It's not really clear what their gameplan is. From the outside, it looks like they're asleep at the wheel. Qwen/Deepseek/Kimi are crushing them from the cheap-and-open side, and they're not remotely competitive with Mythos/Sol or even plain-vanilla Opus on the "premium" tier.

Gemini does actually have its uses, but they're very very marginal and niche.

From day one everybody was saying that Google would eventually capture the AI market, but it looks more remote than ever. Maybe Hassabis' personal inclination towards AI-for-science, and physics/chemistry in particular -- as opposed to consumer AI and coding AI -- has hurt them commercially.

Thing is, nothing was added to the game's aesthetic. No artist or designer put, as it were, his own stamp on the game's designs or environments. It was strictly generic and derivative. So by the time it came out I had seen it all a million times before. It could not have been less original, less inspired.

Today the all-time record in Austria was broken with 40.8°C (105.4°F) in Vienna.

> https://www.krone.at/4242196

> https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c78gn8zvrx4o

I'm near Graz, in Austria, where we're also in the middle of a drought and in truth I can't remember a summer as hot as this one...

The Deus Ex character designs, environment designs, and armor designs were also much less conventional.

I think that it's fair to call CP2077 aesthetically uninspired. It copied wholesale from the conventional and well-established aesthetic of the 2005-2015 period, without even changing anything. The end result is perfectly generic and looks like "art by committee" or "the path of least resistance."

> https://tacticalneuralimplant.tumblr.com/archive/2013/4

> https://cyberpunktech.tumblr.com/archive/2015/8

Aesthetically, what the game did was literally the very definition of "nothing new" and "uninspired." It wasn't bad, but they definitely weren't pushing any new angles or visions.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution got around this by making gunplay genuinely dangerous, especially to your enemies. (Okay, much-maligned boss fights aside...)

In CP2077, the majority of enemies were just bullet-sponges, though. It was frankly terrible.

And, yeah, the world was disappointingly empty and lifeless. I don't think that the aesthetics were bad -- the game hewed closely to the fairly generic 2005-2015 "cyberpunk" tumblr aesthetic, and didn't do anything too interesting or take too many chances, but it was okay for all that. The setting was just vacant and boring, though.

An infinite/unbounded universe can literally be modeled by a single random infinite sequence, though. Even a random binary sequence. Think about it: Every logical structure, every pattern, must recur infinitely many times. A complete description of our universe, also, will be among them.

> Cause-and-Effect in the real world is actually aggregate multiple causes giving rise to multiple effects and so trying to follow a single cause to effect presupposes you can have knowledge of every single parameter (i.e. nothing hidden) in all the causes and the same for all the effects.

This is not a real objection, though.

Consider this: Let's say you have a physical model of the solar system and you want to specify the position of Venus to fantastically high accuracy, absolute or near-absolute precision. First, you'd have to take into account the position of every body in the solar system, then you would need to fold in the influence of nearby stars, then the whole galaxy, then the full stress-energy content of the observable universe -- and beyond that our notions of "position" themselves break down. In our universe, everything is in principle simulatable, but no finite agent can ever measure or compute to arbitrary precision.

So you can't say "arbitrary precision can't be measured, thus the universe is unsimulatable in principle" because the first statement there is trivial and the second doesn't really follow and is still far out of reach.

> For many cases it may not matter eg. all our technology today, but in some very important cases it does eg. Consciousness.

Consciousness is the most common objection, and yet there's absolutely nothing to suggest that it isn't simulatable. Hence the enduring popularity of "the universe isn't real and we're post-singularity ancestor simulation" theories, and similar. They're popular precisely because there's nothing to disprove them, and it's not even clear that they can be disproved.

> https://www.edisonresearch.com/the-true-crime-consumer-repor...

But it's absolutely true that the internet-based tribe called the "TCC" -- the true crime community -- is a hotbed of severe mental illness and moral depravity. It's a very young-skewing demographic, too. You can think of it as Fandom for killers. I monitor my son's internet activity in large part to ensure that he's not exposing himself to it, and I would view any exposure to the TCC as the reddest of red flags.

This is emphatically not the case, though! Not only does he not deny any sense of hope, he dwells on his hope. He practically lives on it.

I'll quote from the book:

"There were two other things about which I was always thinking: the dawn and my appeal. . .

"Then all day there was my appeal to think about. I made the most of this idea, studying my effects so as to squeeze out the maximum of consolation. . .

