Nice article by Stephen Diehl - I really liked his latest on crypto.
I noticed that in certain sections there seems to be a heavy use of LLM-assisted writing, such as this one:
> The platforms did not invent fear, greed, loneliness, or status anxiety. They industrialised their extraction. Their recommendation systems are vast reinforcement-learning loops that continuously experiment on human weakness. Each objective is a moving composite of high-dimensional signals for attention, retention, and conversion, dispersed across models, metrics, tests, and feedback systems. The subject cannot see the experiment. The operator cannot fully explain it. The regulator can barely comprehend it. The loop knows only that one stimulus keeps a person scrolling while another lets them leave. Calm accuracy loses. Threat, transgression, humiliation, and impossible promises win. The resulting social damage appears nowhere in the objective function. It arrives as an externality.
Not sure what you think of it.
In my view, his ideas are nice and interesting, and I would rather read less verbose, less "perfect" blog posts, and reduce or remove the use of LLMs.
Same. Every time I see LLM has contributed to the work I feel it greatly dilutes it. I'll push through if the topic is important and there's good points. But e.g. on YT, a sloppy script that barely stands on its own becomes a hard no on the very first "it's not X, it's Y".
> At the Eighth Annual Tree Diversity Conference on March 4th, our Front Range conditions for growing trees was described as “harsh”.
Wow, didn't even know that there was such a thing.
The article is... beautiful, in a sense. It is SO clear that it is not written by AI (it's from 2022, in fact), and it seems refreshing to read something without the need to constantly ask yourself what was written with AI and what by a human mind.
Anyway... Planting trees is getting worse and worse. Our climate is pretty much f*cked. That, in 2026, is abuntantly clear. Sigh.
What does it mean that planting trees is getting worse? In my country we have a holiday for planting trees. The school children plant a tree every year - and when my children were younger I would plant with them.
In my climate, tree establishment is getting more difficult and expensive because of stronger summer droughts. The local city plans for five years of establishment watering now, at an overall establishment cost of ~$4,000 per tree.
A lot of urban trees are badly planted as well. There was a very old tree round here which died, because most of the area around it was tarred over and it couldn't get access to rainwater when it did fall.
Roots can extend like 1.5 times or so the high of the tree. In each direction. Paving everything to 1 m of the trunk and expecting the tree roots to breath or be able to survive is extremely dumb.
We need to develop some sort of permeable pavement around this trees or, much better, none at all. Granting a bigger amount of this space by law could be done tomorrow. Taking selfies of yourself planting a tree where is not space for the roots, is just virtue signaling.
Instead to dump trees in some coins of our cities, we need a way to include entire forests to act as a big air conditioner for the city, central park style. And the will to make this places thrive instead to see it as a nuisance that must be cleaned where the unemployed people prune everything at sight. Nobody would put unemployed people at charge of the Mona Lisa. Trees are much more important for our survival than the Mona Lisa.
Totally. The tree I was referring to was at least three hundred years old, and had survived a road being built by it. Then the local government decided to pave the path so it got hardly any rain.
There is also a tree near me which has barely grown in thirty years due to close planting and most of the area near it being paved.
By whom has the obligation to enforce laws in a country; Normally called the executive branch of the government. Environmental crimes are still crimes, as is damaging public property. Trees have an economic value attached. Destroying, lets say, $50,000 of public property should raise some eyebrows at least.
Unless some exceptions apply, the neighbors suffered a damage in the value of their real state. Specially if is proven than the wood was stolen and its money was pocketed by some private actor.
Shouldn't that money come from increased taxes on one of the primary causes of the climate change making it more expensive? E.g. gasoline automobile fuel?
One private jet flight produces more pollution than a car does in its entire lifetime. They spray their exhaust fumes thousands of feet up in the sky Yet private jets do not get anything like the same exemptions. I wonder why.
Yes, I do happen to know about jet fuel. There was a scandal at one of the COP summits when it was announced that private jets and private yachts would not have the same tax rates.
Private jet flights are extremely frequent, and are used by wealthy or powerful people. They even use them to go climate conferences. They are used to go to the WEF at Davos in Switzerland, and there are supposed to be so many going there that they have to build extra hangar space.
Even someone like Taylor Swift reportedly uses a private jet all the time to go to her fiancé's games. All of those exhaust fumes go straight into the upper atmosphere.
How many of this trees survived this year? Planting is easy. Assuring that the trees will not be stolen or destroyed later is getting more and more difficult each year by the antiscience/antihuman current trend.
