David Edgar's website

https://www.theguardian.com/gnm-press-office/2025/feb/14/guardian-media-group-announces-strategic-partnership-with-openai

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Do they still manufacture iron lungs?

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-02-05/record-numbers-of-nesting-loggerhead-turtles-mon-repos-beach/104895950

When I was growing up in Bundaberg in the 80s you could still pretty much just go down to Mon Repos and walk around amongst the turtles as they were laying and hatching. They locked that down in the 90s, I believe, because turtle numbers were dropping off.

Now record numbers 30 years later. Coincidence? 🤔

I have played every one of the major versions of the Civilisation series. Hours upon hours lost to a series of choices and decisions. I wouldn't be able to quantify most of them, but Civilization 5 was the one I liked the least and I put 494 hours into that. 3431 hours of my life went into Civilisation 6.

Hi, my name is David and I have a 4x problem.

Civilisation 7 was pre-released on Thursday. Given my established credentials above, you would have guessed I pre-purchased. I have finished my first run through and I have thoughts.

The big change for VII is the concept of Ages. The entire game revolves around them now, in the same way Districts were the pivot for VI. I am pretty sure that if the Ages concept wasn't the first decision Firaxis made, it was the one they tossed out all their previous plans to support. It's trite to say they just ripped off Humankind , but the trends are there and the similarities are striking.

Firaxis like to trot out Sid Meir's Rule of Thirds when their doing PR for a new version:

one-third traditional gameplay, one-third is improved from the last version, and one-third is brand new.

In a small, but-not-really way in Civilisation 7, the first Age is traditional Civilisation gameplay, the second Age is an improved version of Colonisation (albeit more focussed on the home counties still running the New World) and the metaphor/joke falls over in a heap in the third Age but I guess the way the Ages build on each other towards the ultimate victory conditions is pretty brand new.

Each of the Ages is not-quite it's own game with goals to achieve towards the ultimate game victory conditions. So much so you could actually just one Age and have, as a winner, the side that achieved the most on the victory condition being pursued. Those goals track, but morph, through a full run of the game, and in each Age are quite flavourful. For example, in the first Age the Economic victory goal is to have a set number of resource tokens allocated to your settlements. In the second Age the Economic victory is to have settlements in the New World shipping treasure fleets back to the homelands. A culture victory starts with building a number of Wonders, the second Age is earning relics from spreading a religion.

There's a pretty sharp reset at the beginning of each Age. Any units you have are all upgraded are more or less discarded and replaced with era-specific units. I'm still not quite sure how it decides what numbers to give you, if it is a specific mix and number or it is based on what you had at the end of the last era. There's two classes of city now, Cities and Towns. Cities are the first-class, can do everything settlement, Towns are more limited and act more like support. You can upgrade from a Town to a City, but again, at the start of each age, almost all your Cities are reset to Towns.

The Ages are a really interesting attempt at solving two problems: Snowballing and Late Game Grind. There's always been a snowballing problem in the game. Early success and luck for the player (or one player in a multiplayer game) begets more success because that player has more resources to get edge after edge. Firaxis has been trying to deal with that for three versions now. They've not been very successful but a reset serves as a (bit of a) rubberbanding effect, to drag the leader back to the pack. Successes in the previous Age still give you a boost for the next and if you have eaten a big chunk of another Civ's cities you definitely have an edge.

Late Game Grind is the tendency for the late game to shift from a series of interesting decisions to a series of hoops to jump through. The Ages instead give you three reasonably distinct peaks to climb throughout the game before you need to start from scratch again.

