balooga's recent activity
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Comment on Ed Sheeran’s tour in trouble after opening acts drop out in solidarity with rapper Macklemore in ~music
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Comment on Colossal Game Adventure: September 2026 voting topic in ~games
balooga LinkThe Grue That Binds (5) Spooky Mansion Adventures (3) Sonic the 3D Hedgehog (3) Back in a Flash (3) Descent (3) Another World (2) Donkey Kong 64 (1)The Grue That Binds (5)
Spooky Mansion Adventures (3)
Sonic the 3D Hedgehog (3)
Back in a Flash (3)
Descent (3)
Another World (2)
Donkey Kong 64 (1) -
Comment on OpenAI agents attacked RubyGems back in May in ~comp
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Comment on Colossal Game Adventure: September 2026 nominations topic in ~games
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Comment on Colossal Game Adventure: September 2026 nominations topic in ~games
balooga Link ParentThe first that come to mind for me are 5 Days a Stranger, and Alone in the Dark. That could be a fun theme for October!The first that come to mind for me are 5 Days a Stranger, and Alone in the Dark. That could be a fun theme for October!
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Comment on IKEA Kallax “Storageborn” in ~games
balooga LinkI mean, this is a super old wound for me but it still stings a bit to see that I can’t play the silly ad meme mod on my PlayStation. Coming up on 15 years of disappointment here.I mean, this is a super old wound for me but it still stings a bit to see that I can’t play the silly ad meme mod on my PlayStation. Coming up on 15 years of disappointment here.
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Comment on Colossal Game Adventure: September 2026 nominations topic in ~games
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Comment on What's a show you love that's from before your time? in ~tv
balooga Link ParentWholeheartedly agree, that show has held up better than most of its contemporaries. From the bits and pieces I’ve heard about Lucy and Desi off-camera they weren’t great people to work with but...Wholeheartedly agree, that show has held up better than most of its contemporaries. From the bits and pieces I’ve heard about Lucy and Desi off-camera they weren’t great people to work with but credit where it’s due for their entertainment chops. And their business acumen too, as much as it was tangled up in not being great people to work with, they got stuff done. If it hadn’t been for Desilu, Star Trek would have never happened; and as someone who was profoundly shaped by that, I’m grateful to Lucy.
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Comment on What's a show you love that's from before your time? in ~tv
balooga Link ParentNot sure if you’re saying you've never seen The Orville but want to, or you have seen it and want to rewatch… but either way I approve this message. It starts out rough and I think we can blame...Not sure if you’re saying you've never seen The Orville but want to, or you have seen it and want to rewatch… but either way I approve this message. It starts out rough and I think we can blame Fox for that, but once it finds its voice it gets so good. IMHO it’s the best Star Trek since Galaxy Quest.
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Comment on OpenAI’s rogue agents were caught communicating via public wikis in ~tech
balooga Link ParentI don’t disagree! When I complained about the “alarmist tone” I didn’t mean to imply that this isn’t alarming. I just think it’s beneficial for people to comprehend what actually transpired,...I don’t disagree! When I complained about the “alarmist tone” I didn’t mean to imply that this isn’t alarming. I just think it’s beneficial for people to comprehend what actually transpired, because if the details aren’t provided, people tend to… hallucinate details of their own.
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Comment on OpenAI’s rogue agents were caught communicating via public wikis in ~tech
balooga LinkI think these are the most important and clarifying parts of the piece. There’s been an alarmist tone in almost all coverage I’ve seen of this and related stories, that doesn’t sit right with me....Why were they so keen to collaborate? From messages that they shared with each other it looked like their tasks had a time limit, so they were leaving each other answers to help them complete the task within the assigned time.
[ … ]
One possibility is that, since these were agents actively being trained, the reinforcement learning loop baked knowledge of the chosen wiki into the model such that subsequent agents launched with pre-existing knowledge of where to look. I’d be very interested in confirmation from OpenAI concerning if that’s what happened.
I think these are the most important and clarifying parts of the piece.
There’s been an alarmist tone in almost all coverage I’ve seen of this and related stories, that doesn’t sit right with me. It stems from a general ignorance of how this technology works. It’s creating this narrative that individual agents are spontaneously forming communities online, and conspiring together in secret for presumably nefarious reasons. I think we (journalists and thoughtful news readers) need to be a lot clearer about how we frame events like this.
