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Game studio Electronic Arts has been showing signs of trouble for a while now. They’re in profit, but the line is going down. The second quarter of 2025 shows net income of $201 million, down from $280 million in the second quarter of 2024. Year on year, it’s down nearly 10%. [EA, PDF]

And EA is furiously laying off staff — about 300 just this year, after 670 last year. [GamesIndustry.biz]

How does a company get out of this sort of spiral? Well, you know the answer. EA’s been going all-in on AI!

In 2024, EA unveiled the exciting new tool “Imagination to Creation”! Well, they made a video of what it’ll totally be like when it exists. You type in a prompt and it’ll generate a whole game! Allegedly. Prompts like “make it more epic.” [YouTube]

The very biggest, most epic idea the executives can think of is “make a maze of cardboard boxes.” These are the sort of insightful minds we need leading a game studio.

Business Insider has a story on EA’s troubles getting the workers to take on AI. This story is the sort of thing Ed Zitron calls “boss erotica” — where you write some fawning bilge that tells the bosses: yes sir, you were right about everything, it’s those workers who suck. [BI, archive]

EA executives have spent the past year pushing AI internally as hard as possible. AI slop concept art! AI slop coding! AI slop management coaching! Yes, really — an AI slop generator is coaching your boss on how to talk to peons like you.

EA’s internal tool, ReefGPT, is a hallucination machine. The workers are forced to use it, and then spend time cleaning up its mess.

The bosses also want staff to train ReefGPT on their own work, so they can get fired in the next round of layoffs. The Business Insider article laments that workers might not want to do that, and suggests strategies to force them into it. I told you, this is boss erotica.

EA just got bought out by a private equity consortium led by Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of President Trump. The buyers have put in $36 billion of their own money, and the rest is loading down EA — not the buyers, but the company — with $20 billion in debt, over a third of the entire value of the company. [press release]

Net income of $1.1 billion a year is not going to pay off $20 billion of debt. They can dip into the $7.3 billion annual revenue for a while. But everything will have to change radically at EA. Then it dies anyway.

The way these deals end is the company goes broke from the crippling load of debt, and the buyers walk away from the bankrupt shell. Now, you might think that sounds a bit parasitical.

The buyers are betting that the magic of even more AI can cut costs. Which costs? Well, you know. Costs! If they knew how game dev works they’d be game devs, not finance parasites.

The buyers are looking to the magical version of AI: [FT, archive]

some believe the technology may soon be able to go much further in creating more realistic and responsive characters, or adapting storylines to players’ personal preferences.

Kushner announced he “grew up playing their games,” so I’m sure it’ll all be very competent and well arranged.

The paying customers — remember them? It’s useful to have some! — despise AI slop. Gamers go feral at the slightest hint of AI slop text or pictures in a game. To the point that EA had to warn about it as a business risk in their SEC filings.

But who needs customers? We’ve got fabulous private equity deals!

• Video — Podcast

The AI hyper-scalers have problems getting power for all their new data centres.

How about using small gas turbines that used to be jet engines? Landon Tessmer from ProEnergy says: [IEEE Spectrum]

We have sold 21 gas turbines for two data-center projects amounting to more than 1 gigawatt. Both projects are expected to provide bridging power for five to seven years, which is when they expect to have grid interconnection and no longer need permanent behind-the-meter generation.

Twenty jet engines screaming next to your house and pumping out nitrous oxide. But just for five to seven years. It’s fine.

Jet engines are not quiet, with delightful screeching high frequencies at 120 decibels. With some serious acoustic work, they can get that down to 40-50 dB at 750 feet away. [Power Engineering]

The first OpenAI/Oracle Stargate Project data centre in Abilene, Texas is deploying 30 jet turbine generators as backups. [Tom’s Hardware]

Abilene residents are not delighted at the noise, bright lights, pollution, and sudden traffic jams. The city gave Oracle a property tax cut in return for 357 jobs. [KTXS; Texas Observer]

The Abilene data centre also uses a ton of water — in the middle of a desert. The residents are on two-day-a-week water restrictions. This is even as the data centre runs its water closed loop. [AP]

This isn’t just the future of AI data centres — xAI is already making life a misery in South Memphis, with 35 little gas generators and another 90 planned. That’ll be your town next. And you thought bitcoin miners were bad.

• Video — Podcast

I am haunted by a pregnant bill in Andrew Cuomo’s new AI-generated attack ad against Zohran Mamdani.

