Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Richard Meredith @rtm223.me · 10h

Came home to a crime scene this evening. But who has murdered my plant?

Luckily detective Loppan is on the case and I'm sure has no biasses in this case

A potter plant with most of it's leaves torn off sits on a coffee table a white cat is sniffing at the removed leaves

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Richard Meredith @rtm223.me · 20h

If, as is claimed here, they paid someone the absolute minimum they could to produce a single logo treatment then butchered (sorry, "polished") that with an algorithm, that's still bad

And if you have a designer for your logo, they will do those extra treatments for you. That's part of the job

AmericanTruckSongs10 @ethangach.bsky.social · 1d

A rep for Sackbird Studios tells me the team's logo was hand drawn by a human artist.

Some elements of the website did use AI and were later touched up.

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Richard Meredith @rtm223.me · 21h

And I'm pretty sure these lightweight spinoffs of the LLMs-in-Everything cult will hang around even after the inevitable GenAI bubble collapse. So we're just gonna be left with everything we use being noticeably worse than it was before

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Richard Meredith @rtm223.me · 21h

Slowed things down in the video above, but I'd normally be hitting enter or space so quickly that I don't even see the autocomplete dropdown pop up, so it manifests as just random class and variable names appearing as I type

Utterly infuriating and useless. Who are these "improvements" for?

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Richard Meredith @rtm223.me · 21h

Rider autocomplete has gotten *significantly* worse from 2024.x to 2025.2. It's now adding autocomplete recommendations at the end of lines, so hitting Enter doesn't go to next line, it spaffs out nonsense

I've got all the GenAI bullshit switched off, but I'm betting this is LLM madness creeping in

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Richard Meredith @rtm223.me · 1d

As a weird industrial design project, or a movie prop, this could be kinda cool, but this is being sold as a genuine survival tool, but also pictured like you could be real world wolverine maybe 😂

The same claw in isolation, with a rainbow tether attached

Gloved hand holds the claw in such a way that it runs along their knuckles, I don't think that any use could be made in the grip

Someone with fingerless gloves is brandishing a claw in each hand, held between their index and middle finger

Someone holding 2 claws between the fingers of one hand. No glove and it's unclear how secure the hold is, but it's definitely designed to remind you of Wolverine

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Richard Meredith @rtm223.me · 1d

Have YOU considered whether you have enough RAPTOR utility in your life? For survival AND construction - the two domains we all associate with RAPTORS

A photo of a hand in some kind of tacticool glove holding a curved blade that maybe looks a little like a velociraptor claw. The point of th blade is held against some kind of small glass porthole in the ground. Maybe it's an outdoor light? The glass is not damaged in any way. Text reads

DAILY RAPTOR UTILITY
Instant Glass Shatterer

It can pierce through double-layer tempered
glass, making it highly suitable for both survival
and construction scenarios.

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Richard Meredith @rtm223.me · 1d

Neglected to take photos, but I got a spiralizer today and made a stir fry with spiralized courgette noodles in and it was extremely good

Looking forward to an overly-spiralized lifestyle for the foreseeable future

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Reposted by Richard Meredith

Tim Dawson @ironicaccount.bsky.social · 1d

when people say genAI is the future I am struck by how short sighted and fatalistic this is as a concept

it’s recycling our past for the future, it’s drinking our filtered waste while not thinking about how many times you can do that, it’s hoping tomorrow’s answers have already been said

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Richard Meredith @rtm223.me · 2d

I should have commented the other day about the really nice curved corners on that smaller rack. Stood out as a really high quality feature

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Richard Meredith @rtm223.me · 2d

Just imagine having the level of cowardice that'd make you scared of acknowledging the Klan as bad guys

Stephen Totilo @stephentotilo.bsky.social · 2d

SCOOP: Last year, Ubisoft cancelled an Assassin's Creed game set during Reconstruction. Was to feature a Black Assassin who, among other things, fought the rise of the Klan

Sources: Leadership nixed it over concerns re: U.S. political climate, backlash to Yasuke

www.gamefile.news/p/scoop-ubis...

Scoop: Ubisoft cancelled a post-Civil War Assassin’s Creed last year

Company leadership deemed the project too controversial for the moment, sources tell Game File

www.gamefile.news

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Reposted by Richard Meredith

Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 25d

Replit, a vibe coding startup, pushed a new product called "agent 3" that appears to be completely broken other than in its ability to burn tons of money

Fear of Agent 3
Question / Discussion
Join
Hi all, I would like to share my experience so far.
Ever since Agent 3 was released, l've been stuck in a nightmare with my app.
I've already spent around $300 and lost an entire weekend completely isolated, trying to fix issues that Agent 3 keeps making worse. My app is live, with about 250 users, and right now it's broken. Users are complaining, and I feel powerless.
Every time I run Agent 3, it feels like pulling the lever of a slot machine. Sometimes it runs for an hour and produces nothing. Sometimes it introduces new bugs. Most of the time, it doesn't solve the problem. I've ended up spending money just to watch things break even further.
I'm mentally exhausted. I wasted a whole weekend like this, and I can't see a way forward. With Agent 2 l had something that worked, but now everything seems fragile and unreliable.
If there were even one way to get out of this at a reasonable cost, I would take it immediately. But everything is tied up on Replit like database, server, user base etc.. I wouldn't even know where to move, and I can't deliver the same experience elsewhere.
Right now, I feel destroyed and broken.
Please, if anyone has advice or a solution, I'd be deeply grateful.
D

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Richard Meredith @rtm223.me · 3d

So much of what's going on in that space is either

A) companies announcing huge future investments, with money that doesn't exist

B) NVIDIA giving people money to buy their GPUs, which a smart person would consider a loss. But both companies get to book it as revenue so number go up!

