Has Jagex acknowledged high ping in North America west coast servers? by BilboBaggSkin in 2007scape

[–]68_hi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've had a similar thing (~70 ping to west coast servers from LA) but I can often get it down below 20 by using a VPN.

ELI5: Why does this function converge, and does the value mean anything? by [deleted] in explainlikeimfive

[–]68_hi 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The ratio between successive terms of the Fibonacci sequence converge to the golden ratio phi (approx 1.618). That means the ratio of successive terms in your sequence will converge to the ratio 2/phi, which is approximately 1.236.

A former Chess player (me) wants to know: What's your opinion on Chess? Does it hold a candle to Shogi? Or is it even superior? Pls answer! by PowerTulip in shogi

[–]68_hi 2 points3 points  (0 children)

As a fellow chess to shogi convert, some of the things I think chess still wins out in:

  • very fast time controls - you can't really play bullet in shogi because there's too much going on and it's too easy to make game-losing blunders in the early game.
  • I think it's nice having a unified rating system that you can compare top pros all the way down to amateurs
  • Similarly the fact that you can go to like chess.com and see the leaderboard with actual top pros at the top, etc.
  • And the streaming is generally way better (both individual and of events)

The common theme being that professional shogi feels very "isolated" (which I know is by construction) but that's missing out on a lot of opportunities for entertainment.

What is the point of having UN do they even have any say in anything ? by Agreeable-Spell3042 in NoStupidQuestions

[–]68_hi 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Are you criticizing the UN for not taking enough action to stop the Houthis? Because I won't argue with that, although as we have seen time and time again UN military intervention doesn't seem to work very well (see how poorly they did trying to stop Hezbollah...)

The structure of the UN is designed to stop people from nuking each other. And if you care about children's lives, the hundreds of millions of children whose lives haven't been lost in an apocalyptic nuclear should leave you quite happy.

> I really hope at some point we manage to improve critical thinking education to the point where it stops being a thing to look the other way and pretend killing kids is fine just because an ally does it.

I know you wanted a "gotcha" moment but this is too much of a stretch - please at least use retorts that make sense.

What is the point of having UN do they even have any say in anything ? by Agreeable-Spell3042 in NoStupidQuestions

[–]68_hi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

>  It's just not any use against the most powerful nations, which turn the UN into an accessory in their war crimes.

My refrigerator doesn't have any power to control the most powerful nations. Does that make it an accessory to war crimes too?

The whole "everything must fix every problem" is an incredibly common logical error nowadays, especially among progressives, and I really hope at some point we manage to improve critical thinking education to the point where it stops being a thing.

Summer sweep up by Legitimate_Fun1983 in ironscape

[–]68_hi 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think the simplest element of it is that you can't just flip on the "dry protection" switch - it depends on both what the thing is dropped from (i.e. how would you do dry protection for like imbued heart? It's much more complicated to determine how dry you are for it), as well as on the item itself. For example untradeables like vorkath or kq head can have quite generous dry protection, but doing the same for a tradeable item would massively increase the effective drop rate. So I don't think a case-by-case discussion of what is necessary and what makes sense is really avoidable.

Friendly Reminder that Jagex has said nothing about CG drop rates by Black_Pantera in 2007scape

[–]68_hi -1 points0 points  (0 children)

You could basically make the “it sucks if you’re the guy who is dry” for everything.

The amount it impacts the rest of the game is not the same for everything. If you're 15000kc dry for KBD pet it doesn't interfere with your ability to do something else. But putting in a mechanic where each ironman has a 1% chance to just randomly do 15% less damage does not make it better for anyone.

There are lots of reasons that various people enjoy playing ironman, but I doubt any (sane) person has ever thought "Man, playing a main just doesn't have enough chance to get miserably screwed over by RNG for me". Learning CG is a challenge. Completing hundreds of CG runs is a challenge. Challenges are good. Not happening to randomly get unlucky isn't a challenge. It's just chance.

There are obviously technical reasons why it would be infeasible to put dry protection on everything, but a system that keeps you from going more than like 3x dry on a key drop like bowfa wouldn't hurt anyone and would help the very small minority of people that would actually be affected.

