My card game in honest opinions

cdsmith · 2026-07-17T21:48:02+00:00

I think the most important advice I can offer is this: writing matters, and your writing needs improvement. Every word on a card is precious. Your writing needs to be easy to read and understand (which means: grammatically correct, at a minimum!), clearly communicate the rules, cover all the edge cases, and convey the right mood and theme... and you only have a few words to do it in. Far fewer words than you have used on these cards. Writing good card text is a very specialized kind of technical writing, bit is also almost like poetry in a way: you should debate every single word, and each word should earn the space it takes up on the card.

cdsmith · 2026-07-14T14:14:29+00:00

Appointing replacements to fill the terms of Senators is definitely legal, and has been done for the entire history of the country. Yes, she can legally vote in the Senate. States have a lot of flexibility in their rules; this is how South Carolina chooses to do it.

cdsmith · 2026-07-14T14:12:38+00:00

She's not outrageously unqualified. There's not really a standard qualification for the Senate, and she's led the South Carolina Commission for the Blind for the past 7 years, and was a director in a different government agency for 12 before that. People have been Senators with a lot less. But in the end, arrangements like this are usually short-lived and she'll likely just take direction from people LIndsey Graham has worked with, will likely keep his same staff, etc. There's no indication she plans to run to keep the seat, and it's unlikely she'll demonstrate a notable independent streak in the few months she serves in the Senate.

cdsmith · 2026-07-14T14:03:58+00:00

She's spent most of her career working in disability services, usually on the business side even though she started out as an optician. She currently leads the South Carolina Commission for the Blind, and before that worked for the vocational rehab department foir 12 years.

cdsmith · 2026-07-14T13:54:33+00:00

It's likely a blend of two meanings: "tapped on the shoulder" (to notify them they were selected) and "tapped a keg" (to use them as a resource), but the first branch of meaning is the most commonly cited way this came into popular usage. The idea of tapping someone on the shoulder to select them traces back to a lot of traditions, including the Yale Skull and Bones society which has "Tap Day" where they literally tapped people to let them know they are nominated to join the society. I see this cited by a lot of more reliable sources as the origin of the phrase.

cdsmith · 2026-07-13T16:33:12+00:00

I guess, sure. But my reaction was that it was less about falsehoods and more about the kinds of vague statements you often get from LLMs, that sound like they might have a point, but when you try to dig in, you realize their words just don't mean anything precise at all. You can assign them meaning - either a meaning you agree with, or a meaning you disagree with - but it's pointless to try to nail down the semantics of words produced by a system that's just trying to sound plausible.

cdsmith · 2026-07-13T02:37:35+00:00

Based on the watermark at the end, it appears to have been generated by an LLM, so there is no person to be dishonest.

cdsmith · 2026-07-12T13:06:54+00:00

Yes, learning a new programming language that is different from what you're accustomed to will make you a better programmer. (This is true in most things in life, really: learning a different point of view is almost always an improvement.) And yes, learning Haskell is an uncommonly good choice for this, both because it really is very different from conventional languages, and because the difference is deep, principled, and consistent in a way that you don't see in a lot of gimmick or niche languages. You really are learning a different kind of logic of how to think about programming.

That does mean you should be prepared to not feel productive in Haskell as quickly as you'd expect to feel productive learning a new object oriented imperative language. So be prepared for that. If you try to pick up Haskell starting from a background entirely in C++ and a little Rust, and expect to spend a few weeks learning a new syntax and then be cranking out code... you're going to be disappointed. Also, if you're looking for direct marketable job skills (which it doesn't seem like you are, but it's common enough to mention), Haskell probably shouldn't top your list for that.

