Google will begin punishing sites for back button hijacking in June Google says it could penalize back button hijacking by demoting websites in search ranking.

Back button hijacking is often used to wring more pageviews out of visitors, and it’s common on sites that live and die on search traffic.

Young adult happiness is falling. Percent of young people who are pretty or very happy has dropped from 88% to 76% over the last 15 years after having held fairly steady between 1980 and 2010

My hottest “I have no data to back this up” take is that phones aren’t making young people less happy. What’s making them less happy is living in a world where everyone is having their reality defined by recommendation algorithms that can only care about whether something keeps you watching.

“The AI Great Leap Forward,” cf Mao’s Great Leap Forward of 1958–1962. Lol. leehanchung.github.io/blogs/2026/0...

Sam Altman Says It'll Take Another Year Before ChatGPT Can Start a Timer An $852 billion company, ladies and gentlemen.

Putting aside Sam Altman just continuing to emit huge lies constantly, this is an amazing example of what I mean when I talk about how GenAI is replacing *extremely low energy* digital tasks with *WAY WAY HIGHER ENERGY* replacements that *do not even work*

Why TF is anyone using ChatGPT as a timer!

Hot Take: I want to be viewed as outdated by future standards. I want things to progress so well for everyone that many of my perspectives or actions don’t age well. I view it as a sign of growth. I don’t want society to be stagnant. I am fully okay with future generations thinking I’m cringe

The Subprime AI Crisis Is Here Hi! If you like this piece and want to support my independent reporting and analysis, why not subscribe to my premium newsletter? It’s $70 a year, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newslet...

Free newsletter: The Subprime AI Crisis is here. I explore the disturbing parallels between the run-up to the global financial crisis and the heavily-subsidized AI bubble, and how Anthropic and OpenAI's rush to IPO accelerates the crisis further.
www.wheresyoured.at/the-subprime-ai-crisis-is-here/

Michael Collins, the chap who took this photograph, remains the only person on earth to have taken a photo that had everyone in shot aside himself.

If Artemis is going up then it gives me an excuse to once again post this photo, the only one to contain every human being in the universe but one.

video games have been around since my grandparents were little and weirdo freaks now try to act like it’s impossible to make one without using the Polluting Thief Chatbot that didn’t exist before like five years ago and I will never understand that

‘Succulent Chinese meal’ speech added to Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive Jack Karlson’s rallying cry of ‘democracy manifest’ added to national collection of sound recordings that hold historical, cultural and aesthetic significance * Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast Thirty-five years ago, when Jack Karlson was hauled into a police car outside a Chinese restaurant in Queensland, he couldn’t have known his bombastic speech would be watched by millions around the world, become a meme and now, be preserved for ever in Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive. Karlson’s declaration – “Gentlemen, this is democracy manifest! … What is the charge? Eating a meal? A succulent Chinese meal?” – is one of nine pieces of audio that have been added to the NFSA’s Sounds of Australia collection this year, along with a pedestrian crossing signal and Missy Higgins’ 2004 hit Scar. Continue reading...

‘Succulent Chinese meal’ speech added to Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive

Tweet from @dandouglas – “i'm the CEO of an AAA games studio, and as you might guess, we're pretty psyched about making games! but we never let making games get in the way of our true passion: laying off loads of staff fucking constantly”

DEI this, DEI that, DEI is killing video games, blah blah blah: for woke week I spoke with a recent DEI manager at a AAA games company, to find out what leading a diversity team at such a huge studio actually involves, and what the challenges are:

It’s so fun how this is basically the third time in 6 years that we’re doing the “oops supply chain brokey” shit

Gotta say I’m loving this American bloke in Melbourne trying to find a bad coffee. Good fucking luck with that buddy. 😂😂🤣🤣

Nvidia Answers my DLSS 5 Questions YouTube video by Daniel Owen

great reporting here. basically yes DLSS 5 is running a gen AI model on the 2D output and nothing more. it doesn’t know anything about the 3D scene, textures / models / lighting / PBR other than what the model infers by looking at a frame.

TL:DR, they sped up slop.

youtu.be/D0EM1vKt36s?...

It’s just conservatism expressing itself in a different context. Racing was good and decided on pure merit when I was young. It got bad when it became more inclusive and started talking about sustainability. It’s ahistorical nonsense that’s just intellectualizing a broader discomfort and resentment.

Sometimes it helpful to talk to dipshits to understand where something is coming from. Had someone argue that all the artificial elements in F1 proceeded from the decision to make the cars “EVs” and advances in aerodynamics did not cause overtaking issues. Just the battery.

try as companies might to project an illusion of business as usual onto this year's gdc, the reality of the show was anything but. game developers are feeling the squeeze from the industry's uncertain future and a country in rapid, violent decline. the anxiety was palpable. the vibes were off

GDC was defined by anxiety about the future of the games industry and America, even if big companies didn't want to acknowledge it

aftermath.site/gdc-2026-xbox-...

This'll be handy for games like Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, which end up dumping you back to the main menu anyway.

So:
Text in a game exists within an info/attention economy. And it takes careful design to manage these economies, which MOST complex games struggle to get right. And even if you try to train players, they're bringing training from outside.

None of this is "making stupid games" for "stupid players"

Sometimes the simple reality is that we make games with a lot of mechanics, a lot going on. We ask the players to intake and evaluate a LOT of information, rapidly, that matters to their survival and second-to-second decisions. Elements within a game compete with each other for attention.

"Players don't read text." This is not literally true in all cases, but it IS a factual statement in many contexts.

An interesting question is "Why?"

The same player who reads a text-heavy game like Disco Elysium may not read text popping up in a UI during the action or during a tutorial.

Any Australian Govt which aligns us to this organisation betrays us all #auspol

'This is the worst item I have ever bought from Amazon'

AI grifters are selling fake video game guidebooks, some even masquerading as 'official' releases:

aftermath.site/video-game-gui...

Not anymore. 🔥

Maybe there was a spider inside.

omg, nailed

Not beating the geriatric millennial allegations here, but if you want to feel totally fine for 22 minutes, the new Scrubs shockingly accomplishes that. Feels like reading a well written email from an old friend who hasn't changed a bit.

I miss Trillian