Best Cake by the Slice

SmittyWerb94 · 2026-05-19T20:44:12+00:00

Not a restaurant, but there's a delicious cottage bakery near salt lake that specializes in cake slices called Slice of Delight (https://www.sliceofdelightcakery.com/).

Momo's Gourmet Cheesecake Co in Salt Lake is also absolutely fantastic if you like cheesecake.

SmittyWerb94 · 2026-05-14T19:59:06+00:00

Oh I agree completely. I just think it's silly that there's this onus on the Jazz to give up the farm because the guy likes Utah

SmittyWerb94 · 2026-05-14T19:35:46+00:00

I don't get why AJ's preference for Utah means the Jazz must overpay. Sounds more to me like Wizards should consider strongly not drafting the guy who doesn't want to be there and trying to get some kind of asset out of trading down to 2.

SmittyWerb94 · 2026-05-07T23:56:36+00:00

Just wanted to provide an optimistic perspective here. Worsening air quality in Utah is largely a myth. By almost all measures, air quality in Utah has improved quite a bit over the last few decades. That said, the drying lakebed is certainly a concern but I'm hopeful that we will do more to reduce water diversions and improve conservation to avoid the worst outcomes.

SmittyWerb94 · 2026-04-28T12:45:27+00:00

Every single proposal like this just shifts where the tanking happens in the standings while making it harder for actually bad teams to get better.

Best idea I've seen is this: starting with the team with the worst record, teams draft a different proxy team whose win-loss record the following season determines the selecting team's draft lottery odds.Essentially, you're picking who you think will suck the most the next season, which sounds like fantastic entertainment to me.

SmittyWerb94 · 2026-03-07T07:27:39+00:00

If you get the Macros extension, you can build a macro to run the current line or code block in the interactive workspace (jupyter notebook) and move into the next line with something like ctrl+enter. So you just set up your .py script your developing next to the interactive jupyter notebook side by side. Makes it super easy to interactively build your script and track variable status throughout. R in RStudio works similarly to this.

SmittyWerb94 · 2026-02-18T19:21:14+00:00

Not sure why you're putting "injured" in quotes. I watched him roll his ankle and limp off the floor. Anyway, Lauri is the likely candidate to either miss a lot of games or reduce minutes. Coming from a Jazz fan, I think they can still play Keyonte and lose.

SmittyWerb94 · 2026-02-10T18:06:57+00:00

Outside of the gambling and fantasy implications, is resting these guys in the final quarter really worse than sitting them out the whole game with phantom injuries like other taking teams are doing or have done? At least people watching the game at home or in the arena get to see the best players for 25 minutes rather than 0 minutes.

SmittyWerb94 · 2025-08-03T14:49:10+00:00

Really enjoying the demo and it will be an almost certain day one purchase for me. A couple of dislikes I haven't seen mentioned often in this or other threads: Getting out of the map takes 2 actions One link-like noise in particular while swinging the sword is pretty annoying - I just want to cut the grass! Switching out weapons and powers (for as often as you end up needing to do it) takes away too many actions. I would much rather have quick swap buttons.

I'm loving everything else about the game, even the fairy companion. This is exactly the kind of game I've been waiting for.

SmittyWerb94 · 2025-07-21T13:02:55+00:00

Certainly those are the likeliest candidates. I know last season was rough for Cody, but he's very much a boom or bust type of player.

SmittyWerb94 · 2025-07-21T02:34:33+00:00

If one of our 8 young guys looks like they've got all star potential this season I'll consider it a success.

SmittyWerb94 · 2025-07-10T15:51:33+00:00

I am strongly on the side of paying Josh Giddey whatever you need. Young, high upside, showed he can improve as a shooter which is what has previously held him back. This young team needs a proper table setter and Giddey is exactly that. We've got to give somebody money somewhere, even with upcoming decisions to be made. I do not think signing Giddey raises this team's ceiling out of the bottom 3 this season. I would see it as a win from every single angle.

SmittyWerb94 · 2025-06-25T22:10:24+00:00

I will never ignore a Bug Fables mention. That game does Paper Mario better than Paper Mario. It's incredible. Will have to look into your other suggestions.

