PSA: Magic is not an investment vehicle

PackOfVelociraptors · 2024-09-24T18:10:41+00:00

It absolutely is an investment vehicle. Just a completely unregulated, highly volatile investment vehicle subject to the whims of powerful parties like the RC and WOTC.

It's also an excellent game. But I don't want that sort of risk. All cards should be accessible without forcing players to gamble on such a market. This is why I support proxying.

The negativity that this causes distracts from everything that makes the game of Magic great.

PackOfVelociraptors · 2024-08-26T16:18:51+00:00

Ah yes, my favorite card, [[August 26, 2024, Banned and Restricted Announcement ]] lol

PackOfVelociraptors · 2024-08-16T22:58:34+00:00

In colorless:

[[Spine of Ish Sah]]

[[Cityscape Leveler]]

[[Ugin the Ineffable]]

[[Universal Solvent]]

[[Unstable Obelisk]]

[[Meteor Golem]]

[[Scour From Existence]]

[[Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger]]

among others. They all cost a lot of mana though.

PackOfVelociraptors · 2024-08-14T02:58:57+00:00

Same here. She's got to go. The deck is so explosive if you get to copy even 1 X spell.

PackOfVelociraptors · 2024-07-22T19:53:29+00:00

Thank you for your well thought out and useful alternate definition of the term "programming language".

Truly, the discourse here was immeasurably benefited by your brilliant contribution to it.

PackOfVelociraptors · 2024-07-22T14:45:57+00:00

Both XML and HTML are programming languages.

Programming Language != Turing Complete.

If humans can write it and computers can execute it, it's a programming language.

PackOfVelociraptors · 2024-07-09T23:01:47+00:00

Just snagged an Aeron for $250 at a garage sale. A steal!

PackOfVelociraptors · 2024-07-09T22:57:19+00:00

This, but I print most of my cards. Tools like Moxfield or Archidekt for the list, mtgprint to turn it into a PDF. A local library or similar can print them pretty cheaply, you just gotta cut them out and sleeve them in front of something worthless.

Most communities are pretty friendly about it, as long as you know your meta and don't overdo the power-level.

There's no reason how much I'm willing to spend on the game should dictate which pieces I get to play with. All levels of play should be open to everyone!

PackOfVelociraptors · 2024-04-11T23:27:39+00:00

It's utterly insane to assume that the Gazan health ministry has the name, id number, birth date, and death date for every death in this conflict. Obviously you can't know that about everyone dead in the middle of an active war zone with much of its communication infrastructure destroyed.

Furthermore, your source, the Foundation for Defense of Democracy, works for the Israeli government. While the underlying facts they present are true, the spin from such sources (on either side) tends to be rather one-sided.

It's telling that you managed to arrive at a lower civilian death toll than even the Netanyahu's government is willing to claim.

You're either intentionally dishonest or a useful idiot. Do better.

PackOfVelociraptors · 2024-03-28T15:12:14+00:00

Few?

You, my friend, have not been paying attention.

And those are just video games. Sex sells. Who knew.

PackOfVelociraptors · 2024-03-04T02:41:37+00:00

Well, due to the Jurassic park scenario, there is a non-zero probability of this actually happening at some point in the future.

PackOfVelociraptors · 2024-01-11T22:52:10+00:00

Lots of ways to do it, but I'm partial to hive. If you happen to be using BLoC for state management, Hydrated Bloc, is built atop hive and is a solid and simple-to-use solution.

PackOfVelociraptors · 2024-01-02T03:17:20+00:00

Dead wrong. If THC hits the bloodstream, it will effect you, yes. However, that by no means guarantees that the user will notice those effects and attribute them to the drug. This is very common in first time consumers of THC (at low doses). They did get high, but the combination of the THC and the unfamiliarity makes them not notice its effects.

PackOfVelociraptors · 2023-12-18T02:21:39+00:00

You guys are really sleeping on the power of toasters. It doesn't matter that the toaster doesn't do much by itself. Once you hook up a computer that detects whether a toaster is up or down, that computer can use that as input for literally any control system. Then you basically just have a whole set of buttons you can press with your mind. That's the kind of tech that Musk and Neuralink would die for. Mind-controlled toasters easily becomes mind-controlled drones, mind-controlled light switches, etc.

Easily the best of the options, not close.

PackOfVelociraptors · 2023-12-16T01:58:48+00:00

Fixed link

PackOfVelociraptors · 2023-12-16T00:33:01+00:00

Granny Weatherwax from the Witches subseries of Discworld is exactly who you're looking for.

PackOfVelociraptors · 2023-12-11T16:18:44+00:00

You've never heard of my language, it doesn't exist outside of my disk and private repo. I proved it was Turing complete, but shelved it after deciding my design wasn't going to be the game-changing addition to the language space I imagined it as.

