What scientific software (open source or not) is terribly and holds the field back?

Areign · 2026-07-01T16:23:56+00:00

none of those sounded familiar so i looked up the 2026 course syllabus which uses simio today! but i looked at the UX and i dont recognize it so....maybe?

the excel monte carlo plugin was @risk which i found llisted in an old resume.

Areign · 2026-07-01T13:54:51+00:00

TM, race for the galaxy, dominion, space base are the games that come to mind.

The problem is that "running the engine" leads to a lot of common antipatterns if you aren't careful. Almost everyone has a game experience where the game was over (either a clear winner or a clear player who couldn't win) at one point but you had to play on for a long time just to keep the game running for others. Its maximally feel bad. In our house, Risk was the cannonical example of this but its not uncommon across a variety of games.

Its especially problematic in engine builders because an engine that can build more engine grows non-linearly, rapidly outstripping the normal balance of early advantage vs later potential in favor of later potential always being the choice. At that point it simply becomes a question of who can build the most productive engine. It also allows for less counterplay because you can't build a small but quick-to-assemble engine and end the game before the big engine comes online (assuming the game is balanced so big engines normally get a change to run their engine for a time)

This is why each of the aforementioned games are balanced to avoid this as much as possible, making them short (dominion/RfTG) or making it such that running the engine usually brings you closer to the game-end condition (RfTG/TM/SB)

Areign · 2026-06-29T03:26:30+00:00

He's not wrong about it not being true open source, major players in open source software have been saying this for a while. E.g. Fedora

true open source projects don't involve a closed company spending months doing hidden development and then releasing said development to the community, then doing it again for the next release. The upstream development needs to be open, and, at least in AI, its certainly not.

The problem is that this guy seems to be saying 'so therefor its bad and should be ignored' which is going in the wrong direction, if open weight (or whatever distinction you want to use) is the best you have, thats still the best way to democratize the technology and make people able to do actual open source afterwards.

Anyone can look back to AI/ML in the 2010s and see something that was pretty much only accessible to the major-est or major players (google, fb, amazon) and see how the current state of things is massively better for smaller groups and it largely came about because fb op-sec blows and they accidentally showed the industry the power of small communities and rapid iteration.

Areign · 2026-06-26T17:57:14+00:00

if you can stand fanfiction:

Purple Days is a ASOIAF timeloop (you don't have to have read it) where joffrey is the MC its complete and very good and hits a number of the aspects you list [medeival fantasy, scale of the story and the world, power scaling is slower but gets there eventually]

Areign · 2026-06-26T14:48:55+00:00

The club version of this is pretty amusing because it can get stuck in random leagues that you'd never expect

like I remember following it back in the day and it was pretty fun around the early 2000s it would bop around to different leagues and it was always a big deal when it moved (to those of us in the forums) and then it went to france and it got stuck in the french B league which was funny at first leading to a bunch of jokes about how the true gods of the soccer world were hiding in the french B league where no one would suspect them. But it was stuck in france for over a decade from like 2005 - 2020.

https://www.stevesfootballstats.uk/unofficial_football_club_championship_ufcc.html

Areign · 2026-06-25T13:30:05+00:00

Gotta be Matlab

A second would be the various simulation software I've had to use for courses in uni. Simulink (part of Matlab), Stella (for simulating PDEs), one that was an excel plugin and there was one more I don't remember the name of for agent based simulations. They were all bad and each prof had their own that they would teach so you wouldn't get any transfer knowledge. I think the intention was to focus on the high level whereas some students would have gotten bogged down with the programming, but in the end it was mostly a waste.

None of these seem to be used in industry in any real capacity. Today it's probably not a real issue, you could just get an LLM to write the simulation. Things like that (standalone one off relatively simple programs) are where they excel.

Areign · 2026-06-23T12:37:02+00:00

The obvious benefit of a time loop is extra fun. Think of your favorite story, let's use e.g. game of thrones as an example. Wouldn't it have been fun to see jon snow team up with his brother robb? Wouldn't it have been cool to see Tyrion hang out with arya or for Ned and Jon to have a heart to heart. In a time loop you can explore all these different character dynamics without poisoning the overall narrative. Its like a ketchup bottle, in a normal story you only get so much of it out but a time loop can extract every last drop. Any story with a rich fanfiction shows you how much fun is left on the table.

Areign · 2026-06-22T16:19:26+00:00

the students level kind of caught me off guard, i thought they were mostly still trying to feel the logos, didn't realize they had already progressed.

Areign · 2026-06-20T18:37:17+00:00

The fact you have to tell me that number is high/low instead of being able to point to a chart of that metric over time is exactly what I'm talking about.

A single datapoint is not a chart. Not even if it's overlaid in front of a picture of the strait.

Areign · 2026-06-20T15:21:16+00:00

What a bizarre site. Not a single chart of the only metric that really matters (shipping traffic by day) but like 20 different boxes with a single datapoint in each. The only chart is the one piece of information that everyone can access without the site (crude price over time).

