I'm very glad that Ars allows me to subscribe so that I don't have to see the ads. Some sites don't allow the option to pay for their service but force the free-but-ad-filled option on everyone
Oh, I missed the memo that Amazon Leo is the new name for Project Kuiper, rebranded in November of last year. I saw a presentation back when it was Kuiper so have still been calling it that
For readers who are vaguely aware of Steins;Gate, you may be interested to know that it's actually part of a wider universe called the Science Adventure series (or SciADV for short).
Steins;Gate works really well as a standalone entry (and I didn't even realise it wasn't a standalone thing until a year or two back) but it's part of a loose overarching canon.
Most of the games have various errors but there's a translation group called Committee of Zero who not only retranslate all of the games (sometimes from the ground up) but also do a lot of technical work. They've been doing essentially a reimplementation of the entire engine as well, although I don't know that it'd be accurate to say it's a clean room implementation or anything like that.
I will mention that the first entry, Chaos;Head NoAH takes a while to get going (like a few hours) and gets quite gruesome towards the end (to the point that I wanted to quit) but once you get past it, the rest is all a lot tamer in comparison.
The whole series is a very long time investment as far as VNs go but I personally got really into the series and spent a few months(!) just getting through the mainline entries which culminated with the most recent entry: Anonymous;Code.
Without going into any details, there's a loose canon across the series that Anonymous;Code finally digs into and makes you look at the entire series from a new angle. It's a bit controversial but I appreciated it.
It's not really that clear what the future of the series is as there's a remake coming up called Steins;??? where it appears to be a remake but there's a bunch of fans hoping that it's more in the vein of Final Fantasy 7 Remake where there's really more going on under the hood.
There are also the anime adaptions but I wouldn't recommend them. I've seen most of them, and I'm really not a snob about this sort of stuff but just due to the medium of VNs (with multiple routes and that), they aren't able to successfully replicate a lot of the twists and turns at all which take time to build up.
It's pretty bizarre to me to have even stuck with a VN let alone played through like 6 over the span of like half a year or more? Honestly, I'm not even sure if SciADV is actually "good" or if it's just one of the first franchises in a long time where I haven't ruined it for myself by reading Wikipedia in advance. I think it's pretty good though.
Not recommending the Steins;Gate anime adaption is pretty wild, it's an incredibly highly rated Anime series. The story telling language of a VN and an Anime are very different so it's no surprise they don't perfectly capture the complexities of the other medium. They don't have to be the same to be worth watching.
fwiw: no idea on the other anime adaptions quality
Oh yeah, the Steins:Gate animes are perfectly fine to be clear! I was only thinking of the non-SG animes which are... pretty messy!
The Chaos;Head anime barely makes any sense, even having read the VN because it only got 12 episodes. I haven't finished Chaos;Child or Robotics;Notes which seem fine so far for C;C anyway, it doesn't quite feel the same.
There is Occultic;Nine which anime only in that the VN was never localised plus the game itself isn't on Steam so there's nothing to base a patch off of.
Anyway, take my thoughts with a grain of salt and not like some correct stance haha
Do you think the Chaos;Head anime could have been good like SG if it had had more episodes? Or is the fundamental nature of a VN story hard to adapt to a linear anime format?
I came into Steins;Gate completely cold. I watched it when it came out and I only just realised there's more to the universe. It's a ridiculously good anime, probably a top 10 for me. It's got a really cool storyline with loads of plot twists, interesting characters and deep mystery.
> Well, it's more because of its cult status (especially on imageboards) than actual objective appreciation.
No way. There are nearly 3M user ratings on that website. How many of those would you say belong to regular imageboard users? A few tens of thousands, tops? And when was the last time you saw a Steins;Gate meme?
Worth watching? Not really but they are definitely worth playing. It's hard to fault the anime adaptions because they have limited time compared to the 20 - 40 hours that some of the VNs take. Many of the other entries (Chaos;Child is great) are definitely worth it but won't really hit as well if you're just watching the adaption. The main reason being that VNs have multiple paths so they reveal information piece by piece. The adaptions generally try to include all of the information at once in a linear fashion but it doesn't really have the same effect.
I focused too much on the non-Steins;Gate works when I replied (as pointed out elsewhere) so to be clear, when I say "worth watching", I was referring to the "other animes" bit. Steins;Gate's adaptions are great! It's the other SciADV anime adaptions that aren't quite on the same level
Well, I assume this is all just generated with Claude Code, right? Whether there is much back and forth with the LLM is a valid question and nothing wrong with generating websites (I do it too for some side projects). Claude loves generating websites with a particular style of serif font. We also saw this with https://tboteproject.com/timeline/ and I've just generally seen it from various designs that coworkers have spit out over months using Claude defaults.