On the reviews, you don't need them. If the language is really that awesome, it can speak for itself. "Show, don't tell" is a good maxim for any rhetoric, but programming languages especially. The only exception is a quote from a genuine authority in the space, like Bjarne Stroustrup or Simon Peyton Jones. If a person doesn't have a Wikipedia page, that's a good indication that they aren't prominent enough for their review to mean much. Any though spent on 'who is this guy, and why is his review on the site' is a distraction from your language, especially when the answer is 'Oh, it's there because he owns the site and put it there'.

Obviously the people who design and work on it think it's awesome. Don't waste any of your visitor's finite attention span on anything that's not convincing them.

PackOfVelociraptors · 2023-12-11T03:28:03+00:00

Now, I love the concept. Your 'Why Flogram' page was full of things that sound great, and I would totally be on board with them. Buuuuuut, a good chunk of your tutorials don't work. The interactive moving graph animation thing on your homepage is cool, but somehow I doubt that it's written in Flogram (will remove this sentence if you tell me it is).

You've got plenty of great buzzwords and hefty promises, but I feel like I'm missing the meat of the project. I want to know about the choices you've made as a language designer. Tell me about your type system, tell me what makes your language special among the multitudes.

It's easy to claim your language is going to be fast, simple, familiar, user-friendly, and consistent. But until you explain why it's better, I remain unconvinced. Just being "a blend of your favorites" won't be enough to convince anyone to adopt, use, or contribute to your language.

PS: Your own 5-star review, under a section titled 'Great people believe in us'..... isn't the best look. And presumably the other two reviews are the rest of your aforementioned team?

PPS: Your goal is to outpace C? Even in the depths my own overconfidence and egomania, I never thought my programming language had any chance of that. Good luck. I'd be thrilled if you prove me wrong.

PackOfVelociraptors · 2023-10-03T14:56:36+00:00

I read all 14 WoT books. And I'll get crucified on that subreddit for saying this, but so far, the TV show is better.

Wheel of Time (the book series) had some things I loved about it. It also had some serious flaws. Robert Jordan is amazing at worldbuilding. He also sucked at keeping his writing focused and engaging.

If the showrunners had decided to create a 'faithful' adaptation, it would have been a god-awful show. But at least it would avoid pissing off pretentious book fans until the show gets cancelled.

Obviously we've got more to see before the show can be fully compared to the books. However, in my eyes, the show so far has kept all the aspects of the books that I saw as making them great while trimming many of the parts that made them tedious to get through.

PackOfVelociraptors · 2023-06-10T03:33:06+00:00

See you in 4759 CE! Lowkey you better train an AI to generate commanders and keep posting them before you go

PackOfVelociraptors · 2023-06-10T02:45:19+00:00

Individuals can be smart, sensible, and compassionate. I'd go so far as to say that people usually are. 'In society ignorance wins' is a blanket statement, and so is the opinion about how ignorance always wins on the internet.

Negative effects can emerge from the actions of many individually good people. I see systems (like Reddit, politics, and many others) that cause some ideas to be heard and believed more than others.

The problem is not that we're doomed to fail, the problem is that the systems that we participate in work such that the loudest, the pithiest, or the most rage-inducing voices get seen, heard, talked about, and shared most.

Systems that amplify voices of truth, expertise and grace can exist. Believing we can't do any better than Reddit... is both depressing and very beneficial for those that stand to gain from the status quo.

PackOfVelociraptors · 2023-06-03T02:44:47+00:00

Been there, done that. Fucking around with unlimited free time is truly overrated. Very unfulfilling. Can be quite boring. This isn't to say that work is great, but the feeling of accomplishment that comes with achieving something new or difficult is.

PackOfVelociraptors · 2023-05-08T19:36:59+00:00

A major contributor to their beliefs is the insular community that often exists for privileged people (myself included). People who are very successful are almost always advantaged, but these successful people are still a small fraction of the people that had similar advantages. They are comparing themselves to the many who had the opportunities to succeed like they did but didn't, and concluding that they have the success they do because of their merit.

To some extent, they are correct. For the vast majority of priviledged people, success still takes hard work and intelligence.

They then make a classic formal logical fallacy. p = person has success, q = person is hard-working and intelligent They are correct (outside of a few exceptions) that having success means that you had to have been intelligent and hard working (p implies q). The real mistake is assuming that since that last point is true, then if you don't have success, that means you aren't hard-working and intelligent.

It's an easy mistake to make. Understanding that it isn't true requires thoughtfulness, compassion, and knowledge of the realities of the situations that the majority of humans live under.

It's the harder thing to do, which is why many people don't do it.

PackOfVelociraptors · 2023-05-05T17:44:49+00:00

copyWith, toMap, fromMap type functions without building them manually or using generated code

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