There's an old saying. "Anyone can build a bridge that stands up. It takes an engineer to design a bridge that will barely stand up."

Some may say that the hangman was clearly incompetent. Others might say he was actually the most skilled at his craft on this Earth, simply....optimizing for a different variable.

I mean, eventually, he can improve by repetition if nothing else. I mean, wasn't he objectively one of the most experienced executioners in modern history?

That will not happen with a Democrat in office. Still probably worth voting for them in the general for harm reduction. But don't kid yourself. The next Democratic president will appoint a Republican as attorney general and FBI head. Their cabinet will be half centrist Democrats, 1/4 progressive, and 1/4 Republican.

Putting faith in Democrats to bring justice to Republicans is literally believing in magic. It's completely divorced from history. You might as well put your faith in a literal angel coming down from heaven and personally hauling Trump kicking and screaming into Hell. Both events are equally likely.

Ford and Carter let Nixon's crimes slide. Bush I and Clinton let Reagan's crimes slide. Obama let Bush II's crimes slide. And Biden appointed a Republican attorney general who initially refused to do anything, acceded only under Congressional pressure, then slow-walked things until Trump could run out the clock.

Again, Democrats are better in terms of general harm reduction, but it's like comparing two plagues. If you gave me the choice, I would vote for another big Covid pandemic over a global Ebola outbreak, but that doesn't mean Covid isn't still a plague.

We have three clear examples of cartoonishly corrupt Republicans committing crimes left and right. Dems are 0 out of 3.

I'm a scientist. I go buy the evidence observable to my eyes. I see Democrats are 0/3 for holding criminal Republican administrations accountable. That's the evidence I'm basing my conclusion on - actual historical observation.

Do you have any evidence you would like to bring up? Because all you've said so far is "trust me bro."

JD Vance? Locked the fuck up without charges forever. Clarence Thomas? Locked the fuck up without charges. John Roberts, Drunken McRapey Kavanaugh? Locked the fuck up without charges.

Yeah I suppose that did get off the rails there. Forgot this all started with, "JD Vance? Locked the fuck up without charges forever. Clarence Thomas? Locked the fuck up without charges. John Roberts, Drunken McRapey Kavanaugh? Locked the fuck up without charges." The conversation did start with discussing cabinet officials. So, I suppose you're right in that regard. Somehow I interpreted it as president specifically.

I said metaphorically telling a story. Chess is literally a battlefield, but even physical sports focus on certain categories of human movement and form. They encourage certain body types. They require certain movements. Body language is a form of communication. The shape of your body tells stories of your ancestors and the story of what you've done and how you've treated it. There is poetry in body langue. It can tell a story. There are many kinds of stories. Not all of them are narrative. Some are metaphor. Every sport has its own vibe to it. Every game has its own feel. A video game is the creation of a human being(s). Another human being wants you to share an experience, whether game mechanic or literal plot narrative. Even a game with no plot at all still has heart, still has a soul. It represents another human being's expression of what they believe to be fun, enjoyable, and wondrous.

That is a deeply human form of communication. Even if it is entirely nonverbal. Every game played and loved represents the opening of one human heart unto another. And I find it morally reprehensible to be tricked into having that kind of experience with a machine.

I feel the same for most all creative arts.

That seems like the type of thing that would still need to be administered very carefully by an expert dentist. Look at the entire field of orthodontics or the product category of braces to see what happens when teeth grow in in the wrong number, position, or orientation. In theory, anyone can perform surgery on themselves with a scalpel they sterilize on their stove top. Very few attempt that for damn good reasons.

Sorry, I was talking specifically about presidents themselves.

If NPCs can be dynamically fleshed out using LLMs, why not.

Sorry for the essay, but your "why not" got me thinking. I would argue it shouldn't be done, both for gameplay and safety reasons.

The application I see of this is something like city population in RPGs. Looks at Skyrim. Canonically, the cities of Skyrim were supposed to have populations in the thousands. But that wasn't possible to develop with realistic resources, and instead, they hand crafted a large, but still reasonable, number of NPCs to populate each town. It was enough to make the place feel like a functional city, but the cities themselves were physically small enough to make it all work. And, of course, like any RPG, after awhile you max out the dialogue tree of any NPC. This does cause you to lose the immersion.

So you might be tempted, "let's use generative AI to populate a truly vast metropolis. Let's build cities with thousands of NPCs."

