Millennial optimism is back? I must have missed when we had it before.

First of all, I think this is a bit.

But (and this is my understanding, although I’ve never tried it) on Kalshi you buy a contract that says “if X happens, this contract can be redeemed for Y money” and then you can, in turn, sell that contract to someone else before it expires/pays out. So you can actually make money by trading the contracts regardless of whether they pay out or not—you buy at some price, and then if the contract price goes up (either because the event seems more likely, or because many people were buying it in the hopes of selling later) you can sell it to someone else at a profit. This is the sense in which it’s like a stock market.

So there’s like two layers to the joke here, one is intentionally misunderstanding the way Kalshi is like stocks (it’s actually more like options, which do expire and become worthless) and the other is that sometimes stocks really do go to zero.

Wait weren’t they “accusing” him of being vegan? Where do they think cheese and eggs come from?

When I went to Japan a lot of people spoke English. I don’t think we had any trouble. Everyone was very helpful. At one point my granddad and I were looking at a map trying to figure out how far we were from our hotel, and a guy came up and asked us in English if we needed help, and when we told him where we were staying he walked with us like 2.5km to make sure we got there! (This was in ye olde days before smartphones, so we were using paper maps.)

Doesn’t clicking the dislike button move the video up in the algo anyway? It’s “engagement.” If you don’t like a video the best thing to do is “not interested” it on your recommendation page.

From the title I foolishly thought that maybe he built a machine learning system to optimize player selection by training on the results of hypothetical fantasy football teams from previous seasons, or something, and I thought “well it might not be in the spirit of the competition but at least he’s having fun tinkering.”

No, he just handed it off to an “agentic” system and lets it play for him because he couldn’t be assed. Why even bother?

I forgot about the Wired interview. It’s kind of wild that AntiNorn intentionally got people riled up and then called them vindictive.

Like, if I joined a community for some wholesome show and started posting distressing gore of people’s blorbos, and when people expressed their disgust my response was to say “UM ACKSHULLY blorbo isn’t real, so there’s no reason for you to be distressed when seeing this image” and then I posted some more stuff I knew would piss them off, I would fully expect to be ostracized.

If I said “We already had this debate when Antinorn was pioneering AI torture thirty years ago” would anyone know what I’m talking about or is this extremely niche internet trivia?

Context: Creatures was a series of “artificial life” simulation games centered around caring for norns, simulated life-forms with (simplified) simulated genetics, biochemistry, and “brains” made of linked neurons that control their response to stimuli and include neurons related to memory, emotional states, etc. It’s primitive but reward and punishment work the way you would expect: praising your norn for taking a certain action will improve their mood and lead them to be more likely to take that action again, they will learn to be afraid of creatures if they’re hit by them, etc. (There are notable limitations, including there only being one representation in their “brain” for all “norns” for the first two games, so they can’t easily distinguish between members of their species, and some things are basically hacks, like they way they “learn” words.) It was convincing enough that some people became very attached to them, and there was a thriving fan community organized in webrings. A popular fan creation for the first game was a custom norn genome, the “canny norns” by Akamai, which added an extra brain “lobe” that allowed them to pay attention to the object in their hands and the object they were looking at simultaneously, which led to a pretty large improvement in their behavior.

And so of course there was one fan, Antinorn, who enjoyed torturing his norns: slapping them, starving them, using the built-in Science Kit to inject them with toxins, and other creative punishments. Then he’d upload the damaged norns to his fansite, seemingly primarily for purpose of ragebaiting the rest of the fandom, which was extremely effective.

Mercantilism, in 2026? It’s more likely than you’d think!

He looks different without the helmet!