Weekly round up #01
Personal updates
We had a great Memorial Day weekend here in Oregon. Hosted a backyard BBQ for some friends, and also had some friends from California pass through the area and stay with us for one night before flying home. We got our garden planted – attempting to grow flowers, tomatoes, blueberries, serrano and habanero peppers, and cilantro and basil.
Games and other media
New DLC for Witcher 3... ten years later
CD Projekt Red is planning to release a third DLC called "Songs of the Past" for The Witcher 3 in 2027. The game is over a decade old.
The Witcher 4 is still in development as well, of course.
(via Polygon)
PC game emulation on Android
I successfully configured and tested GameNative, an incredible app for emulating PC games on an Android device (I'm using my AYN Odin 2 Mini). I got Bug Fables (PC) running at 720p resolution 60fps on the Android handheld, with just a little bit of configuration tinkering.
This remarkable feat of emulation engineering involves half a dozen translation layers to get x86 binary code running on a Snapdragon chip. Claude helpfully put together a diagram to visualize the stack:
News and geopolitics
Drones are the future of warfare
This has been a frequently-recurring topic in a lot of my reading lately:
- All non-drone militaries are obsolete (Noah Smith)
- How Ukraine Scaled to Millions of Drones (ChinaTalk)
- WarTalk: Ukraine War Tactical Update (ChinaTalk)
- Drone Warfare Strategy (Arnold Kling)
The Ukraine War conflict has been a petri dish for rapid evolution of modern warfare tactics. Front-line warfare in 2026 looks vastly different than it did just a decade or two ago. Operators hunker down in trenches and basements for months at a time, remotely piloting drones that whir back and forth across the killzone, scanning for targets. I recommend watching this terrifying short compilation of drone attacks to get a visceral feel for this new paradigm.
The practical reality is that basically only two militaries have direct, first-hand combat experience with the newly-redefined future of warfare. It's crucial for the United States military to absorb learnings from the conflict in Ukraine and be prepared to quickly adapt. The next war between great powers will be fought very differently than what the US military is accustomed to.
Artificial Intelligence
Magnifica Humanitas
The big news this week is the release of Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, which lays out the Roman Catholic church's official teaching for the age of artificial intelligence (full text available here).
Zvi offers his write-up and comprehensive analysis.
Interestingly, multiple LessWrong authors have pointed out evidence that portions of the encyclical seem to have been written by AI (Claude, specifically):
Claude Plays Pokémon
Pokémon Red has finally been beaten by Claude Opus 4.7. This article is a good retrospective on the experiment.
Miscellanea
Amusingly tiny typeface
Two Slice is a font that's only two pixels tall.
(via Unsung)
Starlink for in-flight Wi-Fi
American Airlines chooses Starlink to provide in-flight Wi-Fi, joining United, Southwest Airlines, and Alaska Airlines. Delta chose Amazon Leo instead (Starlink competitor).
(via CNBC)