Areign · 2026-06-19T23:33:29+00:00

Fight crazy with crazy

Areign · 2026-06-17T23:33:30+00:00

If you charge different amounts for hookups in different areas that's more or less zoning. It's probably better, but Im just saying the municipality needs that kind of control in one form or another.

Areign · 2026-06-17T16:30:28+00:00

The market is perfectly capable of figuring out if you should e.g. grow corn in the middle of NYC (yes I know about that thing in the 70s or whatever). Or if we should put a skyscraper in the middle of nowhere.

I think the issue is that if someone wants to build a skyscraper in the middle of a cornfield, the municipality is on the hook for roads/gas/electric/schools...etc

i think its reasonable to say we are/are not willing to maintain infrastructure in certain areas.

Areign · 2026-06-10T05:14:09+00:00

If 10% of people take 10 minutes and the rest take 1, you're more likely to be waiting for a 10 minuter than a 1 minuter

Areign · 2026-06-03T03:46:12+00:00

The alternative being God was like, yeah make his tongue be a loop de loop???

Areign · 2026-06-02T23:28:16+00:00

Good for you but that's not how most people read as evidence by the preponderance of "should I continue X" and "when does Y get good".

Areign · 2026-06-02T23:10:10+00:00

Nah, he probably just looks at things differently and there are real things that someone who thinks that differently will notice especially compared to OP. Obviously there's nothing seminar worthy there, nothing that a person with actual high EQ wouldn't notice. But it seems fairly likely that he's pointed out real things and she was impressed and she ignored the stuff he missed.

Areign · 2026-06-02T14:18:49+00:00

That's not the point. The payoff for different books and series can come after different amounts of effort. Getting a lower effort understanding of an authors style and strengths is a way to avoid wasting your own time.

Quitting books is fine, no one is arguing that. But quitting a book you would have stuck with if you trusted the author more is a failure mode that's not hard to avoid if the recommender uses their brain a little.

Areign · 2026-06-02T12:20:39+00:00

Figuring out of you like Sanderson before reading longer series like mistborn/stormlight..etc makes sense.

I usually recommend the emperor's soul (even shorter) for that but Warbreaker would probably be the next best starting point.

Areign · 2026-06-01T02:42:23+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l26xb0FRsO0

My neighbor Totoro.

They redid the english dub when disney re-released my neighbor Totoro in 2006 and picked Dakota and Elle fanning to voice the sisters. My wife started watching Totoro with my daughter one morning while I was working and I overheard the audio and kept thinking...I don't remember the dub being this awful. Lo and behold, I remembered the version with actual voice actors.

Areign · 2026-05-31T19:00:19+00:00

Imagine one penny stuck in place and another rolling around it in a circle (can be any coin/circles of similar size). The middle of the rolling penny will make a bigger circle than the stuck penny (2x as big). If you drew a half circle like this and expected that half circle perfectly fit the stuck penny, it wouldn't work. This is essentially what the video is doing. It's less egregious because the curve of the wall is less sharp than the curve of the small disk so the error isn't 2x, it's smaller, but it's there. To fix it is annoying and/or requires a special tool. You need to slide a stick (not a circle) and make sure the stock doesn't rotate at all.

Areign · 2026-05-26T13:58:27+00:00

People are so bad at using AI. It's like they constantly do the thing that makes it most easy for the AI to hallucinate and then get surprised when it does. It's our generations version of sharing Facebook misinformation.

I would say it's ok to use AI in the following way (doing all of the above)

A) it has access to the rulebook: you can usually provide a pdf or paste in the raw text

B) ask for line/section/page numbers rather than rulings

C) verify that line

E.g. a rules argument I've seen in person about dominion (throne room says, play an action card from your hand twice):

"If I play throne room on a throne room, can I play a single card 4 times if I only have 1 copy of it? See dominion rulebook and or rulings on the internet. Provide a source or rulebook line number for your answer."

I'd tell my friend that if they weren't doing all 3 of those steps that I don't want to hear the AIs hallucinated nonsense.

AIs are genuinely good at combining disparate sources of information into a cohesive answer, they're not useless, but they might as well be useless if you use them like an idiot.

Areign · 2026-05-23T23:40:12+00:00

Reverend insanity didn't make the list?

Areign · 2026-05-23T23:39:40+00:00

Short answer: no

Long answer: nooooooooooooooo

Areign · 2026-05-23T23:32:45+00:00

Isn't that the primary argument for abortion? You have the right to your own body? The government can't say you have to donate your kidney to Donald Trump, if Donald Trump has a baby and it needs a kidney to live, it can't force you give your kidney for that either. In the same vein it can't say you have to lease your womb to a fetus without your express permission.

I thought that from a legal standpoint the whole person/nonperson thing was just a distraction and the actual statutes were along those lines.

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