rmidthun

All this eulogy for an abusive bully.

Among the many "innovations", there was a feature where he would link to a website that he thought was worthy of ridicule. Often mentioning directly that it had a guest book to sign in.

So a horde of bullies would descend on that website, fill the book and any forums with goatse porn and email the same. Some of the victims shut down their websites, their complaints posted to SA so people could laugh at them.

Brigading and "cancelling"... Yes, some of the humor was funny, but the site was a cesspool that festered into the chans. Let's Play is good, but the worst of the Internet was fostered here as well.

The best part was when he was tricked into a boxing match with Uwe Boll, which didn't work out well for him.

No mention of Tom Lehrer? I still remember the -LY song he wrote.

One recurring joke was based on 2001. A giant monolith would crumble to reveal the sound of the day while Also Sprach Zarathustra played. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zY0GhNBMkM8

Slack decided that my phone is no longer good enough. So I have lost access to the main method of communication when I am away from the computer.

I really don't want to get a new phone just for this...

There is a distinct drop in quality as time passes, anything written in the 50s is golden (Untouched by Human Hands, Store of Infinity) , in the 60s is mixed but still some good stuff (Can you Feel Anything When I do This?). After that is pretty hit or miss (Options), including a collaboration with Zelazny that I found quite disappointing.

By using expected value, you are assuming that the distribution of the even numbers is uniform. You will need to prove that first, and I suspect that will be difficult.

Since we're looking at Scott Aaronson, you might want to check out "Quantum Computing Since Democritus". It gives a good explanation of the math behind qubits and how they can be used. Best intro I know of.

It also gets pretty macabre in parts. Specifically The Tin-Woodsman of Oz where the title character wonders whatever happened to the girl that was the reason he was cursed. You see, he fell in love with a girl who was enslaved to a witch, so the witch enchanted his axe to chop parts of him off every time he swung it. Eventually, there was nothing left but the tin replacements.

And if that isn't enough, it is established that nothing in Oz ever dies. Including all his chopped off parts...

Strongly disagree.

I Am a Strange Loop spends an entire chapter of Hofstadter informing us how he is better than everyone else because he hears Bach better than everyone else. And this attitude fills the book, I found it very obnoxious and am not sure why no else mentions it.

There are at least two places in the book where he talks about an interesting point, then realizes it is a rehash of something from a previous book. And aside from the self-congratulations (did you know being a vegetarian makes you more of a person?), anything interesting in this book was done better in a previous book.

I would recommend The Mind's I instead. It's a collection of stories and essays from most of his influences, see what Turing, Lucas, et al. actually said.

I once registered a password using a special character, but I could not get in. It turned out that they url encoded it, if I used %21 instead of "!" I could get into the site.

By this logic, would Guitar Magazine, which published very complete sheet music for many of these songs have a copyright claim? I know I have a magazine at home with Stairway to Heaven and I'm pretty sure there's a copyright in there somewhere.

FATE. Designed to be about the simplest thing that could be called a system, but endless flexibility in what you use it for. The Accelerated version is about 40 pages, the Core version is a more detailed, but still less than the typical RPG rules set.

The system is designed so that the players can influence the events of the game at the cost of increasing difficultly. For instance, every character has a High Concept, such as "Best swordsman in the kingdom". This can be used by the player in many ways, such as celebrity notice, justifying related skills, background, etc. but the game master can also invoke it for things like bitter rivalry, getting conscripted or not being able to go incognito.

As such, the system can work at many different levels. One popular setting has characters as magical cats, another as post-human cyborgs. And it all works.

For a list of various settings: https://www.evilhat.com/home/fate-worlds-and-adventures/

I think you need to read that linked article a bit more closely.

"You can go to jail for not filing your taxes. You can go to jail for lying on your return. But you can’t go to jail for not having enough money to pay your taxes. "

That is, if you intentionally avoid paying taxes by either not filing or filing a fraudulent report, then you certain can go to jail. See Al Capone for the most famous example.

That's a crash trap. But if you were to have a glitch trap, that would be funny. A glitch trap teleports the person carrying you, probably into space to die, leaving you behind. Then you could go get the next one.

So many tricks and traps in this game. Did you ever see that you can throw traps? If you throw a trap, pause, teleport it to you, then use it normally, it comes out with the same velocity as when it was teleported. So you can throw an armed trap, causing it to teleport/crash/acid whoever it hits.

Greg Egan wrote a story ("Border Guards")in which post-human players play a game of Quantum Soccer. Being Greg Egan, he actually created the game in Java.

http://www.gregegan.net/BORDER/Soccer/Soccer.html

I wouldn't call it accessible, though.

Warning: That link was replaced with a "your machine might be infected, call us now!" type scam.

The web site https://betterexplained.com/ has physical books that you can purchase "Math, Better Explained: Learn to Unlock Your Math Intuition". The explanations on that website are excellent, I imagine the book is the same.

Like this one?

https://blog.highfidelity.com/avatar-island-our-first-steps-...

It doesn't even need to be hostile to be trouble.

The Strugatsky brothers book "Roadside Picnic" (inspiration for game and movie "Stalker") is based on the idea that aliens came and visited Earth and ignored us completely.

