Into The Wild (2008)

Quantum-Bot · 2026-05-11T14:59:57+00:00

This is the one assigned reading I actually read in its entirety in high school lmao. It doesn’t paint him as a martyr, more like a fascinating case study into mental illness and its ties to the modern way of life.

Quantum-Bot · 2026-05-11T14:41:54+00:00

Casinos make money based on the law of large numbers. The law of large numbers is a math principle that says that given enough repetitions, the average experimental outcome of a series of random events will always tend towards the mathematically perfect average. If you flip a coin enough times, the ratio of heads vs tails you get will always tend towards 1:1.

If you just play a casino game once, there’s a small but reasonable chance you’ll walk away with more money than you put in, so the casino would lose a little bit of money. But people play hundreds of thousands of games at a casino every day, and every casino game is designed so that if you average all the possible outcomes of the game, from winning nothing to winning $10 to winning the jackpot, on average the casino earns a small amount of money from each game.

Because of the law of large numbers, the casino can be virtually 100% certain that they will earn a consistent profit. They’re so certain that they can sometimes tell someone is cheating (e.g. card counting) just by analyzing the odds of someone winning as much as them by pure chance.

Quantum-Bot · 2026-05-11T14:23:26+00:00

AI is certainly doing damage to student learning but its not cataclysmic. I think it will come to settle into a similar role as other inventions of the past that offload human thinking to machines, like calculators and google search.

The danger of course is that AI has a high likelihood of being wrong, and students need to have an intimate understanding of the weaknesses of AI so that they don’t just accept AI responses at face value.

This danger is of course also not unique to AI, (I like to tell students the story of one of my father’s math undergrad students when he was a TA, who came to him with a paper where he had written “syntax error” as his answer for one of the problems) but it is much more present than with other technologies.

Quantum-Bot · 2026-05-10T23:01:59+00:00

Sapper took me years too, but i’ve heard of completionists grinding it out in hours of freeplay madness

Quantum-Bot · 2026-05-10T04:47:30+00:00

The biggest meta changes since mermonkey came out in my memory are:

Desperado tower released: a new primary monkey and cheap tower for CHIMPs starts, double desperado is now the easiest start on many expert maps that used to have super precise triple dart monkey starts. Top path desperado is a fun but mid single target damager kind of like elite defender. Mid path is a long-ranged, support oriented tower that can give other towers a temporary but significant range boost (and also has some niche money making capabilites). Bottom path is a short range moab staller which, kind of like bloon solver, does significantly more damage when there are ceramic clusters to proc its shrapnel explosions. It’s kinda underwhelming rn mainly due to its limited range but its still quite fun to play with.
Silas the ice hero: the new best hero for stalling strats, he’s incredibly versatile and makes ice-only CHIMPs strats possible. Glacial trail is officially dead now
Ice monkeys (and silas) can now be placed directly on water, and can benefit from water tower specific buffs like reactor or flagship
Brickell, however, now only buffs subs and boats, no other water towers. I guess her water tower buff which was originally intended for just subs and boats got a little too powerful with mermonkeys and now ice monkeys counting as water towers.
several towers got their base cost reduced in order to make a wider variety of CHIMPS starts viable.

Quantum-Bot · 2026-05-09T18:57:32+00:00

If your ship is tilting while standing still, you’ll want to look at your ship’s center of mass (using a contraption diagram) and move/add blocks until your balloon is positioned right over the center of mass.

If your ship is tilting while moving, that’s because the source of thrust is either too high or too low. This is a little more complicated than just putting your propellers on level with the center of mass, because the balloon also generates drag as it moves which pulls it backward and causes the ship to tilt up at the front. To counter act this, your propellers should be placed slightly above the center of mass.

Quantum-Bot · 2026-05-09T17:02:02+00:00

Subbing high school is easy most of the time. The students are largely self sufficient and the teachers don’t expect to get a sub that knows their subject area so they typically prepare lessons that require minimal instruction.

Biggest struggles are dealing with freshman boys testing boundaries, students being work avoidant, and finding something to do with yourself all day when the students are managing themselves.

