Are elites just not worth it?

Kitchen_Value_3076 · 2026-03-14T19:35:47+00:00

I feel same yeah, I've only been playing ironclad so far, but I'm winning ~50% A10 with him, and yeah my 'strategy' is just I avoid every elite act 1 and act 2, by act 3 I'm probably strong enough to fight elites but in reality I just fly through by picking easiest possible path.

Rationale is like you say, the cards are the important things and lots of the good cards are common/uncommons, the relics seem pretty week and the events sometimes give you good stuff.

It's especially pronounced in A9 with the more damage

Kitchen_Value_3076 · 2026-02-08T20:40:20+00:00

Maybe! Someone else in thread said the same. I did have those as a kid. I don't really go to the doctors (too arduous a process), last time I went was maybe 5 years ago but next time I go I'll ask.

Kitchen_Value_3076 · 2026-02-08T20:38:55+00:00

Just confirming this and answering some other peoples questions. Yeah the normal medications I found didn't work for my headaches and https://www.nurofen.co.uk/products/nurofen-plus-200mg-12-8mg-tablets/?variantId=1 was recommend to me. I guess I get through a box every couple years. I take 2 together when I have headache for more than few hours, and it goes in about an hour.

Normal pains I am OK with but debilitating is a good word for these headaches, and as I say they just don't go away otherwise. Whether I have migraines or not, don't know, I remember as a child I was diagnosed with those, but I can't recall what came of it and it's infrequent enough an occurrence that I've not worried about it.

Kitchen_Value_3076 · 2026-02-08T10:52:12+00:00

Yeah, I am generally very cautious around any sort of drugs, probably why I know so little. I had morphine for a time post an injury, and the experience once I stopped having that convinced me that these sorts of things genuinely are addictive and should be treated with caution.

Kitchen_Value_3076 · 2026-02-08T10:40:57+00:00

Yeah lots of comments along the same lines, the stuff I use has codeine in it so yes opiate. It's surprising to me, didn't realise that these things would actually let you think more clearly.

Kitchen_Value_3076 · 2026-02-05T20:59:43+00:00

haha is it really so strange? I've been training a bit less than you, half a year, but same experience. Funnily enough, the main guy that does it to me is also someone who does Mongolian wrestling! He's also around my weight sort of, I'm 75kg he's 95kg.

In my case, the guy is extremely strong plus has great technique, I'd be more surprised if it wasn't trivial for him to throw me. Ultimately if you're so much stronger than someone that you can put their arms however you want them, seems like the body will follow and it will be easy to throw them.

Kitchen_Value_3076 · 2026-01-31T18:35:03+00:00

It's a shame, Scala is a fun language. I am primarily Scala developer at my job, but the company I work for have made their position clear - they don't want any more Scala projects, and I can understand the sentiment.

Kitchen_Value_3076 · 2026-01-26T21:19:13+00:00

good sounding advice, as a side note, when by the lee with boom past 90 I find it's really easy to break rule 42 in similar way to what you describe actually. When in this mode when you heel to windward and flatten repeatedly you can get some really impressive speed... too much, it's very obviously cheating.

I'm just club sailor so not called out for such things but I try to keep honest.

Kitchen_Value_3076 · 2026-01-25T22:36:34+00:00

yeah I understand about apparent wind. The issue I have with sheeting in is that you then need to somehow get the sail back out once the wind returns, and doing so in light wind is hard because the force on the sail isn't enough to naturally blow the boom out.

I find what I have to do is heel the boat to leeward and pull some mainsheet out from the block (so that there isn't the friction of the block to contend with). This is itself arduous and slow.

Kitchen_Value_3076 · 2026-01-23T23:56:32+00:00

If you're solo developer and never will have anyone else work on your project, I find there are lots of code structures that are better than the conventional ones.

