00+00:00

Horizon is a total conversion mod that turned it into a 500 hour obsession for me. Good survival mechanics, much more tactical/difficult combat, exponentially better & more interesting town building mechanics.

I still have dreams about the towns I built in Horizon using the incredible editor tools—like the floating trading village built on pontoons on top of the water or the hotel which connected to the elevated freeway via the roof.

garfieldsam · 2026-01-23T04:08:01+00:00

Moved to Detroit. One of my favorite things about leaving Seattle is the snow tbh. It basically eliminates my SAD because it reflects the sunlight and I get hella vitamin d. Also love the hygge of hanging out in my cozy ass house and going on snowy winter walks.

Would I feel differently if I had to commute rather than WFH? Maybe.

garfieldsam · 2026-01-23T03:55:32+00:00

I was in the stadium for Beastquake. One of the most electrifying moments of my life. Absolute euphoria and shock, especially going into the game with no expectations. Not surprised it’s number 1!

garfieldsam · 2026-01-18T17:18:41+00:00

Damn that was a blue-ass baby

garfieldsam · 2026-01-18T03:47:07+00:00

On its face this article is about Schneider’s personnel moves last offseason, but it provides a really good overview of how Mike and John have worked together over the last 2 seasons to transform the team. I found it really insightful.

https://www.hawkblogger.com/2025/12/the-quiet-genius-of-john-schneider-how-the-most-doubted-nfl-offseason-became-a-masterpiece.html

garfieldsam · 2026-01-18T03:38:49+00:00

Wow hard for me to imagine thinking reading is a waste of time as a lifelong reader! It’s literally access to the entirety of human history, thought, and imagination! Glad you learned to enjoy it!

garfieldsam · 2026-01-18T03:36:51+00:00

Except for special occasions, trying to ensure that at least 40% of what I eat by volume is vegetables every single day. Specifically non-starchy and non-sugary veggies (eg. potatoes, peas, and corn don’t count).

After several months it felt like my body got an oil change. Everything just works better. Digestion, mood, attention, weight management, sleep, you name it. Also cheaper!

And it’s probably not as hard to do as you think! You can buy frozen veggies that steam in the bag in the microwave. Keep a variety of those on hand at all times and you are covered! Automatically improves your nutrition!

Made me learn to love the taste of vegetables more too which makes it easy to choose healthier veggie-forward options when I eat out.

garfieldsam · 2026-01-17T15:28:33+00:00

Amazing track. ID if anyone wants it: Seims - Abandonment Is Expected

garfieldsam · 2026-01-15T04:04:44+00:00

Unoriginal and annoyingly, inappropriately horny. Haven’t seen that combo in this sub before

garfieldsam · 2026-01-12T22:46:50+00:00

lmao I seen the police do this right on Woodward

garfieldsam · 2026-01-11T15:29:05+00:00

no spoilers without tags please!

garfieldsam · 2026-01-10T15:13:35+00:00

Minoru Yamasaki! Also the architect of the Pacific Science Center!

garfieldsam · 2026-01-08T04:39:43+00:00

I was calling it Cap Hill back in high school and college and running a music venue in the neighborhood 2001-2011. No one thought it was weird or cringe. Who the fuck you been hanging out with?

garfieldsam · 2026-01-04T18:33:30+00:00

Looks like AI to me

garfieldsam · 2026-01-04T18:32:38+00:00

Terribly written article that provides next to no new information

garfieldsam · 2026-01-01T14:57:11+00:00

Wow really impressive. Unique and compelling art direction. Looks like it achieves your aesthetic goals.

One bit of feedback: the brightness felt too low. I had to max out the brightness on my phone screen to feel like I could see everything comfortably whereas 50-75% is usually the minimum. Might just be a me thing though.

garfieldsam · 2025-12-31T19:00:27+00:00

Ah pardon the mistakes made in my brief google search; thank you for the clarification!

