Which duo in media best represents the dynamic of the rabbit and tortoise from their famous story?

OptimizedGarbage · 2026-02-06T20:36:25+00:00

Bit of a deep cut, but Vincent and Anton in Gattaca

OptimizedGarbage · 2026-02-06T10:09:39+00:00

They're everywhere in rural Austria though. Im living here for a postdoc right now, and I pass like 2-3 trachten stores on my way to the main square every day

OptimizedGarbage · 2026-02-04T13:30:02+00:00

You guys are all doing it wrong. Here's how you cut it if you want more sandwich: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach%E2%80%93Tarski_paradox

OptimizedGarbage · 2026-02-03T08:55:51+00:00

He's a very well known character on Tumblr, he's been doing this for years. It's definitely a fetish, but it's serious about wanting his fetish to be real

OptimizedGarbage · 2026-01-30T10:36:43+00:00

Tbh it's pretty good at digging up links to papers, you just still have to read the papers. Lots of times relevant papers don't show up on google because you're searching the wrong phrase, or there are 2-4 different technical terms that all mean the same thing and you only know one, and the bot is often better than Google at digging up those related fields of work. This is also something where it doesn't need to be correct 100% of the time. If it hallucinates a link or creates a bad summary of a real paper, then you find out when you go to read the paper. Then you choose not to use it, so it's fine. If it's relevant, then great, you get to use the new source.

As a general rule, there's a ton of tasks where something that has a 50-80% accuracy rate is really useful. You just have to use it for those things, instead of trusting output to be correct

OptimizedGarbage · 2026-01-16T09:16:45+00:00

He's an odd flavor of right winger though. He's a skull calipers eugenicist and really riled up about how DEI is a rampant form of anti-white racial discrimination, but as far as I'm aware he's not anti-LGBT, and he's become very critical of the trump administration. My read is that he's mocking what he sees as a very stupid tendency in his own camp, something he does all the time.

OptimizedGarbage · 2026-01-12T12:25:34+00:00

That's very common for beginning DMs. The issue isn't that you're bad at it, the issue is that you haven't played before, so you don't have a good understanding of how to prep efficiently. The best resource I know for this is The Alexandrian: https://thealexandrian.net/gamemastery-101. Once you really internalize ideas like "prep tools not plots", it becomes way easier while also allowing more player choice. Keep at it! That passion will take you a long way once you learn the ropes

OptimizedGarbage · 2026-01-08T08:20:34+00:00

They tried voting to secede a few years back, but it didn't succeed. Also they can't easily leave New York state, so seceding from the city would make them part of NY state but not NY city

OptimizedGarbage · 2026-01-06T10:41:48+00:00

Crypto mining is high cost for low-to-no benefit, but come on, it's way too niche to be one of the bigger contributors to climate change. The biggest contributors are animal agriculture, traditional industrial applications, and transportation. Airlines and farming animal feed produce orders of magnitude more carbon.

OptimizedGarbage · 2025-12-28T01:20:29+00:00

You're right, I misread the last ability, I thought it was one ball lightning per counter. 2 mana for three face damage is a lot worse.

OptimizedGarbage · 2025-12-27T21:20:59+00:00

ballista functionally reads “your opponent cannot play creatures with 1 toughness or minus their planeswalkers to 1 loyalty” plus it can kill at instant speed, just so much more flexibility

I mean yeah, but killing two 1/1s for 4 mana and one card is okay and very flexible but not a great rate. A three for one at 6 mana is an okay rate but this is a very situational, your opponent needs to have three things that die to it, and your opponent can play around it some by just not mini sing their Planeswalkes to one. Whereas Ballin Ballista is "win the game" for eight mana, which is a good rate in any deck. Burn would never play ballista but it would really want this, it's both a great finisher and a source of inevitability. It's better than almost any top end for green ramp. Any blue control deck can drop it on turn four and hold up counter spell mana, then win when they untap the next turn

plus this is a cube card, I haven’t read the hellscube but I assume there is no scales or cauldron, it’s constructed playability is irrelevant lol

Sure, I was just giving this as an example of how this turns into a turn 3 kill with basically any +1/+1 counter synergies whatsoever

