Same, a long time ago.

I never posted anything close to political or “sketchy” either. Was never impolite; it was just a place for niches. I still don’t know why I was banned/shadowbanned…

NASA is researching quieter supersonic flight, and I can’t help but think of how the (also Lockheed Martin) X-59:

Has a extreme wing profile/nose, not unlike SR-71:

On the contrary, NASA mounted stuff to it for research in the 90s:

The upcoming Slate could be what you want.

The part that provides value is dirt cheap, though.

Deepseek 4.1 and Mimo 2.6 are basically free compared to Claude, and TBH it feels like the harness/wrapper, not the LLM, is the limitation for doing useful things with them.

Where would it even come from?

Everyone’s retirement.

Admittedly, no, but this is slowly improving. Stepfun published their SFT dataset, smaller labs are publishing their datasets for task specific tunes. I believe there was another Chinese lab that published bulk pretraining data, but I can’t find it in my history at the moment.

And, notably, these comparatively tiny labs generally aren’t scraping the internet so abusively like OpenAI/Meta. They don’t need as much. Going by statements in their papers, they tend to use existing archives of web data, buy commercial data, or (more recently) generate a lot synthetic data.

If you run Nemotron, from open datasets.

I have an iPhone 16 Pro Max (2024), and the 18 Pro/Max presentation definitely gave me a bit of phone envy.

I have a 16 base… and I didn’t raise an eyebrow. What kind of app running can a 18 do that a 16 can’t, other than whatever is self inflicted with software bloat?

A LOFIC camera would have gotten me interested, but they didn’t ship that.

Since 2016, Obsidian has released 10 games. BGS released 2: Fallout 76 and Starfield.

Grounded 2 is out in EA, seems to be close to release, and by all accounts it is excellent.

Obsidian is doing fallout.

But under BGS now. To me, that is frightening.

They made a bunch of good RPGs/RPG-ish games, and a bunch of “mid” ones.

My personal favorite is Grounded. It does sorta feel like classic Obsidian/BGS game, with its heavy implicit environmental storytelling, audio logs and such, and the survival aspect is great for coop.

No, none of them sold a zillion copies like Fallout 76 or Starfield, but I had more fun in them than either of those, by a long shot.

Halo was an attempt at a better direction, compared to 5.

That is a very low bar though.

Mojang must have a pretty strong contract, given how little they messed with Minecraft Java Edition.

Holy moly.

That is basically the worst case scenario, no?

• The absolute last thing Obsidian needs is Bethesda presiding over them. Bethesda the publisher is pure toxicity.

• They should have given Obsidian TES/Falliut, and folded Bethesda into Obsidian as a studio to farm work out to.

• The absolute last thing Halo campaigns need is to be more like Call of Duty.

• They should have cut 343, and split the IP amongst specialized studios. Like an Arkane special ops stealth game, or a strictly multiplayer Activision game.

This is beyond even my worst expectations.

My guess is it will go into Xbox/Gamepass on PC, and in MS games, but not in other launcher ecosystems.

Still, go ahead and start researching. Whether it’s this or something else, something will be the final straw for you in Windows, soon.

This is true.

Some sites do this already. Wired may do it; not sure, though you are right in that advocacy posts should make the cut.

…Those “14 year olds” make money with ads, if not by being straight-up product shills. And social media takes most of the cut.

Also, that’s quite different than sustaining a whole journalism business. There is of course social media centric journalism, and Wired does plenty of that too.

It’s not perfect, no, but what are they supposed to do to keep the lights on? Double down on ads giving everyone malware, that everyone should be blocking anyway?

…That being said, we have every right to try and bypass the paywall too, heh.

To be fair, this is not that different from the always-on, always-listening phones in everyone’s hands now.