saalo

I like my city builder games as much as the next guy. I’ve played them since SimCity 2000 and earlier this year wrote about TheoTown already. Last week I stumbled upon this guy jamessimo on YouTube who’s creating the city builder of his dreams: a game with no grid whatsoever, with parcels of land of arbitrary shapes and sizes. Traditionally these games have been strongly grid-based, even if Cities: Skylines popularized a method where your roads can curve freely, yet the buildings next to them are always placed on a (rotated) grid. I really like jamessimo’s clear and calm explanations of the systems in his game. He’s an experienced software engineer by trade and has already been working on his game for a couple of years. There’s a part 2 of his series already available as well, detailing his traffic simulation model. While looking into city builders I discovered there is, of course, a city builder subreddit, r/CityBuilders. There, someone had recently announced a new game called Traffic Architect which I ended up playing on my phone for quite a while. It’s a sub-category of city builders, I guess, where you only focus on making the traffic flow as efficiently as possible. New buildings pop up, new pieces of the map open up, and you unlock new road types. Eventually the game ends once your road network is gridlocked enough. The game reminds me of Mini Metro, or maybe more accurately Mini Motorways. Traffic Architect is also coming to Steam as an improved version, but the browser-based game will stay free, the author says.

The post “I’d not buy a LG monitor” by Beko Pharm drew my attention to this recent video by Gamers Nexus. Beko sums the video up nicely: > It reports about LG’s latest practise to add blatant spyware to a monitor. Or to be precise to the software application associated with that monitor. The icing is that Windows apparently automatically downloads this software by default and this thing starts – without consent – to display ads. It’s ToS also explicitly allows “wiretapping” and “eavesdropping” and it’s the user’s responsibility to obtain consent from anyone in the room. Indeed, can you imagine that? I went ahead and looked up the LG Terms of Service, and sure enough, there’s this piece: > (…) the voices and utterances of third parties (including family members, guests, children, and bystanders) in the vicinity may be recorded and analyzed to provide the AI-Based Services. > > i. CONSENT REQUIREMENT: You acknowledge and agree that it is your sole responsibility to obtain all necessary consents from any third parties whose voices may be captured by the Product and to notify household members and guests that their voices may be captured and processed (…) The Gamers Nexus video already made fun of this, but indeed, LG expects you to greet your guests with something like “Welcome, welcome! Step in — unless, of course, you object to my TV recording everything you say while you’re at my place.” 🤦 Quoting Beko again: > I’d not buy a LG monitor again. And you shouldn’t too. Couldn’t say it better myself. But in addition to just boycotting LG devices, consider asking innocent questions from your retailers, especially if they provide online forms for enquiring more info on their products: “Is this one of those models that installs adware on you computer?”. (In a sense I have to be a bit grateful to LG, though, for making it easier for me to decide my new TV/monitor make when the time eventually comes. I’ve already settled for no Intel either.)

I read JTR’s post about em dashes and found it resonating with my own thoughts. The issue with em dashes these days is that AI is unproportionately fond of them, so using them is considered as a sign of AI writing by some. JTR quotes Sasha Putilin’s post twice: > “But what would people think of my writing if I ever used an em dash? What if someone points one out in my writing?”. Bitch, please. Are you writing for an internet rando who’s got nothing better to do than to hunt for em dashes? and: > I don’t give a shit what the “oh yeah let’s examine this piece of writing with a magnifying glass for any signs of AI” crowd thinks. I don’t give a shit that AI figured out how to produce em dashes before these online troglodytes did. Typing em dashes is not an AGI-complete problem. So, yeah, exactly. I’ve been a happy user of em dashes in the past too, but recently I’ve found myself censoring my own posts, i.e. not using em dashes at all and finding ways around them. I also use AI to polish my posts. I feed my final text to one and ask it to point out any (grammatical) issues. More often than not it tries to push my text into something that does not sound like me, but I simply reject those ideas. One particular “fix” I regret, and have now reverted, was the time when in this post about the Skunk Works book the AI said my text would “flow better” if I removed my em dash! Let us all proudly use whatever punctuation we like. You know how your text has been created and don’t owe anything to anyone. --- PS. While writing this I discovered I’ve actually been using en dashes, –, instead of em dashes, —! In Markdown, the former is created with two dashes (--), while the latter is made with three (---). That’s already too many dashes for me, I’d be happy with one long and one short one… PPS. No AI was used with this post at all.

When I wrote about the Titanic someone asked me what’s my next cheerful topic going to be – nuclear disasters? That came back to me recently when I found out about the IndieWeb Carnival topic No Way?! hosted by Alex Hsu. When it comes to nuclear accidents, everyone knows about Chernobyl and Fukushima, but there have been interesting cases of nuclear warheads getting lost as well. Broken Arrow is not only a 1996 movie starring John Travolta and featuring missing nuclear weapons, but an actual US military codename for nuclear accidents. It’s rather disturbing that such a concept even needs its own codeword, given that nuclear weapons are one of the last things you want to have accidents with. It turns out, however, that people are human and humans make mistakes even when the stakes are high, so here we are. Some of the most famous of these Broken Arrow cases are: The 1966 Palomares accident. During the Cold War it was customary for the US bombers to fly around with nuclear weapons, because while in the air those weapons were considered to be safe from a surprise attack by the Soviet Union, and the bombers could also easily be sent for a counterattack in that case. This was called Operation Chrome Dome. In January 1966 one of these bombers collided mid-air with a tanker while attempting to refuel. The bomber was carrying four thermonuclear bombs. One of the nuclear bombs fell into the sea and the rest to the land near the village of Palomares. The nuclear bombs didn’t go off but the conventional explosives inside two of them did, breaking the weapons apart and distributing radioactive material widely around the area. The US and Spain jointly removed a whopping 1750 tons of radioactive soil and shipped it to the US for disposal. Wikipedia still reports that as of 2025 some contaminated land still remains. All the bombs and their parts were, according to public information, properly recovered though – the one that fell into the sea after almost three months of searching. Almost exactly two years later, in January 1968, the very similar Thule accident took place. A bomber crashed on ice in Greenland and the conventional explosives inside the weapons spread the radioactive material again, leading to yet another massive cleanup and recovery operation. This time a major part of one of the bombs may even have been left behind, but without the rest of the weapon it poses no realistic danger today. After the Thule accident the US stopped the Chrome Dome flights, because the risks outgrew the perceived benefits. But it’s not only foreign countries that the US has accidentally almost nuked! In Goldsboro, North Carolina in 1961 the crew lost control of a bomber armed with two nukes when there was a massive fuel leak. The crew had to abandon the aircraft, which then broke apart in the air and released the nukes it was carrying. One bomb buried itself deep in muddy farmland and could never be fully recovered. The other progressed almost all the way through its arming sequence but thankfully had six different fail-safe systems to prevent it from exploding by mistake, because five of them failed and only a single little system prevented the big disaster! If all of that wasn’t disturbing enough yet, let’s check one more incident: the 1980 Damascus accident. This one didn’t even involve a plane, but something much more mundane: a dropped wrench. Unfortunately this particular wrench was quite heavy, and it was dropped into an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) silo, damaging the fuel tank of the super powerful Titan II ICBM within it. The fuel tank then started leaking, and after about nine hours the silo exploded, catapulting the missile out into a nearby field. Thankfully the safety measures worked perfectly and not even any radioactive contamination took place this time. So what can we learn about these incidents? Probably not much, except that you should play responsibly around nuclear weapons. So far, good luck has been involved in many of these Broken Arrow incidents, but relying on that is not a viable long-term strategy.