I guess I just find it weird because all the signals are messed up so whenever I see these sorts of layouts, I feel like I'm looking at the average where I don't think "gorgeous and interesting" at all. Instead, I'm forced to think "I should be skeptical of this based on the presentation because it presents as high quality but this may be hiding someone who is not actually aware of what they're presenting in any depth" as the author may have just shoved in a prompt and let it spin.
There's actually a similarly designed website (font weights, font styles etc) here in New Zealand (https://nzoilwatch.com/) where at a glance, it might seem like some overloaded professional-backed thing but instead it's just some guy who may or may not know anything about oil at all, yet people are linking it around the place like some sort of authoritative resource.
I would have way less of an issue if people just put their names by things and disclosed their LLM usage (which again, is fine) rather than giving the potentially false impression to unequipped people that the information presented is actually as accurate and trustworthy as the polish would suggest.
We do need "hard effortful careful work" to keep planes flying, electrical grids running and medical devices safe. It's very relevant but very undervalued by our current economy.
That was the leaked code and now it's just some random dudes harness btw. He swapped it out. Did a sloppy find and replace for "claude" and made it claw.
Here are some relevant excerpts from an October 2025 article[1]:
> In a message to GitHub’s staff, CTO Vladimir Fedorov notes that GitHub is constrained on capacity in its Virginia data center. “It’s existential for us to keep up with the demands of AI and Copilot, which are changing how people use GitHub,” he writes.
> The plan, he writes, is for GitHub to completely move out of its own data centers in 24 months. “This means we have 18 months to execute (with a 6 month buffer),” Fedorov’s memo says. He acknowledges that since any migration of this scope will have to run in parallel on both the new and old infrastructure for at least six months, the team realistically needs to get this work done in the next 12 months.
If you consider that six month parallel window to have started from the time of the October memo (written presumably at the start of October), then that puts us currently or past the point where they would have cut off their old DC and defaulted to Azure only.
Whether plans or timelines changed, I have no idea of course but the above does make for a convenient timeline that would explain the recent instability. Of course, it could also just be symptomatic of increased AI usage generally and the same problems might have surfaced at a software level regardless of whether they were in a DC or on Azure.
Putting that nuance aside, personally I like the idea that Azure is simply a giant pile of shit operated by a corporation with no taste.
>It’s existential for us to keep up with the demands of AI and Copilot
if by chance the CTO reads this, as a user of GitHub I would find it really existential if GitHub continues functioning as a reliable hub for git workflows (hence the name), and I have the strong suspicion nobody except for the shareholders gives a lick about copilot or 'AI' if it makes the core service the site was designed for unusable
Why? What is the correlation between profit and shareholder sentiment (besides the fact that shareholders want said profits)? They don't really influence the operation of the business meaningfully.
Sure, but I think it's the wrong way around. Appeasing shareholders doesn't make you profitable, being profitable appeases shareholders. I think there is a wealth of evidence that appeasing shareholders actually impedes profits overall.
Incorrect. They need to appease/trick/threaten/etc those that are paying for their services. Shareholders just demand they do so at the greatest (often short term) rate.
I'm not explicitly authorised to speak about this stuff by my employer but I think it's valuable to share some observations that go beyond "It's good for me" so here's a relatively unfiltered take of what I've seen so far.
Internally, we have a closed beta for what is basically a hosted Claude Code harness. It's ideal for scheduled jobs or async jobs that benefit from large amounts of context.
At a glance, it seems similar to Uber's Minion concept, although we weren't aware of that until recently. I think a lot of people have converged on the same thing.
Having scheduled roundups of things (what did I post in Slack? what did I PR in Github etc) is a nice quality of life improvement. I also have some daily tasks like "Find a subtle cloud spend that would otherwise go unnoticed", "Investigate an unresolved hotfix from one repo and provide the backstory" and "Find a CI pipeline that has been failing 10 times in a row and suggest a fix"
I work in the platform space so your mileage may vary of course. More interesting to me are the second order effects beyond my own experience:
- Hints of engineering-adjacent roles (ie; technical support) who are now empowered to try and generate large PRs implementing unscoped/ill-defined new internal services because they don't have any background to know is "good" or "bad". These sorts of types have always existed as you get people on the edge of technical-adjacent roles who aspire to become fully fledged developers without an internal support mechanism but now the barrier is a little lower.
- PR review fatigue: As a Platform Engineer, I already get tagged on acres of PRs but the velocity of PRs has increased so my inbox is still flooded with merged PRs, not that it was ever a good signal anyway.
- First hints of technical folk who progressed off the tools who might now be encouraged to fix those long standing issues that are simple in their mind but reality has shifted around a lot since. Generally LLMs are pretty good at surfacing this once they check how things are in reality but LLMs don't "know" what your mental model is when you frame a question
- Coworkers defaulting to asking LLMs about niche queries instead of asking others. There are a few queries I've seen where the answer from an LLM is fine but it lacks the historical part that makes many things make sense. As an example off the top of my head, websites often have subdomains not for any good present reason but just because back in the day, you could only have like 6 XHR connections to a domain or whatever it was. LLMs probably aren't going to surface that sort of context which takes a topic from "Was this person just a complexity lover" to "Ah, they were working around the constraints at the time".
