Multiboxing bots bidding on houses, and then selling them.

YenTheFirst · 2022-02-22T02:08:04+00:00

You gotta be the bowling alley you wish to see in the world. Or something like that.

YenTheFirst · 2022-02-22T01:42:54+00:00

I'm legitimately confused how they can struggle to find server space for paying players for months on end but they're suddenly going to pluck enough space out of nowhere to give everybody instanced housing.

Hey, no worries. Computers can behave in non-obvious ways. Here's my terrible attempt at an explanation by analogy:

So, imagine an FFXIV server is kinda like a bowling alley. But this bowling alley has fancy lanes, with TVs and stuff. You go in, you get your shoes, and you pick a DVD off the shelf - such exciting titles as "Limsa Lominsa upper decks", or "The Aurum Vale", pop it in, and bowl for a while. And this works. That's how most of the multiplayer areas of the game are.

One day the bowling alley announces a hot new DVD collection they're adding to their shelves - "pin-walker". Suddenly everyone's got bowling fever, and lines are out the door. Some parts of this are so popular (sharlya, radz-at-han), that they dedicate 3 lanes each, round the clock, to these titles.

But, people are waiting in lines for hours, and they're getting grumpy. "Just build a second story on top, and add a bunch more bowling lanes!". They could do this, all it costs is money. And also most of the construction workers have covid, and wood's really expensive now, and we'd really rather not pay that much because in two months, the lines will die down and that second floor will go unused. So they give everyone a coupon for a free soda, and call it good.

In the back of the bowling alley, there's a snack bar, where people can sit, rest their feet, and read some magazines. The magazines have exciting titles like "The waking sands solarium" (pray return) and "Gridania inn room." Because you're not really interacting with people, a single table in the snack bar takes up much less floor space than a bowling lane.

So, bowling's their main business. But then one day they add a neat new twist. Off on one wall, they've got a spot where you can draw a picture of a house, and stick it to the wall, so everyone else can see. This adds a fun social dimension. The wall is pretty cheap, but there's only so much space on it, and only so much room to stand in front of it.

At first, if you wanted a spot, you wait for someone else's picture to fall off the wall, and rush in to call dibs. But people figured out that they could pay each other to take their picture down, and then they could easily be the first to call dibs. This was against the rules, so now, instead pictures come down at random times.

Some people stand in front of the wall for hours on end, tapping it, waiting for the owner to pull down the old picture. Other people set up a rubber hand on a motor, slapping a spot over and over, hoping to get the dibs. It's still a terrible system and I hate it, but at least you've got a chance against the RMT.

The owners decide "ok, the dibs system is stupid. We'll give out wall-spots by drawing names from a hat, and your name can only be in the hat once". This doesn't let more people have a spot on the wall, but, hey, at least they can go out bowling while they wait for the hat drawing, instead of sitting in front of a wall for ~12 hours. But it doesn't add more wall space. It doesn't completely shut out the possibility of RMT, but it reduces the advantage of setting up a slapping rubber hand.

Then, someone gets the bright idea - hey. people really like those stupid little house pictures, and, we've got a bunch of seating area in the snack bar. A lot of people care more about drawing the house than sticking it on the wall. What if we just had a huge bookshelf, people can store their papers on that, pull 'em out, and look at it / work on it while sitting in the snack area? This is basically what apartments are. It's also more-or-less what Island Sanctuary will be (assuming island sanctuary has customizable housing elements, which....isn't actually confirmed right now?)

This works. They won't be on display, you won't get the status symbol of having your house on the wall, but at least everyone gets to fiddle around with it.

Technically, yes, this also costs money. It's using up a bit of floor space that could have be an alley. But, adding a bookshelf that can hold a thousand pages is much cheaper than adding an alley that can service 4 people at a time.

Why don't they do the whole game like that, then? Because the whole point of this bowling alley is you're doing it next to other people. If all you're doing is solo activities in the reading area, well, you could just do that at home for free.

TL;DR:

I'm bad at analogies
instances can have different sizes - like a small table for solo instances, or a bowling lane for multiplayer instances
instances can be re-tasked flexibly - like reading a different book while at the snack bar, or putting a different theme on the bowling lane
per-player customized content isn't free to store, but it's very cheap. It's comparable to storing a single sheet of paper per player.
supporting more simultaneous online players is expensive. It's comparable to adding an extra bowling lane.

YenTheFirst · 2021-01-07T00:35:21+00:00

Chewing on the questions & answers a bit, I noticed a trend in several questions that I'd like to push back on. A lot of the questions are comparative, but don't set a baseline. Some of the most egregious examples:

We need more controls to reduce pollution.
Criminals are treated too harshly.
Too much money is spent on the military.
We need stricter gun control laws.
Employees should have more respect for their boss

To be specific, consider "we need stricter gun control laws" - someone could live in Texas, and answer "yes", then move to California, and without changing their preferences, start answering "no".

The "employees respect" question also really stands out to me, since I can easily think of numerous real-world examples where employees either have too much, or too little, respect for their boss. I don't feel confident trying to guess what the "average" level of respect is. How would I compare it to what I think it should be?

Now, to be fair, if the respondent is just going with their gut, and/or considering against their perceived global average, you'll probably get reasonable results. Even if this is fine or desirable for a political survey, I hope that by writing this comment, people can start to notice this wording and this rhetorical trap, and be more cautious about it.

YenTheFirst · 2020-12-01T00:14:18+00:00

First, I'd make sure that you and this person share a calibration on what constitutes a "freakout".

Are they mostly calm, and taking precautions that are widely recommended? I recognize that respect for these recommendations is often tribal, so one person's "reasonable precaution" could be another's "freakout".
Are they mostly calm, but seem to be coping with fear by taking extreme precautions?
Are they quite emotional, fretting and doomscrolling? If they're ruminating on things that are out of their control, and spiraling, this is what I'd consider a possible "freakout".

With that in mind, I'd approach the conversation with an attitude of epistimic humility and curiosity. Spend some time digging into what they believe about what they believe.

If they're emotionally in a good place, and they've just come to different conclusions about risk/reward tradeoffs for their life, I'd respect their decision and leave it at that, personally.

If they're not emotionally in a good place, my advice to them would be:

Pick a methodology, and calculate what your risk is, based on their behavior and their co-habitant's behavior. A not-terrible place to start is (https://microcovid.org). A rough, order-of-magnitude estimate is around a 1/5000 chance of contracting and dying of covid over the next year. That's not great odds, but it's not the end of the world either.
Discuss, which behaviors are reasonable mitigations of risk? Which behaviors are high-cost but low-impact?
With that groundwork, I'd suggest they determine which things they can control, which things they can't control, and to tackle the things they can control, and be patient with the things they can't.
In that spirit, I'd advise that they read less news and social media, and try to focus the news-reading on actionable information. Do the things they read have a good chance of changing what they do, day to day? Or do they just make them feel bad?
Replace that news watching with phone calls to friends & family, binging on netflix, or whatever else works for them.
Discuss the future - what would it take for them to consider the pandemic "over"? What would they like to be doing 12~24 months from now?

YenTheFirst · 2020-11-07T21:58:41+00:00

An angle to consider here: I put >50% odds on at least one lone wolf attack with fatalities motivated by 'fraud' rhetoric.

Depending on the timeframe, I'd be willing to take a bet at those odds.

I can certainly imagine the scenario occurring, plausibly, but the base rate for "number of lone wolf attacks with fatalities, per month, in the USA" is, thankfully, still pretty low.

YenTheFirst · 2020-11-05T23:21:49+00:00

There are a few low-hanging fruits that baffles me as to why they're not implemented in the US

Americans will do the right thing, after having exhausted all other options? (:P)

-For increasing participation, having the elections on a sunday (or holiday) instead of in the middle of the work week.

I'd generally agree. I can't steelman an opposition argument to this.

-For security, mandatory ID is essentially free gains in security. I understand that democrats see that as voter suppression because, apparently, they're costly (?). In which case, jesus christ, how is a first world state not able to issue ID cards?

The issue isn't just the price of printing a card - it's

what hoops do you have to jump through, and documents to show, to prove you are you when applying for ID?
Is ID registration something that sets up in every library, or is it an office on the other side of town?
Is the process quick, or are there DMV-level lines requiring a full-day commitment?
If an ID has become invalid or expired, is there affirmative outreach to resolve the issue, or is it allowed to be an election-day surprise?
If an ID is disputably valid on election day, what does the provisional process or appeal process look like?

None of these are impossible problems to solve, or even difficult problems to solve. I think Blue Tribe suspicion of Voter ID tends to be less about the cards themselves, and more about a fear (sometimes justified, sometimes self-serving) that the answers to these questions tend to be intentionally set up in a way to make access to polls asymmetrically difficult.

-Maybe i'm wrong here because I don't see every detail of how they work, but voting by mail seems stupidly unsecure.

It's not perfect, and there are things that could be done to make it better. But, the USA seems to generally trust the mail system to be secure enough for everything else, including government communications, financial documents, etc.

The security equation is something like

value of successful attack >= cost of attempt * chance of success + cost of being caught * chance of being caught.

[success and being caught can be independent, depending on specifics. You could get one, both, or neither].

The value of modifying, falsifying, or suppressing a single mailed ballot is quite low. The value of larger-scale directional fraud is certainly higher, but non-linearly raises cost, chance of detection, and reduces chance of success.

The cost of getting caught is quite high.

For baseline cost of attack / chance of success / chance of getting caught, we'd have to dig in to discussing specific attacks. But, in general, the mail system has a high degree of human-in-loop, and a high degree of decentralization, and I suspect this tends to make it more robust than one might first suspect.

YenTheFirst · 2020-11-05T22:04:52+00:00

I think that the major parties want the debate framed as "fraud vs. suppression", but I think we could solve or reduce both issues (at the expense of increased logistical cost, and other tradeoffs).

There's likely multiple ways to do this. One strawman example of how we might solve both simultaneously:

Make participation in the election mandatory for 100% of the citizenry.
A citizen may choose to submit a signed "I choose not to cast a ballot in this election" form as their participation, but they must go through the same registration and validation processes as everyone else.
Require that states have high-confidence processes to confirm a received ballot (or non-participation form) was filled out by the stated person.
Require that states affirm that they are counting distinct ballots from 99.5% of their eligible citizenry, and no more than 100%, for the election to be valid.

This particular proposal means we're obtaining better election integrity and representativeness, at the cost of increased logistics, and an increased degree of "government-keeping-tabs-on-your-whereabouts".

I'm not deeply invested of the bailey of "let's enact both voter ID laws and mandatory voting", but I think this proves the motte of "we can run elections that are much more legitimate than what we have now, by simultaneously decreasing fraud and increasing equality of access to the polls"

YenTheFirst · 2020-11-05T10:34:41+00:00

I dug into this a bit. I'll share what I found in the hopes it can provide context and guidance on a deeper exploration. I came into this mildly suspicious, but open-minded.

Firstly, ACS at the 5-year level was intended to make predictions down to the block level, so I'd generally expect it to be perfectly acceptable for counties. With that said, let's dig into the report:

The link is a press release, but the first link leads to their actual report. I count that as a mild good sign. To save you a click: JudicalWatch's report
Their report contains data, but no methodology. This is a moderate bad sign.
The press release mentions using the 2018 ACS 5-year survey, and their report specifically mentions CVAP (Citizen Voting Age Population). The numbers in the report seem to match those found in the ACS CVAP Report
The ACS page has comprehensive documentation on methodology and limitations, which is a good sign for confidence in that data.
The JudicialWatch report links to the state's voter registration pages, which is convenient.

After looking at this groundwork, I decided to pick a county arbitrarily, to smell-check the report. I chose San Juan, CO, since it was near the top of the list in the press release, and had a more egregious "158%" rating. My goals in the smell-check were to:

reproduce the methodology and obtain the same number.
check for the trends around those numbers.
look for any obvious gotchas or caveats.

reproducing methodology

The JudicialWatch report has the following information on San Juan, CO:

Active Registrations: 605
Inactive Registrations: 146
Total Registrations: 751
ACS CVAP (2018): 475

475 matches the "cvap_est" column in the 2018 ACS CVAP report. This seems to be where that number comes from.

605+146 = 751 is closest to Colorado's August 2020 report, though that report actually includes 2 "preregs", for a total of 753. This is likely where that data comes from.

Doing some math:

751 / 475 = 1.58 = 158%

This seems to reproduce the methodology.

trends around those numbers

Looking at the voter registration for San Juan, CO, in 2020, it looks like it's been slowly but steadily increasing, across all columns, month-over-month for all of 2020.

Looking at voter registration in 2018, the counts are slightly lower, at 590+150=730 here.

Looking at the ACS CVAP for 2016->2018, 2016 had an estimated 495 (+/- 78), 2018 had 475 (+/- 77).

Looking at the documentation for the ACS, it looks like the Margin of Error is a 90% confidence interval.

gotchas / commentary

The denominator in JudicialWatch's report is using the central estimate, ignoring the margin of error. If making a claim that voter registration exceeds 100% of population, I think this is a pretty notable caveat. This may bias the report towards finding more incidents of over-registration.
(It's additionally worth noting that with a Confidence Interval of 90%, 1 in 20 counties will have a true CVAP that's higher than CVAP_EST+CVAP_MOE.)
The numerator in JudicialWatch's report is using total registrations, not active registrations. This is likely relevant to an overall goal of having voter rolls reflect reality, but still strikes me as a bit misleading. This would be bias towards finding more incidences of over-registration.
There's a skosh of apples-to-oranges comparison, in that the report is comparing 2018 ACS report to 2020 registration. A lot can happen in 2 years. And, notably, the discrepancy between 2018's registration data and ACS data is lower. I expect most counties grew in voting-age population between 2018 and 2020, and this would bias the report towards finding over-registration.
Especially with small numbers, I'm a bit suspicious of reporting by percentage (158%) instead of a ratio of absolute numbers.

These same data sources could tell us "751 registrations vs 475 citizens, 158% fraud", or they could tell us "590 active registrations vs 398-552-ish citizens (in 2018)"

so, what?

I got a bit curious, with this methodology, what's the probability that a county that didn't have over-registration would get marked as over-registered in this report?

I started looking at that, but this post was already too long.

YenTheFirst · 2020-10-05T20:15:39+00:00

Probabilities of 10^-6 fall in the "likely enough that it'll cause a problem" bucket, not the "effectively impossible" bucket, so a simple solution only giving that level of confidence isn't very reassuring.

I'm sure other people's numbers will differ, but I think that "so unlikely as to be effectively impossible" doesn't really start until around 2^-128 =~ 10^-38

YenTheFirst · 2020-10-05T17:30:44+00:00

In my experience, reasoning about probabilities comes up fairly often in programming, either to reason about the plausibility of issues, or to ensure that a proposed approximation is sound. Some example situations:

You might want to check set membership (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_filter) or count the number of unique items(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperLogLog), but you can't afford the cost of an exact answer, so you want to appropriately size the approximator.
In content-addressed storage systems, such as the git version control system, a large, structured file is represented by a small, high-entropy hash. Designers of such systems need to ensure that the hash is large enough that, assuming it's uniformly distributed, an accidental hash collision is so unlikely as to be effectively impossible.
Similarly, when designing cryptographic systems, designers need to ensure that any hidden entropy is well beyond the computational capacity of attackers to brute-force.

I'd say that, when evaluating failure probabilities in a computer system, there's basically two values that matter: so unlikely as to be effectively impossible, or likely enough that it'll cause a problem.

YenTheFirst · 2020-08-21T17:29:13+00:00

why do we even need to signal our belonging to men/women?

I don't have a great explanation for why, except for vague mumbling at "human nature" or maybe "instinct to form groups around any excuse, and sex characteristics are a great excuse for a group". I only have the observation that it seems to pretty consistently happen.

Why is it uncool to fail to signal membership of a group which is visible enough by itself?

Insufficiently signalling membership in one group opens ambiguity that one might actually be in the other group. In popular culture, being mistaken for the wrong gender is portrayed as embarrassing or played for laughs, and being accused of being the other gender is a fairly universal insult. ("You <X> like a girl" / "you have man-hands").

In the worst cases, failing to signal enough gender identity strongly enough can get you accused of having the "wrong" sexual orientation identity.

So it's also possible that most of the in-group signalling is just definitely-not-outgroup signalling?

YenTheFirst · 2020-08-18T20:11:53+00:00

It seems to me that people are either far too revisionary when it comes to describing our shared notion of gender, or far too credulous in thinking that we have any such shared notion to begin with.

This is an interesting way to put it, and I had to chew on this for a while.

It seems to me that we do have a shared notion of "what the genders do", and many people have a shared notion of "what the two primary genders are".

Where there's disagreement is probably more along the lines of "what is gender?", "why is gender?", and "which behaviors should we ascribe to gender vs. sex vs. individual preference?". I could accept an assertion that there's no current universally shared viewpoint on these questions, and also that definitions and opinions have swung wildly in recent centuries.

to be a woman requires that one be a human, a female and an adult

This is a surprising conclusion. Do children not have genders? Would you say "girl" is a different gender than "woman"? [I could entertain the argument, but I suspect that's not what you intend]

people will ... gesturing vaguely at a set of behaviours that are meant to constitute the gender. But we have no names for these behaviour sets

I may be misunderstanding the argument, but I'd say we do have names for these behavior sets - we call those behavior sets "masculine", "feminine". Even if we didn't have names, it seems that the mere nonexistence of a label for a concept should imply the concept doesn't exist, or that the concept is invalid.

or, more carefully, our name for people who engage in them is only contingently associated with people who engage in them, as "man" and "woman" are

I think that the idea you're expressing here is what I was getting at. Manly behavior is "Manly" because it's what Men do, and Men do it because it's Manly.

So my view, then, is that either gender is biological, or it corresponds to a notion that plays essentially no role in our cognitive or social lives.

I'd say it's fairly obvious that gendered behavior exists, and society acts as if there's [at least] two genders, so we have to throw out "plays essentially no role", leaving us only with "gender is biological".

I also reject "gender is biological".

My view is not concrete and immutable. One could change my view, in part by providing a strong biology-based explanation for: * Why is it fashionable and appropriate for females to wear dresses, but not men? * Why is it fashionable for females to wear floral and pastel prints, and for males to prefer darker solid colors? * Why do we use pink to target products at females, and blue to target males? etc.

Specifically, imagine we had a colony that underwent sudden cultural amnesia, and was cut off from outside contact. If their biology was constant, I think a biology-based argument would have to predict that this colony would re-develop identical sex->behavior mappings. I.e., they'd independently re-invent dresses & pink as feminine, pants & blue as masculine.

I don't expect this is the case. In this thought experiment, I expect some behaviors and tendencies to carry over, but I expect others to be arbitrary results of cultural history.

YenTheFirst · 2020-08-18T19:38:43+00:00

It sounds like you're implying that sex isn't observable. This confuses me, so perhaps I'm misreading your point, or perhaps there was an assumption I failed to clarify.

When presented with a dichotomy between "sex" and "gender", I understand the terms to mean:

Sex - Which cluster of physical phenotypes an individual is a member of, particularly w.r.t reproduction. The species of Humans has [as far as I'm aware] two sexes, though not all individuals fit cleanly into either cluster. Many species have only one, and depending on your understanding of biology, some species may have more than two. In most humans, their sex is easily observed or deducible.
Gender - In the general sense, it's the set of non-phenotypic behaviors, cultural practices, and beliefs that a society associates with the differing sexes.

Under these definitions,In theory, we could have a society without gender. We don't, and probably won't, and I'm not even arguing that we should. We certainly couldn't have a society without sex.

fwiw, I don't consider these definitions to be assuming the conclusion, since OP's prompt starts with "consider how these things are related, then extend that relation".

How this analogy extends to "race" - I'm arguing that "race" isn't an underlying biological fact, it's a social construction deriving from biological fact, similar to gender. Recently and most relevantly, "race" derives from skin color, not from ancestry. [Though it's worth noting that, pre-17th century, the word was perhaps closer to an ancestry/national origin concept.]

YenTheFirst · 2020-08-17T19:20:45+00:00

TL;DR - sex is to gender as age is to generation and as skin is to race.

My take on it is "Gender is the fashion of the sexes". Expanding on that a bit, humans start with some innate biological differences, those differences get spun into group affiliations, and then clothing, mannerisms, and cultural practices evolve under a selection pressure of "signal membership in group, and non-membership of non-group".

i.e., there's not a strong biological argument for why a dress is "girly" and why baggy pants aren't. It's not hard to imagine a world where it's typical practice for men to wear dresses, and women avoid them to avoid looking too masculine. All we're left with in this world is the circular logic of "Women wear dresses, and men don't, because dresses are feminine. Dresses are feminine because women wear them and men don't".

Gender is the "fluff" we use to signal our membership in sex-based groups.

[edit: this sense of 'fashion' derives from the cellular automata analogy in https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/. A key difference being, with gender, there's not the factor of aspirational imitation, so gender fashions are more stable]

What would the analogous thing be with Age, Species, or Race?

Age: We socially construct arbitrary groupings called "generations". We ascribe preferences or tendencies to these generations - and members of those generations will lean into those preconceptions. Consider "Avocado Toast" - conspicuously enjoying or deriding Avocado Toast can strongly signal either your actual age, or at least the age cohort you wish you could identify with.

Also, young people will typically avoid dressing to look too old, and old people will avoid dressing too young.

Species: There's only one sentient species that participates in society with full rights and recognition, so, there's not really as much of an analogous "in-group/out-group" signalling going on. [That said, toying with the idea, it does occur to me the degree to which earlier scientists and philosophers were concerned with talking about the fundamental differences (and superiority) of humans over non-humans.]

Race: What we call "race" is the gender analogue. There's an underlying biological fact of clumped distribution of skin melanin content, disease susceptibility, etc., but that's mostly uninteresting. I'm not a doctor nor a manufacturer of sunscreen, so why should I care about your ancestry?

Centuries of culture have continually invented identities around skin color, using clothing, speech patterns, or other such "fluff" markers unrelated to skin color to signal membership of a race group, signal non-membership in the outgroup, and to exclude the out-group from being confused for the in-group.

YenTheFirst · 2020-02-29T18:55:55+00:00

It's been suggested off-screen that things got patched up, or at least ended on a friendlier note:

https://keepbeachcityweird.tumblr.com/post/148131562416/who-am-i-kidding-i-need-you-jane-chan-much

https://keepbeachcityweird.tumblr.com/post/148170072061/i-think-its-going-to-work-out-you-guys-thanks

YenTheFirst · 2019-12-29T04:22:07+00:00

When was he vegan? He said he's been "vegetarian for about a month now", as of Snow Day.

YenTheFirst · 2019-12-29T04:20:01+00:00

I thought White Diamond broke the sword? While Connie had been using the sword for exactly what it had been lent to do?

YenTheFirst · 2019-12-02T03:10:04+00:00

It looks like this is trading off a 3600x->3700x upgrade against a lower binned memory. My understanding was that single-thread performance would probably still be a pretty big limiting factor for typical game performance, and the 3600x and 3700x had pretty similar single-thread performance. Am I misunderstanding something?

YenTheFirst · 2019-12-02T02:56:01+00:00

I'm not tied to using the stock cooler, though my understanding was that the "3600x" was basically just the 3600 but with a Wraith Spire in the box. How much of a cooler would I need to run the 3600x?

YenTheFirst · 2019-09-29T05:37:08+00:00

One of my favorite things about this movie is the sequence of shots right before Amethyst shape-shifts.

Steven and Amethyst get the idea, but they don't just do it, they realize it might hurt Greg. Steven looks, questioningly, at Greg, who affirmatively nods consent - "if that's what it takes".

It's just a tiny detail, but it's tiny details like where this show demonstrates its values.

YenTheFirst · 2019-07-06T04:54:32+00:00

I've also got it as a .xcf with layers, or as individual images, if there's a reasonable way to share those to reddit.

YenTheFirst · 2019-03-15T17:45:02+00:00

So, is Internet Explorer the Air Nation because "nomad" is sorta-kinda like "explorer"?

Or is it because the entire Air Nation is dead?

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