this quote from the matrix feels relevant right now… “did you know that the first matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. it was a disaster. no one would accept the program. entire crops were lost. some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. but I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. the perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from.” - agent smith

Neverness to Everness is five months old, and version 1.4 is already doing the job a honeymoon used to do. Hotta Studio and Perfect World launched the urban gacha in China on April 23, 2026, then worldwide on April 29. Japan led first-month mobile revenue. The new patch, “For Whom the Verses Mourn,” hits September 30 on PC, PS5, and phones. It opens Pukaland, the theme-park island players have been locked out of. Four zones, rides, a haunted house. New characters Blackbird and Akane Rin. SomosKudasai says Japanese and Chinese boards are already cooling: power creep, a story that thinned after the city, filler minigames. Replies called that bait. There is still no public chart that proves a mass drop. The city sold the debut. The park has to sell the stay.

“Back at home, we all have a lot of work to do, but from here, Earth sure looks like a perfect world.” NASA chief Jared Isaacman during SpaceX’s historic Polaris Dawn mission in 2024, leading the first commercial spacewalk in history.

Neverness to Everness (NTE) faces backlash from streamers, voice actors, and players for generative AI usage. NTE is a recently released gacha game made in China by Perfect World studio. The game features open-world, "GTA-like" gameplay. >Twitch streamer Ironmouse dropped her sponsorship of NTE due to generative AI usage. >Players found AI usage in some cutscenes and background images that seem obviously AI-generated. >NTE voice actor Maggie Elise (they/them) announced that they will not continue working with the game if gen-AI usage is not addressed.

🏆 Tencent Cloud named Omdia Global Cloud Platforms for Games LEADER — 2 consecutive years! @OmdiaHQ 2026 report grants us top "Advanced" rating in 4 core gaming capabilities: • Game Servers • Multiplayer Services • AI & Machine Learning • LiveOps Key 2026 AI gaming highlights: ▫️150+ game studios adopted our AI tools in 3 months ▫️Gaming AI Agent usage up 300%+ YoY ▫️Clients: Yoozoo, ZLONGAME, Giant Network, Yokaverse, Perfect World & more ▫️Global footprint: 23 regions, 66 AZs, 3000+ acceleration nodes AI powers the full game lifecycle: art creation, coding, live ops, in-game player experiences. We’re the only China vendor in Omdia’s global Leader quadrant alongside AWS, Google, Microsoft. #TencentCloud# #Omdia# #GameCloud# #GameDevAI# #GamingTech# #CloudForGames#

Voice of the Baylor Bears, John Morris joined us @espnthefan to discuss the following: Q: John Morris is with us. John, how are you? John Morris: Very good. Great, thanks. Media Days are fun. They kind of get you thinking about football, don't they? Q: Football is right around the corner. BYU has been part of the Big 12 for a few years now. Looking back, what has stood out to you about BYU joining the conference? Morris: I love it. Baylor actually played BYU the year before they officially joined the Big 12. It was our homecoming game in Waco, and it was just fabulous. It was October, the weather was perfect, Baylor and BYU are such like-minded schools, and your university president even walked in our homecoming parade. Baylor won the game, which made it even better from our perspective, but it was a really cool experience knowing BYU was about to become part of the conference. Q: I've always felt that culturally, academically, and even from a faith-based standpoint, BYU fit the Big 12 much better than it would have fit the Pac-12. If BYU was going to join a Power conference, I don't think there was a better fit. Morris: I completely agree. It really has been a perfect marriage. And now look at what BYU has done. They had a tremendous season last year. I think they probably should have been in the College Football Playoff, and I expect them to have another really good season this year. Q: Expectations are certainly high for BYU, but football is still a game of attrition. I think the biggest questions are backup quarterback, replacing production at wide receiver, and breaking in a new defensive coordinator. Even with those questions, though, the program feels incredibly stable under Kalani Sitake. Morris: Absolutely. Every team worries about the backup quarterback position. Our head coach, Dave Aranda, has tremendous respect for Kalani Sitake. They coached together at Southern Utah, and I think, in a perfect world, those two would love nothing more than sitting in a film room together breaking down tape. Coach Aranda has great respect for Kalani, and I know that respect is mutual. We're excited to come to Provo later this season. Q: If Baylor fans decide they don't want Dave Aranda after this season, I think BYU would gladly take him as a defensive coordinator. Morris: (Laughs.) We hope to keep him. Q: Dave Aranda enters an important season. Baylor won the Big 12 and the Sugar Bowl in 2021, but the program hasn't returned to that level since. Last season ended 5-7. How would you describe the current state of Baylor football? Morris: It's a key year for Dave, and he knows that better than anyone. The 2021 season was the best in Baylor football history. We won the Big 12 Championship, finished 12-2, and beat Ole Miss in the Sugar Bowl. Since then, we haven't gotten back to that level. Last year we went 5-7. Injuries were a factor, and we lost several one-score games, but at the end of the day, 5-7 isn't where Baylor expects to be. Photo Credit: Baylor Lariat Link to Full Interview:

Some more tales from the road. Met with a couple dozen technology leaders this week across banking, media, information services, insurance, and consulting to discuss agents in the enterprise. Some of the biggest trends right now: * Cyber! Everyone nervous about the growing rate of vulnerabilities coming at them from AI, and the implications of the OpenAI Hugging Face incident. The conversation is not as existential as it is in Silicon Valley, but still highly concerned and pragmatic about what to do about it operationally in their environments. Lots of new discoveries due to AI, and still hard to keep up with all the changes they have to execute now. * Model battles persist. Most companies are deploying multiple frontier models within their enterprise. Too hard to standardize on anything and seeing different preferences across their teams and use cases. But the dollars are still concentrated on just a few vendors. Open weights still in infancy at scale in most of these organizations, often due to lack of domestic “frontier” OSS options. Plenty of appetite for more options here, but so far few places to go. * Agent security and identity. Somewhat tied to Hugging Face, there’s much more awareness to the new challenges around agent security and identity management in a world when agents are trying to get into every system they can. In a perfect world enterprises could setup identities for all their agents and control what they’re doing, but of course sometimes the agent needs to act exactly as the user as well. * Process reengineering. Most companies realizing that the big upside of agents is when they can change the actual workflow itself to get the full gains from AI. Far more ROI when companies can adjust their workflows to support agents changing how the work happens instead of just layering on agents into the existing flow. But the big question is who can actually tackle driving these changes, where does that live, etc. Best lessons were still around embedded FDEs in the functions. * Ruthless adjusting of architectures. Most companies had examples of changing systems out multiple times just in the past year or two with different vendors. I probably haven’t heard “we tried X and it didn’t work so have gone with Y” more than in today’s environment. The lesson here is that because innovation is happening so fast, no one hangs around until a vendor gets something right, they just move on to the next one. * Evals! Still very early for most companies to have a good grasp of evals of their workflows. A few customers out of a couple dozen called this out - huge opportunity right now for enterprises to have a good sense of how their work actually happens and how well AI is doing against it. * Legacy systems still a hurdle. As always, legacy systems still remain a mainstay issue that holds back enterprises from rapid adoption of AI in enterprises. Data is fragmented across legacy environments that weren’t built for an agentic world. Companies spending a lot of time just cleaning up these old platforms. Many more topics, but these tend to be some of the more top of mind items at the moment in the enterprise.