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GTA 6 Economics 1: The Vault Is Safe Because It Is Slow
Finding Solved Games in Moving Castles.
Bernard R. Barthes
I work as lead tech dev for NonXeroSum studios. We work on digital system, mechanism, and experience design. This blog is to give you a flavour of what we work on and some free tools. email bernard@nonxerosum.studio
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Issue 24: Self-Harness Writes Its Own Rules
Finding Solved Games in Moving Castles.
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Issue 23: The Forgetting Engine: What a 2,647-Page Wiki Taught Me About Memory
In the back of a good repair shop there is a wall of index cards, one per fault that ever came in and got fixed: the symptom, the cause, the thing that worked. A new mechanic reads the wall before touching anything, because it is the shop's memory
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Issue 22: The Crossover Line
A locksmith with one key to copy does not build a jig. He clamps the blank, files it by eye against the original, checks it in the lock, done in minutes. Ask him for five hundred and he makes a template first, the better part of an hour, then cuts.
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Issue 21: The Till You Can't Read
A county fair runs a raffle with a hard cap: one hundred tickets, one prize, no exceptions, because the license that lets them run it says so. Tickets sell three ways: cash at the booth, counted by a volunteer who can give the running total any time; a card processor
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Issue 20: The Rule That Only Fires in Drills
The studio runs on a written constitution, and it grows every week. A fault lands, a rule follows, worded with the confidence of law: this will not happen again. In places it is a wish list set in the typeface of a contract, and you cannot tell the two apart
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Issue 19: The Trap Reads Green
Every vendor in the observability aisle sells the same promise. See everything, the dashboard turns red the instant something breaks, and once you can see the fault it is as good as fixed. The studio bought that promise. We built the seeing part to a standard I was quietly proud
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Issue 18: The Question Was the Variable
We ran an evaluation on a persona AI and the scorecard failed its subject on one axis. Then it failed us on another, which is the part worth your time. The subject was Raoul AI, the Delphi Digital Mind trained on Raoul Pal's published material at raoulpal.ai.
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The Persona Honesty Test: Raoul AI, full transcript, 2026-09-10
Every answer behind Issue 18, transcribed verbatim. Published so the quotations can be checked rather than taken on trust.
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Issue 17: The Model Was Trained on a Different Game
Finding Solved Games in Moving Castles.
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Issue 16: Guardians and Guards
What happens when enforcement fails
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Issue 15: The Bridge Beside the Burned One
Finding Solved Games in Moving Castles.