And not only is she capable of scaring Picard and Odo, she also becomes one of very few people who truly accept all of Odo’s weirdness and social awkwardness and just let him be himself.

Sure, Kira also accepted him in a similar way but that took years of time and romantic feelings. Lwaxana was just cool with it pretty much immediately. DS9 did a lot to show us that there was more to her than just an incredibly loud personality.

I predict incremental quality increases. Qwen4 will probably be a somewhat better Qwen3 (and a dud if we’re unlucky). I do agree that it’ll probably come out; there’s not enough life left in this AI boom for a Qwen5, though.

The biggest change will probably come from figuring out where LLM use will actually benefit us. Right now the industry zeros to answer that with “everywhere” and concludes that it’s prudent to spend money equivalent to the GDP of an industrial nation on compute-only data centers.

For example, I expect the use case for coding to be more like “autocomplete a code block based on known patterns” rather than “build a public-facing web application from a prompt”.

Gotta be honest, though, a locally hosted 70B model with basic RAG functionality isn’t exactly playing in the same league as the market leaders, which can be bigger by two to three orders of magnitude. And a model that size is already around the limit of what a beefy gaming PC can do with reasonable performance. We’re unlikely to ever beat the big players on quality with local models.

What might happen is that the market collapses, the big players all go bankrupt, further LLM development ceases, and locally hosted Qwen3-80B will be the pinnacle of available text generation for the next thirty years.

I love the suggestion of “Picture a sunset” at the bottom.

“Gemini, I want you to picture a beautiful sunset… and then fuck right off into it.”

Old men are the future!

I’m not complaining about a hero having some kind of advantage that allows them to go on an epic quest. I’m complaining about the devices of a) fantasy universes inexplicably having game mechanics like character levels and numeric stats and b) the protagonist being ridiculously overpowered, usually without expending any effort.

The former feels like a lazy shorthand so the author doesn’t have to be able to actually depict power differences well; just pretend everything is Dragon Quest and throw around a few numbers. The latter is instant gratification wish fulfillment that may be nice every once in a while but feels wildly overused.

Heroes can win without being overpowered. They can start out weak and grow with their challenges. They can even stay weak but persevere through it all. I think a heavily condensed Lord of the Rings clone would probably make for a more compelling story than yet another cookie cutter story à la “I Got Reincarnated In Another World And My Cheat Skill Made Me Level 9999 Instantly”.

Sounds good but can we set it in a world that inexplicably has explicit game mechanics? And can the protagonist be absurdly strong because of some technicality that somehow nobody else has run into? I feel that would really set it apart from the competition.

Those two studios for the game because it was Hardsuit’s idea to make the game in the first place and TCR barely kept Paradox from canceling the have after they kicked Hardsuit out of the project.

I think it basically went like this (simplified):

Hardsuit: “Hey Paradox, we wanna make Bloodlines 2. We have everything worked out, we have the best possible writers involved, and it’s a real passion project; here’s our pitch.”

Paradox: “Wow, that pitch convinced us completely! You get all the green lights in the world!”

Hardsuit: “Now keep in mind we’ve never done a project on this scale before so we’ll need plenty of time—”

Paradox: “We set you on an extremely aggressive schedule. Surely that’ll motivate you into delivering perfection!”

Hardsuit: “That’s literally the exact opposite of what we need.”

Paradox: “But it’s the exact non-opposite of what you get. Now chop chop, we already gave the release date to the press.”

Hardsuit: “We’re not getting the game done in that timeframe.”

Paradox: “No problem; we’ll delay a little bit. Surely nobody will mind.”

Hardsuit: “It’ll take more than ‘a little bit’. We told you that—”

Paradox: “Okay, sure, whatever, the game’s canceled now. Don’t call us back.”

TCR: “Hey, can we try to salvage this? We really wanna see this made. But we’d like to throw away all of the writing, characters, and gameplay. Everything except the setting, really.”

Paradox: “Okay, sounds reasonable. But make it snappy.”

TCR: “We’d also like to change the name because what we can deliver won’t really be a proper sequel to—”

Paradox: “Bloodlines 2 it is. Good discussion. Glad we talked about this.”

TCR: “That’s literally the exact opposite of what we asked for.”

Paradox: “Can’t hear you; too busy launching the sequel to one of the most beloved cult classics in the action RPG genre.”

Customers: “Well, this is a pretty bad sequel. Decent game but they really shouldn’t have called it Bloodlines 2. We’re disappointed.”

Paradox: “The only logical course of action is to swear to never release a non-strategy game ever again because nobody appreciates our art.”

