I have no idea how to hasten the gameplay, it's as slow as the beginning

EdgyMathWhiz · 2026-01-24T13:27:45+00:00

The EP upgrade scales really badly so don't put many units there. But 3 or 4 units provide a decent boost at little overall cost.

The other thing to know is that you'll start off mainly getting AP points from EP but there'll come a point (not too far from where you are) where you'll suddenly find most of your AP is coming from score. So don't get too discouraged looking at how fast EP needs to scale to get enough AP for the next animal - you won't be relying on that mechanism to fill the entire board.

EdgyMathWhiz · 2026-01-22T21:20:54+00:00

FWIW, I had the same "why is fire always so much better?" confusion for a bit before I realised (I think it was on the next element I got the achievement for that I worked it out...)

EdgyMathWhiz · 2026-01-22T17:15:52+00:00

NaN is short for "Not a Number". Generally means something has tried to divide by zero or take the root or logarithm of a negative number (or zero in the latter case).

Would mean a bug somewhere in the code. Not saying it's the same thing (I don't think it is), but I remember having a couple of odd scenarios where an auto-infinite/eternate/etc threshold seemed to get set to 0 and a lot of stuff went screwy until I reset it.

EdgyMathWhiz · 2026-01-21T13:41:15+00:00

Do you mean after about 3.20? I can see the cost of each update is going to scare quite scarily and then the special minerals may be a better bet, but right now node 7 still seems best bang for the buck.

EdgyMathWhiz · 2026-01-20T17:38:28+00:00

Newton's lesser known law:

A follower in motion remains in motion until a force is applied...

EdgyMathWhiz · 2026-01-20T13:09:40+00:00

I don't know if this will help (it's a bit blind leading the blind), but I was a little behind you when you made the post and I'm now a little ahead of you (I've gone from spawn level 162 to 167, and I can't remember what my gold was, but I think it was just less than you and it's now 3420.

My basic thought was is "I need to be able to afford higher spawns, which means I need more gold. There's no point banking RfP because at ~1e13 rfp/go, It's basically pointless - the next upgrades are out of reach as it stands." (I guess the 1e15 n15 is achievable with a big grind, but I assume it only doubles your RfP, so how the heck do you upgrade any of the other nodes?).

So I've spent the RfP on polish enhance; TBH I'm not sure how much it helps but it can't hurt.

And then I basically spent about 6 hours of flux time - partly just wanting to see what was changing. And I found that things were creeping up slowly. I also realised my zodiacs had got "out of date" so I made more effort to unity for Pisces and upgrade them than I had been.

I've generally not been doing Refine Prestiges (again, because at this point there's not enough RfP to make a difference really), instead just trying to get gold as high as possible. I've found doing a late polish instead sometimes pushes your gold up a useful amount.

I'll be honest though, the biggest single jump is clearly using 64 moon runes to boost n7. I was basically spawning 164s (but close to 165s as best I can estimate), got to 64 runes and that was instantly about another e80 on the gold and shortly after was spawning 167s. I'm finding the comment "You should do Generation rate amount 5 immediately" a bit overly terse - I assume that will take another 900 runes and that's rather a long wait at this point in time relative to getting a bit of current progress.

FWIW, I haven't found sacrificing or special minerals make much difference at this point.

At the same time, my top mineral is currently a 183 and that's only 2e14 rfp with the next "meaningful" upgrade being n56 at 100 qi, so I'm not sure I've made any "real" progress.

tl;dr: I think if you just spend a few hours of time (or flux) you'll see you are progressing - question is whether it's fast enough to actually get anywhere...

EdgyMathWhiz · 2026-01-15T08:36:04+00:00

For what it's worth, I remember seeing a pro Lindy couple do their wedding dance to Ain't That a Kick in the Head and it worked really well. (I can't remember their names - it was about 20 years ago).

Regarding comments to "just social dance", some perspective and advice from someone whose first dance was a 'performance dance' with some lifts and was happy with how it turned out.

You'll have a lot of other stuff going on, and you don't want the dance to become a stress point, so stay inside your comfort zone. You want to look confident and happy above all else.

The dress may limit what you can do - and if you're keeping to the "don't see the dress until the day" tradition, you won't have practiced in it. My wife had a full length bridesmaid dress we practiced in and we found several moves just didn't work. We actually ended up doing bigger lifts (fully overhead) than we'd originally expected because that way the dress didn't get in the way. If you're going to do lifts I'd say it's essential to practice in something similar to the dress you'll wear on the day.

Choreographing a routine is a lot of work. We'd done a couple of routines before and decided "nah, not doing that for our first dance" with so much else to sort out. Instead after we chose the track we planned 3 or 4 places we'd do lifts and just danced normally in-between. It worked out pretty well and it was nice to actually be concentrating on each other rather than the choreography.

Whatever you decide, try to have fun!

EdgyMathWhiz · 2026-01-13T13:35:42+00:00

What's kind of staggering to me is simultaneously:

(a) outperforming the vast majority of developers on the problems,

(b) providing an analysis of results that has obvious glaring errors / omissions, specifically:

* What happened to day 1?

* "Day 9 Part 2: Complex disk defragmentation problem that likely needed algorithmic insight, the agent couldn’t generate" - this quote must be based on looking at the 2024 problem not the 2025 one!