"I gave myself leave, to consider the other alternative; that my appeal was successful. And then the trouble was to calm down that sudden rush of joy racing through my body and even bringing tears to my eyes."

The prison scenes mostly concern how he alternates between clinging to hope and distracting his mind. He merely claims to lose hope in the book's very last paragraph, and imagines a spectacular public execution. (Something else that's quite weird in itself, as the French banned public executions in 1939 and the book takes place in the 1940s.)

> I think the first part was an exploration of the absurd hero's life, and the second part was more of the reaction to the absurd hero by society.

This is by no means clear, as I don't think that Mersault is a well-defined "absurd hero" (VERY subtle differences in framing, and more introspective narration, would have you believe that he's the perfect bourgeois citizen!) nor is the "reaction by society" at all credible.

Then the murder happens -- which was a highly contrived and even quite ridiculous scenario, in that (a) Mersault's party was quite literally being stalked by an armed gang, (b) Mersault separated himself from the pack and was menaced by one of his stalkers, who was armed with a knife, (c) the naked knife was in the man's hand, as that man was blocking Mersault's path, (d) there were no witnesses, and (e) Mersault was a Frenchman in colonial French Algeria.

Not 1 in 10000 times does that go to court for murder, and not 1 in 1000000 times does it result in the death penalty.

But, anyway, back to my point: The minute the murder happens, we're yanked out of the naturalistic world and thrust directly into the world of Kafka's The Trial. Nothing makes sense any longer. What once was so true-to-life becomes something akin to the hallucinatory descent of divine justice -- a bad trip, a fever dream. "Yeah, you're off to the guillotine because you didn't cry at your mom's funeral. What kind of monster are you?" The most parsimonious interpretation is that the narrator has simply lost his mind.

Don't even get me started on the fact that every reviewer thinks that Mersault was executed, when that never actually happens in the book, and would result in him not being able to write the book in the first place. (Further confused by the variety of tenses used in the construction of the prose.) The book, which is written something like a memoir, ends with his appeal still pending, and the prison chaplain "sure of its success."

As to the critiques, the Orientalist one is in Edward Said's "Culture and Imperialism" but I don't think that the full version is online. As I recall, it basically concerned point (e) above, and noted that the trial would not have happened -- so the notion of the trial may be a sort of cope.

The first half of the short book is easily on-par with any of the great masterpieces of literature. It was written in a direct, vivid, gripping, and yet somehow languorous style -- something almost paradoxical. It was also very attuned to the aesthetics and flow of the outside world, but inattentive to the narrator's inner life -- insensitive and, in a sense, essentially masculine in a non-performative way. As a purely aesthetic work, it is truly excellent.

The second half falls apart catastrophically. The key scenario, the book's turning point, is contrived almost beyond belief. The trial is a farce on several distinct levels -- you can criticize it from almost any perspective, and you'd be right. (There's a well-known Orientalist critique which is just the tip of the iceberg.) And the close of the book brings with it a number of unreliable narrator problems, which make the book as difficult to resolve as time-travel fiction.

My impression was that it worked wonderfully as pure prose, and that Camus should probably have written travel journals a la Gerard Nerval. As philosophy, though, it was hopelessly muddled, badly contrived, and confused.

It generally stood for either:

- fireworks (combined with other firework emojis,)

- birthdays/festivals (next to the birthday cake and "party popper" thing emoji,)

- magic (next to the wizard or wand, which features almost identical sparkles)

It was pretty festive. Now it's just AI, lol.

Not even close. Look at satellite imaging.

Not only is the Amazon far from lost, the jungles in Africa/Borneo/PNG all look to be doing surprisingly okay.

Arguably because of state intervention in the economy. They give generous cash subsidies across various industrial sectors -- and as "investors" they have a remarkably light touch! Their standard modus operandi is to subsidize a number of competing ventures per sector (which number could be somewhere in the dozens or hundreds) and have competition take care of the rest. This is always good for the consumer, good where the perception of fairness is (internally) concerned, and good for the government's position of power. They don't build monopolies, nor are most firms left to scramble for multiple successive rounds of VC funding.

America prefers protectionism and tax credits; a markedly inferior overall strategy. We know this from the past five decades of economic history. Subsidies to high-value and growing technological industry are the best way to go from poor to rich, and the best way to go from "not producing much" to "producing everything we want."