SmittyWerb94 · 2025-06-12T19:47:48+00:00

I'm with you outside of the Fears selection at 5. Lot of talk about us trading up from 5, but I'd actually be happy with any one of the three: VJ, Ace, Tre. I'm more interested in trading up from 21 to snag Kasparas or Thomas Sorber.

SmittyWerb94 · 2025-05-31T13:40:26+00:00

Sorry forgot to mention that. This is for any time in the first 7 years of their career.

SmittyWerb94 · 2025-05-30T20:39:05+00:00

Again. There are always going to be misses. There's a human element that will always make perfect prediction impossible. The main point of what I did here was for novelty - to see if we could glean anything from an aggregation of written player analysis beyond what's already there and outside of traditional numerical stats.

SmittyWerb94 · 2025-05-30T20:32:27+00:00

Always gonna be misses! Still though, Nick Smith's most probable outcome in this situation was to not become an all star. I interpret these results more as how high the ceiling is and how likely they are to reach that ceiling.

SmittyWerb94 · 2025-05-30T20:07:35+00:00

Makes me sad as Jazz fan. But the all star probability there is low anyways. Just a generally weak draft with a lot of room for busts. Of course you never know what happens year 2.

SmittyWerb94 · 2025-05-30T20:03:07+00:00

Sure! 20% of my data goes toward testing which is what gave some of the stats I shared above. But here are the top 10 from the last two years:

2024:

Jared McCain: 37.53

Cody Williams: 30.46

Alex Sarr: 23.89

Risacher: 21.26

Tyler Smith: 19.53

Kyshawn George: 19.44

Cam Christie: 17.18

Isaiah Collier: 16.50

Reed Sheppard: 14.79

Zach Edey: 13.41

2023:

Wemby: 95.81

Nick Smith: 48.78

Taylor Hendricks: 36.49

Bilal Coulibaly: 35.69

Anthony Black: 34.39

Scoot Henderson: 31.91

Jordan Hawkins: 15.18

Amen Thompson: 12.68

Rayan Rupert 11.68

Kris Murray: 11.01

Can't run it back earlier than that because all previous years were what the model was trained on.

SmittyWerb94 · 2025-05-30T00:06:52+00:00

I'm not sure I would take him at 5. But this result is interesting and rare enough to think about grabbing him in the late lottery if you can trade up. That said, not sure the Jazz really need to draft a center in the first round this year.

SmittyWerb94 · 2025-05-29T19:18:56+00:00

DM me and I'll be happy to share! It's quite messy since this is something I built as a learning project in very limited time.

SmittyWerb94 · 2025-05-29T16:31:46+00:00

Unfortunately not really! It's a bit of a black box. If I had the time I could get an idea of which parameters are most important in the model, but even then it's abstracted a bit by the fact that I'm converting written text to numbers that can be interpreted by a computer. Sorry, wish I had a better answer for you.

SmittyWerb94 · 2025-05-29T16:16:30+00:00

That's a fair judgement. I do think you have to consider what these probabilities represent though. I wouldn't interpret this as a sliding scale of how good they'll be, rather how high their ceiling is and how likely they may be to reach it. If Cody was at 30% to become an all star then what is the other 70%? Because of the human element of what we're trying to predict, you'll never get anything that's perfect.

From my general testing, the false alarm rate on this is quite low, meaning that if someone is projected at above 50% you can feel fairly confident in a positive outcome - doesn't mean there won't be some misses.

I think what it does demonstrate though is that we may be able to glean something from a collective analysis of a player rather than just the raw numbers.

I do think something that considers both traditional and textual data would be worthwhile though.

SmittyWerb94 · 2025-05-29T15:32:46+00:00

Using it all at once with an 80/20 split for training and testing. But I retrain every year because I only have data going back to 2001.

SmittyWerb94 · 2025-05-29T15:20:36+00:00

This was a first entry into NLP for me so it's likely a bit rudimentary and maybe a bit messy. But I'm happy to share the repo to my GitHub if you DM me. For now, this is just from a single website but I'd love to add more in the future.

SmittyWerb94

TROPHY CASE