The provoked wildfires in most of US, Canada and Europe this year had destroyed decades of work. And the changing climate too fast to allow the forests to adapt to much more heat, and dry spells, and stronger storms, and more salt from the sea level raising... is a big challenge.
And is an asymmetrical game. The group of people that spend their own resources (and get poorer) to save nature can't win against the group of people that get richer destroying nature, even if they pay a small fine eventually only the bad actors can win. Many people has the feeling that the huge efforts on conservation of rainforests, oceans or local nature is just fattening the goose until some criminal eventually come, grab and cash.
After some decades playing of this game one group starves and shrinks while the other have a feast of resources and buys everything
I guess they mean it's harsh because it's Colorado. Bad soil, scarce rain, scorching summers, freezing winters... So they have to take extra care with the species they plant.
Excerpt from the article: "Conditions are predicted to be getting worse. At the Tree Conference, speakers were confident in models showing temperatures increasing more rapidly than in the past and even faster for higher elevations because heat rises. On top of that, large numbers of ash trees, cottonwoods, and weak trees will be disappearing, increasing the “heat island effect”."
I started more than 15 years ago and recently got back into it. I would say that game has stagnated a lot more, character numbers may seem like it isn't that low but in reality most people who play it has around 5 accounts which they multibox with. So number of actual people who play it went really down. It is looking bleak for the future, and i can confidently say that it is all CCP's fault (called Fenris Creations now). They started aiming for short term gains and they probably realized themselves long ago it won't last so they started investing in other IP's but they were all mega failures so far.
Keep an eye out for EVE vanguard, an Eve-related extraction FPS. It might scratch the itch for many who perhaps enjoyed the universe but don't want to (or can't) spend the enormous time to ramp up again.
EVE is on the list with Dwarf Fortress for me. I'm interested in it. I absolutely see the appeal of them, and wish I had played them instead of WoW back when I was 20.
As someone who really no life fit and played WoW, Dwarf Fortress, and EVE in my 20s, you didn’t miss much. My most momentous EVE achievement was betraying my online “friends” who had mostly stopped playing, blowing up all their expensive ships for the insurance payout, then like a true space pirate losing all my ill gotten gains playing Space Poker.
EVE (and other MMOs) had their moment and the ideas of MMOs with a persistent lived in world were very cool but the moment for them seems to have sadly passed beyond the horizon for whatever reason. If you had asked me 20 years ago I would have told you MMOs were the future of gaming.
It's worth saying that whatever they call it, GTA: Online is basically an MMO and it's one of the top three most popular game on Earth iirc. In fact I think only Tetris and Minecraft beat it.
Looking at what GTA6 is shaping up to be, and wondering how R* is evolving the online side, I think we might simply have seen MMO's turn into something people our age don't recognize.
I think it was similar to all the early MMO's. They were a platform to create a community in a time where that was hard to do in the real world. Back when I started playing Asheron's Call there were basically two "nerds" on my school of like 1000 students and the town computer club had 5 members. It wasn't like today where you can easily find someone to play DnD or board games with and you couldn't really play video games online. Hell, how many people under 35 knows what the internet chatrooms were?
MMO's let you go online and be social and build communities. WoW did that really well back then. Eventually as things went on, MMO's got more and more tools that let you avoid building those communities. Like the dungeon finder in WoW. I think a lot of MMO's and games in general turned to letting peope get their dopamine fix from increasing numbers through RNG rather than being social.
I know people who stuck around with WoW because of the social communities they build. One of the guilds I was in 20 years ago still meets up in the real world, I know because one of my old friends still plays. I also know people who stuck around because of what is essentially the idle gambling. I became a jock of sorts back around the burning crusade release because I had to put a lot of focus into water polo training. Which meant I didn't do a whole lot "nerdy" stuff for a decade. Once I started doing "nerdy" things again it was easy to find people near me because everyone is a "nerd" these days.
There was a time when the community was the attraction, although I wouldn't say "the insanely large community", given that at the (for me anyway) best/peak WoW times, your specific community was the server, which was maybe a couple of thousand or so?
Around that sort of time you would encounter known groups/people, e.g. characters that had a reputation as extremely good in PvP etc.
Then along came the cross-realm stuff, and fairly quickly community ceased to matter, you just queue up, play, and move on.
Great for ease of play etc, terrible for community.
As someone who used to have a WoW problem and now and then relapses, it tickles me the same way Cookie Clicker does. It’s nice to see number go up.