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Richard Meredith @rtm223.me · 3d

You know how when people on the margins joke about passing the same 20 bucks around to each other for their work as a joke about how it can be a struggle to survive in that space?

The billionaires are *extremely* struggling w right now

Carl Quintanilla @carlquintanilla.bsky.social · 3d

NVIDIA and OpenAi:

Concerns that their “increasingly complex and interconnected web of business transactions is artificially propping up the trillion-dollar AI boom.“

@bloomberg.com $NVDA 👀
www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

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Richard Meredith @rtm223.me · 3d

Heads up if you're using @jetbrains.com IDEs: They're gonna start defaulting to stealing all your code if you're not on a commercial license. Which really sucks. Luckily it's still possible to opt-out, for now

blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2025/09...

Better AI Depends on Better Data: We Need Your Help | The JetBrains Blog

TL;DR Over the past few years, AI has made remarkable progress, but it doesn’t always deliver what professional developers need. One key reason is that most models are trained on public datasets th

blog.jetbrains.com

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Reposted by Richard Meredith

KC Complains a Lot @kccomplainsalot.blacksky.app · 7d

It’s either her burner or someone on the dev team bsky.app/profile/ench...

bsky.app

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Reposted by Richard Meredith

Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social · 8d

"Contrarian" is killing me, the whole premise of the Free Press is telling rich elderly and middle-aged men that they're right about everything

Phil Lewis @phillewis.bsky.social · 8d

Bari Weiss is set to be named the editor in chief of CBS News, the New York Post reports

Paramount Skydance is poised to name Bari Weiss as editor in chief of CBS News in the coming days — giving the hard-charging journalist unusual clout to revamp the struggling network as it also acquires her scrappy news site the Free Press, The Post has learned.

Weiss — a 41-year-old former New York Times opinion writer who has built the Free Press into a buzzworthy site with a contrarian bent — is expected to be named to the top post in a Monday announcement, although the talks are in flux and the timing could change, a source close to the situation said.

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Kevin Lam @kevinonthelam.bsky.social · 7d

If anyone knows of any animation jobs open, I'd love to hear about it as I'm looking for my next adventure.

Thanks!

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Richard Meredith @rtm223.me · 10d

Jim Jefferies lucky he was only disappeared from the lineup, not from this mortal coil

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Richard Meredith @rtm223.me · 10d

The "yeah my client is a murderer, but who cares?" is probably a really stupid line to take when your client is spending hundreds of billions to try and wash their murderous reputation with entertainers like yourself

Also your client is a murderer, don't embarrass them publicly maybe?

"One reporter was killed by thegovernment - unfortunate, but not a fucking hill that I'm gonna die on, Jim Jefferies said on Theo Von's podcast inAugust, arguing it is for the greater good that "freedom-of-speech machines' such as himself bestow their "edgy" material on the kingdom and its subjects. (Since making the comments, Jefferies has since disappeared from the festival's lineup; his representatives did not respond to inquiries about this.)

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Reposted by Richard Meredith

Virtual Economy Podcast @virtualeconcast.com · 11d

A bonus episode is LIVE, as we discuss the $55B EA leveraged buyout. We explain how we got here, what a leveraged buyout is, and what questions labor should be asking.

virtualeconcast.com/podcast/bonu...

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JB_AU @jbau.bsky.social · 12d

This whole section really.

Finally: AI cannot do your job, but an AI salesman can 100% convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job, and when the bubble bursts, the money-hemorrhaging "foundation models" will be shut off and we'll lose the AI that can't do your job, and you will be long gone, retrained or retired or "discouraged" and out of the labor market, and no one will do your job.
AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations:

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Ed Morrish @edmorrish.bsky.social · Jan 17

Hi! I borrowed $300m from the worst people in the world to buy your favourite thing! Now your favourite thing owes me $300m and sadly it looks like it can’t pay me back so I’ve taken it out back and shot it. Anyways, just wanted to ask… what’s your *second* favourite thing?

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Richard Meredith @rtm223.me · 14d

Also in exciting news: I've published my little blueprint exceptions plugin on the Fab store. It lets you raise blueprint exceptions from Blueprints and CPP using Assert and Verify behaviors. With support for auto-breakpointing on errors and custom diagnostic messages

www.fab.com/listings/e3a...

RTM Blueprint Exceptions

A plugin providing a clean and easy way to implement Blueprint Exceptions in your UE5 codebase, from Blueprints or cpp code, with automatic breakpointing on errors and integration with the Message Log...

www.fab.com

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Richard Meredith @rtm223.me · 14d

I have no useful input but

An altered @dril tweet badly edited to read

Turning a big dial that says "Gay" on it and constantly looking back at the audience to ensure all the fascists have gone away

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