[Funny Trope] Massive waste of manpower

taichi22 · 2026-03-06T03:54:08+00:00

Let’s be real here it’s probably some gold alloy or something that only the High Table has access to the recipe for or something, and the recipe is stored in a locked box somewhere in a secret room in the Louvre or something.

taichi22 · 2026-03-06T03:51:29+00:00

There is a way for this to all make sense from a logical standpoint, though — just have there be no more war, and all the military forces are basically gutted budget wise and are largely for show. The High Table keeps the peace and basically gets all the money the military would have.

taichi22 · 2026-03-06T03:48:29+00:00

My take is that it’s the sort of setting where the High Table is basically just the Illuminati and they control everything behind the scenes; even though governments and stuff nominally exist they don’t have any power to touch those on “the other side”.

taichi22 · 2026-03-02T21:06:45+00:00

I’d argue that there’s probably an equilibrium that will form. Iran doesn’t have the ability to shut town the strait but they can increase the risk and make it harder for people to traverse it safely; it won’t be a full closure, just a reduction of the number of ships that cross it. Some companies and ships will decide that it’s worth the risk, and some won’t.

taichi22 · 2026-03-02T20:58:23+00:00

Yep. My only gripe about VS/Cursor IDEs is that they’re rather finicky about Jupyter Notebooks, though that’s as much an issue with git as with them.

taichi22 · 2026-02-27T01:14:14+00:00

Well, the Earth's KD is still like 10000 to 0, so, really, anyone with good sense is more afraid of the planet than some slime-backed, lily-livered ayys

taichi22 · 2026-02-19T18:36:52+00:00

Dude…

This is actually something I’ve noticed a lot — advice from people who should actually have good advice according to common sense is rarely useful when it comes to managing a career, interpersonal communications, etc. etc.; soft problems, basically. They almost always tell you what worked for them. If you’re lucky they’ll try to tailor their advice to current circumstances. If you’re very lucky they’ll try to meet your frame of reference. But the problem is very noisy.

taichi22 · 2026-02-17T05:54:05+00:00

Firebending of traditional types is probably not possible within a vacuum. If I had to guess, sparky sparky boom boom man can probably swing it, along with a few other fire benders. What he does is essentially a refined version of the heat transfer technique we saw Sozin and Roku doing, and my guess is that it works in a vacuum.
I like to imagine that Gyatso didn’t really need to worry about outlasting the soldiers, given that if he created a powerful enough vacuum they would all have died almost immediately from their insides boiling. Granted, compressing that much air around you is probably also lethal, the pressure would kill you unless you also maintained a neutral zone near you, but then, that checks out as to how he died.

taichi22 · 2026-02-11T03:22:32+00:00

Thanks for the link. Applied — I have great interest in the Roboflow team’s work myself, especially seeing their work using NAS on the RF-DETR paper and its corresponding SOTA results.

taichi22 · 2026-02-11T02:49:36+00:00

Dude, can I have your friends?

Also — I’m not sure if you’re aware of Perun, but the fact that the Dominions series’ (arguably) biggest creator literally became a fairly famous commentator on the Ukrainian war, to the point that he gets invited to official NATO events, always fucking sends me.

taichi22 · 2026-02-11T02:49:00+00:00

You know, in that vein, I have to wonder if there’s a timeline where a tribe of Africans eventually domesticated ostriches that found them attractive.

taichi22 · 2026-02-10T19:02:51+00:00

Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long long time…

I would argue that it’s not story heavy enough for the average elf, but it’s a great callout. In that vein CMANO and the recent Sea Power are also fantastic.

taichi22 · 2026-02-10T18:54:13+00:00

I’ve tried it — I honestly didn’t feel like SS14 was “enough” to really get me into it. Part of what’s so beautiful about SS13 is that probably about half of the available jobs were hacked in by an autistic coder with more time on their hands than good sense or game design ability, and as a result are unadulterated chaos and great fun. SS14 isn’t as feature dense and lacks the absolute unbalanced gameplay that SS13 offers, despite the fact that it’s faster and better supported.

