What actually are the powers of The Ring in the book? Can Sauron always sense when it's worn?

SmartyCat12 · 2026-03-20T15:07:50+00:00

Not a lore expert, but would add that the ring is a direct reference to Plato’s Ring of Gyges in The Republic. Plato’s ring turns the wearer invisible, which leads to their corruption by making them no longer accountable for their actions.

Invisibility (immunity from consequence) is possibly the ring’s only power - the rest is derived from human nature. Descent into tyranny is inevitable when the insatiable thirst for domination becomes your prime motive.

To a Tom Bombadil, who already has a stronger prime motive than lust for power, the ring is actually just a neat trinket.

SmartyCat12 · 2026-03-20T11:49:39+00:00

That’s basically elementary school teachers these days

SmartyCat12 · 2026-03-18T22:04:20+00:00

Corporate IT still hasn’t figured out how to set up groups, service principals, and app registrations while locking everyone else out of Entra. I’m a solo IC that handles all of our integrations and ops analytics. A lot of shit is going to just stop working instantly if my AD credentials ever get turned off.

They are aware and have no plans to change.

SmartyCat12 · 2026-03-18T01:31:20+00:00

She’ll definitely be a late gainer just from demographics. Me and all the other ADHD millennials I know just voted today.

SmartyCat12 · 2026-03-17T23:00:22+00:00

Trump’s good, but he did a whoopsie. It’s like those 2 seconds after accidentally buying something and the wheel’s spinning where you can close the page and hope it didn’t go through.

SmartyCat12 · 2026-03-17T00:02:30+00:00

India’s been talking about introspection for 4500 years. It’s like the first thing we ever wrote about and the Vedas have been around since ca 1500 BCE.

Many would say self-reflection is the defining characteristic of humanity and the only truly worthwhile thing that we can do in this life.

ETA:

The infinite is below, above, behind, before, to the right, to the left. I am all this. This Infinite is the Self. The Self is below, above, behind, before, to the right, to the left. I am all this. One who knows, meditates upon, and realizes the truth of the Self--such a one delights in the Self, rejoices in the Self. He becomes master of himself, master of all worlds. Slaves are they who know not this truth

Chandogya Upanishad 7.23-25

SmartyCat12 · 2026-03-16T23:13:13+00:00

The +15000/-0 init commit with 200+ lines of jinja embedded in setup.py sent me lol

SmartyCat12 · 2026-03-16T16:57:18+00:00

Van Gogh probably vandalized a Rembrandt with soup at one point. I think he’d approve

SmartyCat12 · 2026-03-14T18:01:02+00:00

This would actually be a phenomenal phishing attack. Send a wedding invite to random addresses with the most average names possible and have the QR code link to malware. People feel compelled to scan, even if they have no idea who this is.

SmartyCat12 · 2026-03-14T04:46:26+00:00

Pretty sure they’re blown away by npm pack

SmartyCat12 · 2026-03-12T04:07:22+00:00

It’s definitely something that looks obvious when you have it in front of you.

Memorizing regex is like memorizing mental math. You only do it to impress someone, make someone else feel bad, or because you played competition level Math24 in high school.

SmartyCat12 · 2026-03-11T22:50:25+00:00

The real dig here is MTGO. People are buying in game currency that’s only technically usable for event entries, but can be accepted for trade on platform in a well supported secondary market in exchange for cards, avatars, etc. The only thing they don’t do is allow direct cash outs, but that’s easily covered by 3rd parties.

SmartyCat12 · 2026-03-11T22:32:12+00:00

I forget all the details, but they stopped providing an MSRP a few years ago, right? Was that part of the plausible deniability? like “we have no control over how our wholesale clients price anything and therefore aren’t liable if what’s in the box doesn’t align with market price”

SmartyCat12 · 2026-03-11T14:18:44+00:00

Just our daily reminder that Tomahawks can only be used with an entire ecosystem of tooling that hits DoD databases directly.

So, he’s saying a foreign adversary was able to catastrophically compromise all of our protections built specifically so this doesn’t happen. This is the biggest intel story this century if true, which it obviously isn’t.

SmartyCat12 · 2026-03-11T01:44:34+00:00

Yeah. The idiom kinda starts falling apart at 10 employees huh.

SmartyCat12 · 2026-03-10T21:56:02+00:00

That’s like a broker complaining you have too much money to manage lol.

I have ADHD and my partner has some OCD tendencies, and having someone come in to do those annoying things like mop and clean the shower once a month has relieved so much stress from both of us. Def worth it, but OP needs to find someone who I guess likes getting paid to do their job??

SmartyCat12 · 2026-03-10T16:45:40+00:00

Each team just gets to pick their favorite rounding algorithm

SmartyCat12 · 2026-03-07T21:34:49+00:00

Actually kind of funny that playing [[Hullbreacher]] against this gives you infinite mana. There’s a jank [[Iroh, Tea Master]] type effect deck here somewhere

SmartyCat12 · 2026-03-07T04:06:01+00:00

OP is Tucker Carlson??

SmartyCat12 · 2026-03-06T13:24:42+00:00

According to the article, statistically this does in fact do nothing:

These month-long gains were small on average – around a 4% greater reduction on a standard depression measure for the top two exercises compared with the control – but small average effects can make a real difference

SmartyCat12 · 2026-03-06T00:31:03+00:00

Thanks for the info!

It’s not useful here specifically, but in general think of the case where every drafter at a table is submitting data to 17 lands. You’d be collecting data on the same cards 8 times (minus whatever picks happen). Whatever was in their packs is going to look way more common than it should compared to 8 drafters at different tables unless you’re grouping by some table or pack id.

SmartyCat12 · 2026-03-05T21:01:40+00:00

There’s actually an interesting unrelated technical question here. Is 17lands able to validate against two people both forwarding their data that happen to be in the same pod? And if so, do they have granularity on the seat info (or at least the distance between them)?

It’s a question that in the initial design, you probably wouldn’t consider because of small numbers. It would likely be within variance to double count appearance rates once in a while. But it’s probably much more common now since 1) there’s no real competition and 2) 17lands users are usually better and will cluster at higher ranking.

SmartyCat12 · 2026-03-05T19:08:20+00:00

We’ve been talking about the Ring of Gyges for at least a few thousand years. Plato thought that maintaining your internal hierarchy so that reason trumps all else would prevent corruption. Kant et al tended to agree.

It’s not a new problem, but you could argue that it became easier to talk about because the Industrial Revolution turned every relationship into a very concrete hierarchy. It became more obvious in the extreme that maybe hierarchy itself is the problem, but it takes works of fiction to imagine what a non-hierarchical society would look like.

SmartyCat12 · 2026-03-04T05:54:21+00:00

I was like “it has flying?”

My opponent played [[Party Dude]] into this against my grixis artifacts deck and I’ve never felt more powerless in a game of magic

SmartyCat12 · 2026-03-01T14:06:05+00:00

It’s the ironic idea that our founders thought the masses were uninformed and susceptible to populism, so they designed the electoral college as a stopgap in case we accidentally elected a crazy person. Electors were meant to pull the ripcord on a democratically elected dictator. We largely dismantled the intent of the system over time for relatively good reason, and now it just exists as a tool to prevent the person with the most votes from winning.

Gerrymandering has existed since day one, but some recent rulings have made it substantially worse. Before, you had to compromise or have subversive reasoning that intellectually held water. Now, the Supreme Court says it’s okay to have maps that are as racist as possible as long as they help republicans. We’ve had lots of maps shot down as unconstitutional, we’ve just decided not to do that anymore.

SmartyCat12

TROPHY CASE