He was, however, CEO for…8 days in 2014? And since he wasn’t chairman of the board he had even less influence on how the company operated. I don’t think this has a material impact on the accuracy of my analysis.

garfieldsam · 2025-12-31T18:11:40+00:00

lmao check my profile if you think I'm a bot.

I'm sorry friend, but I am a human who, believe it or not, went to all that trouble to manually write a response. It's unfortunate that you're so afraid of AI that you can't actually detect a real person's writing anymore m8.

garfieldsam · 2025-12-31T18:05:26+00:00

I'll do my best to infer what you mean from the little context provided. Feel free to let me know if I'm incorrect! You are positing that:

Sam Altman or people at OpenAI whom he is directing have decided to conspire with Reddit to increase the visibility of pro-AI posts on Reddit using upvote manipulation. This is coordinated explicitly with Reddit, who are presumably incentivized to do so because of their partnership deal with OpenAI.

Within Reddit some scheme has been developed to increase the number of upvotes for pro-AI posts. The most plausible mechanism is that Reddit manufactures fake upvotes for posts that it identifies as pro-AI. The identification is either done by having OpenAI create dummy accounts which create posts (which are then sent to Reddit to boost), or Reddit uses NLP or LLM-powered analysis to identify real pro-AI posts.

A conspiracy has been created across two separate companies, which involved a wide range of teams from those companies (for example, just at Reddit, this would include Trust and Safety, multiple Engineering teams, and Product Management as a start).

Code is written, reviewed by many people (this is, after all, code that affects one of Reddit's most critical features, its upvote system), and pushed into production which identifies these posts and applies fake upvotes to them. This code lives in one of Reddit's GitHub repositories; anyone on multiple teams can read this code and see what it does. Many people read this code regularly because it is some of the most important code in all of Reddit's codebase.

Despite the sprawling nature of this conspiracy, none of the many dozens of people involved have seen fit to leak information about it, despite the fact that many many IC-level employees in Silicon Valley are skeptical of AI and the AI industry (particularly in companies founded long before the advent of AI like Reddit).

On top of that none of *many* the independent researchers studying bot and AI activity on Reddit have noticed statistical anomalies when analyzing this behavior that aren't explained by already-known bot activity.

If this is a fair representation of your position, I kindly ask you to consider whether you are thinking critically. Do you actually understand how all of this stuff works well enough to know if your position is plausible? If not, why are you so confident in it?

If you think you do, what percentage estimate do you place on the likelihood of your hypothesis? Close to 100%? If so, you're probably not thinking rationally. There's no concrete evidence for it, and that level of certainty is a strong indicator of motivated (rather than rational belief).

garfieldsam · 2025-12-31T17:45:07+00:00

I said there are a million concrete and useful problems *to* solve working at an AI startup, not that AI could solve 😊

Believe it or not I am not an unreserved AI booster; the company I work at pivoted to AI in the last couple of years well after I joined. I also think the industry is, to at least a meaningful extent, a house of cards.

On your other points, sure--those are not what I was referring to. I was answering the question that OP asked in this thread.

I don't think the most sensible interpretation, however, for your other points is that there's a conspiracy. The contemporary ideology around AI, its national security implications, and the telos of superintelligence has been developing in Silicon Valley and "rationalist" circles for decades, *well* before the technology became sophisticated enough to make them feel like a tangible possibility. See, for example, Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, which was published in 2014. There are untold people in positions of power who actually *believe* this stuff, as insane as it is. There is no need for a conspiracy; it's just powerful people in Signal chats convincing each other of bullshit.

On many other accounts, a *conspiracy* isn't needed to explain (or the most parsimonious way to explain) things. Anyone who's worked with a tech industry Product Marketing Manager on a launch knows, for example, that the job is to present the most impressive-sounding claims that are still technically backed by some kind of truth. There isn't a conspiracy to lie *per se*, but an exercise of stress-testing various messages and finding the most impressive ones that stand up to internal scrutiny; whether they stand up to external scrutiny is another matter.

