Etienne de Martel

Kalshi employees "kind of understand that without the tweets and the streamers and all of the social-media stuff that the traders do for them, usually just for free, their marketing would be a lot harder," said Jack Campion, 20, a junior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Kalshi affiliate. In September, Kalshi briefly signed up a 15-year-old videogame streamer who goes by vertid online to promote its brand on X as an affiliate. A week later, Kalshi ended the partnership. "Yo brother, legal team confirmed that we can't work with minors rn," a Kalshi employee wrote to the user in messages reviewed by the Journal. "Kinda sad tbh."

what the fuck are we doing

www.wsj.com/business/med...

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We've freed Cookie's Bustle from copyright hell. Here's how. | Video Game History Foundation We've stopped a persistent copyright troll who was trying to impede our work. Here's everything we learned—and how we beat them.

BREAKING: We've freed Cookie.

Following an investigation by VGHF, Ukie and Web Capio have suspended DMCA takedowns for Cookie's Bustle on behalf of Graceware, SL.

More info:

It’s wrong to vaporize school children even if Congress votes to approve it.

Wow Signal

I fundamentally believe this era is an illusion. The current versions of Codex and Claude Code are costing OpenAI and Anthropic so much money because they’re running at like a negative 150% gross margin. All improvements involve more and more compute. The limits will be sudden and brutal.

Phonopolis Demo is OUT NOW on Steam!! 📣
store.steampowered.com/app/4109130/...

Take a look at how we built the cardboard city by hand.

Here is one of the dumbest things about vibe coding that I don't see a lot of people talking about

Imagine you're an open source maintainer and someone opens up a pull request against your repository that they vibe coded. They may or may not tell you they vibe coded it; it doesn't really matter… 🧵

The only thing stopping Lorelei and the Laser Eyes from being a masterpiece is the lack of a back button.

Code is liability. AI allows us to create tremendous amounts of liability very quickly

Screenshot of a data visualization titled “The Cost of American Exceptionalism,” subtitled “What would change if the U.S. matched the OECD average?” The page explains that each card shows how outcomes would change if the U.S. matched the average of 31 peer democracies. Below, a section labeled “Economy & Inequality” displays eight cards comparing U.S. figures to OECD averages. Highlights include: +$19K per household per year in redistributed income and +$96K in redistributed wealth if the top 1% matched OECD shares; a 71% lower CEO-to-worker pay ratio (from 354× to 101×); 50 million more workers with union coverage; 26 million more people with health insurance; $2.1 trillion saved annually in healthcare spending; $691 less per person per year in prescription drug costs; and intergenerational economic mobility being twice as high. Each card shows the U.S. value alongside the OECD average.

If there's one empirical insight I'd want everyone to understand about American politics, it's this:

America's problems are solved problems. Just not here.

What would change if the US simply matched the average of 31 peer democracies? Not Denmark or Norway. Just the middle of the pack. 🧵

Latin American Coups promoted by the United States

The way the press is treating chatbots, like they have agency and they “know” things all of a sudden, crossed the line recently from dumb and obsequious to something else entirely. Treating them as alive and making conscious decisions is an almost religious belief. It won’t age well.

Sora: Improv for the Creatively Bankrupt Note: Due to its subject matter, parts of this post contain AI generated content. Not the text — that’s all hand written prose full of…

Sora is one of the worst experiences I have ever had online. So much so that I felt obligated to dissect its various failings. Unsurprisingly, they all come back to the fact that it's an AI product pretending to be a social media platform.

Barely made it to the finish line in time, but I managed to hit my arbitrary goal of reading 52 books this year! That's one per week on average.

I don't know if I'll be able to keep that up next year, but still, already got several more books lined up on the pile.

I’ve been in game dev for 26 years and I can’t remember any other time where a specific tech was being insistently and persistently pushed on devs as a group in the public sphere.

Why would it? Cui bono? Why would any given dev have an interest in other devs using tech they don’t have a stake in?

Honestly I just don't know if its even ethical to play AAA games anymore

This year I played like 10 games but I read 49 books, so you know, that's something.

one thing to note about award ceremonies, in a system is a purpose way, they exist to establish the award-giver as a kingmaker, trendsetter, or authority, and as a side effect, recognize those who help them achieve that goal

is this about time magazine? the game awards? who can tell

Two things can be true: 1.) The Game Awards are meaningless and we shouldn't take them all that seriously. 2.) Award shows of its scale DO rewrite the mainstream history of the art form, whether they deserve to or not, and its okay to care that it's so thoughtless despite having that responsibility.

This survey is an absolute joke on every level. The survey design was bad, their methodology is haphazard, their sample is completely unrepresentative, and the results are worthless

At this point, if a game about time travel has a new game plus feature in it, I fully expect the twist that the story is a time loop, and the new game plus is explained in the narrative as an iteration of that loop. I think it's a law now.

"World's first potential trillionaire has killed 600,000 people, including 400,000 children" is the only headline that anyone should ever read about Elon Musk

I don't know why they call him the "sandwich guy", what he chucked was sold at Subway, that's not a sandwich.

May all terrible people be sad tonight.

I remember reading something about how public opinion on immigration issues in the UK correlated more with tabloid front pages than with reality.

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

Q: How long does it take to build a new data center? A: Approximately one closed-door city council vote.

What To Know About Data Centers https://theonion.com/what-to-know-about-data-centers/

"normies do not care about this thing and so it is no use raising a stink" is imho just an excuse for not doing politics, which is the job of making normies care about something

It’s 2050 and a teen girl is torrenting a .tar.gz file of all the consciousnesses of all the tech bros who uploaded themselves into the cloud in a bid for immortality and modding them into The Sims 4