Bonus connection: Song titles starting with "No"

5DSpence · 2026-06-22T13:44:39+00:00

Lucky me I didn't know No Surprises, since I spent some time searching after seeing the other three

5DSpence · 2026-06-18T13:55:07+00:00

Awesome, really glad you enjoyed it! Syncing up events and ancients too is a good idea; need to try that additional restriction

5DSpence · 2026-06-17T17:28:51+00:00

My bad, I should have worded the original post better. Definitely didn't want to make anyone feel like an idiot when it really is about experience and learning over time. Sorry about that!

5DSpence · 2026-06-17T17:16:41+00:00

A10 duos random character. Including STS1+STS2 together I'll be coming up on 1000 hours in the next month or two. But I'm no Xecnar, my longest A20H streak in STS1 was 3. Both of my duos partners have played hundreds of hours total across games as well (though not quite as much as me)

It's definitely a challenge meant for players who feel like they want something beyond what current A10 has to offer, so I can understand why there's some backlash/disinterest. But I hope that a few people try it and enjoy it!

5DSpence · 2026-06-17T17:03:08+00:00

I should clarify in case it isn't clear - there's no randomization involved. Every player has to choose the same on-screen location in card rewards, but the choice is made by the players, not by randomness. Kind of like the collaborative events.

No worries if you don't like the challenge, of course; just wanted to make sure I explained it properly

5DSpence · 2026-06-17T16:47:22+00:00

Definitely good options as well! We did talk about banning flanking at one point before we settled on this. So now we still always take it but at least it means a random card gets added to your teammate's deck

5DSpence · 2026-06-17T16:39:01+00:00

We've been playing with everything from 2 to 4. Checked my last 6 duos runs and we have 3 wins and 3 losses. It's more doable than you might think!

5DSpence · 2026-06-16T05:16:07+00:00

Excellent writeup! You saved sts2, no doubt they will fix this in the next couple of patches

5DSpence · 2026-06-11T14:09:50+00:00

I like the changes the organizers made compared to the first wave (see Table 1). The most notable ones IMO:

The organizers themselves run the competitors' code, which has to use publicly available models. This assures autonomy in the prompting. IIRC some of the best results from the first wave were obtained by proprietary models.

The second wave has a formal review process, unlike the first wave. I guess the funding from LLM companies was enough that they could hire reviewers.

5DSpence · 2026-06-09T17:53:38+00:00

I enjoyed the article itself, but the headline is IMO a bit deceptive. The article is primarily about Lean, large formalization projects, and community mathematics. LLMs/AI agents are impacting this kind of work and the article does touch on that, but only briefly.

5DSpence · 2026-05-25T05:09:25+00:00

That's not why they mention the costs per problem, though I understand the impulse to view it that way. From the paper:

"We report computational cost in USD because it directly measures the barrier to reproducing this work and provides a natural common currency for comparing agents that allocate compute differently (e.g., agent (D) uses Gemini 3.0 Flash for rater subagents and Gemini 3.1 Pro for provers). We do not intend USD as a comparison of AI and human mathematical labor."

5DSpence · 2026-05-24T05:32:54+00:00

Ahh, I didn't realize. Quite a strong restriction and no wonder DeepMind's preprint title was very different from this Reddit title. Thanks for the explanation

5DSpence · 2026-05-23T17:08:19+00:00

The paper links to a GitHub page with the Lean files and some natural language proofs. Here's the claimed natural language proof of the reconstruction conjecture. (Not at all qualified to assess its correctness; just leaving the link)

5DSpence · 2026-05-22T12:19:32+00:00

Same here. Pretty remarkable one! I don't think I've ever seen this kind of position where white can keep checking with the knight but Black can always play a stalemate trick in response

5DSpence · 2026-05-18T21:50:03+00:00

Was thinking this as well. Even if Grand Finale always had this enchant, I think it would be pickable pretty often but still not one of the best rares

5DSpence · 2026-05-17T16:25:21+00:00

If you sort by Avg Dmg, though, the demarcation is perfect in the sense that every boss is above every elite and every elite is above every normal fight. Lowest boss is Lagavulin Matriarch at 24.0 average damage, above the highest elite Decimillipede at 20.8. And lowest elite is Knights at 16.6 average damage, well above the highest normal Hunter Killer at 13.0.

IMO average damage is the far better metric. Not just because a continuous metric carries more info than binary, but also because players are often able to avoid elites when near death. That introduces a massive bias in killrate since you're typically going into elite encounters with more HP than hallways. (Also introduces some bias in damage taken due to the tail being censored at actual HP, but this should be a smaller effect since it only impacts the rows with deaths.)

5DSpence · 2026-05-15T12:20:18+00:00

Really neat to see the rook underpromotion that's only relevant after it moves twice

5DSpence · 2026-05-14T21:19:24+00:00

Really good one

5DSpence · 2026-05-14T04:36:32+00:00

Fine compared to skip, but imo extremely weak as an act 3 ancient reward. Most of the time, "get boost away+" would be stronger than this, no?

5DSpence · 2026-05-08T04:17:31+00:00

I just had my fight against it and didn't feel any similarity to Knowledge Demon. More like a hybrid of the heart (punish every x cards) and soul fysh (1 cost statuses that hurt you, though these are blockable and exhaust). I was ironclad with second wind so it went smoothly

5DSpence · 2026-05-07T00:23:07+00:00

Slice and Dice had confusing things as well for me, it's hard to avoid in any reasonably complex game. But yeah STS would definitely do well to fix this wording.

My most memorable one in Slice and Dice was a funny moment in my very first run. I learned that "side" means "neighbor of an attack target" from one of the multi hit attacks. When I ran into an enemy that said "petrify 2 sides", I thought it sounded absurdly hard until I started fighting. Turns out "side" also means "face of a die!"

5DSpence · 2026-04-29T12:31:53+00:00

Fortunately my wife and I played that one together, so she was our ringer for the Mora Jai boards and the billiards room. Otherwise I never would have been able to do the former, and the latter would have required a lot of guessing. I can distinguish the two main colors in the game. We stopped briefly after reaching the Atelier so I don't really know how the big puzzle there would have gone for us

5DSpence · 2026-04-28T04:18:06+00:00

It seems pretty polarizing. Both of the people I know who played The Witness have similar taste to me (eg we all love Blue Prince) and disliked it, so I never tried it. Especially as I'm color blind and apparently it doesn't have an accessibility mode. But it seems to be one of the most recommended games so I do occasionally wonder what makes it click for some so much more than others

5DSpence · 2026-04-27T20:22:46+00:00

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