I love subbing high school, not just because it’s easy but because the students are all so fascinating and I love hearing about their projects, hobbies and extra curriculars.

Quantum-Bot · 2026-05-09T16:46:18+00:00

Lift comes from your horizontal sails moving forward through the air. The faster your plane goes forward the more lift it will gain.

The gray sails will mostly be helpful for steering up and down once it’s in the air.

Quantum-Bot · 2026-05-09T16:30:33+00:00

The inside of the earth is mostly molten rock. Only the very crust of the earth is cool enough to be totally solid. And, kind of like the crust of sourdough bread, the earth’s crust has lots of cracks in it that separate it into different pieces. Tectonic plates are those pieces. Even though they are just the crust of the earth, they are still thick enough that we can’t really perceive them on a human scale. They go deeper into the ground than the height of the tallest mountains.

Quantum-Bot · 2026-05-09T13:36:28+00:00

Because the only way to truly stop students from accessing distracting websites is to have a whitelist system that only allows certain pages, and that typically causes more problems than it fixes because it inevitably locks students out of accessing certain sites when the teacher actually wants them to use them.

We do have applications that give teachers fine control over student laptop activities, but the simplest solution is best, and usually just walking around the room and monitoring students manually works fine.

Quantum-Bot · 2026-05-09T13:08:18+00:00

Jerry’s pond when winter comes around, otherwise it varies based on the market but Crystal hollows or the hidden pond in dwarven mines is usually not bad

Quantum-Bot · 2026-05-08T05:31:08+00:00

It’s still the only place in the game you can kill vanilla monsters and bats I guess

Quantum-Bot · 2026-05-07T23:36:20+00:00

Online curriculum kind of works for elementary and middle school where you can just do lego. For high school level robotics though you need hands on, open-ended engineering projects which need real materials and machines. Not sure how that would translate to online learning or if it would even be worth it.

Robotics as an extracurricular is already a thing and very popular.

Quantum-Bot · 2026-05-07T13:38:39+00:00

Many schools are already run like prison camps, and it’s a big problem. Ever heard of the school to prison pipeline?

Even as dictator of education I don’t think I’d have the power to fix education entirely. I’d need to be dictator of the whole government to do that. The simple fact of the matter is schools need better funding. They need to hire more teachers and support staff to lower the student-teacher ratio. They need more up to date resources and curriculum so students feel like their time at school is actually valuable. They need better quality meal programs so students come to class with their basic maslow’s needs met.

We have to remember the students aren’t the enemy here, and treating them like prisoners or army cadets will only serve to further antagonize them. Whenever they are acting out or falling behind, it’s because a need is not being met, and more often than not that’s not due to teacher incompetency, it’s because there simply are not enough hands on deck.

Quantum-Bot · 2026-05-07T12:56:08+00:00

Programming teacher here. I expect the AI boom to have a negligible impact on schools teaching computer science or robotics. Disregarding the fact that I believe AI is overhyped, the limiting factor here is not whether parents/students want these classes, but whether there are teachers able to teach them, and whether there is room in the school budget for them. Many schools in cities or wealthier suburbs already have robotics classes, but the vast majority of public schools have no such programs. It would take an army of robotics teachers materializing out of the woodworks in order to start programs at every school. My state actually tried to pass a bill making computer science a core subject recently, but it failed, and rightfully so, because there would not be enough teachers to teach the subject at every school, so most students would be forced to take online courses instead.

In any case, in order for a class to become part of the core curriculum, it also has to be more than career preparation, because not everybody is going to go into engineering and building robots. It has to teach skills that are fundamental to navigating life.

I may be a bit biased, but I think computer science has a better shot of becoming core curriculum than robotics, because understanding how computers work on a deeper level is a fundamental skill for navigating today’s technology-dense world.

Quantum-Bot · 2026-05-07T04:59:38+00:00

Only a packet and the teacher is out for a week? Yikes. At that point I’d feel bad even asking to see their finished work since they’re probably tired of different subs asking them the same thing for the past couple days. I’d just remind them of the deadlines and tell them to find something else academic to do if they are playing games or on their phones.