Cuomo posted the ad on his X account that riffed on the famous Schoolhouse Rock! song “I’m just a bill.” In Cuomo’s AI-generated cartoon nightmare, Zohran Mamdani lights money on fire while a phone bearing the ChatGPT logo explains, apparently, that Mamdani is not qualified. 

The ad bears all the hallmarks of the sloppiest of AI trash: weird artifacting, strange voices that don’t sync with the mouths talking, and inconsistent animation. It feels both surreal and of the moment and completely ancient. 

And then there’s the pregnant bill.

The Schoolhouse Rock! Bill is an iconic cartoon character that has been parodied by everyone from The Simpsons to Saturday Night Live. There are thousands, perhaps millions, of pictures of the cartoon bill online, all available to be gobbled up by scrapers and turned into training data for AI.

For some reason, the bill in Cuomo’s ad has thick red lips (notably absent in the original) and appears to be pregnant. Adding to the discordant AI jank of the image, the pregnancy is only visible when the bill is standing up. Sometimes it’s leaning against the steps and in those shots it has the slim figure characteristic of its inspiration. But when the bill stands it looks positively inflated, almost as if the video generator used to make Cuomo’s ad was trained on MPREG fetish art of the bill and not the original cartoon itself. The thick and luscious red lips are present whether the bill is leaning or standing. 

Towards the end of the ad, an anthropomorphic phone with a ChatGPT logo wanders into the scene. Standing next to the pregnant bill, I could not but help but think that the phone is the father of whatever child the bill carried.

My observation led to an argument in the 404 Media Slack channel and opinions were split. “It does not seem pregnant to me,” said Emanuel Maiberg.

Jason Koebler, however, came to my defense. He circled the pregnant belly of the cartoon bill and shared it. “Baby is stored in the circle area,” he said.

Perplexed by all this, I reached out to Cuomo’s campaign for an explanation. I wanted a response to the ad and to get his thoughts on AI-generated political content. More importantly, I needed to know their opinion on the pregnancy. “Does that bill look pregnant to you?” I asked. “I think it looks pregnant, but my editors are split. I would love for the Campaign to weigh in.” Out of journalist due diligence, I also reached out to Mamdani’s press office. Neither campaign has responded to my request for it to weigh in on the pregnancy of the AI-generated cartoon bill.

This is not the first time the Cuomo campaign has used AI. An ad in early October featured a deepfaked Cuomo working as a train operator, stock trader, and a stagehand. A week ago, the Cuomo campaign released a long, racist video depicting criminals endorsing Mamdani. Critics called the ad racist. The campaign deleted it shortly after it was posted and blamed the whole thing on a junior staffer.

It is worth noting that Cuomo's AI slop is being deployed most likely because the candidate has been utterly incapable of generating any authentic excitement about his campaign in New York City or on the internet, and he is facing a digitally native, younger candidate who just seems effortlessly Good At the Internet and Posting.

This is, unfortunately, how a lot of politics works in 2025. Desperate campaigns and desperate presidents are in a slop-fueled arms race to make the most ridiculous possible ads and social media content. It looks cheap, is cheap, and is the realm of politicians who are totally out of ideas, but increasingly it feels like slop is the dominant aesthetic of our time.

Last night Trump directed the Pentagon to start testing nukes again. If that happens, it’ll be the first time the US has detonated a nuke in more than 30 years. The organization that would likely be responsible for this would be the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), a civilian workforce that oversees the American nuclear stockpile. Because of the current government shutdown, 1,400 NNSA workers are on furlough and the remaining 375 are working without pay.

America detonated its last nuke in 1992 as part of a general drawn down following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Four years later, it was the first country to sign the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) which bans nuclear explosions for civilian or military purposes. But Congress never ratified the treaty and the CTBT never entered into force. Despite this, there has not been a nuke tested by the United States since.

Trump threatened to resume nuclear testing during his first term but it never happened. At the time, officials at the Pentagon and NNSA said it would take them a few months to get tests running again should the President order them.

The NNSA has maintained the underground tunnels once used for testing since the 1990s and converted them into a different kind of space that verifies the reliability of existing nukes without blowing them up in what are called “virtual tests.” During a rare tour of the tunnel with journalists earlier this year, a nuclear weapons scientist from Los Alamos National Laboratory told NPR that “our assessment is that there are no system questions that would be answered by a test, that would be worth the expense and the effort and the time.”

