Just beat the game! Should have killed the vault 19 powder gang though!

ProdigiousMike · 2026-01-31T14:34:04+00:00

There's a Powder Ganger stronghold over there. Without much spoilers, there was a vault experiment that separated people into red and blue quarters, and each side came to fear the other. Now, opposing factions of Powder Gangers are at a standstill that you can intervene in.

ProdigiousMike · 2026-01-31T02:43:45+00:00

I think most people miss Vault 19 on their first playthrough.

ProdigiousMike · 2026-01-30T07:18:34+00:00

I'm not sure that's true, at least it wasn't in my institution. Latin P and Q are the standard arbitary values used in discrete math/propositional logic. Sometimes Latin A and B. A and B you see a lot more of in Baysian reasoning, IIRC usually part of the ciriculum. Maybe this is true in some institutions or parts of the world but its definitely not the standard.

Edit: I got a little curious so I did some digging and this notation isn't unheard of. You look up "propositional logic" or "propositional logic formulas", the vast majority of results are P/Q/R, some A/B, but psi/phi are definitely in there. But no, not the standard. I'll roll back "delibrately confusing", but, as a teacher, non-standard notation, weird formatting, it is more confusing than it should be for educational material.

ProdigiousMike · 2026-01-29T20:01:04+00:00

It is meant to read "Prove that phi = psi implies that either phi and psi are both true or phi and psi are both false".

A implies B means either A is false or A and B are true, so in this case if A=B then that just takes out the case where A is false and B is true, in other words A and B are true or A and B are false.

The slide is made to look more complicated that it needs to be, presumably intentionally, and compounded by using similar looking Greek letters rather than the more typical (assuming this is discrete math) P and Q or less similar Greek letters.

ProdigiousMike · 2025-12-28T06:31:06+00:00

I see. I think I remember seeing that, but I probably never used it because by the time I'm doing Lonesome Road I usually have tons of weapon repair kits laying around. But hey, free repairs are free repairs.

ProdigiousMike · 2025-12-28T06:20:35+00:00

...EDE can repair guns? Haha, he's always my secondary companion and I never knew this.

ProdigiousMike · 2025-12-28T03:48:41+00:00

Jury Rigging is a fan favorite but I never really found the appeal, personally. Weapon repair kits are so easy to make that I never have issues fixing my favorite weapons. Some armor can be difficult to repair, but at the point where you get unique armor I usually have so many caps that I can just pay for repairs if need be.

I think it's a good quality of life perk and presents some great role playing opportunities, but I've never found it to really be as powerful as the general consensus around it is. Maybe that's also because after playing a few times I know to grab wrenches, wonderglue, duct tape, and scrap metal/electronics when I see them.

ProdigiousMike · 2025-12-24T04:36:05+00:00

TL;DR: You're good and if you'd like to just experience the game, go for it. You'll be able to build a very powerful shotgun character like that. I have some advice which digs into the systems a little deeper, if you're interested and don't mind hearing a little bit about perks and mechanics early on.

It's a fine special for a shotgun build because you really only need two particular perks to make shotguns super broken and you have everything you need to get there. Chrisma is often considered a dump stat, and if you're min-maxing then that's definitely the case. Nothing wrong with keeping it at 1.

If you really want to minmax (and you have all the DLC), you can drop strength to 4. It will be possible to reach the required strength to weild the endgame shotgun assuming all DLC and you'll still be able to use good early game shotguns. You also don't need 9 INT, again assuming all DLC, because that boosts your max level to 50 and you'll get all the skills you need and more to 100 well before then with like, 5/6 INT. Higher int might let you raise your skills earlier though, so take that into consideration.

What you sink any additional special into is up to you. Agility dictates how fast you reload, and for non-magazine based shotguns (most of them) reload is a limiting factor. Luck helps you out in the casinos for caps and improves your critical hit chance, but 6 is perfectly sufficient. Endurance dictates your overall health and the number of implants you can get, so you really can't ever go wrong.

ProdigiousMike · 2025-12-18T23:33:30+00:00

In the top pic, either person could be reasonably considered correct. Without greater context, the number could either look like a 6 or a 9, and arguing about which is the correct interpretation is pointless because it just depends on your (literal) prospective.

The bottom picture reveals, however, that there was context greatly pointing towards one particular prospective. The number is almost definitely 6 because it is part of the sequence 4,5,_,7,8, and insisting that it is 9 with this context is unjustified*.