Back when I was playing with my friends and the game was a little harder (BC & WotLK), there was a sense of shared accomplishment when overcoming difficult regions and raids.
For many, it's an online third space. Cooperating to overcome shared challenges reinforces social ties. The game provides a weekly schedule of activities and new challenges quarterly.
My credentials: I played every expansion (but not every tier) since vanilla with the same group of people. I only stepped away in The War Within after family obligations and time zones got in the way.
Planning 40 man raids was a part time job. Everyone worked together to grind out materials for potions and stuff and you really had to work together on dungeons to get through them, whether that was acquiring better gear or practicing strategies. The payoff of working on a dungeon for a month and finally clearing a boss was so satisfying. It created real comraderie.
Grind addiction aside, the gameplay was legitimately good. PvP was compelling, raiding was compelling, even the grind was pretty fun (especially compared to your usual free-to-play MMO).
It's not WoW, but the thing that kept me playing City of Heroes for longer than I should have was a weekly game night where a group of us would get together and run characters that we only ran on those nights.
When news about the server code leak broke containment and the open servers started I was initially intrigued, but I discovered that playing with randos just wasn't as much fun.
It was a very forgiving and accessible MMO, one that really felt like playing diablo 2 on a persistent multiplayer world. That, and warcraft 3 was released not too long, and the Frozen Throne expansion the year before. So the setting and lore was fresh in people's minds.
There was no MMO like WoW before, that was a big appeal why I started after not doing homework for weeks while playing closed US beta and then later closed EU beta.
Only played casually and like a noob for a few years because I was like 12? and playing on the PC of my big brother.
They were a social network before social networks and always available IM and the gameplay provided a reason to be in the game (and therefore available to socialise with) even if you were the first/only one there.
I mean, they also had their own gameplay appeal, but I think the current player pool of WoW+FFXIV+ESO+GW is probably a more accurate reflection of how widespread the appeal of them as pure games is, while the crazy numbers of 00s WoW were about the social network aspect.
Eve online holdem? Amazing. Was a banker there for a bit while I was working as a poker dealer IRL at night. Won a fully fitted mom in a game, lost it in another:D
I had a friend who was really into EVE online and showed me about 20 years ago. It felt too much like waiting and spreadsheets for me.
I got into Dwarf Fortress around 2015 and I was hooked. These days it's something I often play together with my son. I love how dynamic and deep it feels. It was such a privilege to get to buy a copy when it finally came to Steam.
My comment included EVE Vanguard. I tried it. As someone who played FPS all his life starting from Quake 1 and Wolfenstein 3D, and all the AA and AAA FPS that came afterwards, EVE Vanguard feels like a money laundering scheme at this point. Nowadays a single person with access to he SOTA AI models and engines like Unreal, can make a much better and polished game in less time. It's gonna be an absolute DoA. The only reasons CCP is still able to operate is the addicts (mostly old men with no other hobby) that has spent thousands upon thousands on their accounts can't let go.
The thing I miss the most about Eve Online is the immersive free market economy. I long for a true, in-depth economic MMO more than the space veneer around the order book. Buy low, sell high. Specialize in industry, trading, transportation. Add a little bit of light PvP to inject chaos and it's more fun than playing the stock market.
(I am actually designing such a game, but I'm open to suggestions)
My main activity in the game was stealing loot from under carebears' noses to sell for profit. A true rat scouring the battlefields for scraps. That must say a lot about me.
Dune: Awakening tried this. Was kind of fun while it lasted (and before the bug stole all of my resources I was trying to sell. The support was zero help on getting that resolved. That killed it for me immediately).
Usually I don't care about the economy in MMOs, but in New World it was fun and different when it launched. I played almost exclusively for the economy. Buy and sell orders and separate auction houses between cities. There was many unexpected ways to make money with trading and crafting. The only major source of gold was a single main story quest early in the game, so if you weren't careful you would go broke and struggle. The economy wasn't that advanced, but it was fun watching the players ping pong back and forth with supply and demand.
The crafting systems were so trivial that didn't make the economy game of New World particularly engaging. One core mechanic I seek is the division of labor; if everyone can and is expected to become a master in every skill, there is no niche to corner, and trivialises the experience.
There are very few games (actually, only EVE comes to mind with its skill system) that require you to specialize if you want to compete over everybody else.
I don't like how EVE is run, and the pay-to-win mechanics added over the years to entice the whales.
