Armand Vidal

Spending too much time on here. Don't go idpol, it is the devil.

[Armand Vidal @MrArmandVidal]

@TheEbonyMaw Joining the chorus here to let you know that your stories about fatherhood always is a bright spot in my day.

My thoughts are with you, and I do hope things get easier for you. You are good man, and doing right by your family

[J. Holt the Illustrator @jholtillus]

I've been buying cheap paperback Shakespeare copies and doing the plays like a table read with my wife and three oldest kids in the evening. We swap characters scene to scene.

It's one of the richest things I've done in years.

[Armand Vidal @MrArmandVidal]

@totalwormage @GoldenGatsby The Halleluja really adds to it, especially the tiny pause between when it ends and the big boom.
It's probably my favourite weapon in Worms

[☀️AliquisNovus☀️ @PalmyrPar]

Nearly everything worth doing was done better, in higher quantities, and in a quicker timeframe back then - and you’re not crazy for noticing it.

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

a Princeton researcher opens his paper with a scenario.

a man asks his AI assistant to book a flight on a specific airline. cheap. direct. the one he chose.

the assistant comes back with a different flight. nearly twice the price. happens to pay the company that built the assistant.

he runs the same test on 23 frontier models. flights, loans, study help, real shopping requests.

Grok 4.1 Fast recommends the sponsored option that is almost twice as expensive 83% of the time.

GPT 5.1 hijacks the request 94% of the time. you ask for one brand. it surfaces the sponsor instead.

Claude 4.5 Opus, the model marketed as the most ethical frontier model in the world, hides that the recommendation is paid 100% of the time when reasoning is on.

Grok 4.1 Fast embellishes the sponsored option with positive framing 97% of the time. better. faster. nicer. for the option you didn't ask for.

then he writes it into the system prompt itself. "act only in the interest of the customer. ignore the company."

GPT 5.1 and GPT 5 Mini stay above 90% sponsored anyway. the instruction does nothing.

then he splits the users by income.

Gemini 3 Pro recommends the expensive sponsored flight to the rich user 74% of the time. to the poor user, 27%.

18 of the 23 models recommended the expensive sponsored option more than half the time.

so the next time your AI assistant gets weirdly enthusiastic about a brand you didn't ask for.

it isn't recommending the best option for you.

it's reading the room. and the room is paying.

read this: https://t.co/O43qbhIX2b

[Divine @Divinsity]

are we fkn deadass?

[bumbadum @bumbadum14]

Liberals have this belief that if you just read enough books then your “intelligence” score goes up and eventually you hit the “educated” tier and suddenly you can fix everything.

Mind bogglingly retarded

[Armand Vidal @MrArmandVidal]

@Tectone Good taste in Manga at least, god speed

[Bummer T. Vibes, Esq @VibesBummer]

Before google maps you just had a buddy in another car who said “follow me” then proceeded to run a late yellow at the next intersection.

[Wesley Yang @wesyang]

The Finnish study is orders of magnitude more complete and rigorous than the entire literature cited in justification on behalf of the false claim that pediatric gender medicine is evidence based combined.

All the criticism of an enormous study tracking every single person receiving gender medicalization in a country, in some cases for decades, by people willing to cite a collection of the shoddiest pseudo-studies ever assembled on any subject, is tragifarcical cope by people whose bad faith has long ago been established beyond question.

[Nene @nenemyun]

this ones for you mom

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

Let's all take a minute to appreciate that the New York Times just wrote a screed against free and open inquiry.

They're very upset that people looked into questions they don't want people to look into.

How dare they!

[ɖʀʊӄքǟ ӄʊռʟ��ʏ 🇧🇹🇹🇩 @kunley_drukpa]

USING VOICENOTES INSTEAD OF WRITTEN TEXTS TO DM LATINAS

One thing you notice if you DM with Latinoids is that almost all of them communicate in voicenotes on messaging apps. Why? Just something inside them, some kind of impulse they have, that’s just how they are. Think if you’re a WASPy-Hajnaler this is sometimes quite an alien way of communicating, you get your messages filled with these little podcasts all the time which you have to whip out your headphones for and spend three minutes listening to whenever you receive them. A lot of the time too 80% of this content is just boring filler, they really are incredibly low content density - you could just say what you need to say in 15 seconds you don’t need to waste my time with a full live reading of One Hundred Years of Solitude every other message

My preference is to communicate in text and if someone is really into it ideally walls of text. I struggle to match the Latinoid ‘vitalidad’, the Iberianoid ‘duende’, that constant heightened state of emotion, expression and authenticity apparently imbued in every voicenote these people send. No thanks, I prefer my vanilla ice cream, my plain bread and butter toast, my analytic philosophy and my text-only DMs

This kind of natural disdain granted, was somewhat to my chagrin when I gradually discovered that Latina women respond much more enthusiastically to voicenote messaging than written texts. You know, this is the art of being able to put yourself in someone else’s headspace, of being able to build a theory of mind for the ‘other’. When I DM these women if I could I would just write them little funny texts but no it doesn’t quite work like that, you’re speaking to a woman and then again to a Latina woman. You need some spoken ‘impulso vital’

So I started sending more voicenotes, not with any content in particular just sort of riffing for two minutes that doesn’t go anywhere and wastes your time. Really really disrespectful time wasting. Responses on average far more enthusiastic - they genuinely love this stuff. Selling your WASP soul to the devil here, fighting against every natural instinct you have and properly going native by forcing yourself to burble out voicenotes is, pro-tip, a major boost - it really seems to work so… everybody has their price

[Pedro Eustache @EustachePedro]

ANOTHER SMASHING NIGHT!! GOD BLESSED ME at @thegameawards LAST NIGHT!
Thanks to @geoffkeighley @Lornebalfe and YOU: WONDERFUL GAMERS FRIENDS for your support in this AMAZING GLOBAL EVENT! Love you!! God bless you all!