You could try it, but it's already been tried. It's called Starfield. I have a weird relationship to that game. I find the plot vapid and empty. And there is no joy in exploration. There are innumerable planets, but each of them is filled with procedurally generated assets. Every planet is vast, fully and utterly empty at the same time. There's tons of bases, landmarks, flora and fauna to explore, but they're all repeats of the same thing, nothing like the vast yet still handcrafted worlds of Skyrim and Oblivion. There's some variety, but after playing for awhile, you see beyond the veil and the patterns become obvious. At that point, exploration loses all joy. I have a complicated relationship to Starfield mostly because despite hating much of it, I still have around 200 hours in it. Though that was mostly because I'm a sucker for factory games and got really into the base builder. The base builder, notably, doesn't rely on those procedurally assets for its core functioning. The parts I like best about Starfield were the handmade parts.

It's tempting to use LLMS to populate a vast RPG world. But soon enough, you will see behind the veil. Sure, they won't repeat the same catch phrases, but after awhile all the NPCs will start sounding the same. Instead of getting disillusioned because all the NPCs repeat the same 5 lines, you'll instead become disillusioned because they all sound like Claude or ChatGPT.

And worse, even if this doesn't happen, even if it never gets old, that's in some cases worse. Imagine you took this to the ultimate conclusion. Not only do you generate a mountain of dialog options for all your NPCs, you also embed an active LLM prompt window into the game. And let's magically assume that LLMs get good enough to never hallucinate and to always give unique and relevant answers.

Such a game might be legitimately dangerous to the mental health of anyone using it. People already get addicting to immersive games. Take a game as addictive as WoW at its prime. Now fill it with NPCs, each the most engaging conversation partner you've ever had in your life, each with infinite patience and willing to talk with you for as long as you want, at whatever you want, who will never question your ideas or find you at fault for anything. Each as unique as people in the real world are from each other.

That right there is a dangerous machine. That is not something anyone should build. Immersive games are already addictive to many. People are already falling in love with chatbots. Combine them together, and you're going to ruin a lot of innocent lives.

Games are ultimately about telling a story, through literal plot narrative or metaphor. I like it when people tell stories. I don't want to be told a story by a damned machine.

Horse horse racing. Via elaborate saddle arrangements, a small jockey rides atop a small horse. That small horse then rides atop a large horse. It's all the animal cruelty of regular horse racing, but squared.

Honestly, should there be a condition on this? Like perhaps, the UK is only allowed to rejoin if a referendum is approved by a supermajority of the population? Really. What's to stop the UK from see-sawing again and starting this whole mess all over again? The surest way to prevent that is to require a referendum with 2/3 majority approval. This ensures that EU membership is popular, and thus likely to be more durable. It is hard to get a 2/3 majority on anything.

Or perhaps some other mechanism could be proposed. How do you avoid the risk of the UK just doing this all over again?

You’re not comming out of that bath sober.

I don't think you're coming out of that bath at all. My money's on "instant heart attack."

I mean, I suppose this is at a minimum more ethical than conventional horse racing. Right to any kind of dignity aside, at the very least yours seems to present little risk of injury to the horse. Now, you would probably want the horses trained to just go rag doll when picked up. But could you train the horse to do that ethically? That seems so counter to a horse's natural instincts that I imagine it might be impossible to train without some serious animal cruelty. But, then again, I know nothing about horse training. Maybe there's someone out there who could figure out how to train that behavior through non-violent, reward-based conditioning methods, or other ethical training models.

lovely!

It's not inefficient, it's extraordinarily efficient.

There are efficiencies and then there are relative efficiencies. You could design a combustion engine that used its intake air very efficiently, but as our supply of atmospheric oxygen is effectively limitless, it would be completely irrelevant. No one is ever going to care how efficient their car is at managing its oxygen use.

Posting images of text is not cheap in terms of computer resources, but it's extraordinarily efficient in terms of human time. A quick screen shot, a box to select, and you're done. Sure, you could just as quickly copy the text of a tweet or other message, but you would also be cutting out important details. If you want to include the source's username, the site it came from, the profile picture, etc., each of these has to be gathered separately. Then they have to be pasted into a text entry box, as well as any images. Oh, and it won't actually end up being formatted like it was on the original site.

People post text as images for the exact same reason we invented computers in the first place - human convenience and time savings. If you want to post text that preserves its original context and source, it is almost always easier to just post a screen shot than it is to manually copy all that information over piecemeal. Yes, posting the text directly is more resource efficient, but that's pretty irrelevant in 2026. You do have points on the translation though. And of course it does make it harder for screen readers.

But there's your answer. Convenience.

Beautiful!

Why the change? August 6, 1945.

For kids growing up in car-dependent suburbia, outside does not exist. If you can't drive, you're trapped in your home, unless you want to just go for a walk among endless identical winding cookie cutter streets.

Where is a kid in suburbia supposed to go that's actually within walking distance? I suppose they could just hang out on the street. But homeowners seeing a group of teen loitering on the sidewalk in front of their home will call the cops. Hell, sometimes just walking around is enough to get a group of teens harassed by police.

A lot of those places ban unaccompanied minors.