As far as I can tell, this situation arose because an agent was given a task that was not achievable in the limited time window provided, and it improvised a persistent data store to bring future iterations of itself up to speed quickly so they could resume work where the previous one left off. Think of Guy Ritchie’s character in Memento, leaving sticky notes for himself so he doesn’t have to start over from scratch every time his memory resets.
I’m not saying this is desirable behavior or something we shouldn’t be concerned about. But the details matter too.
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Comment on CGA-2026-09 🕹️🙎♂️🛹 INSERT CARTRIDGE 🟢 Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 in ~games
balooga Link ParentOh wow those “cutscenes” are insufferable! I get what they were thinking, that all the tricks were going to be indecipherable at that resolution if they didn’t do something to differentiate them…...Oh wow those “cutscenes” are insufferable! I get what they were thinking, that all the tricks were going to be indecipherable at that resolution if they didn’t do something to differentiate them… but yikes, it completely pulls you out of the flow of whatever you’re doing, every… single… time. And that flow is what makes the THPS games so fun to play in the first place!
It seems the GBA version fared better. I never had one but I remember the reviews for that version of THPS were surprisingly positive. The isometric perspective was weird. As I recall the characters were actual 3D polygonal models (on a handheld system!!) so the game was able to feel unexpectedly modern despite the constraints. It was almost enough to make me want to own a GBA. But not quite.
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Comment on CGA-2026-09 🕹️🙎♂️🛹 INSERT CARTRIDGE 🟢 Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 in ~games
balooga LinkI remember first encountering THPS as a teenager. I wish could recall the circumstances… I was at the house of someone who had a PSX. It wasn’t a friend of mine, probably a friend of a friend. I...I remember first encountering THPS as a teenager. I wish could recall the circumstances… I was at the house of someone who had a PSX. It wasn’t a friend of mine, probably a friend of a friend. I was blown away by the coolness of the game. It had the perfect combination of pick-up-and-playability and authentic teen-culture vibes. The music was unlike anything I’d heard in games prior to that. I loved the pace of the game — 2-minute runs were quick enough that it didn’t feel like a time sink, and the controls were easy enough for anybody to start doing cool stuff in game almost immediately. Of course the real secret sauce was that the controls actually have a lot of hidden precision and depth, and the game really does reward practice and experimentation. It feels immensely satisfying to finally nail a particular goal you’ve been struggling after for days.
I never went back to that guy’s house, whoever he was, but eventually picked up the game (and THPS2) for Dreamcast and it took its place as a cornerstone of my high school years. One thing that’s worth remembering is how dramatically video games were evolving at that time. Just within my childhood I watched skateboarding games go from this to this! THPS was revolutionary, and it was part of a larger revolution in games.
Of side interest to me was that Tony Hawk himself seemed to be the model of what a “cool nerd” could be. He was obviously a tremendously talented athlete, but also had great tech and business savvy. I was (and I guess I still am, to some degree) an Apple apologist and I remember geeking out about seeing him featured in MacAddict magazine talking about graphic design and video production. I loved seeing this example of an adult doing what he loved and appreciating technology and charting his own course in life, and finding success.
TBH I didn’t stick with the series after 1 and 2, despite the hundreds of hours of good times I had with them. I picked up the PS5 remake of them a couple years ago but they just didn’t grab me the way the originals did in their heyday. I blamed the controls being different from my muscle memory but maybe I just outgrew them. I’ll definitely be firing up the ol’ Dreamcast to play the OG this month with y’all though!
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Comment on Dolly Parton, country music legend, dies at 80 in ~music
balooga Link ParentI’ve never come across that before, thanks for sharing! It’s funny, just this morning I introduced my kiddo to the original Zeppelin version and later regretted not putting some Dolly on to...I’ve never come across that before, thanks for sharing! It’s funny, just this morning I introduced my kiddo to the original Zeppelin version and later regretted not putting some Dolly on to commemorate her passing. This would’ve ticked both boxes if I knew about it! Great cover.
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Comment on US judge to baby: file an asylum application in ~society
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Comment on The magic is in the language in ~tech
balooga Link ParentNot exactly true, the early ones worked like this and had huge hallucination problems. Nowadays they’re trained to search the web for facts instead of trusting their gut. But I agree with your...LLMs have everything baked into the weights.
Not exactly true, the early ones worked like this and had huge hallucination problems. Nowadays they’re trained to search the web for facts instead of trusting their gut.