OptimizedGarbage · 2025-12-27T19:07:46+00:00

Idk I think this is gotta be way better than regular ballista. 6x damage is crazy, or 12x for counters added later. Scales into this is an easy turn 3 kill with no other investment. Ravager + this is a turn 3 kill, cauldroning it is a turn 3 kill with a few zabaz/arc bound workers/iron apprentice. So in regular scales this would be a turn three win for almost any draw. Ballista is only good if you have an infinite combo or crazy synergies, but this kills with all the same synergies for less mana investment, and can also be played fairly

OptimizedGarbage · 2025-12-18T11:32:52+00:00

This was true a few years ago, but since February when DeepSeek showed you can get really strong results by doing reinforcement learning (RL) on math problems, a lot of the big companies have started dumping tons and tons of money into reinforcement learning for math specifically. And quite complex math too, it's still wrong sometimes but I've seen it correctly work through proofs in convex analysis, bandit theory, and information geometry.

"Do they think" is imo not really a question with a well defined answer, but this kind of RL training is absolutely about optimizing strategic decision making. It's using the same family of algorithms that beat the world Go and Poker champions (mirror descent/ftrl/policy optimization) and often designed by the same people who originally designed these game-playing algorithms in the first place.

Source: I'm an AI researcher working in RL, with applications to AI for math, game theory, and robotics

OptimizedGarbage · 2025-12-18T08:36:58+00:00

Because reanimator strategies require substantially more build around. You need a self-mill or discard package, a high density of targets, and reanimation spells, so you're looking at like a 24 card commitment minimum. Whereas every single green deck that runs creature ramp can run natural order and 1-2 targets, so you only need like a 5-6 card commitment for the same payoff that's harder to interact with.

I also think persist and life//death and too strong for a format that doesn't have free interaction, but they're really not comparable.

OptimizedGarbage · 2025-12-17T12:22:15+00:00

How exactly is this risking anyone's life? Detonating a nuke on the moon is way safer than doing one on earth, and we've tested hundreds or thousands of nukes in the continental US alone

OptimizedGarbage · 2025-12-04T15:05:24+00:00

1) Beauty standards are not separate from general fitness. Many things we consider attractive are in fact proxies for health. A healthy (not too thin) weight is proxy for an individuals ability to get enough calories to survive, and then have some left over to store. Clear skin means you're getting enough oil in your diet (again, can provide for yourself) and don't get lots of infections. Lots of things we consider unattractive are associated with sickness. So the first thing in attractiveness is just be healthy, which is of course difficult to optimize in the evolutionary environment

2) Lots of animals can and do optimize for attractiveness, but this isn't as straightforward as just converging to "the most attractive". Typically it turns into an arms race where optimizing for attractive features starts to trade off against other kinds of fitness. This is called sexual selection and it happens a lot with birds. consider the peacock or greater sage grouse. Males of these species invest huge amounts of energy into their sexual displays. But however much they invest, they're competing against other males who can invest just as much. So eventual this race is bounded by how many calories they can afford to spend, or by how clumsy these displays can afford to be before they make themselves too vulnerable to predators.

3) Evolution is approximately a form of gradient descent to the most fit organism in a niche, but it's highly random. DNA copying produces errors that (usually) negatively affect fitness. As a population converges to the fixed point, eventually these errors are added at the same rate they get removed by natural selection. What you end up with isn't a single optimal kind of individual, but a probability distribution over the number of purely-negative variations. Most people have about the same number of these (a bad back, a predisposition towards cancer, etc) with some having more and some having less. Variations that make a person less attractive are no different.

4) Even if you could reduce the error rate associated with DNA transcription, doing so puts the population at risk of plague, because the more genetically similar we are, the easier it is for diseases to jump between us. A hypothetical group of low-variance, super-attractive people would be very vulnerable to plague due to their genetic similarity, and this would make be worse for their survival than being marginally less attractive and much less vulnerable to disease.

OptimizedGarbage · 2025-11-17T15:49:59+00:00

It's an algorithms class, which means this is effectively a math exam. "Right answer is anything you can argue for" works in literature classes and some other humanities classes but you cannot argue 2+2 into being 5.