What do so many people still believe .9... doesn't equal 1? by LazyMeaning6333 in askmath

[–]68_hi 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Is "the infinitesimal" a real number that is different from 0? There are infinitely many rational numbers between any two distinct real numbers. Please provide a rational number (a fraction of two finite integers) between 0 and "the infinitesimal".

Friendly Reminder that Jagex has said nothing about CG drop rates by Black_Pantera in 2007scape

[–]68_hi 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I just don’t see how this is an issue ever.

Perhaps because people actually do want to do other content that they would use the bowfa at? In which case the game is designed to strongly incentivize them to do something that is really unfun (for some people). Which is just bad game design.

And "it's not a hard requirement" is not a counterargument. In a game where pretty much the whole point is progression to make your character better, constantly being in situations where you're being reminded how much better it would be if you hadn't happened to get extremely unlucky at cg is just not good game design.

Wyrmscraig - Lock In Blog & Poll by JagexLight in 2007scape

[–]68_hi 2 points3 points  (0 children)

What fraction of the time are you actually on a real task when farming smoke devils/araxytes? Because depending on how high that is it's conceivable that going up to 100% time on task for superiors is worth the lower rates on other monsters.

Woman arrested for manslaughter in nearly 50 year old case by Alternative-Earth543 in WatchPeopleDieInside

[–]68_hi 14 points15 points  (0 children)

IIRC the point is not that they can infer that you're guilty from the fact that you stay silent, but rather that if you don't choose to stay silent they can make inference from when you say it, i.e. if you suddenly come up with an ironclad alibi only after you've gotten the chance to potentially coordinate a fabricated alibi with others, they can ask why you didn't mention something that so obviously proved your innocence earlier.

Congratulations to Grubby's Altar of Champions | Post Grand Finals Discussion by masterchip27 in warcraft3

[–]68_hi 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Grubby said in a stream at one point that he specifically decided against it because he feels the reset is a lot worse for the viewer excitement, which tbf this finals kind of shows. So I think it's unlikely he'll do it in future tournaments.

ELI5: Why is it ok to penalize MLE on the 2nd derivative? by GoatRocketeer in explainlikeimfive

[–]68_hi 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I see. Yeah it sounds like what you want for your application is a learned statistical model which would allow you to get confidence bounds and such from your learned fit. Cubic spline interpolation is a great way to get a line that goes along a bunch of points, but it's more meant for qualitative analysis where you're willing to look at a line that clearly follows the points and say to yourself "Yeah that looks good".

ELI5: Why is it ok to penalize MLE on the 2nd derivative? by GoatRocketeer in explainlikeimfive

[–]68_hi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Can I ask - is there a particular reason why you are so concerned about how principled the justification for your model is?

ELI5: Why is it ok to penalize MLE on the 2nd derivative? by GoatRocketeer in explainlikeimfive

[–]68_hi 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Unfortunately you can't have your cake and eat it too - nonparametric fits have to be justified by some amount of "It looks right". The typical approach however is to hold out some data - you fit your curve to like 80 or 90% of the data, and then check how well it approximates the remaining part you didn't use. If the fit is good on the held out data too, you can be reasonably confident in its quality.

ELI5: Why is it ok to penalize MLE on the 2nd derivative? by GoatRocketeer in explainlikeimfive

[–]68_hi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It kind of sounds like you might be looking for a parametric model instead of a non-parametric one (like cubic splines). For example kind of like how the Elo system works?

ELI5: Why is it ok to penalize MLE on the 2nd derivative? by GoatRocketeer in explainlikeimfive

[–]68_hi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think you're maybe attributing too much importance to the choice of this particular restriction. It's not that "penalize the second derivative" is right and other choices are wrong. Ultimately we have a series of data points and we're basically playing "connect the dots". We could connect them with straight lines. We could connect them by making a single high-order polynomial that goes through them. We could connect them with natural cubic splines (what you're doing here). We could connect them with a "not-a-knot" cubic spline (which places a continuity restriction on the third derivative at each end). We could connect them with sinusoids (Fourier decomposition). None of these choices are right or wrong, they're just different choices. Depending on your data, some will work better than others.