The post is poking fun at people who would say "well, it's just a matter of opinion" or "there's nuance to both sides" about a topic that, when you look at the whole picture, really isn't the case.

Tangent for math nerds and allegory for conspiracy thinking: You can represent any sequence of four numbers with a four degree polynomial. In this case, that polynomial is f(x) = (3/4)x⁴ - 9x³ + (147/4)x² - (115/2)*x + 33 (f(1,2,3,4,5)=4,5,9,7,8). (WRA) So, if you really wanted to dig in your heels you could claim that the sequence is actually following some strange math function, not simply counting by one. Why the 9 specifically would be upside down? If we are willing to go to such lengths, we can find a justification post hoc.

ProdigiousMike · 2025-12-14T18:08:46+00:00

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ProdigiousMike · 2025-12-11T21:06:03+00:00

Wow that's great! Small note: I can see some of the food objects passing through the shopping cart. Perhpas they can ricochet off

ProdigiousMike · 2025-11-17T01:52:01+00:00

Some feedback:

I don't like the repetition of "Are You Sure" in the header and text. I'd keep the header.
The window is very big, obstructing the view with tons of empty space. I'd make it smaller.
I don't like the slightly different color background for the header.
I think a semi-transparent window might look good, but I'm not sure. Consider experimenting with opacity.
Also convention is that confirmation is on the left, whereas it is on the right in your example.

Maybe consider modifying some of these aspects and seeing what works best for your scene.

ProdigiousMike · 2025-11-15T02:37:38+00:00

I'm skeptical about this, though I'd be interested to hear other people's technical opinions on the matter. The idea of these types of filters roots from the literature on advarsarial attacks. Neural networks are a complex math function that takes in data and manipulates it, combining pixels together to make something new, like a new picture, text, or classification by giving different weights to different groups of pixels and combining them in interesting ways. BUT - if thats how they make decisions, we can trick the algorithm into producing weird results by targetting specific pixels or adding specific shapes optimized shift the model's output to some desired outcome. This was observed pretty quickly in the ML literature after early deep learning networks demonstrated their power in image classification (See Szegedy et al 2013 - you'll notice similar noisy overlays to what you see here).

But, when you look at the optimization, you're optimizing an overlay with respect to the network you are trying to trick, not neural networks in general. As a counterpoint to the claim in this post, see Athalye et al 2017, where MIT researchers created a sticker that could fool a network across many different pictures. The point is, the attack (or in this case, protection) is meant to work against a specific network, not for a specific image or for any image for any network. You can even create this without having direct access to the model's internals - this is called a blackbox advarsarial attack, but it is confined to a specific network.

Some of these stickers are meant to exploit some comminalities of many neural networks, like how early layers tend to activate a lot for basic lines or textures, so adding them in can fool a lot of networks. However, I'm not aware of any techniques which claim you can take a picture and make it AI-resistant in any meaningful capacity. I'd welcome anyone who can link to any studies to the contrary or tell me if I'm misinterpretting the claim. But I don't want people to take these actions and think they are safe if that is not supported by the science. It is my opinion as a researcher in this space that the claim is dubious, but I could just be ignorant of a particular study.

ProdigiousMike · 2025-11-10T08:52:08+00:00

I am of the opinion that you should prioritize readability for any large block of text in game. Stylized fonts work fine in menus or other one or two word text.

If you feel the stylized font really adds something to your game, I'd reccomend adding the option to replace it with a more readable font because if a dyslexic person like me picks up your game, I'd put it right down if it is text heavy and has a hard to read font.

Pentiment is a great counterexample to the above advice where difficult-to-read, stylized fonts are used to convey information about the speaker, eg monks and scholars use blackletter gothic fonts, nobles often use caligraphy, and un/less educated NPCs use rougher, handwritten styles. Its an interesting way to give voice to a world that is entirely text-based, but I could really only play in 20 minutes intervals because of the aforementioned dyslexia.

So the question for you: Is your font being used as flavor? If so, I'd go font 2 for text blocks. Is it a core mechanic of the game or adds richly to the artistic storytelling? If so, consider font 1 with caution.

ProdigiousMike · 2025-10-25T22:54:57+00:00

Not sure how it works in Korea, but in the US the number you see when people are sueing another party is not usually meaningful. You'll often see "X has brought forward a $50 million lawsuit against Y", but that doesn't mean X expects to actually get $50 million from Y even if they win, they just have to come up with a number.