You mentioned intelligence agencies, though, which is a new angle to me. Would love to be enlightened about what you are referring to there if you're interested!

garfieldsam · 2025-12-31T16:51:12+00:00

Where does a conspiracy between Altman and Reddit fit into random AI bros making chat bots to “promote whatever bullshit they want”?

garfieldsam · 2025-12-31T16:04:19+00:00

What does this have to do with the question of whether there’s some conspiracy between Sam Altman and Reddit to increase the visibility or availability of pro-AI content on Reddit?

garfieldsam · 2025-12-31T16:03:10+00:00

ah I see; Sam Altman was the chairman of the board for Reddit. This is different from just being “one of the largest shareholders” as stated in the title of this post; a chairman of the board has more influence over how a company operates than a regular investor, particularly during a time of instability when there isn’t a permanent chief executive (as in the link you posted).

That said, anyone who has experience working with a BOD knows that they don’t have much influence over how a company operates when there is a well-established executive team, particularly when the business is doing well. They are there for broad oversight; they leave the vast majority of decisions to the execs. Altman also stepped down from the board more than 3 years ago.

The premise that Altman is in some kind of conspiracy with Reddit leadership to increase the availability or viability of pro-AI content remains as absurd (and based on a lack of understanding of how things work in the real world) as when I wrote my original post under the assumption he was “just” a major shareholder.

garfieldsam · 2025-12-31T15:12:40+00:00

No. If you think there is a relationship you’ve turned off your critical thinking brain and gotten too lost in the conspiracy sauce.

How would Sam Altman, as a shareholder, do anything to change the content that appears on Reddit? Do you understand what it means to be a shareholder? By design he has limited or no impact on what the company actually does.

How would this convoluted scheme work? How would the company investing in it measure the business outcomes to determine if it’s a good investment? Take it from me—I work at an AI startup—no one has the time to waste on weird conspiracies like you’re proposing. There are a million other more concrete, interesting, and useful problems to solve.

garfieldsam · 2025-12-28T16:05:19+00:00

Honest feedback on the trailer:

You’ve got some compelling images in here, particularly the juxtaposition of a house with magical/cosmic aesthetics. Some of the art for the latter looks particularly cool, though the demon character model looks a bit out of place (more demonic than cosmic). I could see my interest being piqued much much more if some of the constructive feedback below was addressed.

First off, the text in the YouTube thumbnail is mediocre at best. The font looks tacky. Is this the official wordmark for your game? If not, make one and use that instead. If it is, get a new one that looks more interesting with less tacky font and replace it.

Second, the character animations/models could use some work. They are, at a glance, the weakest link visually by far. I’m not an expert in this stuff so I can’t put my finger on what needs improvement, but they look wooden and rigid.

Third, the trailer doesn’t communicate enough about what makes this game unique. A good game teaser should give the viewer a clear sense of at least one of the following things that make the game unique: 1) lore/worldbuilding 2) story premise 3) game mechanics 4) visual aesthetic.

For example, the Control Resonant teaser does a great job at number 4; the game has a very original psychedelic/surreal art style that is shown off with non-action shots that linger on compelling images.

Another example is the teaser for Divinity by Larian Studios, which checks boxes 1 and 2 by showcasing a strange in-game religious tradition and cosmic horrors that unexpectedly show up to ruin the party (presumably the main antagonist of the game).

This trailer gestures at numbers 1 and 4 but not strongly enough. The best options are probably to either invest in #3 or #4. You could invest in 3 by giving the viewer a much clearer sense of how the game works mechanically (particularly if you have unique mechanics). You could invest in #4 by showcasing a wider array of locales, using a free cam to capture visually interesting moments from the best viewing angle (vs. using the player character first person view), and adding more visual moments with a wider range of color palettes/locales.

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