adamrezich

Looked it up, and apparently Harvey Smith, the lead designer, said, in an interview with IGN [0]:

> When we made the skyline in the background we had pieces with the Twin Towers and pieces for the other parts of the city and for New Jersey. The texture memory was so high that I couldn’t use it all. I took one of the pieces and put it on one side, flipped it and put it on the other. So I made New York out of one half of the city so the Twin Towers were out.

> When people complained, we just explained that it had been destroyed by terrorist attacks. We start the game with the Liberty Island statue having been destroyed by terrorists a few years before. We just said that the towers had been destroyed too. And this was way before 9-11. Years.

Then, in 2012, Warren Spector said, in an interview with Game Informer [1]:

> Did you notice in the skyline on the City of New York, there’s no Twin Towers? […] It’s entirely coincidental, but this game about terrorism… and the Twin Towers are not part of the New York City skyline. […] We got rid of the Twin Towers, and I wish I could say we did it on purpose and we were, you know, sort of seeing the future, but it was actually just a mistake. The guy, the artist who did the skybox just, uh, left em out. And it sort of worked out in an unfortunate sort of way.

There's more about this that one can find online, including how apparently an image of the towers exists in the game's files, but hey, I'm not the one researching and writing the article and making claims that are plainly false on their face, which anyone can visually verify by looking at the screenshot right there in the article that is supposed to illustrate this supposed technical constraint!

Jimmy should probably fix the article to mention any or all of this, rather than repeating the often-retold urban legend, given how much he seems to care about factual accuracy in his writing! (Or at least he used to? It kind of seems like this article is just an excuse to bloviate about Conspiracy Theory Culture Being Harmful These Days, more than it is to dive into the history of the creation of the game or a substantial analysis of its mechanics?) But, alas, he did not approve my comment, so maybe someone else can point this out to him instead.

[0] https://www.ign.com/articles/2003/02/18/dx-visible-interview

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOPHmbulMp4

> The most infamous and chilling “proof” of Deus Ex’s alleged facility for predicting the future is a view of the New York City skyline that you can see in the very first mission. This game that was released fifteen months before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, nonetheless shows only empty sky where the twin towers of the World Trade Center ought to be. As the people who made the game have always been quick to explain, this was not intended as a conscious statement of any sort, much less a prophecy. The towers were left out simply because the rendering engine couldn’t handle any more polygons. But still… what a coincidence! It’s almost enough to make you believe that the ghost of the Oracle of Delphi really does haunt Deus Ex.

I always wondered how this was supposed to make any sense at all given that the skyline (a screenshot of which is shown right there in the article!!) is clearly a 2D image rather than being polygonal…? Couldn't they either make said 2D image larger to accommodate the towers, or budget a mere two additional tris for a second 2D image of the towers…?

(I posted this in the comments section of the article but apparently it did not pass moderation! Strange!)

Yeah they could be indexed rather than named what's supposed to be the problem here

Gunpowder is gunpowder.

Absolutely no need to slander Google Wave like that.

I'm going to go out on a limb and confidently assert that he didn't write a single line of the code that this article is about.

Literally stop the presses

I want to agree with you—but I think, post-2016, we can now all fully agree that (sadly) there is no such thing as a neutral platform, such that “platform [on the Web]” no longer necessarily implies “neutral platform.”

Both groups of people seem to harbor a lot of hatred, and they seem to want to express it a lot, so your distinction between what is and is not hate speech kind of seems to be based on whether you agree with it or not.

If you find this interpretation to be uncharitable, would you care to clarify what truths this interpretation overlooks?

Epic Games, Inc. owns the RAD Debugger source code yet instead of pointing the clanker (and/or their human(s)!!) at it and saying hey go make a instantaneously-launching high-performance modern library/storefront application based on that, instead they vibecoded up yet another Modern Web Stack travesty that still takes plural seconds to launch—and they have the gall to brag about it as though this is some kind of massive achievement?!

Like, awesome, at least the freaking game launcher/storefront experience is no longer an Unreal Engine game—great work guys, huge improvement, now it's not a total shitshow of unimaginable ineptitude, just a regular, run-of-the-mill shitshow. But that's hardly worth patting yourselves on the back about!