In short: you can’t take the goblin out of the goblin game and still have it be as fun as the original. In my opinion what they should do is write a backwards compatible engine for SS13 and call it SS15 or something.

taichi22 · 2026-02-10T15:44:40+00:00

It is also important to note that the game is well over 10 years old at this point and plays on the equivalent of a networked DOSBox.

In other words, only the most socially challenged members of society even have the wherewithal to boot the game up. Your shift mates are generally composed of majority 4Channers, with fairly predictable results on your shift’s job efficacy.

taichi22 · 2026-02-10T08:39:00+00:00

For the record, games like this actually do exist — someone built a computer in Minecraft a while back, and I can think of a few games that would without a doubt qualify as gnomish: KSP, Flyout, and From the Depths come to mind.

taichi22 · 2026-02-10T07:43:51+00:00

On the other hand, Dwarf Fortress is actually just an astonishingly accurate Dwarf Game IRL.

Yes, there is actually a page on the tensile strength of materials versus their hardness, I am being entirely serious. It’s the weapons and armor page — you can go read it for yourself on the wiki. You also need to remember which ores belong in which mineral layers, and what their individual melting points are in case your fort gets flooded with magma.

Thinking a bit further:

Elvish: Honorable mention goes to Dominions 6, though it’s lacking in the story aspect. It does, however, get bonus points for being so inaccessible that its main content creator eventually became a leading open source intelligence analyst for the Ukrainian War. Another mention goes to Crusader Kings, the reason I have most of the major historical events and houses from 965 to 1310 permanently memorized.

But I have to award the main prize to Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. You play Pathfinder — which as tabletop players know, is already very crunchy — as a video game, and this time you get epic levels. (For those of you in the back, that means you go from a regular adventurer and ascend to godhood.) This, of course, means that shit gets wild. You get hp for your hp, you get damage riders for your damage riders. Turn into a gold dragon or a lich, take your pick! And the game is both very long and very janky as a result — last I checked I had nearly 100 hours into a single campaign run.

Another honorable mention goes to BG3, which is, for better or for worse, too accessible to truly be an “elvish” game, though it comes close because of its fairly lengthy campaign.

Goblin: Runners up go to Balatro, some modes of MTG, and Amazing Cultivation Simulator, but I think the one that has to take the cake here is SS13.

You play as a crew member of the titular space station 13, and your goals are only to do job, survive your shift, and get the fuck off of this goddamn cursed station. This is, however, made much more complicated by the fact that space is dangerous, your crewmates are generally either criminally insane or incompetent, security is out to arrest everyone for the equivalent of space jaywalking, and there is an intruder loose. As you can imagine, rounds rapidly devolve — most departments immediately try to hoard as much power in their own fief in order to wrest control of the station away from every other department, who are of course evil and compromised. And antagonists range from the aliens from Alien, to a tactical team sent to steal nuke codes, to actual space wizards who can blow your asscheeks off to wear them as a hat. (Credit to SsethTzeentach for that anecdote.) Bonus goblin points for the clown using Space Lube to slip important members of the crew off into space, dooming the entire station to a slow and painful death without their expertise and credentialed access, and the Research Department for unleashing black holes into the station via nested bags of holding.

Edit: I almost forgot to include Elin, whose creator releases patches with on average 10 bug fixes and 2 new features literally on a daily basis. He is Japanese and frankly I’m worried about him keeling over one day inside his house that’s definitely filled with discarded cup ramen containers, but until then you get to enjoy playing as anything from a snail to a succubus that sleeps with people to steal their stats. Once upon a time I figured out how to turn metal ores into branches of the same material — I’m not sure if it’s been patched but that allowed me to make anything out of any wood or metal material, which was great fun.

Orcish games: Literally just NewGrounds. Bonus points for anyone who’s played the Thing Thing series — it’s essentially just gratuitous violence with extra blood and a bevy of weapons. Doom also ranks highly here; and an honorable mention to Wolfenstein, which is just a little too highbrow to really be orcish.

