Nostr notes by supersquirrel

> When composing their latest offering, the creators of the ...

2026-10-25T19:45:21Z

> When composing their latest offering, the creators of the futurist communism-flavored spy adventure Zero Parades: For Dead Spies had to reckon with three proverbial elephants in the room.

> > First, their studio’s first game, Disco Elysium, was an instant classic and critical darling that revitalized the genre of Computer Role-Playing Games (CRPGs) and set sky-high expectations for their sophomore effort.

> > Second, they aren’t actually the creative talent responsible for Disco Elysium, but the businesspeople who took over studio ZA/UM and fired most of its founding talent, completing its transition from an Estonian artists’ collective to a subsidiary of a for-profit company.

> >Third, the game’s themes, which set the ideologies of communism, neoliberalism, and techno-fascism against each other, are becoming much more salient in the political world. The U.S. government has rediscovered its zeal for hunting communists at home and abroad and revived its longstanding obsession with Cuba, billionaire tech-men are attempting to achieve immortality, various trends associated with the People's Republic of China are trending on U.S. TikTok, and remaining neoliberals continue to tinker around the edges as Rome burns (good riddance, but still).

> **These looming realities create a central irony at the core of Zero Parades, which was released on PC this May. While it attempts to comment upon ideologies that are increasingly relevant in the real world, it does so without the intellectual grounding in those ideologies that the original creative team brought to the table for Disco Elysium. Instead, the new ownership ape the style and basic subject matter of their first game without fully understanding the political substance that made it compelling. In this way, ZA/UM’s new owners have taken the crystallized output of a decade of labor from a Marxist artists’ collective and repackaged it for private profit, garbling their message in the process.**

> The warping of the first game’s distinct perspective is apparent in the opening of each game. In the first five minutes playing Disco Elysium, you are confronted with a labor strike, hints at racism in society, and anti-police sentiment directed at your character, a detective. Meanwhile, in Zero Parades, the initial framing suggests that political change isn’t driven by the streets or the shop floor, but by the elite, secretive machinations of spies and assassins.

Nostr event nevent1qqsfq64zxn379ufsz5x6dle8gjx7f54xnw8pqph6hrh39n9rdnkymeszyz9t067vj5v9xf4wrua0tesfs32dmktsheq3gez4q5dxzfr2v6hlvpz0tl7

2026-10-22T21:24:20Z

Iran's not half bad tech take.

Nostr event nevent1qqsgef3d7eqdjhzjqkpd3ddg485em7uk5qclendy92n8mxf35va9ecgzyz9t067vj5v9xf4wrua0tesfs32dmktsheq3gez4q5dxzfr2v6hlvts6lgy

2026-10-22T02:25:43Z

It isn't that surprising but it is somewhat surprising.

> "A resolution for this issue is planned to be included ...

2026-10-21T01:23:37Z

> "A resolution for this issue is planned to be included in an update to be released in the coming weeks."

> In this case, the structure of the investment market for AI ...

2026-10-21T01:19:44Z

> In this case, the structure of the investment market for AI is picked apart. It is very weird. Neocloud is made up of startups with a voracious appetite for cash, but no investment grade status. Thus, Nvidia backstops them, guaranteeing to rent unsold capacity for a fixed price for long enough to guarantee enough revenue to attract other investment. Other cash-rich big tech companies do similar things. This backstopping, also known more wryly as "balance sheet as a service," effectively shifts more risk to investment-rated companies. It's an increasingly important capex enabler, but as SemiAnalysis says, it’s necessarily limited, especially if AI itself has blown a hole in the enterprise.

*If it is a bubble than why is there is big loud noise and me trying to push a bunch of hot air onto you before I disappear into thin air???*

> Neighbourhoods across the United States that experienced a ...

2026-08-15T06:28:12Z

> Neighbourhoods across the United States that experienced a growth in their undocumented population also saw property-related and violent crime fall, not rise, according to an analysis of 11,500 neighbourhoods in more than 100 cities.

> In a paper published in the Journal of Urban Affairs on 10 August1, researchers combined estimates of numbers of undocumented residents with crime statistics from between 2010 and 2018.

> “Our study is the first to analyse these numbers across neighbourhoods and using such a diverse national sample,” says co-author Charis Kubrin, a criminologist at the University of California, Irvine. “That’s important because neighbourhoods are very proximate spaces to people. That’s where perceptions form.”