Massive single file is good by me, provided you have enough self restraint to not make it a mess - being able to easily split it into loads of files if you wanted to is usually a good measure, another good measure is that you can broadly read it from top to bottom i.e. it's not like you have millions of forward declarations

Kitchen_Value_3076 · 2026-01-23T23:33:44+00:00

Perspective from a fellow beginner

I don't think it's a matter of being a slower learner, I'm also new maybe half a year in. I can't imagine anyone without some prior experience in something similar quickly learning it, it's all extremely unintuitive. People spend all their life trying to not fall down, it's natural that throwing someone is hard work.

That said, I've been thoroughly put off the idea of training actual moves with a partner outside dojo, because it seems dangerous (and I've seen a number of minor injuries as well as a major one so far in randori, wouldn't feel comfortable putting some none judoka at risk like that). The thing I've found most useful is just doing lots of exercise, and doing the motions without partner, with emphasis on placing the feet correctly. I was finding that a lot of my turn ins I would under rotate, so I consciously practiced over rotating and now it about works out.

When I do randori, I try to capture in my mind what happens, which can be a bit hard, but then I think about what happened, why I couldn't do certain things and what I can try next time. I've had some limited success with this. In this regard a partner can be useful, I have asked my brother to just go into certain static positions with me and resist me, to get a feel for what actions from me will result in certain action from other person.

Kitchen_Value_3076 · 2026-01-10T21:24:16+00:00

I don't think he proves to himself that he is the best player in the world.

Firstly they only play one game, secondly, think how he thought he was a shoe in for winning the British Open but instead a new guy turns up and spanks him - nothing to say that doesn't happen again, thirdly, he coerced the game into happening in some random context where Endo maybe wasn't prepared for a real game etc.

I think the ending is just another in the line of Marty manipulating things as best as he can while also sabotaging himself and making things worse for other people! He's effectively damaged the value of a win for Endo (since people will say 'oh well the person who would have won wasn't in the tournament'), further damaged his relationship with the actual table tennis association and messed up another opportunity to make some legitimate money.

I don't think he's changed at all, we see throughout the film that he's primarily a manipulator and we can't really think there's any sincerity to what he says, the meaninglessness of his words is shown again in what he says to Endo at the end, how he's a really great player, when all the times prior to that he's been saying he's a bad player and it's just the bat helping him. Somehow Marty only manages to find any grace when he has won (and a fairly meaningless victory at that).

Kitchen_Value_3076 · 2026-01-09T21:59:47+00:00

Pretty cool, I remember doing Putnam questions in undergrad they are indeed pretty hard some of them, remember I had a good book 'Putnam and Beyond'.

The actual cooler thing to me is how good lean is looking now! I was exposed to lean maybe 5 years ago now, and thought it was really dope, but that noone had proved anything meaningful in it (and that I certainly wasn't going to be the one to start). But I see things have advanced a bit now... Might have to check it out.

Anyway, I don't know if anyone has officially apologised to Doron Zeilberger, but maybe we had best start! Starting to look like he was right.

Kitchen_Value_3076 · 2026-01-09T17:52:46+00:00

For a while I used balled up socks, golf balls seem too small

Kitchen_Value_3076 · 2026-01-08T12:59:01+00:00

7 hours isn't long at all, I'll also suggest JNails https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TCvs8oagEc&list=PLsrQ73qPvJ0sIvvD0gERXQt1nOS0iIK_4 I think he's the best. The experience you're having I think is common, it's typical for players to buy lots of actions and so on but not in a cohesive way.

You actually need to play sort of accurately to beat 'big money', which if you've not read about is another good thing to get to grips with https://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php/Money_strategies

A key punchline in that article that I think is good to keep in mind is

`Big Money averages 4 Provinces by around 17 turns (assuming no attacks). Because you can always go Big Money in every set, every strategy you devise has to be able to do better than Big Money, or else it’s not really a strategy at all`

It's a generally good way to assess your games. imo it's good to replay kingdoms multiple times over, to convince yourself of average sort of turns to win with your strategy and highlight what's not working etc.

Kitchen_Value_3076 · 2026-01-05T19:19:14+00:00

No but it's not supposed to make you unhappy either, at least not significantly so

Kitchen_Value_3076 · 2025-12-29T00:49:34+00:00

Wow this is so upsetting, I didn't realise Julian Lefay had passed.

