What if instead the manager was saying: “hey team I need you to all buy as many lotto tickets as possible!”
I feel like that’s a better analogy. Some charlatans are buying fake tickets, but as a manager who wants to win big, I’m ok with some chicanery so long as the average person is trying to honestly meet my directive.
It sounds to me like the safe assumption with software is that no matter how solid your stack is, there are vulnerabilities, potentially catastrophic. A question to folks more experienced than me - if my business depends on software, and I know that my software is almost certainly exploitable, how do I posture my business in such a way as to minimize the impacts of exploits like these?
I’d like to point out that TF2 was part of the Orange Box bundle that included Half Life, Portal, and TF2. Those single player games were never given away for free, so as a purchaser of the bundle, I wasn’t miffed TF2 went free to play. In fact, quite the opposite. Because TF2 is free, there are like 50k people to play with me everyday. I think $0 is the right price for TF2.
I agree CS is icky re: skins and gambling. But to say “refuses to control” is disingenuous. They’ve done many things to curtail gambling, like preventing tourneys from displaying gambling sponsors and adding trade restrictions that hampered bot activity. Valve is between a rock and a hard place here- they recognize gambling is a net negative on the value of their game (hence the curtailing and remonetization efforts). Remember, valve didn’t create skin trading with the expectation of third party gambling, so this is something unprecedented they’ve had to figure out as they go. Despite its drawbacks, the gambling market has some positives that valve can’t ignore. It creates liquidity and demand for the skins. People who pay hundreds of dollars for skins hate to see their value plummet. So if valve nuked gambling today, it would upset a lot of folks. I think valve has done a phenomenal job balancing their business needs with the social obligations with the players.
It’s also one of the thinnest floats IPO’ing. They’re only selling less than 5% of the company. That introduces a lot of sensitivity in the valuation, not to mention there exists a bit of game theory around fund managers needing to join in to maintain nominal returns with their peers.
Thank you for sharing! What are your thoughts on intentionally degrading service over the course of an hour instead of a hard cutoff? Like implementing an increasingly restrictive cap on download speeds/intentionally dropping a % of packets over the hour. Might be a little less jarring than a hard stop.
Hey - plugged this into chatGPT 5.2 and it seems to think this theory needs more work.
“As written, this looks closer to sophisticated curve-fitting (numerology with constraints) than a legitimate geometric unification, mainly because the claimed “ppm agreement” is often not assessed against experimental uncertainties and because several integer/constant choices function like hidden degrees of freedom.”
I think we’re in agreement, but I’m afraid I don’t have the philosophical language to precisely pin my mental model into words (what a meta conundrum lol). I’ll try my best here, but I may come back in a few days with an edit if I can more coherently write my ideas.
I take a slightly more narrow definition of “thoughts” that may be more akin to “expressions” - ideas that can be communicated, so excluding non-linguistic mental processes. I think that may be where we disconnect. A lot of my idea about thoughts comes from the Borges story, Funes the memorius (short story about a dude who could not forget - interesting read and really clarifies my feelings on my definition of “all possible thought”). In the story he talks about tree leaves, but instead imagine needing a unique linguistic scheme for every single unique snowflake you ever see. It would be a linguistic nightmare! Therefore language must generalize otherwise it becomes noncommunicable and that generalization to me induces the “lossy approximation” I attribute to language in my prior comment.
So, in my head Funes’s mind represent the abstract space of all possible thoughts. When we use language, we are stacking words/sentences/paragraphs/etc together almost like vector addition trying to reach a particular point in the thought vector space. Some languages have really clean ways of getting to certain thoughts while others take a mouthful and still don’t get you exactly there (物の哀れ example from link).
I agree with your statement on new languages being different thinking. As you follow that vector addition process to get to the “thought,” different languages will take you on different paths to get to your destination thought because languages encode those vectors differently, even if the destination thought is the same. In my mental model, the act of thinking is putting those language vectors together and tracing their path to get to your thought.
And if my comment still makes no sense - I might have to incubate this thought a bit more :) but I do recommend the story- it’s a quick, thought provoking read.
I think a succinct way to describe my thoughts on linear algebra/language is that language has high dimensionality (ie many different basis vectors that may not necessarily be orthogonal) and that individual languages use a unique coordinate system to express thought. Each language is a lossy approximation of all conceivable thought and some languages can more efficiently represent the “all thoughts” vector space because they have basis vectors that point in more uncommon directions (like the go to japan example). So while you can more or less point to any thought in any language, some thoughts are easier to express in certain languages, which the post (and me) agree to be untranslatable words.
