FD4280
3d ago
War and Peace. All those French phrases aggravate me. I already have to lean on a dictionary for Russian literature, and I have too much ego to pick up a translated copy.
FD4280
19d ago
You can definitely learn to code well if you were Caltech material 20-25 years ago.
FD4280
1mo ago
Nitpick: the abstract says that the effect of home team losses on rates of DV goes up by 10% in the presence of gambling, not that DV goes up by 10%. I wonder if there is a corresponding improvement for victories.
FD4280
1mo ago
Go to db.chgk.info instead of reinventing the wheel. You don’t even have to translate the stuff :)
FD4280
1mo ago
Do modern people generally consider Julius Caesar (whose campaigns in Gaul were probably within an order of magnitude of all Vikings across all time wrt killing and slavery) a monster?
FD4280
1mo ago
If you don’t set the high bar at prodigy level, we have counterexamples in Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon.
FD4280
1mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
2mo 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
3mo 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
3mo ago
Nope - what I know in the area is downstream of coursework and messing around with Project Euler.
FD4280
3mo 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.
The first episode. The portrayal of the first battle is ridiculous and at odds with the rest of the show, iirc.
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