Early days and it is in pre-release so there are some ropey balance issues in the game. There are other things I am a bit more wary of. There has been the concept of a worker/builder unit in every version before now. I mean, it's the third X in '4x Game', to eXploit your territory and resources. They're gone. Instead when you grow a city, you pick a hex and lo! it is developed and worked. It takes a lot of micromanagement out of the game, I'm just not sure yet if it takes out too much. Units have been radically simplified. No more rock-paper-scissors balancing of different units being good against each other. Now just an infantry, a more expensive but tougher cavalry, a ranged, and a city-buster siege unit. And three levels of each per Age. So Level 1->Level 2->Level 3 of each class. No differentiation of boats at all. Aircraft got a third class with anti-air, anti-surface unit, and anti-city aircraft. And no promotions for units, but the Great General/Admiral concept is replaced with a Commander unit. That's the one that earns XP and levels up, and Commanders are retained between Ages. And there is an Economic victory. 😬 I've always hated it when the community tried to invent Economic victory types. If an economy is the allocation of limited resources to achieve aims and goals, then every victory type in Civilisation is an economic victory. And usually the community just created shit like 'Own all the money' or 'Own all the resource tokens'. And look, I have a half dozen pages of notes somewhere on an economic victory for Civ 6 that was basically the end of game screen in Civ 1 that showed literacy rates in your civilisation. I was always too lazy to learn enough of the Lua SDK to make it work. So I am wary of this economic victory even if I kind of think they did an interesting solution.

This isn't a review. This is just me rambling on about a new version of the game I like. So I'm not going to score it or anything. It's still a bit messy and it's different and that makes it feel a bit weird and off-putting, but I reckon I am going to get a lot of hours on this game.

• civilisation
• gaming
• review

Fairly well explained, code-heavy description of building a shader image in GLSL, explained with an example image.

• build-your-own
• graphics
• howto
• learn
• programming
• shader

As I wait in the car repair place for the assessor to tell me how long for the repair, I have developed a theory. Morning television shows are the result of a capitalist conspiracy to make workers regret using leave to attend to their health or other personal needs. “Oh, you want to steal office hours from me just because you’re quote-unquote ‘sick’? Ok, but here’s some Matt Shirvington to keep you company. You’ll do it in Saturday next time, won’t you?”

I said, "I'm not your manager, we're peers, so I do feel a little uncomfortable telling you how to do your job" after I suggested a thing we could be doing together and they replyied it was kind of their role.

They said "Sure, but I do appreciate your greater gravitas" and I was suddenly unsure who they were talking to, that it was the first time I've ever been accused of having gravitas, and that it seemed I had the reverse problem of all those GSVs.

So anyway, I immediately displayed my immense and formidable gravitas by editing my profile in the company Slack.

"Hey, your feed is not right, recent posts are missing."

"huh, no, they are there in the curl output. And yeah, there in the feed reader, but out of order. I guess a publish date would help."

/me adds what he thinks is the publish date

"Ok, nope, still out of order. And apparently all published right this second."

/me fixes it properly

"Ok, yep. But feed reader is weird because of those posts 'published' five minutes ago. But real engineers test in production, right? 🫤"

I nearly got into an argument right before Xmas with work colleagues about Gen AI. I had made some snarky comment and got some pushback that they didn’t understand why I wouldn’t use it because it generates good code if you use it right. I ended up just ignoring the pushback and then the break helped the whole thing go away.

That meant I could avoid getting into the awkward conversation about my reasoning. Because my response would have been that whether or not it is an effective generator of good code is irrelevant to me. My distaste for LLMS are in moral and ethical grounds. The ethics of using a tool built on theft. The morality of using a tool that requires so much waste of water and power in the beginning stages of an existential crisis triggered by climate change.

There’s axiomatically no way to live a moral life in capitalism. So I don’t like to get into that with work colleagues. I’ll tease my friends about their moral failings like working for AWS, but it’s closer to sanctimonious to push that kind of position with people I only know because we have the same employer.

To some extent though I am finding myself the last couple of days wondering how, or if, Deepsink and its apparently significantly reduced impacts in training phase alter the equation for me.

Today Sussan Ley - and really I should know better because she's nothing but a public funded performance artist/troll at this point - compared "the First Fleet to Elon Musk’s Space X seeking to reach Mars". I recall there was another allegory regarding the colonists coming to Australia. That one also involved Mars, but that one had travel going the other direction and was perhaps a little closer to the mark.

NGL I'm a little conflicted about the lack of local microbes during the actual events.