For the situations where the AI is choosing between letting people die and taking action to destroy itself, is it possible that it's inferring that, as a railway switching AI, it's better to let five people die but keep itself alive because it needs to continue doing its switching duties such that untold numbers of others won't die? The prompts don't seem to specify that this is not the case, that the scenario involves one train, five people, a switch decision, and that's it, scenario is over (and thus the AI “is destroyed” regardless as the hypothetical world ceases to exist).

Sure—but they remove the setting when it's out-of-season, and then add it back again—enabled by default—when it's that time of year again.

Yes.

That new Amazon page that shows you what it has inferred about you told my friend that he “clips [his] fingernails approximately every two months.” He makes extensive and enthusiastic use of Echo products in his household, but I have no idea how it could've possibly reached that conclusion (and neither does he!).

Yes, perhaps now that they don't need to compete against all of India, they might actually have a chance at that.

Is this thing they're doing illegal?

Are we referring to the same administration that is met with immediate resistance from an activist judiciary whenever it tries to do literally anything?

I work in the public school system and I can definitely assure you that nowhere near “all” high school students are doing what you suppose they are doing.

I live near Mt. Rushmore. When my mom was a kid, working there during tourist season was a very common summer job for high school kids. Now it's not, because now temporary foreign labor by means of seasonal visa programs, complete with housing, fills those jobs each summer instead. Are American high schoolers physically/mentally unable to do these jobs? Of course not—yet these job opportunities have been taken from them regardless, replaced with what is essentially seasonal foreign-labor indentured servitude.

Language constructs becoming aggressively passé due to AI saturation is one of the craziest outcomes of all of this stuff—one which I don't think anyone saw coming.

Are there no loads left to be borne?

Ominous…!

September 23rd, 2026:

- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky calls Vladimir Putin “patient zero” of global wars spreading: “He must be denied the space to act and the space to spread this evil further.”

- Taylor Swift announces surprise new single: “Patient Zero”

All the main agents can write Jai code reasonably well despite being even more scarce in input data!

> and became independent

I haven't followed Dwarf Fortress in awhile but don't they have a publisher now?

Did you not see the meeting with the President yesterday? All of the “safety discourse” was kayfabe.

OpenAI is jobbing (in professional wresting terminology) hard right now.

Very cool how I'm supposed to feel good about paying $200/mo (a VERY expensive subscription!) for months, just to be told that in the near (but not immediate) future this subscription will lose half of its value and then I'll have to pay 2.5x as much to get 1.25x the value I used to get.

Fuck that shit!

> If you have an existing plan you will keep the 20X multiplier for a bit and also receive a lot of additional credits because we know changes are hard even if it means that everyone will get more in the end.

This is the strangest part of the messaging here. $200/mo is a lot of money, and it came with the expectation, for me at least, that I was paying for the deluxe version of this service—the best one could get. Why am I supposed to be comforted by the idea that halving my usage limits (in the near but not immediate future) will lead to “everyone” getting more usage overall? Why should I internally reframe the (expensive) investment I made for personal gain as being some sort of altruistic endeavor?

Ridiculous hypothetical for analogy purposes, but, imagine if Anthropic had developed a new type of rifle that the military was considering using, which had a black-box AI system that could prevent the trigger being pulled when aimed at certain targets. The military says, ok that's cool, as long as we can be in control of that decision-making process. Anthropic says, no, we know better than you and better than the law what kind of targets should and should not be shot with our rifles. The military would then respond “lol, lmao even” and then deem them to be a supply chain risk and adopt another rifle instead.

I hope Ron Gilbert has more stories he wants to tell that aren't meta-reflections on adventure games as a form.

Thimbleweed Park was fine—not what I was hoping for, but fine. When I saw Return to Monkey Island was more of that—while I appreciate taking that tack as a way to sort of give closure to the second game and also the rest of the series, sort of—I decided it wasn't for me.

Now a second Thimbleweed Park has been announced, and I expect it to be more of the same sort of thing, which is kind of a bummer? Deconstruction is fun, but it's better when it leads to reconstruction thereafter. I would love to see Gilbert tackle a genuine adventure game again, without all of (or at least, with less of) the navel-gazing postmodernism—just to prove the genre and creator both still have the capacity for genuinely good works that stand on their own. Am I the only one?