However, they left behind a lot of weird and often deadly trash that people are scavenging.

The source code to Simon Tatham's Puzzles is open-source, so you could see how at least one person does it.

https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/devel/ https://git.tartarus.org/?p=simon/puzzles.git;a=summary

CYOA still lives, but in different forms.

Japanese Visual Novels are basically CYOA with pictures. The number of decision points varies depending on the book in question, but the basic structure is still there.

Twine [1] is a system that allows you to create stories, essentially CYOA but with the option of adding variables. For instance, you could have an option that is only selectable if you found a key earlier. This bridges the gap between CYOA and classic text adventure. Since Twine outputs HTML it is also easy to port wherever you want.

Finally, there are a number of online community CYOA. This being the Internet, the quality is varied and many of them are pornographic. Probably the biggest is Addventure[2]

[1] http://twinery.org/ [2] http://www.addventure.com/

I would add pictorial programming languages, such as ProGraph if you want a really unusual way to program. Object oriented, but inherently dataflow. Loops were very weird though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prograph

Remembered another one: gravitational orbits can't occur in 4D space or higher.

In 3d space, we have inverse-square laws. Think of a light source, the area that is covers at a given distance is the area of a sphere, so it makes sense that it would decrease with that area, or 4piR*R. Gravity is also inverse-square in 3D space (though relativity makes this much more complicated, I expect). Implication is that in a 4D space, it would be an inverse-cubed relation.

It turns out that stable orbits can only happen with inverse squared laws.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand%27s_theorem

Rotations can be composed in up to 3 dimensions only. That means that for any sequence of rotations, you can come up with a single rotation that is equal to that rotation. In 2d, this is just adding scalars and rotation has no meaning in 1 or 0 dimensions.

In 4 dimensions, this is not true. A rotation in XY cannot compose with one in ZW so at least two rotations are required.

Pigeonhole Principle. The number of messages of bit length N is 2^N. You are trying to map these into 2^M compressed strings, M < N. By the Pigeonhole (or Dirichlet's Box) Principle, at least one compressed string will have more than one message mapped to it. So it cannot be reversed.

If you want a good look at the other side, read the Showa series of manga by Shigeru Mizuki. It mixes historical background (based on photos) with his own personal story (a more cartoony style).

And his own story is Hellish by any standard. In the third volume particularly, his group gets caught by enemy fire and are presumed dead. When he makes it back to camp, they has already reported them as dead. This turns out to be an embarrassment and they are effectively told to go back into the jungle and die. Some do.

My daughter played an MMO by Disney called Pixie Hollow. In the game, players were given pets that they needed to play with, keep clean and feed to keep healthy.

About a month after the game closed, she woke up from a nightmare. She dreamed of the pets huddled in the ruins after all the fairies (players) had left them behind. It sounded heartbreaking.

I would encourage a hybrid approach if you are getting nowhere.

There is a trick to finding solving patterns known as commutators. For instance, see http://w.astro.berkeley.edu/~converse/rubiks.php?id1=basics&...

Once you learn the basic idea of the commutator, you can easily make up you own system. Essentially you select a part of the cube and make some specific change to it. For instance, you come up with a move sequence that turns one top corner but doesn't affect any other top cubie. If you were to reverse that move, you would be back to normal or course. So if you rotate the top before reversing the move: 1) The only change on top will be a different corner turning 2) The rest of the cube will go back to it's original state.

Therefore, the only difference is that you rotate two corners. It takes some practice to learn how this is done, but I can solve any cube-like puzzle (ok... except Square-1)and I don't have any memorized system.

Thus [A] B [A'] B' is all you need. You just need to find a proper [A]

It depends on what you mean by layman. I found the book Quantum Computing Since Democritus by Scott Aaronson to be very easy to understand, but it does require some linear algebra and complex numbers. I don't think you can get a good overview of entanglement (where the madness lies) without that basic level.

Check http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/ and see if it works for you.

Otherwise, you are in the realm of popularizers like John Gribbin, who I found entertaining but not very enlightening.

Scale matters. Steam has less than 4000 games total. The App store has 1400 applications every day.

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/steam-reaches-100-million-u... http://www.pocketgamer.biz/metrics/app-store/

There is a way to map each rational to a specific positive integer. First, you need to define a mapping between positives and integers, this is pretty simple.

0 1 2 3 4

0 -1 1 -2 2

in c code: if(x<0) ? (x * -2)-1 : x * 2;

(pretend that's fixed width above)

Next, any rational can be broken down into a unique prime factorization. 4/6 = 2^1 * 3^-1, 4/15 = 2^2 * 3^-1 * 5^-1

From the factorization, define a transform where the exponent for each prime is replaced using the mapping above: so (2^2 * 3^-1 * 5^-1) becomes (2^4 * 3^1 * 5^1) = 240.

Since the original rational can be negative, you'll need to use the first transformation again, so 4/15 = 240, -4/15 = -240, which work out to 480 and 479 respectively.

0 and 1 are left unchanged by the factorization process so 0 maps to 0, 1 to 2, and -1 to 1.