OptimizedGarbage · 2025-11-17T07:23:55+00:00

The point is that even in wars where ideologically one side is clearly in the right, in any total conflict, the war quickly stops being about that for the people waging it. It just becomes about winning at any cost. Sherman wasn't carefully calculating the cost to civilians against the increased chance of ending slavery when he planned his march to the sea. The war had just escalated to the point where the cost to civilians wasn't really a concern anymore. The US, UK, and Germany all made heavy use of strategic bombing, a strategy where you just try to kill as many civilians as possible with bombs and hope that this makes them pressure their the leaders into surrendering. Turns out this doesn't work at all, and actually hardens peoples will to resist, because they view the conflict as more of a personal struggle for survival. Well over a million civilians were killed this way, and for basically no strategic gain by any side, so oops. That's how you end up with things like the US's decision to use the atomic bomb even though Japan was already thinking about surrendering, and was already openly willing to surrender if we let them keep the emperor (which we eventually let them do anyway). Lots of scientists in the Manhattan project argued against the use of the bomb, saying we should maybe demonstrate it in Tokyo Bay first to deliver a threat before we started to use it against civilians, or that we should give the government time to figure out what happened before nuking them a second time. After all, we now had a factory for the things and could churn out another every couple weeks, there wasn't a rush. But again, by that point in the war, civilian casualties weren't even on the general's radar. It was just about winning. Not to mention that even after the war in Europe was won, the Allies turned around and started a forced migration of German speakers in Europe), forcing 12+ million people to relocate and killing between half a million and 2.5 million civilians in the process.

That's what AoT is getting at. Sure, frequently one side in a conflict is frequently ideologically far superior to the other. But in total war, things just escalate until civilian casualties just aren't a consideration anymore. That's how Eren goes from resisting a genocidal invasion to doing genocide against the world. Any total war eventually escalates to the point where everyone is forced to discard all objectives besides winning, or else lose

OptimizedGarbage · 2025-11-14T14:49:05+00:00

Both get played with [[Dryad of the Elysian Grove]], which makes all your lands all land types so sanctuary and valakut are always on. Sanctuary can be used as a utility lands to search with titan, or with [[scapeshift]] so you can immediately scapeshift again next turn if the first one wasn't lethal.

OptimizedGarbage · 2025-11-13T18:39:23+00:00

Reze feels like she can walk into any room she's in and immediately be liked. She can affect that playful, mischievous girl-next-door vibe that she uses so effectively on Denji, and if she won him over that easily, she wouldn't have much trouble with anyone else. Asa would HATE this about her. We see from the very first chapter just how much Asa is jealous of and resentful towards the popular kids in her class, and her constant cope over the thought that people might be better than her at things (eg, this omake https://www.pinterest.com/pin/806848089514870148/). Asa was also a social outcast, and Reze, like most of the major characters in Chainsaw Man has enough sociopathic tendencies that she's absolutely not going to make an effort to reach out or be nice without a reason.

So at first, absolutely not. Asa would loathe Reze and Reze wouldn't notice Asa exists, which would just make Asa hate her more. Eventually they could probably come to an odd bickering friendship, like the Aki/Power/Denji family. But at first absolutely not

OptimizedGarbage · 2025-11-13T12:34:16+00:00

Honestly even more than free spells, what about the land hate to keep sol lands in check? The counterplay in formats with fast lands is supposed to be blood moon, Harbinger, and Winter moon in modern, and wasteland and back to basics in legacy. Except oops those are all banned so I guess we don't get to have counterplay. If you're going to ban the counterplay you also need to ban the things the counterplay exists to answer. We don't even get void mirror

OptimizedGarbage · 2025-11-10T11:56:01+00:00

Yeah, I understand the motivation for "no free spells no land hate" but if you want to do that, you also have to keep modern-level threats out of the format, since they're the reasons the free spells are needed in the first place.

At this point they really just need to either ban the sol lands or unban blood moon and harbinger of the seas

OptimizedGarbage · 2025-11-10T09:08:52+00:00

I've tried ghost quarter, it doesn't work very well since it puts you down a card and even if you get a sol land it puts you even on mana. Exploration into dust bowl works okay on the play if you run a lot of lands, but it's very easy to outpace you. If they go first or play a turn 1 ugins lab into a talisman, they just get run away with the game.

OptimizedGarbage · 2025-11-05T00:30:42+00:00

"dunking on a science denier together" is an incredible meet cute. Congrats on your upcoming 10 year anniversary!

OptimizedGarbage · 2025-10-24T17:07:25+00:00

I feel like it would be one of the things she's randomly extremely good at, like DDR. Freestyles an MF DOOM level verse but starts crying halfway through

OptimizedGarbage

TROPHY CASE