Clusterf**k

Or how I clicked for a card game spoiler and learned about UMAP dimensional reduction.

Preamble

• This article contains Elevation spoilers!

• Substack does not have a spoiler function, so exit now if you don’t want to see the new Elevation card.

• AI-Generated Content: none.

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  I’m not gonna edge you.

Before I jump in to give my impressions, a breakdown of the numbers, and the overall aesthetics and design, let’s quickly recap how a lot of player look at ice.

Section for newer players follow, veterans can skip to the end of this block.

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Ice (important to follow FFG convention and not capitalize it these days) is almost always a “punisher style” card. The usual Magic: the Gathering analog we go to for illustrating this concept is Browbeat. Basically, you do a thing, and then the other players make choices about exactly how that thing changes the game state. Because you are giving the other player the power of choice (do I run, do I break all the subs, do I use my credit pool via a Killer, do I pop Arruaceiras Crew… etc.) ice often does “the floor”- the least it can do for you. Most of the time this means it does nothing or acts as a small detraction to the opponent’s credit pool.

Exceptions to this are cards like Ping, Anemone, Funhouse, Border Control, etc which can do something without offering a punisher-style choice unless the opponent has some very narrow counters. Those are almost always good cards.

Simple ice that only has subroutines and is one of the three main types (Barrier, Code Gate, Sentry), like our new friend Doomscroll - that type of ice is usually subdivided into “gearcheck” , “taxing”, or “both”. Gearcheck ice is usually cheap and has an →End the Run (or something very similar). Corporations use it to protect their very early agenda or asset pushes to force the runner to spend tempo finding a solution. Taxing ice is chosen based on the ability to deplete the runner’s credit pool based on the expected metagame breaker suite composition. Doomscroll doesn’t end the run or do something similar, so it’s regular taxing ice.

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OK, so Doomscroll is mainly going to be used as taxing ice, probably most commonly slapped on a central server to make running there a slog. Do its numbers support that function? I think it’s going to be considered in-faction somewhat regularly, and imported into Jinteki decks occasionally.

You see, in the FFG days, NBN cards were most often seen alongside Weyland cards: NBN tags, Weyland bags. But recently, NSG has been printing cards that encourage us to consider importing NBN into Jinteki and vice-versa. Now, do I think that Doomscroll is going to enable a ton of surprise kills in Jinteki net damage decks? No, because savvy player usually try to have a Sentry solution down before facechecking a Jinteki server. But if an opponent is trying to combo you with net damage, Doomscroll becomes a must-break. So, how much of a tax is it?

Some commonly played Killers that will not rotate are:

• Echelon - Full rig, costs 2 to break Doomscroll, (we assume the last sub is irrelevant). Otherwise 5 or 6 credits.

• Revolver - 2 credits and 2 “bullets”.

• Carmen - 4 credits.

• Orca - 2 credits.

OK, so it’s not super taxing unless you’ve gone full tag-me and have to break that 3rd sub, but it has a nice facecheck-without-sentry penalty and it only costs 3 to rez (midrange ice). Right now, there are only 2 in-faction ice that NBN has access to that cost 3: Klevetnik (mostly combo insurance for Azmari combo) and Free Lunch (which sees little play and will rotate).

How excited am I, as a competitive player to put this in my deck?

I’ll be honest: meh. Yes, it will make the cut sometimes, and yes, it’s a nice surprise out of Jinteki when they facecheck you because you’re only sitting on 3 credits. But I’m still going to be leaning on Ping-heavy remotes to fuel that IP Enforcement. Of course, passing judgement on cards before knowing the full spoiler is a fool’s game. There could be other things on the horizon that in tandem make Doomscroll much more dangerous for the runner. In particular, I’d be looking at cheap options to increase it’s strength by one more pip so that Echelon Basic Bitches have to reach deeper into their pockets to break the damn thing.

OK, if you’re just here for the card and numbers breakdown, we’re done, you can close this window and move on with your life.

For those of you who enjoy commentary, have a seat. We’re just getting started.

Before I went on hiatus, I wrote a column which got good feedback and (happily) didn’t result in mass subscriber exodus.

Since then:

• I have left most of the Facebook/Meta ecosystem¹. I sadly have to have WhatsApp on my phone because the network effect of that communications channel in Latin America and Europe is too strong, but otherwise Meta gets nothing from. No traffic, no engagement, no views, no referral links, no stupid RayBan AI glasses purchased, no Quest headsets, NOTHING. NOTHING. FUCK YOU.

• I know some of you readers may work in the industry, and we all have to choose a Lord for our Current Technofeudalist society, no personal judgement but… I FUCKING HATE ADTECH. My time is my life, my existence. When you blare your fucking advertisements at me when I’m trying to enjoy myself you are literally poisoning my phenomenal sentience. Is AdTech morally worse than LockheedMartin or ExxonMobile? I don’t know. Does it annoy me more? Yes.

• AdTech encompasses not just background cookie and image trackers that build-up a psychographic profile of you from your browsing habits (yes, even incognito mode amigo, and nowadays they can probably correlate you through a VPN too) but the cornerstone of the internet. Google/YouTube can widely be viewed as adtech, and I’m in no hurry to disentangle myself from those tendrils.

• The level of surreptitious surveillance is extremely insidious. For example, for at least 10 years, AdTech has been using inaudible sounds emanated from your devices to exchange information between platforms in a manner invisible to you.

The card Doomscroll is the Netrunner weaponized version of “rage bait” and “engagement mining” (see flavor text). The idea here is that NBN has ice which surveils the runner (Antipersonnel - Observer) and then connects to NBNs unholy infrastructure to rapidly construct an extremely accurate mental model of the runner to generate, on-the-fly CONTENT that hacks the runners brain into PAYING ATTENTION. It’s a literal payment. LOOK AT THIS.

And then they die or end up with a tracker trojan on their rig.

What enables this kind of psychographic manipulation? In short: clustering.

I’m a bit of tweet collector, sometimes even the most infuriating characters post wonderful things.²

What the fuck is Nassim asking about in this poll? He’s not asking anything, he’s using it to make a rhetorical point in his inimitable way that if you give the AdTech conglomerates a little data about yourself, they can probably fit you into a psychographic cluster and exploit you.

What the fuck is a ‘cluster’? In short, it’s a (somewhat arbitrary) grouping of points in a tSNE or UMAP (or other equivalent) dimensional reduction graph.

This is what peak performance looks like.

In biology research, we might have a large dataset of, say, the expression level of 30,000 different genes from 2000 cells. Each one of those genes is a “dimension” (that is, a parameter with an intensity) but we don’t really want to visualize data in a 30000 dimensional space. So, through the magic of tSNE or UMAP math, we compress each data point (each cell’s 30000 dimensions) into (usually) 2 dimensions and end up with something like this:

The colored clusters define cell identity and, crucially, ARE PREDICTIVE.

As it turns out, what you can do with cells, you can also do with human beings.

Next time you’re browsing Reddit or YouTube or Twitter/BlueSky or Facebook or Google News and you see something that upsets you, ask: are you clustering? Because when you do, this guy finds you:

Have you considered going outside and touching grass?

1. My FB profile is permanently deleted. I don’t use Instagram for anything. My life is better because of it, but I refuse to become annoying about it. You do you.

2. I have a screencap of a deleted Sam Altman tweet saying that sometimes he just “rawdogs Word”. Priceless really.