I tried to find the really interesting article about language and color that describes how some cultures use different naming schemes for colors but couldn’t find it. It talked about how back in the day we don’t know orange as a color, we just thought it was red-yellow and only after the fruit was distributed did the word for the color catch on. Here’s the best article I can find that talks about this phenomena https://burnaway.org/magazine/blue-language-visual-perceptio...
I tried the new battlefield game and it’s bizarre how some of my friends play it. There’s this expansive battle pass (pay $20/quarter for access, on top of $70 base game) where you’re given tasks in game to make progress towards cosmetics. My friends only play to complete these tasks - the actual combat gameplay loop almost feels secondary to their enjoyment of the game. The modern trend of games becoming chore simulators is worrisome to me because -call me old fashioned- I believe the core gameplay loop should be fun and addictive, not the progression scaffolded on, even if that gameplay loops is a little “distasteful” like GTA.
It has to do with how ATC needs to be able to communicate with all planes in the air, even ones built 100 years ago. They have to use radio so everyone can hear everyone else. There’s no other technology that is as ubiquitous as radio, so they have to work with what they’ve got. Upgrading to other stuff would be an absolute nightmare, though they are making progress on less critical fronts.
I understand the sentiment about a skilled user not needing this, but I think having a little buddy that I can use to offload some menial tasks would be helpful for me to iterate through my models more efficiently; even if the AI is not perfect. As a highly skilled excel user, I admit the software has terrible ergonomics. It would be a productivity boon for me if an AI can help me stay focused on model design vs model implementation.
I bet the folks who implemented the system do have checks and balances. The article said they placed 2 million successful orders which realistically can’t happen without some form of error correction. These reports seem like black-swan Taco Bell orders that break the system despite any safeguards against it. Luckily there’s no way the guy behind the counter is pouring 18,000 waters lol. I agree with you too - “Taco Bell Employee Fucks Up Order” is only newsworthy because an AI did it when the real headline should read “AI Successfully Processes 2M Taco Bell Orders”
He mentions s&dbox, his new engine/gmod spiritual successor. They maintain an interesting devblog over at https://sbox.game/news if you are interested in how the sausage is made.
Figured I’d ask the HN crowd- what’s the best way around these geofence blocks? Have you had success with a system that can work smoothly on mobile/desktop without any of the disastrous privacy and performance implications that VPN services are prone to?
The black hole has two conceptual parts - the event horizon and the singularity. The event horizon is a one-way imaginary shell where once you pass it, you will end up at the singularity which is a point at the center of the event horizon. It’s the hole in black hole. Because the radius of the spherical horizon grows linearly with mass, but the size of the hole is fixed at effectively 0, it allows for a bit of sightseeing on your way to impending doom if the mass of the hole is large enough.
It’s kinda like why they make compsci majors take a history class - the actual knowledge may not be particularly useful unto itself, but learning that information/skill tickles a part of the brain you dont normally use. So that later, when you need to use your whole brain to solve some problem, all parts of it are strong.
So are the skills themselves important? Not per se, but they represent “meta skills” that we want kids to develop when they are most apt to learn.
Ultimately, I think it’s a big TBD - a child’s mind innately wants to learn, it’s just unclear what kids are learning when exposed to so much tech early on and that’s what has teachers worried. I bet the kids will turn out fine, but we as a society won’t really know until the kids are old enough to tell us firsthand.
If you are a monopoly producer (which seems fair in this context) you would set the price of the rocks where your marginal revenue equals your marginal demand. Loosely, you’d do a market survey to see what price the market would be willing to pay for a mars rock[0], then figure out your cost structure for bringing back one more kilo of rocks. You’d factor in cost to launch a rocket, fuel for the rocket, astronaut salaries, and don’t forget terrestrial costs like marketing and distribution! If you did a good enough job at predicting supply and demand, you wouldn’t actually care what the price of the product is because you would have claimed all the consumer surplus for yourself :)
To specifically answer the optimal quantity question, the above answer implies that you would keep bringing rocks home until the cost to bring them back is higher than the price you set. To be clear, you could still go out and get more rocks and sell them for less and still make a profit, but you wouldn’t maximize your profit with that strategy. Competitive markets nudge behavior towards providing more product for less profit/cost which is why we love competition.
How does one ensure that every seed can be completed without glitches? The website says this is the case, so I wonder how they do it because it seems nontrivial to generate valid seeds efficiently.
I feel like that’s a better analogy. Some charlatans are buying fake tickets, but as a manager who wants to win big, I’m ok with some chicanery so long as the average person is trying to honestly meet my directive.