Etienne de Martel
🖤🩶🤍💜 | https://piment.gay | (he/they) Principal programmer at Eidos Montreal, specializing in making others fitter, happier and more productive. I think you should care about other people. Trans rights are human rights.
- The only thing stopping Lorelei and the Laser Eyes from being a masterpiece is the lack of a back button.
- Reposted by Etienne de MartelCode is liability. AI allows us to create tremendous amounts of liability very quickly
- Reposted by Etienne de MartelIf there's one empirical insight I'd want everyone to understand about American politics, it's this: America's problems are solved problems. Just not here. What would change if the US simply matched the average of 31 peer democracies? Not Denmark or Norway. Just the middle of the pack. 🧵
- Reposted by Etienne de MartelLatin American Coups promoted by the United States
- Reposted by Etienne de MartelThe way the press is treating chatbots, like they have agency and they “know” things all of a sudden, crossed the line recently from dumb and obsequious to something else entirely. Treating them as alive and making conscious decisions is an almost religious belief. It won’t age well.
- Reposted by Etienne de MartelSora is one of the worst experiences I have ever had online. So much so that I felt obligated to dissect its various failings. Unsurprisingly, they all come back to the fact that it's an AI product pretending to be a social media platform.
- Barely made it to the finish line in time, but I managed to hit my arbitrary goal of reading 52 books this year! That's one per week on average. I don't know if I'll be able to keep that up next year, but still, already got several more books lined up on the pile.
- Reposted by Etienne de MartelI’ve been in game dev for 26 years and I can’t remember any other time where a specific tech was being insistently and persistently pushed on devs as a group in the public sphere. Why would it? Cui bono? Why would any given dev have an interest in other devs using tech they don’t have a stake in?
- Reposted by Etienne de MartelHonestly I just don't know if its even ethical to play AAA games anymore
- This year I played like 10 games but I read 49 books, so you know, that's something.
- Reposted by Etienne de Martelone thing to note about award ceremonies, in a system is a purpose way, they exist to establish the award-giver as a kingmaker, trendsetter, or authority, and as a side effect, recognize those who help them achieve that goal is this about time magazine? the game awards? who can tell
- Reposted by Etienne de MartelTwo things can be true: 1.) The Game Awards are meaningless and we shouldn't take them all that seriously. 2.) Award shows of its scale DO rewrite the mainstream history of the art form, whether they deserve to or not, and its okay to care that it's so thoughtless despite having that responsibility.
- Reposted by Etienne de MartelThis survey is an absolute joke on every level. The survey design was bad, their methodology is haphazard, their sample is completely unrepresentative, and the results are worthless
- At this point, if a game about time travel has a new game plus feature in it, I fully expect the twist that the story is a time loop, and the new game plus is explained in the narrative as an iteration of that loop. I think it's a law now.
- Reposted by Etienne de Martel"World's first potential trillionaire has killed 600,000 people, including 400,000 children" is the only headline that anyone should ever read about Elon Musk
- One analytical model shows that, as of November 5th, the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. has already caused the deaths of 600,000 people, two-thirds of them children. newyorkermag.visitlink.me/jUzNSc
- I don't know why they call him the "sandwich guy", what he chucked was sold at Subway, that's not a sandwich.
- Reposted by Etienne de MartelMay all terrible people be sad tonight.
- Reposted by Etienne de MartelChatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.
- Reposted by Etienne de MartelWhat To Know About Data Centers theonion.com/what-to-know-about-…
- Reposted by Etienne de Martel"normies do not care about this thing and so it is no use raising a stink" is imho just an excuse for not doing politics, which is the job of making normies care about something
- Reposted by Etienne de MartelIt’s 2050 and a teen girl is torrenting a .tar.gz file of all the consciousnesses of all the tech bros who uploaded themselves into the cloud in a bid for immortality and modding them into The Sims 4
- Reposted by Etienne de MartelFirst the basics: The vast bulk of physical and sexual violence in our society is *not* perpetrated by strangers, but by people who know each other. Obscuring this fact is a critical feature of copaganda in the news. People are shocked to hear it. Why?
