jcl

I think The Looker might appeal both to those who loved The Witness and those who didn’t. Several laugh-out-loud moments, some fun puzzles of its own - a wonderfully silly send-up, and free, too.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1985690/The_Looker/

Perhaps a more direct relation: most of those preexisting games were made in puzzlescript, which (per the article) was also made by the author of Stephen’s Sausage Roll.

Correct… they “cheated” a little to make the props for the movie. There are other designs for single-sheet unicorn, winged unicorn, and Pegasus — particularly the ones from John Montroll — but they look a bit different from the movie props, and are harder to fold.

https://johnmontroll.com/books/dragons-and-other-fantastic-c...

The impression I get from the article is not that the compiled code of each implementation produces the same object code, but that when the implementations are run with the same inputs, they produce exactly the same output — that is, the same JS VM bytecode.

I hiked up there once… There was a reservoir with a trail around it and, to my surprise, a fenced-off area full of goats. Apparently they were part of a vegetation control program used in the parks there.

It only looks for a single leading “e” or “i”, not any number. I’m guessing those tweaks were added to capture specific proper nouns that weren’t captured by simpler “leading capital letter” regexes, like “iPad” or “eBay”.

The unlikeliness of the wooden spaceship was one of my favorite parts of the sci-fi mystery/adventure game “The Outer Wilds”. (An indie gem…highly recommended, if you like puzzles or exploration.)

https://www.mobiusdigitalgames.com/outer-wilds.html

I wasn’t sure what the article meant by “no screws or glue”, when the photograph appears to have visible screws. But closer images show that these are apparently some sort of rivet?

I found a (Japanese-language-only) news piece that shows some of the crafting and assembly of the satellite, and the box body certainly holds together by itself, via some beautifully intricate joinery:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_F-NzzC7RA

Heh… that exact situation came up here a few years ago, when someone posted their software implementation of the puzzle:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10540014

My understanding of the article is that some companies added sesame to their products and ingredients label, while others may have changed their label to say the product “may contain” sesame — but that Bimbo did neither of these things, instead changing their label to say that the product definitely contained sesame, when in fact sesame was not an ingredient.

My favorite was toward the end of the Evangelion series, where they generated flashback footage by shooting the backs of earlier cels.

I recall Amazon’s Lord of the Rings title sequence [1] received some criticism for looking fake, even though they filmed it practically [2]. I’d guess it was due to folks assuming title sequences are CGI, combined with the fact that few people really know what poured liquid metal is supposed to look like.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HV-dDyYgwkc

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZEpWvQFXqQ

There’s a wonderful little carpentry museum in Kobe, highly recommended:

https://www.dougukan.jp/exhibition?lang=en

It focuses a lot on the evolution of precise woodworking tools, like saws and planes. They also had examples of complex joints, made without nails or glue.

Wouldn’t be surprised if that inspired Altitude, a more recent multiplayer 2d dogfighting game, free on Steam:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altitude_(video_game)

Looks like their “Baldur’s Gate” and “Fallout” games are practically identical, with similar overworld map and battle systems?

https://storyteller-blog.com/2024/03/22/i-made-a-baldurs-gat...

As Monty Hall pointed out in interviews, he was not obligated to offer the opportunity to switch and sometimes did not. So in this case knowledge of the actual show may have contributed to confusion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall#Monty_Hall_Problem

(But vos Savant stated in later columns that most of the critical responses she received assumed that the host was obligated to offer the switch, so they were genuinely confused by the paradox.)

I think Ubisoft’s intent was more to make customers comfortable with the idea of paying for short-term or ongoing access to content. Their shutdown of online services and DLC for some of their Steam games a few years ago did not exactly inspire confidence.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/ubisoft-titles-pulled-from-ste...

There are actually 10,100 equally likely situations: 101 choices of N x 100 choices of ball. When you completely discount the N=0 case, it’s because all choices of ball are green. You similarly need to almost completely discount the N=1 case, because almost all choices of ball in that situation are green, etc.

Yes, it’s a mistake to take the expected value before the ball is drawn, because the drawn ball adds information, disproportionately changing the expected value.

Consider an alternate game, where I flip a hidden coin… if it is heads, I let you pick from an urn with 99 red and 1 green; if it is tails, I let you pick from an urn with 1 red and 99 green. The expected number of red is still 50, and the chance of drawing that first red is still 50%. But once that red is drawn, your expectation of what the next draw will be should change significantly.

I thought Southwest uses “open” seating, where passengers aren’t assigned a seat, but instead just take any unoccupied seat? If so, a perk of being earlier in the boarding order would be that you have a better chance of getting a seat you want, if you have any particular preferences.

So, it seems that the intent of the code is to add two parallel, invisible kill beams to augment the main beam. The nature of the bugs are such that the added beams are positioned in roughly the right place, for a certain axis-aligned view.

I’d guess that the feature was tested manually in such a view, and seemed to work OK. And that the feature was subtle enough of a behavior tweak that no one noticed that it didn’t work correctly in most other situations, since the main, visible beam worked correctly, and no one could see it killing enemies behind walls.

To be fair, bug #1 was that the normalization call had no effect, so the fact that it’s also being done in the wrong sequence doesn’t actually have a further effect on gameplay.

Per the article, probably just Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

I suspect that someone using a public usb-a charging port isn’t expecting fast charging, but rather counting themselves lucky that it works at all.

Reminds me of the making of a pre-CGI HBO intro -- looks CGI but is entirely physical models, motion controlled cameras, and clever compositing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agS6ZXBrcng&t=310s

At this point, I would assume it would be possible simply because text about AIs that want to survive is in its input data -- including, at some point, this thread.

ChatGPT is already pretty good at generating sci-fi dystopia stories, and that's only because we gave it so many examples to learn from: https://twitter.com/zswitten/status/1598088286035415047

True, but both of those examples were written for the general public, where the authors might intentionally be using “symptom” in its colloquial sense to be better understood. So it’s hard to draw conclusions about how the same authors would use “symptom” when writing for a medical audience.

No doubt it would be filled with gratuitous union-finding that wasn't present in the original.

Yeah, they're implementing a Minecraft-like experience within Minecraft, not literally running official Minecraft code on their VM.

I think they specify "3D Minecraft" to distinguish it from earlier efforts, where people built 2D Minecraft-like experiences with redstone, like:

https://www.gamesradar.com/guy-makes-minecraft-playing-compu...

It already won, in 2014: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ig_Nobel_Prize_winners...