FD4280
9d ago
The tenth percentile of the general population is living off some combination of government aid and crime. They’re certainly not cashiers; even restricting to college students, the tenth percentile will not have the work ethic or the numeracy for this.
FD4280
13d ago
There’s a Roald Dahl short story with a similarly structured (much tamer but profoundly uncomfortable) punchline.
O. Henry’s “Gift of the Magi” comes to mind, too, but that one is heartwarming.
FD4280
15d ago
Is the gameplay any good by modern standards? After a long hiatus from both, EverQuest felt horrible, but WoW Classic held up pretty well.
FD4280
29d ago
Thinking back on it, I retract my judgment from RTwP. Neverwinter and Dragon Age 1/2 were perfectly playable. The thing that turned me off was the Baldur’s Gate and Planescape: Torment engine, which had low-level casters with few spells per rest and concurrently made resting a pain in the ass. Thus casters were a liability 80%+ of the time. Never finished BG1 because of this (Torment was good enough to suck it up for the duration) and haven’t tried BG2.
FD4280
1mo ago
Do you really prefer RTwP over turn-based? I’ll grant that it works well in Faster Than Light (and is preferable to the singularly shitty turn-based implementation in Fallout Tactics, which runs both options), but for the most part, the good games that have it are good in spite of it.
FD4280
1mo ago
Mess with some higher math. A fully solved Linear Algebra Done Right (3rd edition is preferable, the problem sets are way beefier and better organized) or a run at Project Euler could keep you entertained for a long time and maybe build motivation for something bigger.
FD4280
1mo ago
Yes, graph theory is math, or at least the math department that gave me a doctorate for a dissertation in graph theory seems to think so :)
FD4280
1mo ago
Nope - what I know in the area is downstream of coursework and messing around with Project Euler.
FD4280
1mo ago
Mind sharing some details, or mentioning when you have it on Arxiv? It’d be really cool to have something better than Miller-Rabin, followed by trial division over a pre-generated list of primes if composite.
FD4280
1mo ago
Struck me as very childish. Stopped there.
In retrospect, Hunter X Hunter had the same issue and turned out great. Might be grounds for giving it another shot.
FD4280
2mo ago
Having spent a decade in math departments (as a master’s student, then adjunct, then doctoral student), nearly all the professors were way brighter than I, and it was obvious very quickly.
The exceptions:
- Some but not all of the math ed specialists.
- Some of the oldest profs, especially US-educated ones, were closer to the stronger students in ability - the competition for tenure track positions was not as insane in the 80s.
FD4280
2mo ago
Two thirds of the way through Seveneves. Would have probably dropped it if not for some nostalgia for Stephenson’s older works. The writing is bloated, and the cast before the time jump feels excessively SJW-flavored.
FD4280
2mo ago
Trump. After the tremendous bad faith of the Covid response, the summer of BLM, and the social media control shenanigans of the last election, I’d take Xi or MBS (or even Putin, if I had no connection to the war zone) over any Dem.
FD4280
2mo ago
They (counting unified/Western only) also averaged 6-7 years on the job. I can’t think of one who was replaced and lived afterwards.
FD4280
2mo ago
Algebraic geometry and most of number theory on top. Graph theory and most of combinatorics toward the bottom (I am here). The basis is largely the minimum difficulty of producing independent, original work.
Getting spoonfed or rubber-stamped in a high status area, like Piper Harron, does not confer high status.
FD4280
3mo ago
You provide lots of accurate media representation of communists in power, with emphasis on the early Soviet Union. Or turn it up to 11 as was done with the Nazis, at the cost of integrity and a few contrarians.
FD4280
3mo ago
I’m from there, haven’t been back for thirty years, and retain some nostalgia for it. Mostly want the mobiks to come back in one piece, on both sides.
Ironically, if my dad had gained custody when I was little, I’d have grown up in Kharkov and possibly died on the front as a Ukrainian mobik by now. Or I might have bailed back to Russia in ‘14, depending on the amount of roots put down by then.
Life is strange.
If you don’t set the high bar at prodigy level, we have counterexamples in Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon.
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