I'm looking at the problem with the eyes of a prospective game dev, and saying that there should be more games focused on free market economy, which is often just a half-arsed mechanic on the side, not the core game.
Problem with EVE is that they did not have a solution for the problem of resource accumulation from the start. It was mitigated to some degree by great wars of old, and then wormhole space, but then they a) sold out to koreans with their interesting approach to MMOs, and b) merged the chinese shard. This did not help at all.
Now.. Py3 is nice, and I guess that move signals that at last they pay attention to engine instead of bolting on useless p2w crap, but to really revive eve this is not it.
In my opinion (joined EVE in 2006, still own a JF and few carriers there), what is needed is a massive sink for all the accumulated assets. Idk, expand the universe like tenfold. Then it would be fun again.
edit: also ditch all the nullsec sov mechanics and revert to something resembling the pre-TCU state. I can't for the life of me think of a reason why they chose to die on the hill of not adding more systems.
While I broadly disagree with much of this, I have been advocating for years that expanding the universe would indeed dispel much of the issues with the power disparity between groups, as well as encourage more involved logistics and stuff like that.
I played EVE for many years, and I really hated the addition of skill injectors. When I first started playing, the only way to get your skills up was to spend the time training them. Now it just takes real money cash.
There's a legitimate argument for some P2W mechanics, though. To keep a game going you need new players, and if you're looking at losing every PvP encounter for years as you skill up your character you probably won't stay.
The thing with EVE is that, even with all the ISK and SP in the game, you can't just buy your way to a win - you can't buy skill. You can have perfect skills and buy the best ship and modules and all that, but if you don't know how to fly, you're going to lose your ship immediately and it won't even be a fight.
That, coupled with your second paragraph (the new player experience being so rough) and I've never really been too upset about the stuff CCP sells.
I enjoyed off world trading company but it’s a very different kind of economic simulator- much shorter and gamified loops - which isn’t a criticism, just not exactly the same itch.
I too would love to know the answer to this question. I loved Eve as a teenager / young adult. It was a brilliant burst of nerdery, and the first time I ever met someone who wrote linux kernel modules for a living.
I sometimes think about logging in (I think I ragequit likely in a pod inside a wormhole in the middle of nullsec) and then I realise that way madness (and much sunk time) lies.
If you ever do wish to go back, request Signal Cartel to rescue you. Rescuing people from wormholes is exactly what they do. I was with them for years.
Not a player myself, but I recall there were some articles about a player organization that helped people who were stranded, or something along these lines. It sounded quite wholesome and fun.
Yeah if I ever have the need to occupy an inordinate number of hours of my life again I’ll log back in, the temptation to dust of the account(s) arises sometimes. Think I managed to log off in lowsec but who knows!
This is why I had to quit. I enjoyed it way too much and would spend nearly all my free time playing it, much to the detriment of the rest of my (non-professional) life.
It was kind of a blessing for me that I was forced to quit after they introduced PLEX and in doing created a conversion rate for ISK to dollars. Suddenly I was too aware of how worthless everything I was doing was. It's one thing to spend an evening grinding to buy that new ship, it's another when you know you were grinding for 73 cents an hour. Risking losing a ship you spent a week earning the ISK for is thrilling and scary, losing a ship you can replace for eight dollars is just annoying.
For me, that was the thing that made the game feel real. The feelings of actual dread and anger when losing a a ship made for some of my best and most intense gaming moments ever. The times I managed to come out on top were amazing.
Participating in the big corporation wars was boring in comparison to small scale stuff. In the big wars, I was just a pawn for the commanders that actually made decisions and could play a giant strategy game.
Yeah it made my day when I’d pop some T3 cruiser gang in wormhole space with my buddies.
It was substantially less fun when I was on the other side of that and got scanned down in my officer fit Archon and popped. Finally I said to myself “why am I doing this to myself?” and quit. My wife approved.
I’ve played off and on for years - even multiple accounts, lots of hours, and a very helpful org, there was too much to do, and I quickly felt overwhelmed. I just can’t imagine them getting many new players, but it’s clear the game is 20+ years of upgrades and content.
I started in 2004 and played on and off until 2015 with a quick stint in 2020.
It was amazing in the early days, it felt like nothing else. I had a background in Ultima Online and Dark Age of Camelot. I liked PVP and I wanted full loot drop on kill.
EVE online has many times been referred to as the spiritual successor of UO, what made it really special however was the one server architecture (until China shard).