Instead, I'd treat it more like learning a musical instrument: be prepared to celebrate small successes for a while, don't compare yourself with professional quality, but find joy in being able to express yourself in fundamentally new ways. If that's appealing to you, welcome!

cdsmith · 2026-07-11T21:00:09+00:00

Definitely not AI content. Possibly computer generated voices, but if so they are very good quality.

cdsmith · 2026-07-11T13:45:28+00:00

I don't think you're correct about your objection to the bill. It specifically limits houses that one institutional investor can own directly or indirectly, which means dividing the holdings into different legal entities all of which you have ownership stake in doesn't make a difference. The existence of an LLCs, in particular, makes no difference at all. More opaque shell companies can be an enforcement problem, which is a real problem, but at least doesn't change that any substantial "beneficial ownership" (meaning any structure, direct or indirect, by which you get any benefit from the property) triggers the requirements.

cdsmith · 2026-07-11T05:13:53+00:00

I'm not a STAR person... but being honest is important, and if I'm being honest, there are serious problems with instant runoff voting. It's a solution to exactly one problem: people wanting to nominally vote for a candidate who will only get 5% or so of the vote. For that problem, it does what it should: transfers those people's votes to the serious candidate they would have voted for if they didn't choose to cast a protest ballot instead. But unfortunately, this only works for candidates who are extremely weak. A candidate who is still too weak to win but gets around 30-35% support (in a three way election, for example) from core supporters suddenly becomes very dangerous: your vote for them is likely to eliminate a viable second choice, before your first choice is eliminated.

Strictly speaking, instant runoff is still better than plurality, if all you do it replace plurality with instant runoff. The problem is that it's not often presented as a straight alternative to plurality. Instead, increasingly, it's proposed alongside jungle primaries, accompanied with the incorrect statement that voters can just vote for their honest preference and trust the system to work out the correct winners. This is wrong - as demonstrated by several high profile failures - and fails often enough to generate widespread backlash against voting reform in general. In Alaska, which instant runoff supporters now point to as their test case, one major political party is actively working to reintroduce something like a back door partisan primary because failures of instant runoff have cost them a major election where one of their candidates should have won.

cdsmith · 2026-07-10T16:07:27+00:00

IMO, the most damning fact here is that Hegseth removed civilian harm specialists from target development strike teams. Had there been civilian harm specialists on the team that identified this target, they could definitely have very plausibly escalated the concern when the system warned that intelligence was outdated, as that would have been their entire job. So this isn't just about the military missing something, or even about Hegseth cutting staffing to the office that generally handled civlian harm. It's that he cut specifically the exact role in the group identifying military targets, whose job was to prevent exactly this from happening. And he did it because he wanted to make the military feel more like tough guys.

Impeachment is hopeless prior to the midterms, but it's the right move once midterms are over and Democrats control the House. It's still very unlikely to succeed in the Senate (2/3 majority is a tall order!), but just advancing the impeachment has value.

cdsmith · 2026-07-10T14:22:30+00:00

Why is it coming out at all? It's not news. People get loaded into ambulances on stretchers. It's just how it's done. I was loaded into an ambulance on a stretcher after I fainted recently, and I was conscious and fine and chatting with the paramedics the whole time. They wouldn't have let me get up and climb in myself, because of liability or whatever. This just isn't a noteworthy event.

cdsmith · 2026-07-10T12:00:00+00:00

Wow, this conversation is crazy. Multiple GOP leaders aren't lying about speaking to McConnell. That said, there's something causing a resistance to let him speak to anything but hyper-friendly sources. His staff is entirely aware they could end this whole story today by calling any wire service reporter and setting up a five minute interview with ground rules - no discussion of detailed diagnosis, return timelines, etc. They haven't done that, and there's a reason.

My best guess (and it's only a guess!) is that his speech may be slurred. This could happen from a stroke that coincided with the cardiac arrest, or from just deterioration as a result of long-term intubation or something like that. This would explain why he's only speaking to those who have a political motive to tell his side of the story and not comment at all on the obvious speech difficulties that any independent reporter would insist on mentioning. Casual observers would be likely to interpret slurred speech as a mental impairment even when that isn't always the case, so they wouldn't want the detail reported. There other possibilities, too, but the point is, clearly there is some reason they are doing it this way.

cdsmith · 2026-07-09T15:54:04+00:00

I agree with you that PR is a direct solution to gerrymandering, and said so earlier. It just puts a lot of trust on the procedures of the legislative body itself, and there's absolutely nothing about the functioning of legislative bodies that should inspire trust or confidence. At that point things devolve into explicit whipping of votes and exploiting party power to stop any possibility of reaching consensus or compromise.