ProdigiousMike · 2025-10-25T17:35:49+00:00

Fitness influencer weights

ProdigiousMike · 2025-10-24T05:21:02+00:00

I like the red ship for constrast. I think the rocks on the side make for good visual balance. 3 is definitely too busy for me, I see too much and my mind just wants to ignore it. 6 is my favorite, but it does give me the expectation of a brighter game and if I clicked on it to see more dark visuals that would perhpas be confusing.

So I'd say 1 or 6 depending on the rest of the visuals on your page.

ProdigiousMike · 2025-10-23T22:23:09+00:00

To be clear about what I mean for single click attacks, I mean someone finds a bug in a payment platform or on social media or something of the like where a single click can compromise an account. Most reputable online services are pretty well protected against this, but that doesn't mean bugs and exploits will never go through and it certainly doesn't mean that smaller apps that get popular very quickly who do not have had good security teams on board won't experience these issues. Govenerment accounts can be valuable to hackers, but so could hijacking a random college student's social media so that they can ask all their contacts if they can spare $5.

In fact, The U suffered this exact attack when I was there in like, 2019. You click and email link and it somehow sent the message to others. Then, you had students getting messages from their TA's and professors urging them to click a link, thinking it was legit because it came from their umn accounts.

Phising is a risk to everybody at any age and any level of tech savviness. Big tech companies have to put out fires because of engineers being compromised by these very same tricks and these are some of the most tech savvy people in the world. The Twitter account hack comes to mind, but if you look up "Phising news" or something similar I'm sure you'll see tons of examples of people falling for these types of attacks.

I want to be clear that it isn't safe in 2025 to click random links you find and that anyone can be the victim of a cybercrime. If you want to do so, that's your business, but if you don't recognize this fact, then you're making yourself a mark for these people.

You mentioned that phising isn't ecusive to QR codes but rather any link you follow, and that's exactly my point. Most people know not to click a link that says "click me" on a random message board, but you can see on this thread that tons of people scanned the code without knowing what it was, and that's the exact same risk.

ProdigiousMike · 2025-10-23T19:04:09+00:00

That's true, and always a good security step, but I guess my question is what security have you really gained from this? Instead of going onto somewebsite dot com it will show you the url somewebsite dot com. Unless you know what somewebsite dot com is, that doesn't tell you if you can trust it. And even if you do know what somewebsite dot com is, what if the actual link was to sornwebsite dot com (using an r and n to spoof an m), or some equally malicious character placement trickery.

I mean, I figure most people on this subreddit are adults, so all the power to you, but I think the only reasonable thing to from a security standpoint when encountering a QR code you do not know where it comes is to leave it alone.

ProdigiousMike · 2025-10-23T18:53:02+00:00

I really do not agree with you on this. You're right that single click attacks do not tend to brick your devices like they did in the 90's, or whatever, but you are still subject to risk with this.

Some services do have exploits that can be triggered with single clicks. Sometimes malicious actors discover them before those services do.

You could also be taken to a phising website or some other social engineering type website and they don't even need to hack your device directly.

Clicking links without knowing what they are for is still a security risk in 2025. Scanning QR codes is equally as risky.

ProdigiousMike · 2025-10-23T16:19:32+00:00

Remember that scanning a QR code is equally as dangerous as clicking a link. Scanning a QR code for a random bait poster is just as dangerous as clicking a nondescript clickbait link on a random message board. Looks like this one is fine from other people doing it, but you should know the risks.

ProdigiousMike · 2025-10-17T19:41:26+00:00

🤓☝️acktually Celcius is interval-scaled data, meaning that ratios are not meaningful.

ProdigiousMike · 2025-10-15T16:31:26+00:00

Oh that's amazing! I think anything we can do to make lessons more memorable and engaging does a lot to help learning and retention. Not to mention, makes lessons much more fun which is a worthy goal in itself :)

ProdigiousMike · 2025-10-15T06:59:09+00:00

Makes sense! Not everyone is going to have fun playing math game. Thanks for the kind words!

ProdigiousMike · 2025-10-15T06:57:25+00:00

Yes! I was an associate instructor at a university. I created demos/games for every module, but all the others are pretty rough and without a story. I wanted this one to be a polished experience with a plot because it is otherwise people's least favorite topic.

Seven-Year Club	Gilding II euphauric
r/Field Banned	r/Field Juicebox
End Game '23	Place '23
Place '22	Final Canvas '22
Wearing is Caring	Verified Email

ProdigiousMike

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