- Obviously security is a forever battle. I think we're more security minded than most but the reality is that I don't think any of this can be 100% secure as long as it has internet access in any form, even "read only".
- A temptation to churn out side quests. When I first got started, I would tend to do work after hours but I've definitely trailed off and am back to normal now. Personally I like shipping stuff compared to programming for the sake of it but even then, I think eventually you just normalise and the new "speed" starts to feel slow again
- Privileged users generating and self-merging PRs. We have one project where most everyone has force merge and because it's internal only, we've been doing that paired with automated PR reviews. It works fairly well because we discuss most changes in person before actioning them but there are now a couple historical users who have that same permission contributing from other timezones. Waking up to a changed mental model that hasn't been discussed definitely won't scale and we're going to need to lock this down.
- Signal degradation for PRs: We have a few PRs I've seen where they provide this whole post-hoc rationalisation of what the PR does and what the problem is. You go to the source input and it's someone writing something like "X isn't working? Can you fix it?". It's really hard to infer intent and capability from PR as a result. Often the changes are even quite good but that's not a reflection of the author. To be fair, the alternative might have been that internal user just giving up and never communicating that there was an issue so I can't say this is strictly a negative.
All of the above are all things that are actively discussed internally, even if they're not immediately obvious so I think we're quite healthy in that sense. This stuff is bound to happen regardless, I'm sure most orgs will probably just paper over it or simply have no mechanism to identify it. I can only imagine what fresh hells exist in Silicon Valley where I don't think most people are equipped to be good stewarts or even consider basic ethics.
Overall, I'm not really negative or positive. There is definitely value to be found but I think there will probably be a reckoning where LLMs have temporarily given a hall pass to go faster than the support structures can keep up with. That probably looks like going from starting with a prompt for some work to moving tasks back into ticket trackers, doing pre-work to figure out the scope of the problem etc. Again, entirely different constraints and concerns with Platform BAU than product work.
Actually, I should probably rephase that a little: I'm mostly positive on pure inference while mostly negative on training costs and other societal impacts. I don't believe we'll get to everyone running Gas Town/The Wasteland nor do I think we should aspire to. I like iterating with an agent back and forth locally and I think just heavily automating stuff with no oversight is bound to fail, in the same way that large corporations get bloated and collapse under their own weight.
I would caution readers to do their due dilligence as the presentation may be fancy but that should not immediately translate into a signal of quality in itself given the author has disclosed using Claude Code for a chunk of this work.
While I won't outright discount the findings (as there is "too much" to reasonably verify), there are a few oddities around the source repo such as errors where Claude has tried to access sources, been denied and then noted as much or where it has seemingly fetched incorrect files and tried to interpret them (https://github.com/upper-up/meta-lobbying-and-other-findings...)
I am not under the immediate impression that the author has done thorough due diligence rather than just offloading that to readers by saying "You can just check the sources yourself"
Also not really a fan of the 'what they're hiding from you' tone it takes (even if that's the subject), like saying that because a website was made less than 100 days before a bill was signed it was a '77-day pipeline' to the bill (which jumped out as a dramatized rephrasing and not present in the original Reddit post).
It also doesn't inline link sources, like the Bloomberg article it mentions (this[1]). A more impartial voice and linked citations to allow quick reference would raise fewer red flags, even if the goal is worthwhile.
I would also encourage taking a critical look at the underlying investigation as it seems mostly LLM generated without a huge amount of manual due dilligence
I also submitted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47370954 because it was pointed out to me that a Reddit submission about the same story on r/linux had been taken down. If there was LLM content I suppose that might at least partially explain a moderator decision there... ?
No, the mods did not make a decision. It got flagged by an auto moderator bot, because of mass flagging. The mass flagging seems to be a brigade that happened on prior posts in that same subreddit discussing this topic of age verification. I don’t have any definite evidence, but it seems odd that a topic that is so relevant to that community would be flagged, so I assume it is a coordinated attack.
I’ve moderated on Reddit before - a mass report bot on r/linux specifically for age verification is too strangely niche. Also automod doesn’t remove flagged posts, unless it has been set up to do it.
It’s also very definitely ai generated, and makes several claims and implication. Users may have reported it as well.
I would hesitate to assume coordinated behavior at this stage.
Maybe it’s a dupe but I think it’s an important topic to discuss. And even if it is mostly LLM generated, that doesn’t mean it is completely invalid. Some of the major points around Meta’s lobbying, and Anthropic’s donations, are seemingly valid.
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