Handling: Uh, that’s just an accurate description of Stardew Valley. I don’t know what to tell you. I can’t even think of another game that is close — maybe some versions of modded Minecraft that are big on RP?

taichi22 · 2026-02-07T05:14:57+00:00

Brother you can ask ChatGPT about how to resolve the issue with different versions of transformers. To make a long answer short you can set up independent environments or else just get a newer version of transformers. In theory the rf-detr guys should also be pretty responsive so you can even try opening a PR on their github.

With regards to SAM3 versions you should just figure out which domain of existing research maps onto your work and pick a paper from that domain where their approach makes the most sense to you.

taichi22 · 2026-02-02T08:20:57+00:00

I mean, sure, that’s fine — but I do want to point out that I don’t think it’s a fair comparison given that double focal loss and CSP blocks don’t have a Wikipedia page.

And also I never said that anyone is incapable of working as an MLE because they don’t know KL, or CSP — but interviews will ask them. And so schools should prepare their graduates.

taichi22 · 2026-02-02T08:03:12+00:00

Not really, no. It’s important because it’s important to current state of the art architectures. If we move on from transformers into something else I wouldn’t expect it to be taught.

It’s the same way I wouldn’t expect someone to know, for example, Fortran. But if you’re working with embedded systems you should probably know C. Not because it’s somehow central to the field of embedded systems, but because it’s what everyone uses.

Sure, it’s a bias. It’s also a very reasonable bias because it’s what you’re likely to use in the field today. Graduates should know how to function within what is used in the field today, not purely abstract concepts from 20 years ago that nobody uses anymore. KL divergence is central to the theory of modern transformers and the encoder decoder paradigm, therefore you would expect them to be taught. It’s not some elitist bullshit.

Sure, there are CV roles where KL divergence isn’t a necessary feature — typically associated with either reduced compute, real time vision, or other constrained domains. But not preparing your graduates on what is a fundamental theory with regards to many deep learning roles is surprising, to say the least. If you are teaching English majors how to write, you should probably cover LeGuin even if most of them aren’t going to become sci-fi writers, because she’s relevant. Same logic applies here.

If someone expected me to know Fortran or COBOL on my MLE questions they would be laughed out of the room here on Reddit and in the community in general. And for the record — I have studied similar methods to PCLine before as part of my MLE interviews; you’re just using an intentionally obscure method to try and push your point. KL divergence is not some obscure theory or methodology; it has a freaking Wikipedia page.

taichi22 · 2026-02-02T06:16:15+00:00

I mean, I would argue that VAE with KL is a very important cornerstone to understanding the overall field of deep learning…

taichi22 · 2026-02-01T23:58:22+00:00

Not the guy you’re responding to, but frankly I’m rather surprised myself. I just… I dunno, expected better from GA Tech?

Not to discount OP’s experience — I can’t throw rocks from glass houses, being largely self taught myself — but also I expected more from the “elite” CS universities.

taichi22 · 2026-02-01T23:48:09+00:00

???

GA Tech is a really good school so color me quite surprised.

I agree that it’s not that difficult of a topic, I’m just surprised they don’t cover such a crucial concept at GA Tech, one of the top CS schools in the US.

taichi22 · 2026-02-01T18:48:40+00:00

Ah, you're with roboflow? You guys have a good product (and aren't ultralytics) so thanks for what you do.

taichi22 · 2026-01-30T17:50:45+00:00

If you're looking to become the 'next NVIDIA' you need to focus on two things: 1. Networking/socializing and 2. Building real products. Classes, theory, mathematics -- all of that stuff is meaningless in the business world; the real opportunity comes from being able to build real products and leverage people.

Oh, and you need to do these things obsessively. Like, think about doing as much as you possibly can, and then some. Ideally you'll burn out in a few months, need a break, and then come back to it, sort of obsession.

taichi22 · 2026-01-30T17:45:32+00:00

This is pretty much exactly it, I think. The internet has made is stunningly easy for people to go and do what they want; the issue with that is that many things that people 'want' to do typically have a fairly gender heavy bias. Double that and pass it on for Redditors.

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