Right now, the NNSA might be hard pressed to find someone to conduct the test. It employs around 2,000 people and the shutdown has seen 1,400 of them furloughed and 375 working without pay. The civilian nuclear workforce was already having a tough year. In February, the Department of Government Efficiency cut 350 NNSA employees only to scramble and rehire all but 28 when they realized how essential they were to nuclear safety. But uncertainty continued and in April the Department of Energy declared 500 NNSA employees “non-essential” and at risk of termination.

That’s a lot of chaos for a government agency charged with ensuring the safety and effectiveness of America’s nuclear weapons. The NNSA is currently in the middle of a massive project to “modernize” America’s nukes, an effort that will cost trillions of dollars. Part of modernization means producing new plutonium pits, the core of a nuclear warhead. That’s a complicated and technical process and no one is sure how much it’ll cost and how dangerous it’ll be. 

And now, it may have to resume nuclear testing while understaffed. 

“We have run out of federal funds for federal workers,” Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said in a press conference announcing furlough on October 20. “This has never happened before…we have never furloughed workers in the NNSA. This should not happen. But this was as long as we could stretch the funds for federal workers. We were able to do some gymnastics and stretch it further for the contractors.”

Three days later, Rep. Dina Titus (D-NV) said the furlough was making the world less safe. “NNSA facilities are charged with maintaining nuclear security in accordance with long-standing policy and the law,” she said in a press release. “Undermining the agency’s workforce at such a challenging time diminishes our nuclear deterrence, emboldens international adversaries, and makes Nevadans less safe. Secretary Wright, Administrator Williams, and Congressional Republicans need to stop playing politics, rescind the furlough notice, and reopen the government.”

Trump announced the nuclear tests in a post on Truth Social, a platform where he announces a lot of things that ultimately end up not happening. “The United States has more Nuclear Weapons than any other country. This was accomplished, including a complete update and renovation of existing weapons, during my First Term in office. Because of the tremendous destructive power, I HATED to do it, but had no choice! Russia is second, and China is a distant third, but will be even within 5 years. Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately. Thank you for your attention to this matter! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP,” the post said.

Matt Korda, a nuclear expert with the Federation of American Scientists, said that the President’s Truth social post was confusing and riddled with misconceptions. Russia has more nuclear weapons than America. Nuclear modernization is ongoing and will take trillions of dollars and many years to complete. Over the weekend, Putin announced that Russia had successfully tested a nuclear-powered cruise missile and on Tuesday he said the country had done the same with a nuclear-powered undersea drone. Russia withdrew from the CTBT in 2023, but neither recent test involved a nuclear explosion. Russia last blew up a nuke in 1990 and China conducted its most recent test in 1996. Both have said they would resume nuclear testing should America do it. Korda said it's unclear what, exactly, Trump means. He could be talking about anything from test firing non-nuclear equipped ICBMs to underground testing to detonating nukes in the desert. “We’ll have to wait and see until either this Truth Social post dissipates and becomes a bunch of nothing or it actually gets turned into policy. Then we’ll have something more concrete to respond to,” Korda said.

Worse, he thinks the resumption of testing would be bad for US national security. “It actually puts the US at a strategic disadvantage,” Korda said. “This moratorium on not testing nuclear weapons benefits the United States because the United States has, by far, the most advanced modeling and simulation equipment…by every measure this is a terrible idea.”

The end of nuclear detonation tests has spurred 30 years of innovation in the field of computer modeling. Subcritical computer modeling happens in the NNSA-maintained underground tunnels where detonations were once a common occurrence. The Los Alamos National Laboratories and other American nuclear labs are building massive super computers that are, in part, the result of decades of work spurred by the end of detonations and the embrace of simulation. 

Detonating a nuclear weapon—whether above ground or below—is disastrous for the environment. There are people alive in the United States today who are living with cancer and other health conditions caused by American nuclear testing. Live tests make the world more anxious, less safe, and encourage other nuclear powers to do their own. It also uses up a nuke, something America has said it wants to build more of.

“There’s no upside to this,” Korda said. He added that he felt bad for the furloughed NNSA workers. “People find out about significant policy changes through Truth social posts. So it’s entirely possible that the people who would be tasked with carrying out this decision are learning about it in the same way we are all learning about it. They probably have the exact same kinds of questions that we do.”