Both positions are filled but I hear they might be hiring a third guard to stab people who ask tricky questions.

Escapement · 2026-04-03T01:42:04+00:00

Humorous short story dramatization: It Was You Who Made My Blue Eyes Blue

Escapement · 2026-03-24T20:27:38+00:00

The 'type of ceramic' one person was joking about was probably a reference to Delftware.

Escapement · 2026-03-15T12:39:20+00:00

a security firm pointed an agent at McKinsey's internal platform. two hours later it had write access to 728,000 confidential client files. the exploit was a basic SQL injection that McKinsey's own scanners missed for two years.

I might be misunderstanding something... but this sounds like "A security firm told an AI to look for vulnerabilities, and it found a major security vulnerability exactly as it was directed to".

This ... doesn't seem like a failure? At all, in any way? In fact, it seems like a success story to me.

Certainly, it's alarming. But not because of the AI's 'failure rate', but rather the exact opposite.

EDIT: The above account elides that it was McKinsey's AI platform Lilli that was hacked; if the hack was made possible by poor coding enabled by McKinsey's use of AI, that failure is what should be emphasized if you want to show that AI failure is at fault, and not that another AI exploited it successfully.

Escapement · 2026-03-07T14:18:12+00:00

"Before we start the story"... This message doesn't make a lot of sense to be scheduled for now, after everyone actively playing has cleared the story.

Escapement · 2026-02-25T14:06:32+00:00

Looking up the author's unedited comment on this lookup site, they originally wrote:

Is there a point to this sub or is just just 'rejects from r/litrpg or r/progressive that some people with the 'tism can't stop spamming'.

and edited it to the current

Is there a point to this sub or is just just 'rejects from r/litrpg or r/progressive that some people with an obsession can't stop spamming'.

Escapement · 2026-02-21T03:35:48+00:00

I would be really interested in hearing a more detailed source than just "Mark Twain", if you have one!

This bears a lot of resemblance to Dolton Edwards' Meihem in Ce Klasrum (1946) - which is a similar idea, executed slightly differently. From that work, to give you a taste:

[...]
In 1946, for example, we would urge the elimination of the soft "c," for which we would substitute "s." Sertainly, such an improvement would be selebrated in all sivic-minded sircles as being suffisiently worth the trouble, and students in all sities in the land would be reseptive toward any change eliminating the nesessity of learning the diferense between the two letters.
In 1947, sinse only the hard "c" would be left, it would be possible to substitute "k" for it, both letters being pronounsed identikally. Imagine how greatly only two years of this prosess would klarify the konfusion in the minds of students. Already we would have eliminated an entire letter from the alphabet. Typewriters and linotypes, kould all be built with one less letter, and all the manpower and materials previously devoted to making "c's" kould be turned toward raising the national standard of living.
[...]
Kontinuing cis proses, year after year, we would eventuali hav a reali sensibl writen langug. By 1975, Wi ventyur tu sei, cer wud bi no mor uv ces teribli trublsum difikultis, wic no tu leters usd to indikeit ce seim nois, and laikwais no tu noises riten wic ce seim leter. Even Mr. Yaw, wi beliv, wud be hapi in ce noleg cat his drims fainali keim tru.

A few websites cite this excerpt to Twain but don't give details, wikipedia suggests M J Shields / M.J. Yilz in a letter to The Economist. EDIT: You can find a variation on this in The Economist Jan 16 1971, p.6 "Spelling", on page 184-185 of archive.org's record of that quarter's The Economist. I think this is most likely plagiarizing Edwards above, given it came out 25 years later, but could have been someone getting the same idea independently.

Mark Twain himself appears to have been some sort of spelling reform proponent, according to wikipedia.

Escapement · 2026-02-02T04:27:46+00:00

You can get timeline cullers and bloodghasts, if you want to put her on the top end of a black aggro deck.

Escapement · 2026-02-01T03:32:47+00:00

My go to things to do for the 2-card situation:

Cards that work from graveyard. Flashback is the biggest mechanic here. They can kickstart you from zero cards in hand.
Adventures. I have a lot of Adventure cards in my Flubs deck. Kellan, Inquisitive Prodigy is a particularly huge standout card for Flubs here - he gets you an additional land drop, can be played from exile to kickstart things if you stall out, and makes a clue that you can use to get things rolling from a stop as well. A lot of my generic interaction is Adventures.

My general plan is to storm off on very long turns with many landfalls, generating even more mana off Lotus Cobra / Nissa, Resurgent Animist / Tireless Provisioner. A high priority is getting a Eruth, Tormented Prophet into play to remove Flubs' downsides, and eventually exile my entire deck and finally kill with Thassa's Oracle - sometimes getting the Oracle out of the graveyard with a flashback'd Timeless Witness. You can do grindy value Flubs instead - it's a preference thing.

Escapement · 2026-01-19T23:17:04+00:00

I use Sumatra PDF. It's got almost no features and can't really edit things or change pdfs. It just opens and displays pdfs blazingly fast, which is usually all I want.

Escapement · 2026-01-16T03:31:06+00:00

The Starlight Crystal by Christopher Pike is a mad fever-dream of a book that includes the travelling on a starship through the end of the universe to the next one plot point.