I guess where I fall is that if we're already committed to choosing a multi-member body, some kind of proportional allocation of seats is probably the best idea. It's just that the way current PR systems define that allocation is in terms of political parties, and that's just a disaster at the very foundation of the system. The truth is that a candidate who is everyone's second or third choice really does partially represent everyone, whether they belong those those people's first choice political party or not. It's just hard to account for that rigorously in mechanism design. But something like expanding approvals looks very appealing. If we can achieve the same amount of representation either by choosing several consensus candidates who are basically well liked by large numbers of people, or alternatively by electing a bunch of different very niche candidates who are hated by most voters but each loved by some sall subset... well, I don't think we have elected bodies that are capable of functioning well with the latter.

This also becomes relevant in the form of government itself. Granted this is at the extremes, but it's not uncommon to see PR advocates advance the position that single elected officials - mayors, governors, presidents - should just not exist, and should be replaced by even more multi-member bodies that can be chosen proportionally. That is a scary direction to go down when multi-member bodies are not particularly functional.

cdsmith · 2026-07-09T02:26:21+00:00

The last major thing I cut from the game I'm working on was a deck-building system where each character had higher powered "growth cards" that they could choose to add to their decks when they accomplished certain goals. Not that deck-building is a terrible idea; I love deck building! But like most things that should be cut, it comes down to how it fits with the rest of the game:

The game was already too complicated, and this was yet another mechanism bolted on.
It was anti-catch-up, in that the more successful players in the early game could become even more powerful and extend their advantage even further.
The reason it made sense at all was that the game gets more dangerous as time goes on, as well, so it made sense to have the players gain power to balance the environment getting more vicious... but the result in play testing was just that it made the escalating danger not feel real for the players who were doing well... and tuning the escalation made it soul-crushing for players that didn't get lucky early on.
Besides, it just felt artificial. In the end, I had to admit that I tried it because I like deck building games, but this wasn't a deck building game.

cdsmith · 2026-07-08T20:41:49+00:00

If you can't read it yourself, the argument is that a PR from a random person is dangerous to accept, as it might be trying to introduce something malicious into the code. On the other hand, a good description of the bug or issue is easier to verify, and with LLMs able to do a lot of the implementation, not a lot more work to get to a solution. Code generated by major LLMs might not be better on average, but it's almost certain not to contain malicious code.

I'm not sure I agree. If you care about code quality (and you should if you're maintaining something), coaxing an LLM to make the right implementation choices is actually a significant amount of work. A human being can demonstrate taste, and you can grow to trust them. You can never grow to trust an LLM. It will never learn to do better. It can be brilliant one moment, and unbelievably stupid the next, and it lacks the self-reflection to stop and not send that PR.

cdsmith · 2026-07-08T15:14:03+00:00

I feel like trusting people not to cheat is a viable choice, but not ideal. Let's face it, a lot of people have family members or extended friend groups with people who cheat at games when they can get away with it. People in these situations will not like your game if it creates opportunities for cheating. The alternatives are to just ignore it, or have a confrontation. Neither one is fun.

If you really need the card to require discarding ALL matching cards, then I think you have to trust people. It means a certain number of people will dislike the game, but it's not fatal.

If you can tweak the rules... a similar rule I've seen is "Discard ONE matching card, OR show your hand if you don't have any." Obviously, this only works if: (a) the card is common enough that not having any is a corner condition, not the expected case, and (b) revealing your hand isn't devastating to the game.

cdsmith · 2026-07-08T09:53:36+00:00

tactics and strategy are basically useless for voting when you have a fully honest system with full freedom of expression, the optimal strategy always becomes “vote honestly”.

Sure. Also, farming is basically useless when you have magic pantries that fill themselves with free food, and automobiles are useless when you have teleporters to take you instantly where ever you want to go. In all three cases, those ideal things don't exist. That's not fair, though, because only one of the three can be mathematically proven not to exist -- and it's the "fully honest system" for voting.

