u/65721

Finally got all FC10 T11 troops as F2P* after about ~1,000 days of playing, judging from the 2026 book item. I wanted to do it before T12 was released but what can you do.

Attached my chief and hero loadouts for reference. I plan on getting marksmen boots to +60 and upgrading my command center to FC9 for more deployment capacity, then probably the base T12 upgrades for the same. And steadily upgrading my chief gear and charms.

(F2P*: I bought the extra march queue and construction queue when I first started the game. It came out to like $5 USD and it's the only money I've spent on this game. Clarifying since some people here get mad about that kind of stuff.)

There's plenty of people who talk sensibly about AI from financial and ethical perspectives, including Ed Zitron. But this Substack blogger is just about the only person I've found who shares my opinions from a technical perspective, a distant second being Carl Brown of Internet of Bugs. A shame she doesn't post very often, but when she does it's always worth reading. (I especially recommend her post on self-driving cars.)

Here she talks about the effective altruism aspect of AI. As a refresher, EA is a utilitarian-like movement that is the purported founding mission of OpenAI, and of Anthropic which broke away to be even more EA. It's the cultlike foundation of "AI doomerism" and the home of such figures as Dario Amodei, Sam Bankman-Fried, the philosopher Peter Singer (of "you shouldn't save a drowning child" fame), and the Harry Potter fanfic writer Eliezer Yudkowsky (of AI 2027 fame). Its breakaway archrival movement that is effective accelerationism, or e/acc, has adherents you may better recognize as the vanguards of modern fascism: the YC CEO Garry Tan, the venture capitalist Marc Andressen, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk.

You may not realize it, but EA (together with e/acc) is the wellspring of almost all media coverage and talking points about AI today. "AI will take everyone's jobs"—EA. "AI is the worst it'll ever be"—EA. "Our AI model is too dangerous and may break containment"—EA. The talk of "recursive improvement," the research on "AI alignment," all of Bernie Sanders' anti-AI statements—they all stem from EA.

EA ostensibly aims to optimize doing the most good worldwide. It was originally known for distributing mosquito nets and donating kidneys to strangers. Today its singular focus is on naming your chatbot, jerking off to dystopian fiction, and seeing how much you can piss your pants with the power of imagination. How did it get here?

This Substack blogger claims to be an early follower of EA, and she explains how the niche movement devolved into the AI Rapture cult that dominates all AI discourse today.

I can remember the melody but not the title, the artist, the lyrics, nothing. It's a pretty fast and upbeat song. I think it's from the 1990s/2000s, and pretty popular (in that time).

I typed up a quick score here from the best I can remember: https://i.ibb.co/PfpFdM1/image.png

For those not so sheet music-inclined, here's the audio version: https://voca.ro/1fZLBWTPsVm3