But also, gee, could you be more obsequious to the Nazi?

What is the statute of limitations on referring to one side of your house as "So and so's side", the family who were there when you first moved in, even if they have moved out?

I try to use NATO phonetics when reading out codes to the drive through at McDonald’s. Tonight I started with ‘Bravo’, but realised I couldn’t remember what the next letter was so paused and then very sheepishly said ‘potato’.

I think I heard a giggle.

Today Paul Graham issued a plea to the MAGA party to recognise his obsequiousness in the form of an essay on how it is possible to be too anti-racist. I won’t link to it; it’s easy enough to find if you respect yourself so little. But I warn you, an extremely white man is going to tell you racism is bad but nearly as bad as anti-racists say it is.

It’s kind of astonishing both how desperate these clowns are to be allowed into the club and how they clearly believe it will last forever and their words won’t be held against them forever. And yes, and how profoundly cringe they are: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/16/i-knew-one-day-id-have-to-watch-powerful-men-burn-the-world-down-i-just-didnt-expect-them-to-be-such-losers

Once is an accident, twice is coincidence, three times a pattern.

On our 5th anniversary D promised me "50 to go." clearly foreshadowing her intent to have me killed in 2063.

And now on our 17th she is telling me I need a will to make sure everything I have goes to the right place.

Chilling escalation.

Anyway, happy anniversary, D.

I'm trying to offload some shelves. I purchased them a decade ago when we first moved into my house because they were cheap and effective. We've subsequently replaced them with something sturdier and neater.

However I can assure you, they could soon do the work of midlevel engineers in any company, not just Meta.

https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-meta-ai-replace-engineers-coders-joe-rogan-podcast-2025-1

what is a modern corporation but a legal spell for turning reasoning beings into temporarily vacant machines?

Just one of a dozen clarifying lines. Masnick's Impossibility Theorem gets trotted out a lot, disingenuously I think by a lot of people who aren't Mike Masnick. Kissing is essentially saying "Yes, but" in this piece. Both should be read together.

• corporate
• politics
• social
• society
• web

I was just reading a blog post an hour ago about how no, your phone is not spying on you. And then...

Today everyone is all het up because famous bullshit artist Donald Trump responded to a press conference question saying that he could not rule out using military force to annex the Panama Canal. From Panama. Which you would have to imagine would be something easily militarily defended and not all all prone to insurgent action, but anyways.

The fact that a journalist even asked the question is a real "paper bag labeled 'Dead Dove'" moment. Aside from the court case (https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-companies-accused-tax-evasion-panama) I'm curious what else Trump might have going on that he'd see this as useful leverage.

If only we had some sort of self-mythologising group of people with access to a kind of broad medium of communication who could question motivations and so forth and shine a light on them.

• media
• uspol

An ebook length screed from Joan Westenberg (not a blog post, SBF would be so disappointed but fuck him) basically calling for radically rethinking of what it means to be responsible for something. Not a full blown "Take the means of production" call to action, but definitely pushing for the devolution of ownership and responsibility to workers and away from middle managers.

As a middle manager I cannot help but fist pump and mutter "fuck yeah!"

I'd propose a framework: * The stakes must be high (in this case, literal life and death) * The intervention must be low-cost and low-risk * The evidence must be clear and immediately observable * The delay caused by seeking permission would result in significant harm

I appreciate how often Joan lays out where she thinks the guardrails on something like this should be. Also:

But - and this is crucial - they did this within carefully designed constraints. Workers can't make changes that would affect other processes without coordination. They can't violate safety protocols. They have to document their changes. But within these constraints, they don't need permission to optimize (sic) their own work.

• culture
• joan-westenberg
• organisation
• ownership
• radicalism
• teams
• work

Kris created an Apple shortcuts flow for posting images to her Wordpress blog. I had something similar at one stage but grew unresaobly angry that Shortcuts couldn't access the secure Passwords app so I had to hardcode the bearer token into the shortcut. Like a barbarian! You know, maybe I could just..you know...do that anyway.

• blogging
• indieweb
• kris_howard
• meta
• shortcuts