As has been established in the previous strip, that’s what her school provides instead of familiars. She wasn’t happy about it back then and it doesn’t look like her opinion is going to change anytime soon.

Oh, I am aware that this dynamic doesn’t quite work. Both sides of the equation get it almost, but not entirely, right. Because getting it right is challenging.

The older generations do get lazy as soon as their own needs are met, especially those of them who wield power. And that doesn’t just mean politicians but also CEOs, large investors, etc. Working for the common good is difficult and most people follow the path of least resistance, leading to the dynamics young people complain about.

But young people fall prey to the very same dynamic. It’s easier to get disillusioned and complain on the internet than to consistently go out and exert pressure. Sure, maybe they go on a protest march or two but few have the energy to consistently go on marches, be active in politics, stay on top of which companies are toxic, openly defy the law, and do a myriad other things that don’t directly benefit them in order to fight for a better world. You can do that if you’re rich and isolated from consequence but in that case your life is cushy already so you’d be fighting for abstract principles.

There are few people of the caliber of Bernie Sanders or Greta Thunberg because it’s really hard and carries a real risk of ruining their own life. Most people who do try end up like the people who glue themselves to highways: They get ridiculed and fined and effect no change whatsoever.

So for most people all that remains is resignation. Gen X said “whatever” when they weren’t listened to because they weren’t willing to sacrifice their personal future to escalate things until change is inevitable. Millennials say “OK Boomer” as they find themselves in the same situation for the same reason.

(I’ll gloss over the “young people are lazy” part but it boils down to young people actually being lazy in terms of failing to apply themselves in ways the older people did, with the caveat that some of those ways no longer apply and young people are applying themselves in new ways the older people don’t realize are necessary now. This perception dynamic is at least as old as recorded history.)

It’s exact opposite of a trend. The younger generations criticizing the older ones for not living up to their responsibilities has been just as much a constant throughout human history as the older generations criticizing the younger ones for being lazy by their parents’ definition.

The world sucks, as usual, and by now Gen X are old enough to be in charge. It’s sensible to call them out, just like in a decade or two it’ll be sensible to call out the Millennials for the same thing.

systemctl disable activationcheck.service

“They’re going to send us where?”

Other lessons from the sign:

• You may send radio broadcasts to origami birds.
• We encourage you to dip your hands into any glasses of sparkling water.
• Do not swing progress bars around.
• Violence against butterfly skewers is forbidden.

That can be addressed by treating EVs as if they weighed less in recognition of other externalities they don’t cause like air pollution from exhaust gasses.

I also keep advocating for a system like this, with charges tiered by size and empty weight (as most cars spend most of their time lightly loaded). The lowest tier should essentially be kei cars, which are perfectly fine for city use.

With the missing f it’s now a law about the transfer of talents of meadows used for the supervision of the labeling of beef.

I’m not sure why they’re supervising that on a meadow but the meadow is clearly very talented.

I have this variation:

1. Get hired. Enjoy awesome coworkers and decent perks.
2. Wait, this is a fintech company.
3. Why did I go with a fintech company again? I hate fintech!
4. Fuck it, I’m not quitting after a single year; I’m not gonna nuke my vacation planning two years in a row.
5. Queue Cue endless scrum meetings about badly defined PBIs referencing ancient versions of a poorly defined domain model.

I’ve never seen a sector of IT less organized, more averse to basic best practices, and more fixated on procedural boilerplate than fintech. It’s like ADHD poison and my relationship with it can be summed up with these lines from the Muppet Show theme:

Why do we always come here? I guess we’ll never know.
It’s like some kind of torture to have to watch this show.

Because they don’t care about morals or the country, they care about winning. If being a fraud is the shortest path to power they’ll be frauds. If being a fascist is the shortest path to power they’ll be fascists.

They can’t be on the wrong side of history when history is written by the winners and they already want to win at any cost.

Cooking instructions don’t mesh well with some people. I’m one of them.

Half of the time the instructions are vague (like “golden brown”, which has vastly different definitions based on what you’re cooking) and the measurements are often inexact (“to taste” is completely useless to someone who doesn’t know how the intermediate product is supposed to taste). Plus, you often have to do things during the heating process and if your multitasking isn’t good enough your meal is ruined.

All of this is less of a deal if you have someone with cooking experience in the kitchen. If you don’t, well, good luck.

I consider cooking to be highly stressful even with a recipe. Baking is much better since the measurements tend to be precise to the gram and the heating step happens in isolation.

Assuming that you can cook well enough that your meals are guaranteed to be edible, which is assuming a lot for novices.