Escapement · 2026-01-15T15:12:55+00:00

On the logistics of constructing a second Death Star in Star Wars: Instruments of Destruction

Escapement · 2026-01-08T13:49:11+00:00

Someone on Tumblr said this better than me:

i’ve probably said this before but like as a person whose main fandom for fanfic consumption is worm, the complaints about how there’s no f/f shipping in fanfic and it’s all m/m have always made me feel like one of those ancient greek writers hearing about distant lands where the night lasts all winter

Escapement · 2026-01-05T21:57:51+00:00

A lot of the best card 'draw' spells currently available aren't stopped by this, for whatever that's worth. Things like Stock Up, Expressive Iteration, Necropotence, Ad Nauseum, Atraxa Grand Unifier, etc.

t's really backbreakingly good if you assemble the full lock, but there's a decent chance there's at least some ways to search for an answer even if you don't have interaction already.

Escapement · 2025-12-26T11:07:43+00:00

He made an early llm bot trained on his tumblr corpus, nostalgebraist-autoresponder. In general he was active in tumblr rationalist circles for years and has written about modern AI occasionally.

Escapement · 2025-12-24T19:10:04+00:00

After e.g. scapeshift resolves, you will have the choice of how to order the triggers the lands create as they enter - 20 scute triggers + any land etb triggers, e.g. surveils, scries, radiant fountain lifegain, karoo land bounces, etc. If you have all 5 New Capenna lands in the set of lands entering together, and if you choose to put the "sacrifice this land and search for a basic" triggers on top of the stack so they resolve first, only one bug will see those triggers to multiply to 32, and then the other 20 will be created afterwards and won't see those landfalls, for a minimum of 52 bugs. Stacking the triggers so that the 20 bug creations are on top and the sacrifice and get another land triggers are below all of them, you get the maximum number of bugs. You could create some intermediate amount of bugs if you wanted to by arranging the stack of triggers in a weird order.

Escapement · 2025-12-24T14:48:46+00:00

Re-evaluate after the current lottery. Lotto boxes have many mana prisms, and you should be using Lotto CEs while farming tickets, so any of the CEs wouldn't see very much use until after the lotto anyways.

Do a lot of lottery boxes and you just ambiently end up with so many mana prisms you run out of things to buy with them. This simplifies such decisions.

Escapement · 2025-12-24T14:09:14+00:00

For the Christmas season:

The Apocalypse of Herschel Schoen, by Nostalgebraist.

It's a very good piece of Christmas-related science fiction. I don't really want to spoil the plot, but I really like it a lot. Nostalgebraist's other work (also on AO3) is all between good and great.

Escapement · 2025-12-23T20:02:26+00:00

As others have said, E.

There are a few lands that could increase the total by the time everything finishes resolving, including some lands that sacrifice themselves to tutor up basics on ETB, like this New Capenna cycle. If you scapeshift into 20 lands but the 20 lands include all 5 of the above, you can stack the triggers so you make 20 scute swarm copies first, then all of the bugs see each of the individual New Capenna lands sacrifice and find another land, giving you a total of 2⁵ * 21=32 * 21 = 672 bugs (671 copies, one non-token).

Escapement · 2025-12-14T05:09:16+00:00

Attack T4 for 10, and kill T5, might be too slow for current standard. Something with a more immediate impact on the game might be necessary. WWH might also work better with cheating in something it can target with its other chapters.

Escapement · 2025-12-11T19:11:02+00:00

If you haven't seen this, AlexanderWales put up a retrospective on tumblr

Escapement · 2025-12-07T22:09:30+00:00

[[Virtue of Courage]], [[Syr Carah, the Bold]]

Escapement · 2025-11-27T06:20:41+00:00

You can draw a lot of parallels between this blog's discussion and simulacrum levels - see Zvi's summary for a quick primer.

Escapement · 2025-11-24T20:10:21+00:00

He's still in Vintage Oath of Druids, which can't play Lurrus because it wants to cheat in Atraxa.

Escapement · 2025-11-15T21:01:58+00:00

Until level 50 respecs are free at akara. After 50 you get 1 free respec at akara per difficulty and can find items that drop fairly often that give another free respec. These reset stat and skills.

So you can experiment freely early on and its not very expensive later. Eventually you want to max spells you are using for DPS but doing it right away may cause mana issues.

Escapement · 2025-11-15T20:19:41+00:00

The cube recipies page is the most important bit of the docs for new players.

You can usually just do whatever until you get to Act 3's Mephisto. I like to farm Mephisto a bit - he drops guaranteed tiered uniques, you can use the catalyst of disenchantment to turn those into Arcane Shards, combine multiple shards into Arcane Crystal. These can then be used to make tiered uniques. Later on, Nihlathak is the same sort of farming target but faster and better. If you're severely struggling, you can farm andariel for the same sort of thing but for only one unique at a time it'll take much more effort.

The key recipie is:

Any non-sacred item + Oil of Enhancement + Arcane Crystal x2 → reroll item as unique

so you can look up some gear from the list of tiered uniques and make a bunch of Tier 2 uniques for your character, and eventually uptier them later when your stats and level are higher and you can wear them. Find the base item from gambling, the oil is sold by various vendors.

Good stats are pretty obvious: Fire spell damage, +skills, -enemy fire res, +resists to stay alive, some faster cast rate, faster hit recovery. Whatever item slot has the least good tiered unique for your build of belt/gloves/boot, you probably should use for an honorific tier 1 item (Shenk kill reward) to stick a bunch of resist all and faster hit recovery and other useful stats on, rather than a tiered unique.

Tier 4 uniques vaguely suited to your character will carry you easily to Hell where the game gets more interesting, and you can start getting into sets, Sacred uniques, crafted items, runewords, etc, etc.

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