My name was Dieter Rams—I ganked, scammed and griefed. I probably made a lot of people quit the game; this was the appeal. I wanted to play a game where I could be the villain (successfully).
Over the years it lost its soul as the internet grew, social media became more prevalent and information disseminated more rapidly (watch madseasonshow on youtube for a great coverage on this topic) around the optimal ways to play etc.
All MMOs suffered for this, you could look everything up before doing anything and so the sense of discovery and adventure was lost. The frontier was no longer undiscovered, and once pay to win came into play everything came off the rails.
This is when I quit for real or as the EVE players say "won EVE".
A better comedic version of the video is this one by Honorable Third Party (typical EVE humor):
This is REALLY EvE
https://youtu.be/LmS9vcVNr5A
I came back in 2020 for a month but it's like that saying you can't step into the same river twice. I was older but the game had also changed so much. Other players were pressuring me to multibox (play multiple accounts), it felt terrible.
I knew a guy who played 30 characters at the same time, his setup was a technical marvel but it made me sad what gaming had become. There was a similar issue with buffbots in Dark Age of Camelot.
The fact that EVE needs a new player tutorial says everything you need to know about the state of the game (and gaming in general). Everyone needs a lot of handholding these days, in 2004 you were just thrown into the universe with nothing but the chat and other players to help you out.
Figuring things out was part of the game.
There were no YouTube guides, no tutorial and no real money to make things easier. The playing field was equal no matter who you were.
The magic was lost because of money, it's always the money in the end.
I miss the insane adrenaline rush when getting into small fights (1v1, 1v2, etc.). You go so long doing doing whatever it is you're doing- PvE, hacking data sites, transporting stuff- it's all a bit mundane.
But nothing raised my heart rate like getting into a fight. 30 seconds of terror. I would have to take a break after these, win or lose, until my HR returned to normal and my hands stopped shaking.
Same here. The thing that makes it so high stakes in EVE is you don't just respawn with all your stuff. It might have taken a couple weeks (or longer) for you to grind up the money for the ship you're using, and if the fight doesn't go well it's gone.
When I started playing (2011-ish), I suppose I was the counterparty to your playstyle. But that was the appeal: Being in actual danger and at risk for loss. Even stuff like moving an industrial with goods from highsec to npc null to sell at a markup was an exhilerating adventure. And if there is risk, sometimes you lose.
I don't know how many people felt like I did, versus how many ragequit the game.
After some years I became a wormholer though, and finally a permanent -10 lowsec pirate in the end. It's been a decade since I quit now.
Works great in a very wealthy country, whose "modern" wealth was generated mostly by being the neutral and untouchable sanctuary for money laundering and illegal money making for centuries. See the 1934 Banking Act, among many things.
Why wouldn't it work if Switzerland was poorer? Are poor people dumber and make stupid decisions if you give them direct democracy, or what do you mean?
I don't see what would break if for example Netherlands copied Swiss direct democracy.
I think it was some regions in Cloudflare (in this case a European one) not having all of the static `vinext` JS files ready immediately at deploy time, and then a `404` on that region sticking around due to very aggressive cacheing.
They left their multiple real estate back home so your kids can emigrate there and rent it, but your kids will have to work hard actually and unfortunately. On the bright side once your kids come back from emigration, they can in turn start catering to them.
The British and German governments pay for the healthcare of their pensioners living in Spain via intergovernmental reimbursement agreements so the healthcare expense to Spain is in fact zero. They also provide a significant economic net benefit to Spain by injecting billions in "imported wealth" through real estate taxes, year-round consumption, and foreign-funded pensions.
I noticed that in certain sections there seems to be a heavy use of LLM-assisted writing, such as this one:
> The platforms did not invent fear, greed, loneliness, or status anxiety. They industrialised their extraction. Their recommendation systems are vast reinforcement-learning loops that continuously experiment on human weakness. Each objective is a moving composite of high-dimensional signals for attention, retention, and conversion, dispersed across models, metrics, tests, and feedback systems. The subject cannot see the experiment. The operator cannot fully explain it. The regulator can barely comprehend it. The loop knows only that one stimulus keeps a person scrolling while another lets them leave. Calm accuracy loses. Threat, transgression, humiliation, and impossible promises win. The resulting social damage appears nowhere in the objective function. It arrives as an externality.
Not sure what you think of it.
In my view, his ideas are nice and interesting, and I would rather read less verbose, less "perfect" blog posts, and reduce or remove the use of LLMs.
reply