- The bad news will continue until morale improves.
- Reposted by Etienne de Marteli created a social media platform to solve tech problems. but now i also have to deal with people problems? what the fuck
- Reposted by Etienne de MartelNewsletter: This is The Case Against Generative AI, a comprehensive analysis of a financial collapse built on myths I’ll dispel, the markets’ unhealthy obsession with NVIDIA's growth, and the fact that there is not enough money in the world to fund OpenAI. www.wheresyoured.at/the-case-aga...
- Reposted by Etienne de MartelOh shit oh fuck it's gonna pop
- Reposted by Etienne de Martelthis hits harder with every fuckin year
- Rest easy, Kaleb Horton. About the only post 2016 election piece worth a damn, and one of the few that showed how 2024 was going to happen too. web.archive.org/web/20221130...
- Reposted by Etienne de MartelI have 3 axioms that help me decide when to talk to people I disagree with: 1. To debate a subject is to concede that the subject is debatable. 2. To reason with a person is to concede that the person is reasonable. 3. To ask for evidence of a claim is to concede that the claim might be true.
- Reposted by Etienne de Martelsince a lot of ppl are discussing the ICE camp shooter's apparent lack of ideology, i would like to posit that online irony blackpill is absolutely an ideology with coherent tenets - the reason it appears incoherent is because this an ideology primarily defined by faithlessness, negative space
- Reposted by Etienne de Martelnew scam going around where they hire you for a job but pay you less than the value your labor produced
- Reposted by Etienne de MartelNo particular reason
- Reposted by Etienne de MartelEzra Klein went beyond opposing political violence to extol Charlie Kirk for doing politics "exactly the right way," making up a fictional version of Kirk to praise. That distortion, with its indulgence of bad faith, is a perfect illustration of the larger media failure that helps Trump. My latest
- This is somewhat of a controversial stance, but I think people should iron their pride flags.
- Reposted by Etienne de Martelanother odd piece to all this is that many people are remembering a wave of "cancel culture" firings over insufficient wokeness that never happened.
- So far this year, I barely played any games but I read a ton of books. It's an interesting shift in my media consumption.
- Reposted by Etienne de Martel“awful people don’t deserve to be killed, but they don’t deserve to be praised, either” is apparently a thought too complex for the pundit mind
- Reposted by Etienne de MartelHere are some things that Charlie Kirk said in his life. The man is dead, and so it only seems fair to share his legacy by cataloguing the values he spread while alive.
- Reading House of Leaves is a workout in itself.
- Reposted by Etienne de MartelAnd that's assuming that the technology can do the work of a junior at the quality of a junior. If it can't, that only speeds up the destruction because now seniors have to babysit the sabotage machine, reducing the amount of senior-level work getting done. Gen AI can't do junior work.
- Reposted by Etienne de MartelI considered writing a long carefully constructed argument laying out the harms and limitations of AI, but instead I wrote about being a hater. Only humans can be haters.
- Reposted by Etienne de MartelTheir memorials are history. Ours are political. Because as always, there are two sexualities - straight, and political. Two genders - male, and political. Two religions - Christian, and political. Two races - white, and political.
- Workers under cover of night removed a rainbow crosswalk outside of the former Pulse nightclub, apparently as part of state and federal transportation officials’ aim to wipe “political banners” from public roadways. www.orlandosentinel.com/2025/08/21/r...
- Reposted by Etienne de Martel"I'm gonna dump all my pent up angst and infodump material into a blog post about Itch/payment processing" I say to myself. It ends up like a million words, oops. but well, I got it out of my brain: voidfox.com/blog/payment...
- Reposted by Etienne de MartelWrote about AI, and the way we talk about it all having the quality of a ghost story. open.substack.com/pub/houseofm...