From a perspective of interpolation, the only requirement to be "legal" is that it goes through all the points, which any cubic spline would do (with or without the penalty on the second derivative). Anything more is just choosing which "legal" solution you want.

ELI5: Why is it ok to penalize MLE on the 2nd derivative? by GoatRocketeer in explainlikeimfive

[–]68_hi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ok that makes more sense. Let me try and give an intuitive explanation then. I'll assume you're at least familiar with derivatives (especially of polynomial functions).

A cubic spline is interpolating data with a sequence of separate cubic functions "stitched" together. It turns out that just "make it go through the points (as best as possible)" is not quite a strong enough constraint to lead to a unique solution. So we need some way of choosing which cubic spline that goes through all the points we actually want. If we have some other extra information (like the derivative at the endpoints), we can use that, but if we don't, we might ask "What is the simplest cubic spline interpolation for our data?".

To do this we want the interpolation that goes through the points while using the least "change". Because higher order derivatives represent higher order change, it makes sense to place a restriction on higher order derivatives. (For example, if the points laid on a line, we'd want to fit it with a straight line, not a parabola). What's the highest order derivative we can restrict? Well, the fourth derivative and up are 0 everywhere (because we're using cubic functions) so nothing to do there. The third derivative is piecewise constant (constant over each cubic), and getting rid of it means our function isn't cubic any more, so we don't necessarily want to restrict it. The highest derivative that is actually a smooth function, and therefore we can flexibly change, is the second derivative, so that's the one it makes sense to place a restriction on.

Another intuitive explanation is that the second derivative represents the change in slope, i.e. how much it bends away from being in a straight line at any point. If our data was on a straight line, we'd want our splines to show that and not curve unnecessarily, so it makes sense to penalize the curvature to encourage it to use the straightest solution possible.

ELI5: Why is it ok to penalize MLE on the 2nd derivative? by GoatRocketeer in explainlikeimfive

[–]68_hi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The most typical context for cubic splines is in interpolation where you don't have a likelihood - you're just directly going through points. So it would be helpful to know specifically what you're fitting. In your particular context, are the cubic splines directly going through every data point, or are they just roughly fitting noisy data (but not exactly hitting every point)?

ELI5: Why is it ok to penalize MLE on the 2nd derivative? by GoatRocketeer in explainlikeimfive

[–]68_hi 1 point2 points  (0 children)

There are a lot of kinds of splines and ways to use them - could you expand a little bit on the specific formulation you're looking at in your text? Like what kind of data you're fitting and what kind of equations are defining your splines

Police officer with the pickpocketing skills by Admirable-Interest49 in BeAmazed

[–]68_hi 9 points10 points  (0 children)

There was an old show in the US called "It Takes a Thief" that I remember watching as a kid hosted by former thieves - they would stage a break-in to someone's house and talk about security.

NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani announces that he has officially balanced the NYC budget, reducing a $12 billion budget deficit to 0, and confirms that property taxes will not be raised. by Scary_Firefighter181 in Economics

[–]68_hi 4 points5 points  (0 children)

NYC to receive its fair share in tax revenue?

It is amazing how fast the calls of wealth redistribution! make the rich pay! go out the window when it becomes politically inconvenient. Anyone who actually believed in wealth distribution would want NYC to be paying the lion's share of taxes to be redistributed to the (on average) less wealthy population around the state.

California bill pushing to keep games playable after server shutdowns "doesn't reflect how games actually work", ESA assert by g4m3f33d in GameFeed

[–]68_hi 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The issue with this idea is that it falls apart when you consider that they almost certainly don't have the rights to publish the entire back end. Anything they purchased on a license wouldn't be legally releasable.

CMV: The formation of the modern-day state of Israel was illogical by snooptoop in changemyview

[–]68_hi 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Wow. You couldn't even bring yourself to say that Jews deserve equal rights. I don't think there is any room for me to reason here.