For me it was "Hollyhock God" from Nobilis.

Why do game designers do this? Does anybody, anywhere, actually use these weird terms while actually playing?

…because they take everything literally.

The funniest line from social media:

"Maybe it's because we don't need a computer to automate mansplaining when there's already an excess supply produced by men," answers one woman.

The "ethnocentric" in the title is coded language¹. It was triggered by a paper² I just stumbled over but is the product of by now over two decades of observation (and, to be fair, festering resentment).

I bring attention to a key phrase in the conclusion of this otherwise meandering and unclear paper:

Thus, we suggest that policymakers in China consider emphasizing more on the reciprocity benefits and build a collaborative effort across the scientific community.

What. A. Coincidence.

A study published in the (western) journal³ Humanities and Social Sciences Communications comes to the conclusion that the Chinese government needs to emphasize the benefits of open data sharing.

Yet the very same culture that preaches loudly "open data sharing" and other such nigh-utopian ideals, in a stunning example of "do what I say, not what I do" also practices the precise opposite. For example the Chinese are specifically barred from cooperation in space ventures⁴ with anything that NASA is affiliated with (which is, essentially, all space ventures and most such conferences).

This is not, however, just the USA and just China. Canada (my nation of citizenship), for example, routinely issues thundering condemnation of any nation that treats indigenous peoples badly (unless that nation is aligned with Canada, in which case Japan's treatment of the Ainu and Taiwan's treatment of their assorted indigenous groups gets passed over with an embarrassed cough) while it treats its own indigenous peoples in ways that are positively shocking even to this day, despite the facade of rapprochement. (Keep in mind that the last of Canada's horrific residential schools was closed in 1997—I was 31 years old at the time!—and that in Canada being a native means you are not a "visible minority", a term fraught with its own weird baggage.)

And you'll find similar ethnocentric, hypocritical bullshit all over the west, even down to all the (well-deserved!) official condemnation of Hamas over the October 2023 attacks while standing by in embarrassed silence as Israel commits open genocide both in and out of Gaza starting well before October 2023 and continuing to this day.

So... My current view is that western powers are a large collection of hypocritical twats whose views can and should be safely ignored by other peoples of the world as far as is possible when so many (chiefly) American guns and bombs are pointed at them threateningly.

Change my view.

¹ Decoding it: "white supremacist".

² https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-024-03570-9

³ Yes the primary authors are Chinese in Chinese universities. There are reasons for this.

⁴ The fact that this has backfired, both directly and indirectly, on the USA multiple times is a never-ending source of amusement to me.

...that I didn't Nintendo.

Just in case that URL doesn't replicate the session properly I've added a screenshot of the session to the end.

A few things are obvious here. First the choice to trumpet the "strengths" of degenerative AI while qualifying the weaknesses is clearly a choice made in the programming of the system. In later interactions it claims that this was not specifically programmed into it but, as it says, it's a black box and there's no way to confirm nor deny anything it claims.

Which is, you know, pretty much the reason why degenerative AI can't be trusted.

Can't they afford the real stuff?

It's 5050.

Up until now I thought he was only a theoretical physicist!

That's a huge red flag, that is!