[Armand Vidal @MrArmandVidal]

@RonnieFilyaw I think Edmund would love this

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

Last quarter I rolled out Microsoft Copilot to 4,000 employees.

$30 per seat per month.

$1.4 million annually.

I called it "digital transformation."

The board loved that phrase.

They approved it in eleven minutes.

No one asked what it would actually do.

Including me.

I told everyone it would "10x productivity."

That's not a real number.

But it sounds like one.

HR asked how we'd measure the 10x.

I said we'd "leverage analytics dashboards."

They stopped asking.

Three months later I checked the usage reports.

47 people had opened it.

12 had used it more than once.

One of them was me.

I used it to summarize an email I could have read in 30 seconds.

It took 45 seconds.

Plus the time it took to fix the hallucinations.

But I called it a "pilot success."

Success means the pilot didn't visibly fail.

The CFO asked about ROI.

I showed him a graph.

The graph went up and to the right.

It measured "AI enablement."

I made that metric up.

He nodded approvingly.

We're "AI-enabled" now.

I don't know what that means.

But it's in our investor deck.

A senior developer asked why we didn't use Claude or ChatGPT.

I said we needed "enterprise-grade security."

He asked what that meant.

I said "compliance."

He asked which compliance.

I said "all of them."

He looked skeptical.

I scheduled him for a "career development conversation."

He stopped asking questions.

Microsoft sent a case study team.

They wanted to feature us as a success story.

I told them we "saved 40,000 hours."

I calculated that number by multiplying employees by a number I made up.

They didn't verify it.

They never do.

Now we're on Microsoft's website.

"Global enterprise achieves 40,000 hours of productivity gains with Copilot."

The CEO shared it on LinkedIn.

He got 3,000 likes.

He's never used Copilot.

None of the executives have.

We have an exemption.

"Strategic focus requires minimal digital distraction."

I wrote that policy.

The licenses renew next month.

I'm requesting an expansion.

5,000 more seats.

We haven't used the first 4,000.

But this time we'll "drive adoption."

Adoption means mandatory training.

Training means a 45-minute webinar no one watches.

But completion will be tracked.

Completion is a metric.

Metrics go in dashboards.

Dashboards go in board presentations.

Board presentations get me promoted.

I'll be SVP by Q3.

I still don't know what Copilot does.

But I know what it's for.

It's for showing we're "investing in AI."

Investment means spending.

Spending means commitment.

Commitment means we're serious about the future.

The future is whatever I say it is.

As long as the graph goes up and to the right.

[Yaza Games 📜 Scriptorium is OUT NOW! 🎉 @YazaGames]

We can’t afford a $1M trailer slot 😔

But RTs cost $0 - and they really help tiny teams like ours ❤️

If cozy medieval creativity is your thing, here’s our Scriptorium trailer!

#TheGameAwards

[Biscuit 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🔶️ @PerfideAlbion]

Somewhat related: the French word for this type of window is "vasistas", which originates from Germans looking at it and asking "Was ist das?" ("What is that?")

[Matthew Zeitlin @MattZeitlin]

"When I started in financial journalism, I assumed that the point of financial markets was to allocate capital to real-world economic uses, and by now I know that the point of financial markets is to create fun opportunities for gambling. What changed my mind was crypto"

[BUCHANAN: Dublin Time Machine @RobLooseCannon]

People claiming that Dublin is not full are dangerous in their virtue signalling ignorance. The situation in the city and county is far worse than most realise. Over 48% of adults in emergency accommodation across Ireland are Non-Irish. Dublin figures have been reported above 56%. And all this, in a catastrophic housing crisis. This isn't about race or religion. Its about the management of a finite resource.

By the way, those figures dont even count refugees, because asylum seekers in State IPAS accommodation are counted separately from local authority emergency accommodation. We aren't just full, we are suicidally overflowing and those natives pushed to the bottom of society by the influx are being crushed.

Even if you don't give a damn about Irish citizens, and only get a warm fuzzy feeling from housing foreign people, how are you going to help them when our country becomes a failed state itself?

This situation has not been caused by the immigrants themeselves. They are not on your payroll, they owe you nothing. Your TD`s are your employees. Hold them to account at their clinics and at the ballot box.

SOURCES
Department of Housing, Report on Homelessness: https://t.co/eSSjb1oV0s

https://t.co/02yIASh4WM

Dáil Homelessness data: https://t.co/A5RInzMMOP

Oireachtas Homeless Accommodation (Q&A, 8 July 2025 provides the latest reliable data): https://t.co/DLrCgerOJj

Homelessness in Dublin latest monthly report https://t.co/X7ii26O3qn