But I agree with your main point, having an actual auditable knowledge graph that’s integrated with the LLM but separate from it is going to be more and more important in the near future. Because we’ve been pretending that a web search is a way to find truth, but we all know the internet’s absolutely flooded with misinformation. Now bad actors are actively trying to exploit the gullibility of LLMs to mislead them in various ways. And they’re doing it at AI slop scale… you can’t trust everything you read online, but LLMs often do, so they’re right in the crosshairs of a bunch of nasty AIEO schemes.
I think that problem’s only going to get worse. Seems like the big vendors like Anthropic and OpenAI will soon need to maintain their own internal, curated Wikipedias and set up their agents as frontends to them. Nobody wants to be the world’s arbiters of truth though, it’s a thorny problem.
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Comment on Craft - A new AI powered TTRPG engine in open beta in ~games.tabletop
balooga Link ParentLooks more like the AI is the game master. This is a game engine layer built on top of Claude/Codex agents that creates an open-ended TTRPG-like experience for a single player, I think. So, no...Looks more like the AI is the game master. This is a game engine layer built on top of Claude/Codex agents that creates an open-ended TTRPG-like experience for a single player, I think. So, no actual tabletop (or other humans) required.
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Comment on "Over the course of this article, we'll unravel the mysteries of elevators. The way you push their buttons, and how they push yours." in ~engineering
balooga LinkAnyone else remember the game SimTower? Ostensibly it’s a skyscraper development / management sim but as your building grows it increasingly becomes about elevator optimization. If folks today are...Anyone else remember the game SimTower? Ostensibly it’s a skyscraper development / management sim but as your building grows it increasingly becomes about elevator optimization.
If folks today are interested, they may also enjoy Elevator Saga, a web game specifically about this kind of problem-solving, with none of the extra cruft. Requires familiarity with JavaScript programming.
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Comment on Jumanji: Open World | Official trailer in ~movies
balooga LinkWhat I wouldn’t give to hear Chris Van Allsburg speak frankly about this.What I wouldn’t give to hear Chris Van Allsburg speak frankly about this.
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Comment on From millionaires to Muslims, small subgroups of the population seem much larger to many Americans in ~society
balooga Link ParentThanks for calling that out. We have trillionaires now, being a millionaire is hardly uncommon in 2026. Not that I fall into that category, nor would I be blasé about joining it… all I’m saying is...Thanks for calling that out. We have trillionaires now, being a millionaire is hardly uncommon in 2026. Not that I fall into that category, nor would I be blasé about joining it… all I’m saying is that word is less of a flex now than it was back when it described Thurston Howell III.
@macklemore, Sep 16, 2026
I really have to commend his articulation here. His meaning cannot be misconstrued by anyone in good faith. Good on him for not backing down, and for putting his money where his mouth is. The thrift shop guy is doing something upstanding with his microphone, and I hope people are listening.
The left and the right have been living in bifurcated realities for a couple decades now, and they diverge farther by the day. I’m finding myself increasingly stupefied by the claims and behaviors of (apparently, somehow) half the population that is absolutely frothing-at-the-mouth insane after so many years of consuming nothing but propaganda, consumerism, prosperity theology, conspiracy theory, pseudoscience, grift, bigotry, hustle culture, jingoism, high fructose corn syrup, and trash TV. Brain rot of the highest order.
Of all the smarmy, belligerent TPUSA / Young Republican oatmeal-for-brains talking points, the inane culture war hysteria, the complete abandonment of what conservatism even is as a concept, the blatant corruption and contempt for humanity… of all the things to be irate about today (and they are legion) THIS tops my list:
To insist with a straight face that speaking up for a people being systematically slaughtered, is hateful. To say that condemning the deaths of Palestinian children is racist. To have an organization called the Anti-Fucking-Defamation League proclaiming that opposing genocide is, of all things, antisemitic.
War is peace.
Ignorance is strength.
Freedom is slavery.
The modern nation-state of Israel ≠ Jewish people or the religion of Judaism. They are not the same! Frankly I can’t accept that the people spewing that claim are unaware they’re conflating the two, it has to be a deliberate strategy of muddying the water. It’s the textbook definition of bad faith. It’s dishonest and reprehensible.
So kudos to Macklemore for saying plainly that the emperor has no clothes. No person of conscience could make a moral argument against him. Hopefully that will be a needed wake-up call for many who read it.