- Reposted by Etienne de Martel[This post could not be retrieved]
- Incorrect documentation is worse than no documentation: with the latter, you just curse and move on, but the former makes you waste a ton of time as it confidently leads you down a rabbit hole of nonsense. This is also why chatbots are not good for search, as hallucinations are just bad docs.
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- Okay, Sorry We're Closed fucks. I'm not generally a big survival horror fan but this one I really like.
- The adventures of Vlad Taltos by Steven Brust are so good. I was expecting middling fantasy pulp trash going in and I instead got hit by a careful balance of action and intrigue, fun characters, creative uses of magic, unique worldbuilding, and leftist politics. Highly recommended.
- Reposted by Etienne de MartelAnd I guess that's the answer as to who uses this tech. It emulates a power dynamic where you're the person in charge. It's Guitar Hero for middle management. It's incredibly flattering to use. "It saw my vision immediately!" is such a giveaway to that mindset. Affirming your input is what it does!
- Reposted by Etienne de Marteli don't know who needs to hear this, but double the garlic
- Reposted by Etienne de Martelthis is basically how I feel about rainbow capitalism is it obviously insincere horseshit? yes it is still much better for society as a whole that companies are expected to performatively signal their support for marginalized people, it helps set the norms we’re seeing the alternative now
- Reposted by Etienne de MartelDIY > AI
- I don't know why they say "don't hate the player, hate the game" when I can hate both.
- Reposted by Etienne de MartelWe should probably be clear eyed about the fact that Microsoft purchased a huge roster of some of the world's best game development studios only to turn around and use them all as kindling for its ill-begotten AI boondoggle
- Reposted by Etienne de MartelJust repeating it because some are repeating Microsoft's lies unquestioningly about them having to cut people to save money, etc. Their gaming division was 26 *billion* USD in the black. They had just posted record revenue. They were swimming in money. But Microsoft wants to invest *80bn* in AI.
- Reposted by Etienne de Martelmore and more elements of the games industry are going to align themselves with gambling in the coming years, in a normalization of market failure. it is crucial to build a new paradigm for games and it must be ideologically opposed to this one. restructuring around gambling is anti-culture.
- Wow This is an insanely cynical and morally abhorrent move I feel sorry for the devs there and more sorry for the families of the folks whose gambling addictions this will nurture www.riotgames.com/en/news/espo...
- Reposted by Etienne de Martel1. Today, 200,000 marched in Budapest Pride in defiance of a ban by Orbán's far-right government. It was led by the city's mayor Gergely Karácsony, who got around the law by making it an "official city gathering." He was warned of arrest. They marched anyway. Subscribe to support my journalism.
- Reposted by Etienne de MartelYou don't know my neighbors, and they don't know you, but there is a LOT of love being shared between you all!!! We hit $50k in just about 24 hours! We've leveled the playing field significantly! There's still a way to go, but we'll get there! Help us fight AirBnb: www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOAM...
- Reposted by Etienne de MartelThe generative AI industry is $38bn-ish in revenue (not profit) of which more than half is either "OpenAI's business that burns $14bn+ a year" or "Microsoft providing compute services to OpenAI at a discount." That's not a real industry! That's barely bigger than the ($32bn) smartwatch industry!
- Reposted by Etienne de MartelMy HOA sent me gore photos after complaining about the AirBnbs: www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-Ad...
- Reposted by Etienne de MartelA new Super Bunnyhop video! This one's not just about how my favorite weird indie game from last year is not just VERY easy to recommend to mass audiences, but also about how to climb the difficulty curve of enjoying poetry and surrealism. Of course, it's JUDERO! nebula.tv/videos/super...
- What rubs me the wrong way about post-apocalyptic settings that are ostensibly presented as our future, is how they often present society as this brittle thing full of sociopaths that collapses the moment you remove the state. They imply that authority is a requirement for civilisation.
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- Reposted by Etienne de MartelWorth considering that one reason Bluesky doesn't always feel super fun is that current events are relentlessly horrifying and bad