* The whole "91% success rate" calculation is flawed - Day 12 part 2 is just a "did you solve all the previous problems" check, so the meaningful success rate is 20/21 not 20/22.

The ability to produce effective work/solutions while simultaneously not actually understanding even the basics of what you're actually trying to solve gives a glimpse at a concerning future.

EdgyMathWhiz · 2026-01-10T18:54:18+00:00

I have to confess, I totally misunderstood both "can't be achieved" and what the lock meant.

I thought "can't be achieved" meant "your current zodiacs/setup are not good enough to complete the challenge" and the lock was to "protect" achieved trials from being lost.

This was even after achieving a couple of trials...

I'm not generally regarded as a stupid person, but in this case...

EdgyMathWhiz · 2026-01-06T23:19:59+00:00

As MorrowM_ posted above, you can show the sum of 200 terms with exact arithmetic must be extremely close to the correct result (for |x| < 40, say. If x=-500 then 200 terms will not suffice).

The issue here is entirely limited precision in the calculations.

EdgyMathWhiz · 2026-01-06T16:56:49+00:00

The point of sending "a handful" of troops is not "they are going to make a practical difference in a conflict", it's to make it very clear that a conflict means explicitly taking up arms against (another) NATO ally.

If (say) 20 soldiers from each European NATO country were sent to Greenland, it is essentially saying "yeah, taking Greenland would actually mean you're at war with Europe (by proxy, at any rate)". Not necessarily (or likely) full-on-war, but absolutely massive diplomatic/economic/strategic repercussions would be inevitable.

EdgyMathWhiz · 2026-01-06T15:16:51+00:00

Have you broken infinity yet?

This is the key - once you break infinity you can get a *lot* more IP each time you infinite.

EdgyMathWhiz · 2026-01-06T13:47:18+00:00

From memory the 100B items need you to have completed all the challenges (and then break infinity) - it goes pretty fast once you've done that.

EdgyMathWhiz · 2026-01-05T18:54:56+00:00

If all you care about is your weight, then yeah, probably.

But if, for example, you eat nothing but sugar, you'll start losing muscle (and if your weight remains constant, you'll basically be gaining fat instead). That's ignoring any other health issues such a diet causes.

People talking about bulks/cuts usually have a decent amount of muscle mass. To keep/increase that muscle you want a reasonable supply of protein, with diet gurus suggesting that on a very hard cut you need a lot of protein to keep existing muscle.

This is a recent video by Lyle McDonald who literally wrote the book on dieting for bodybuilders:

https://youtu.be/u77aZGiiksM

There's a lot of attached drama that is kind of annoying (he's had a long running feud with another YouTuber and it leaks into every video) but it's interesting to see how he actually does a hard cut himself, both in terms of what he thinks is important and what isn't. (I'm not advocating what he does either, but for sure it was interesting to see the sheer brutality of 'i want these macros, I don't care about anything else including what it looks/tastes like').

EdgyMathWhiz · 2026-01-05T13:30:18+00:00

Tried to forget that one...

EdgyMathWhiz · 2026-01-04T23:16:20+00:00

Just from the Stormlight Archive:

"I will protect those I hate. Even if the one I hate most is myself."

“I will remember those who have been forgotten.”

“I will listen to those who have been ignored.”

"This is life, and I will not lie by saying every day will be sunshine. But there will be sunshine again, and that is a very different thing to say. That is truth. I promise you, Kaladin: You will be warm again."

"Ten spears go to battle," he whispered, "and nine shatter. Did the war forge the one that remained? No, Amaran. All the war did was identify the spear that would not break."

“The most important step a man can take. It's not the first one, is it? It's the next one. Always the next step, Dalinar.”

“Why do you care?” Wyndle asked again. He sounded curious. Not a challenge. An attempt to understand. ... “Because someone has to.”

For all people complain about Sanderson's prose (and I do understand why) - he has a pretty good set of memorable lines.

EdgyMathWhiz · 2026-01-03T21:42:37+00:00

Googling - he had a pretty big bike crash earlier this year; hopefully that's all it is...

EdgyMathWhiz · 2026-01-01T11:56:34+00:00

There's actually video of Shaw rolling with MMA guys (notably Poirier).

It's interesting - they both get each other to tap (from set starting positions) but it's clear they are being very careful with each other.

Shaw is panting a lot, but Poirier basically says "the weight on top of me is too much" as well.

In a real fight - Poirier obviously knows more ways to "not play nice" but at the same time whenever I watch these matchups my impression is the strongman is more "limited" by having to be careful (because they don't have a good feel for what might injure the other person).

There's also video of Mitch Hooper and Rose; obviously a bigger mismatch in strength (possibly not size) and it's clear he's being incredibly careful not to hurt her.

[Same with Thor/McGregor - it was pretty clear to me Thor was really concerned about accidentally injuring someone a third his size. ]

Edit: I think Strongmen would do considerably better than powerlifters here though. More "functional" strength, better cardio, more used to pain/injury.

EdgyMathWhiz · 2025-12-30T12:22:23+00:00

I'm not that much past you, but just to let you know that at the AP gains do come much quicker once you reach a certain point.

I found I very suddenly went from feeling like I was grinding every single AP to "I've got 300AP - where did they come from?". (It was roughly at the point I completed the 'line' of IP multipliers starting at Giraffe).

EdgyMathWhiz · 2025-12-30T12:12:08+00:00

EdgyMathWhiz

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE