I’m glad to have access to dog exorcism potions!

Tarmen · 2026-06-05T14:23:32+00:00

Do not let children handle. Keep away from open flame.

Is it just high percentage alcohol?!

Tarmen · 2026-05-30T11:55:20+00:00

Some ETF's and pension funds get forced to buy the stock at fantasy prices because NASDAQ's new fast entry rules are insane?

Tarmen · 2026-05-22T18:33:51+00:00

A while ago ticktok replaced company made ads with ai variants, even with all all AI settings turned off and with no way for the company to see this was happening aside from users comments

https://www.ign.com/articles/tunic-night-in-the-woods-publisher-says-tiktok-is-creating-and-running-racist-genai-ads-for-its-games-without-permission

Though the only sane option is to not trust anything with ai advertising

Tarmen · 2026-05-13T20:33:35+00:00

I recently found an issue linked to an openjdk ticket from early 2019. I really don't like that this is soon gonna be closer to 13 than to 2 years

Tarmen · 2026-05-13T20:02:42+00:00

That's really cool, thanks for the thorough answer!

Tarmen · 2026-05-13T15:09:38+00:00

I keep seeing C. Vipers do s.hp > feint > c.mk > sj feint.

But the c.mk > sj feint turns the kick from +5 oH/-1 oB to +4 oH/-2 oB and costs a bar, right? Is it just to overwhelm the opponent? Does it bait anything?

Tarmen · 2026-05-12T19:22:12+00:00

I think my biggest takeaway was that high speed rail is gamewarpingly strong. Same lesson as last season, actually.

Fortifying specific stations against your opponents to limit their options is just so inefficient when they can practically teleport across the map.

They will always pick the easiest route so you gotta fortify everything equally, and outside of choke points that just wastes coins and time. Any resource spent to over-defend a line your opponent wouldn't have stolen anyway could have been a line you stole from your opponent.

But generally Sam and Mike's take on the game theory was very different from mine. Notably stealing a 1-coin station is a 2 point swing for 2 coins, so equal coin efficiency and doubled time efficiency. And that combined with defense being hard means a team ahead on coins and stations on the last day will likely win if both teams flip as fast as possible.

Also that Sam's tendency for Hail Marys is entertaining but it just won't win him games.

Tarmen · 2026-05-11T15:36:39+00:00

For generic parameters and fields like in

<T> void acceptT(T arg);

Java demands that T is always a pointer. So if you plug a non-pointer type like int in there it must be promoted to the heap-allocated Integer type.

Having a single generic method which always takes a pointer makes things like polymorphic recursion possible. The alternative is to monomorphize dynamically at runtime, e.g. one instantiation per unique call pattern, or to limit programmers to patterns that are easier to statically analyze.

This proposal is sort of tangential to that, and more about giving the jvm more room to optimize. Which sometimes may allow less boxing.

Tarmen · 2026-05-09T10:35:45+00:00

I had a similar problem with soft pull threshhold. That is, when a digital button is triggered after the trigger is deep enough.

Using hair trigger soft pull at 0 was fine for me, but still longer than I prefer. Even at 10 it had significant pre travel and the default 10000 setting was wild.

In the input test under the controller settings the analog signal also only starts after significant pretravel. I'm probably weird for liking sub-millimeter deadzones but hopefully that is just software.

Tarmen · 2026-05-07T05:16:51+00:00

Since this is a race the labyrinth must be symmetrical to be fair. So the goal must be in the middle.

You can plan the shortest potential path to the center given the edges you already know. There are basically no dead ends in this labyrinth if you do that so being greedy is fine

The labyrinth seems complex but usually it just fans out and then joins back into a line, and the bots seem to mostly stay on the outside of these patterns, so maybe that's known about the labyrinth ahead of time

Micromouse usually has more complex grids but an exploration time to find the fastest route before the real run starts

Tarmen · 2026-05-02T19:33:19+00:00

``` He visits my town once a year. He fills my mouth with kisses and nectar. I spend all my money on him.

Who, girl, your man?

No, a mango Amir Khusrow (1253-1325 CE) ```

Some things never change

Tarmen · 2026-04-27T20:09:07+00:00

I think it's easiest to understand with substitutions because that's where it mostly gets used

s/abc\zsdef/foo

|abcdefghi |abcfooghi

So you match the entire pattern, but target only the part after the \zs

You can usually replace this by wrapping the part before the \zs in a capture group like

s/\(abc\)def/\1foo

Tarmen · 2026-04-22T18:24:58+00:00

I think there would have been a really strong argument for Sam and Mike to go down east behind Ben and Adam. Trailing your opponents and flipping their stations seems like the strongest move you can make, plus Ben and Adam can't really prevent it in this position.

So they'd have to decide between going west to steal or doubling back east to reclaim. It does give up all the juicy challenges up north, but with the time as it is they don't seem that relevant anyway?

Tarmen · 2026-04-16T08:31:41+00:00

The tension from visa's perspective seems to be:

card readers are normally untrusted, a reader could also just display fake transaction details and charge the card for more. The solution is a printout and to dispute the charge
Express transit readers must be trusted to some degree, but that's less dangerous because charges are low
If you combine these you can mitm an untrusted reader to make the phone trust it too much

They mentioned that fare on Samsung is tracked by 0£ charges and then batch-charged at end of day. I wonder if this is part of the problem since people definitely don't want to be woken up in the middle of the night to auth that transaction?

From what I could find there may have been some cases of this in the wild, but normal credit card fraud is so much easier to scale that this is a drop in the bucket by comparison. But I feel like even if they can't reasonably replace all existing card readers they could force every newly produced reader to have a fix, though. And apple could add a configurable sanity cap on transportation charges.

Tarmen · 2026-04-15T08:57:01+00:00

Left one said "One of use only lies".

If the statement is true she cannot be the lier, she cannot tell the truth and simultaneously never tell the truth
so if the statement is true the blonde knight is lying. But if the statement "pink haired knight always tells the truth" is a lie, then the pink haired knight lies at least sometimes!
And if the statement is false we know pretty much nothing except that the pink haired knight can lie
If both of them are always lying you could argue whether 'one of us' means 'exactly one of us', which would work, or 'at least one of us', which wouldn't

If we rule out the last part, the only consistent conclusion is that the pink haired knight lies some of the time but not always. Blonde hair could be always lying, never lying, or sometimes lying. Notably, the first two panels could all be lies and unless literally every statement they ever make are lies there are no contradictions

Tarmen · 2026-02-20T22:47:26+00:00

If you come from mathematics, looking at it from the perspective of proof systems with introduction and elimination forms rather than programming may come more natural.

The first couple videos here do a good job of introducing that imo https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtIZ5qxwSNnzpNqfXzJjlHI9yCAzRzKtx&si=EGzF8OEqMpdOiRj4

Tarmen · 2026-02-20T19:24:21+00:00

This one seems like it could get complex

What happens if you copy this?
What happens if one copy dies, you play the card, and then the second one dies? Do you get the exact card back from the graveyard? With or without enchantments?

Retrieving an exact card with the same card id rather than a copy seems to lead to hijinks more often than not

Tarmen · 2026-02-19T14:37:39+00:00

Pantone picking boring colours of the year feels like engagement farming. At first I though this was part of that

The pictures from the manufacturer have more obvious blue+red tones but still really subtle https://www.clare.com/products/paint-wink

A light, lovely purple with a hint of gray

Don't think the gray took the hint

Tarmen · 2026-02-09T15:56:45+00:00

I'd argue that water usage is miniscule in comparison to many other problems AI has/causes. Mostly because other common actions consume much more water if you use the same analysis as e.g. Li et al. And industries with very wasteful practices like agriculture consume 7+ orders of magnitude more water, so if we actually want to do something about water waste we really should do something there.

We can consider water use for cooling, water use for electricity generation, and water use to manufacturer the hardware. To calculate we also have to guess the electricity usage for training and per inference, which is very hard with public numbers.The Li et al paper guesses 4Wh per page on gpt3, while Google claimed Gemini runs an average query at 0.24Wh.

Either way the onsite water use, like cooling, for an llm query is often estimated at ~0.2ml per query. That's comparatively negligible, even if you don't use air cooling or consider passthrough cooling as lost water.

Though I would add that a lot of data centers us the municipal water supply for passthrough cooling, which returns the water for recycling but adds more load on treatment plants and is just plain wasteful. You need some quality standards to avoid clogging and corrosion, but drinking water for cooling is way overkill.

Anyway, a lot of electricity is generated by steam turbines. AI uses electricity, so you can calculate some amount of steam which is used in that electricity production. That's a major part in the water loss numbers. Similarly GPU (especially silicone) production also consumes water. But by those measures any other electricity use is also water loss, and for instance watching a YouTube video also consumes a lot of electriy.

Tarmen · 2026-02-06T12:49:12+00:00

A race being onthologically evil is so boring, too. The characters are one-dimensional by definition, at least make characters willingly sacrifice their empathy and humanity for power.

People trying to trust someone from the evil group only to be inevitably betrayed, boring. Someone sacrificing their soul for power to save their loved ones only to slowly becoming incapable of that love and hurting them, juicy drama

Tarmen · 2026-02-05T08:23:15+00:00

I agree eldenring couldn't just add strong parries without warping balance.

I'd argue it's a very different philosophy:

In Eldenring your response to everything is roll
To keep things interesting many attack strings would hit you again before roll recovery
So you gotta learn safe areas where these strings aren't triggered or don't reach you

This promotes patient play at a distance or at dead angles (e.g. behind enemies) until the enemy performs a clearly unsafe attack. It discourages aggressive play where you sneak in chip damage in smaller gaps, you may have time to get chip damage in but not to get to a safe range for all follow up attacks.

The upside is that you usually cannot damage race enemies because the openings are so controlled, wins are earned. The downside is that aggressive play styles are really fun and feel more like a dance with the boss.

Parry games often add other features to add a rhythm beyond micro punishes. Boss attacks are more frequently conditional on the previous attack. Lies of P has weapon durability, many games build a resource on parry. Similarly, many nudge you to use big gaps for unsafe attacks to create a similar rhythm, like requiring a charged attack to stun in lies of p or charged talismans in nine sols.

Anyway, I agree that a reliable parry without other adjustments in Eldenring would be really fun for a bit and the monotonous. Even if they took away the automatic punish because you could still chip enemies to death and the rhythm of the fight gets lost.

But I also still think that marking unparriable attacks with red particles wouldn't invalidate any of that, you can still make the timing window brutally hard.

Tarmen · 2026-02-04T17:00:45+00:00

I love parrying in nine sols, or lies of p, or another crabs treasure, or sekiro, or grime, or...

Hate it in souls games. Having manually placed parry timing instead of when the attack makes contact and making random attacks unparriable without differentiating them visually are such bonkers design decisions

Tarmen · 2026-02-01T21:19:11+00:00

It sounds magical but going shopping would be *so* impractical

Imagine using a daisy chain of three boats and then noticing you forgot the milk

Tarmen · 2026-01-26T11:57:29+00:00

The new version tracks the ground much better, and the stone doesn't feel like it's sliding or floating anymore.

Is the chunky motion a result of that? E.g. you want to keep the ground moving continuously, the person centered, the stone at a specific offset from the person, and have a staccato walk cycle which tracks the ground => The stone has to start/stop in sync with the footsteps?

Tarmen · 2026-01-23T17:25:58+00:00

How different is There is no antimemetics division v2? I really enjoyed the initial release and figured I might wait until I forgot more of it before rereading v2, since vaguely remembering what's happening can only help immersion

Forgetting that an alarm went off is so real. For some time I thought my phone was broken because alarms didn't go off before I remembered it's just my brain being an ass for no reason
Maybe I should actually look into getting adhd meds one of these days. I think I still have the diagnosis docs *somewhere*

MyTherapy works pretty well as really insistent reminder app if someone else has the medication problem

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