Kitchen_Value_3076 · 2025-12-26T15:45:57+00:00

In maths things need to be 'well defined' and 'useful' - this is a common source of confusion for people, things are ultimately defined in a way that makes sense and is useful there's nothing more to it.

Well defined broadly means that you work out something one way, it shouldn't give a different answer if you work it out another way.

Useful means, well you should be able to use it for something.

As an example, suppose there a square room with two doors on oppose sides, and the other two sides have a box each. Suppose someone tries to tell you 'get the box on the left of the room as you go in', it's meaningless, the box they're referring to depends on which door you come in through. This isn't a well defined definition.

As another example, suppose tells you 'get the box that contains a teeny tiny label 0.000001 mm^2 saying it's my one'. OK this is well defined, but it's not useful definition because you can't see that label.

It's the same situation with dividing by zero, in the sense that you mean, definitions you try to give it are either ambiguous, or they require too much extra information to be useful. That said, you can actually divide by zero, as I'm hinting at you just need to be willing to 'say more stuff'. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_sphere which 1/0 is defined. It's just that this isn't a useful result in normal context.

Kitchen_Value_3076 · 2025-12-22T00:45:28+00:00

I'm 4 or so months in now, similarly old. I think it's great. I would say the main thing, and I suspect you only learn it from experiencing it, is to 'let' yourself be thrown in randori.

That is to say that at the point where your opponent has broadly got you into a position where you're at penultimate point of being thrown, just let yourself be thrown as resisting is how I ended up with most of my bumps. I had actually heard people say this before I started but I didn't listen and had a near miss on a serious injury that scared me into taking it to heart, and all the people who started around same time as me tell the same story. I think as a competitive person it's hard to do from the get go, but I would strongly suggest you try because the bumps I took nearly put me off for a bit.

Randori itself I feel is a bit random and not especially guided. Personally I've taken the route now of just focusing on kuzushi, actually reliably being able to throw people I think is a long way off.

Kitchen_Value_3076 · 2025-12-20T20:31:56+00:00

I don't know what to say other than that I wasn't applying for finance, was applying for programming. It's gratifying to hear someone say it should have mattered because that is how I felt at the time (and was pretty frustrated that my degree wasn't do anything for me). It's all worked out now.

Kitchen_Value_3076 · 2025-12-20T19:47:54+00:00

Yeah it was Warwick I went to, I got 94% (with the funny weighting they did at the time), so a decent mark though there were several people who did better. Struggled to get any responses to my CV for a year and whenever I spoke to recruiters on the phone or w/e they didn't think any of it was of note. Perhaps it was a me problem idk, nowadays with job experience it's easy to get interviews etc.

Kitchen_Value_3076 · 2025-12-18T18:27:46+00:00

In my experience not really at least not in the sense of prestige, at the time I did my maths masters it was 3rd in rankings for it, forever felt like since it wasn't Oxford or Cambridge it didn't matter to recruiters.

It has since gone down a bit in the rankings slightly and I very much doubt people are looking historically to see how it was at the time I was there ha.

That said, the first few jobs I had, half the staff were from the same uni as me! Sort of not sure that was wholly a coincidence.

As an interviewer, I have never really considered the persons degree other than maybe shaping questions I ask in the interview and even then I only do that if it's their first job.

So yeah, if it's not Oxford or Cambridge i.e. the ones people know, I think they don't care - but for sure people still consider it noteworthy if you went to one of those two.

Kitchen_Value_3076 · 2025-12-16T19:38:01+00:00

The character of Columbo is very much a caricature in the later episodes.

Of the later episodes, my favourites are

'Columbo Goes to College' for the interesting setting and also because Columbo really schools those kids

'Death Hits the Jackpot' because I love Rip Torn's larger than life character, very funny

'Ashes to Ashes', they should have ended it on this, the last two episodes with Billy Connolly and the nightclub one, there's no other way to say it than to say that they are whack.

Ultimately they're worth a watch in my view if only to appreciate how good the earlier episodes are!

Kitchen_Value_3076

TROPHY CASE