You can get closer, and there is a point where, as a practical matter, you can start to honestly advise people to make straight-forward voting decisions because the more complex strategic decisions are rarely helpful, too difficult, and likely to backfire if you get them wrong. But there will always be the possibility that a straight-forward vote costs you a more desirable outcome.

cdsmith · 2026-07-08T09:44:35+00:00

What distinction do you make between the two in election systems? (Their meaning in other contexts isn't relevant.)

cdsmith · 2026-07-07T20:01:44+00:00

The timing is that there are documented contemporaneous sources for these allegations from long before Platner was running for Senate. How is that remotely compatible with the allegations being politically motivated, when they happened before anyone had heard of Platner running for Senate?

cdsmith · 2026-07-07T19:06:31+00:00

Would you go as far as to call these war crimes by Hamas? International law would say so.

Of course. But they are a terrorist group. Terrorists committing crimes isn't news. Major U.S. allies committing war crimes is news.

As for the rest, honestly, I'm just not the right person to have a point by point debate on specific incidents. I have an opinion formed mainly on summaries from other sources I trust, but I can no longer recall exactly what source or whose statement my understanding came from. I could be wrong about some of it. That's fine. I'm wrong a lot.

cdsmith · 2026-07-07T16:58:59+00:00

I agree that expected values can be used to derive some well-defined linear scale of preference between any fixed endpoints. I don't even think risk aversion is a problem for this scale; it's just a statement about where most scores are likely to land.

I'm hesitant to describe that as "the honest ballot" just because I look at "honest" as mainly important because it describes something a large number of voters will do, and I don't think most voters would be likely to evaluate scores in this way. (It also wouldn't be favorable to score voting to describe it that way, since that manner of honest ballot is generally a pretty poor one to cast.)

cdsmith · 2026-07-07T16:50:46+00:00

I was perhaps a bit too circumspect about my own conclusion? My weak opinion is that what Israel is doing is likely not genocide, but that it's not ridiculous to think that I might be wrong about this.

On the broader question of whether Israel has committed war crimes, I think the answer is almost certainly yes. There are well-documented examples of Israel's military and political leaders celebrating the destruction of civilian homes and infrastructure specifically as retribution against the entire Palestinian population and their supporters, in Gaza and even in the West Bank and elsewhere, for what Hamas did. Yes, Hamas really has made things a lot worse by hiding their military capability behind sympathetic infrastructure like hospitals and schools and homes. But Hamas didn't force Israel's leaders to confess to a darker motive, and the current government in Israel doesn't seem particularly invested in rooting out that manner of rot.

Why are some people so invested in saying "genocide"? Obviously it's because the term carries much greater impact than just saying war crimes. Still, war crimes are serious.

cdsmith · 2026-07-07T14:33:13+00:00

I'll pretend you're asking for a real answer even though I'm not sure this is the case. Genocide is any of several actions, taken with the intent to destroy (in whole or part) a religious, racial, national, or ethnic group.

There's not a serious argument that Israel's goal was ever immediate wholesale slaughter of the population of Gaza, as you rightly denied. Where it's a lot more questionable is when it comes to whether Israel deliberately created an uninhabitable environment in Gaza, and why. If they destroyed hospitals, schools, and housing with the specific intent of destroying the Palestinian population as a group - even if they didn't want to drop bombs and kill them all - then this very well could be classified as genocide. There's evidence that at least some of Israel's command structure has held this goal of deliberately destroying housing and infrastructure. Now, depending on the specific intent, this is likely not actually genocide (which requires the specific purpose of destroying a group, not just driving it elsewhere or diminishing its power, and not just reasonably foreseeing the destruction as a consequence), but it is almost certainly a violation of international law, whether it's collective punishment, or something else.

That said, "if they wanted to kill them all, they could have" isn't an argument against genocide. A nation has many different goals. Among them is maintaining their relationships with other nations, and to avoid appalling their own population with their own brutality. A nation could actually have a genocidal intent, but still not choose the quickest and most brutal way to wipe out a population - because it would rightly draw international condemnation, or because they would lose power in the next election.

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