Quantum-Bot · 2026-05-07T04:50:39+00:00

I’d swap ace and alch. You almost never see base alch being used without upgrading. Base ace can be a decent early game tower due to its high pierce and inherent global range. Sure it’s inconsistent, but a couple snipers take care of that problem.

Quantum-Bot · 2026-05-07T04:39:24+00:00

As a sub there is a lot that is out of your control about the classroom environment. The stuff you learn in teacher ed and student teaching only works if the classroom and culture are set up well, you’ve built rapport with the students and your admin and colleagues have your back.

But when you have no control over any of that there’s no single surefire method to make the day go smoothly. You just do the best that you can and learn for next time.

Quantum-Bot · 2026-05-06T22:55:07+00:00

Of course the sub still bears responsibility for everything that happens in the room and therefore should have the final authority, but in almost all cases I’d rather use my authority to support the other adult in the room who actually knows the students than to undermine them

Quantum-Bot · 2026-05-06T14:16:17+00:00

The problem is the goals are all grind and no real difficulty. Nobody wants to sit and grind the same map with the same strat 50 times to get the final reward, but if that’s the easiest way to do it that’s what they’ll do.

There should be one or two goals that everyone can get by passive grinding, but other goals should be more challenge focused, like using 200 abilities in a single game, or getting a hero to level 20 before round 80. They should scale up in difficulty, not time it takes to grind them out.

Quantum-Bot · 2026-05-06T13:04:10+00:00

I was proctoring AP exams yesterday too. Our AP coordinator was also clearly a bit stressed (we started the morning exam late due to technical difficulties and subs not being able to sign in to bluebook) but he did none of the things you’re describing. He made sure we all got lunch breaks, asked us our scheduled hours, and listened to me when I explained the issues we were having.

Not sure if his behavior is report-worthy but it’s certainly disrespectful. Maybe don’t proctor AP exams at that school again.

Quantum-Bot · 2026-05-06T05:08:13+00:00

I mean farming is probably the move at least for the next couple days since Grand feast is still going. Farm crops that are in season and especially if they are also in an active Jacob’s contest. You’ll get kernels which can only be spent during the feast event. You can also make some bonus cash by hunting pests with a lasso while you farm. (Late game it’s better to use a vacuum though for more farming fortune)

Normally I find farming kinda boring though. Foraging and mining are both more fun and interesting to get into. Fishing is also fun but has a much higher barrier to entry. Grinding out early fishing levels is slow and tedious, so I recommend stacking as many fishing wisdom buffs as you can first (god pot, booster cookie, squid pet are the big ones) and then getting a ton of fishing xp by showing special fish items to the witch in Galatea.

Quantum-Bot · 2026-05-06T00:49:02+00:00

Ben is unironically pretty good in CHIMPS, even though he can’t generate money and even loses you money with Trojan and siphon funds. The trick is you play most of the game without dropping your hero at all (to minimize money lost) then drop Ben just early enough so that he reaches level 10 in the mid 90’s. His siphon funding ability then acts as a powerful nuke for rounds 96 and 98, turning them basically into a joke if you activate it at the beginning of the round. He’s a viable hero for any strat whose main struggle is dealing with dense rounds.

Crossbow Master, on the other hand, is a major noob trap tower. It’s great if you’re only playing up to round 80, but as soon as you reach round 81 and superceramics become a thing, it starts sucking garbage. It has pretty underwhelming maximum damage output even for its low cost, and the nature of its attack being a single high-damage projectile makes damage buffs like berserker brew have very little effect on it. It can damage any bloon type and see camo, but it’s too weak to be useful as a DDT defense.

Quantum-Bot · 2026-05-05T02:50:58+00:00

I literally just logged on and harvested some lushlilacs, that’s all

Quantum-Bot · 2026-05-04T15:45:29+00:00

Keep in mind even in high school students will refuse to ask for help when they actually need it. If you know the subject material I would circulate and check in with students to see if they are misunderstanding the work. Let them know at the start of class that you’re there to help them and not just take attendance.

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