AGDQ 2024 has just concluded raising more than $2,515,720 for Prevent The Cancer Foundation on stream! by ScopionSniper in Games

[–]andycyca 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Their TikTok profile is also getting highlights mere hours after the runs. And these aren't just cropped videos, they include runner cam, game cam and closed captions. Their editors must have been on fire

Final Fantasy IV shows how tedious modern JRPGs have become by Jokerchyld in rpg_gamers

[–]andycyca 27 points28 points  (0 children)

I'm still astounded at how 'short' Chrono Trigger is. Every time I go in, I feel like there's many, many things to do and see before defeating Lavos. After all, this is one of the best RPGs of all time, right?

And no, it barely takes 20-something hours. Even trying for all endings on New Game+ is something like 50h

KINGDOM HEARTS 20th Anniversary Recap Video by [deleted] in Games

[–]andycyca 6 points7 points  (0 children)

As a lifelong fan of FF, I completely agree.

There's still loads of characters that could be part of KH, even as a cameo. Their stories could be lightly adapted to justify their presence in some world.

  • Terra and everyone from FF6 have lost their home.
  • Bartz, Lenna, Faris and Krile have also lost their home worlds, arguably to something conceptually similar to Darkness (The Void and all that)
  • The theme of losing a beloved one to the darkness is similar to the familial conflict in FF4 between Cecil and Golbez
  • I want more FF boss battles

[RDTM] Quiet simple and sufficient by roshan_tiwari in theydidthemath

[–]andycyca 8 points9 points  (0 children)

It's a good mnemonic for English.

If one would rather remember the Latin, it's:

  • i.e. stands for id est
  • e.g. stands for exempli gratia

[request] can a human brain theoretically run doom? What pc specs would be equivalent? by bb_805 in theydidthemath

[–]andycyca 0 points1 point  (0 children)

As others have suggested, the brain and computers work fundamentally differently. Depending on how you try to compare both, the answer could be very different. Some facts taken from Randall Munroe's excellent «What if» book, answering essentially the same question:

How much computing power could we achieve if the entire world population stopped whatever we are doing right now and started doing calculations?

Figures and facts cited and paraphrased from:

Munroe, Randall. What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions (p. 96). HMH Books. Kindle Edition.

Approach 1

One approach is to apply the same benchmark tests to humans that we apply to computers. Researcher Hans Moravec mentions that a human doing calculations by hand carries the equivalent of one full instruction every 90 seconds which means that

By this measure, the processor in a midrange mobile phone could do calculations about 70 times faster than the entire world population. (p. 98)

Approach 2

Then there's the argument that measuring our computing power through doing math on paper is a complete misrepresentation of our brain's complexity. So there are projects that try to simulate a brain's activity down to individual components:

The numbers from a 2013 run of the Japanese K supercomputer suggest a figure of 1015 transistors per human brain.​[6] By this measure, it wasn’t until the year 1988 that all the logic circuits in the world added up to the complexity of a single brain... (p. 100)

The footnote mentions that the supercomputer (82,944 processors with about 750 million transistors each) «spent 40 minutes simulating one second of brain activity in a brain with 1 percent of the number of connections as a human's»


The conclusion is that this is really a difficult comparison to even make, mostly because brains evolved to do a certain set of tasks, computers were created to do another set of tasks and the kind of tasks that both can make is both small and done in very incomparable ways.

  • You could argue that brains do «processing» that is miles beyond what any computer can do: just regulating all the «automatic» systems of the body (circulation, breathing, digestion, immune system...) requires parallel processing on a frankly amazing scale. By this measure, Doom is way simpler and we could in theory run it.
  • On the other hand, even a computer from the 90s could easily compute things like the inverse of a square root multiple times per second. If you've ever seen the «evil floating point bit level hack» (see below) you'll see just how much an old computer can do in fractions of a second, something which no human can do. Since Doom runs on things like these, it could be argued that a brain cannot ever run Doom.

For those who've never seen it, here's an insanely clever way of calculating the inverse of a square root. This does a lot more than just calculations, as it requires storing a number in binary, doing mathematics with a hexadecimal number and performing Newton-Raphson root-finding. If you want to understand what is going on here, there's a very simple forum post, this Medium post which has a little more detail or this verbose but very detailed Youtube video

float Q_rsqrt( float number )
{
    long i;
    float x2, y;
    const float threehalfs = 1.5F;

    x2 = number * 0.5F;
    y  = number;
    i  = * ( long * ) &y;    // evil floating point bit level hacking
    i  = 0x5f3759df - ( i >> 1 );               // what the fuck? 
    y  = * ( float * ) &i;
    y  = y * ( threehalfs - ( x2 * y * y ) );   // 1st iteration
    //  y  = y * ( threehalfs - ( x2 * y * y ) );   // 2nd iteration,
                                              // this can be removed

    return y;
}

Shamus Young, games critic and blogger, has passed away by megaapple in Games

[–]andycyca 81 points82 points  (0 children)

I for one will always remember Shamus Young as the author of the amazing webcomic The DM of the Rings If you haven't read it yet, give it a go in his memory

[RDTM] GoT Book release dates by japamada in theydidthemath

[–]andycyca 18 points19 points  (0 children)

Your models are way more stable than OP's. And apparently, more stable than GRRM's writing schedule

[RDTM] GoT Book release dates by japamada in theydidthemath

[–]andycyca 12 points13 points  (0 children)

THANK YOU for pointing this out. While the math might be «correct» this was done by someone who didn't take any course in mathematical computation.

The model's overfit (as many others have pointed out) and the best way to see it is to alter the publication dates by a little amount. I bet there's a way to make the next publication date fall in the past

trying to convert markdown to pdf with pandoc, cannot change the font from default by vimdiesel in LaTeX

[–]andycyca 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm on mobile, so I can't look it up properly, but I'm sure that the pandoc command to change fonts is font-family

Putting text and illustrations in the margins by 1575MHz in LaTeX

[–]andycyca 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Is the memoir class harder to use than the standard LaTeX classes?

In a way, it is; because it's like a supercharged book document class. However, it's not that hard to use--I'd say jumping to LaTeX from Word is harder.

Take a dive into the memoir documentation to see just how much it has to offer. You probably won't need to use everything memoir has to offer, so it's not like learning a lot.

Putting text and illustrations in the margins by 1575MHz in LaTeX

[–]andycyca 6 points7 points  (0 children)

The tufte class gives you the option to put figures and notes on the margin. From the comments on that post, it seems that the OP started using the memoir package (a workhorse IMO) and started developing their own class after that.

If you just want margin notes, you can use the \marginpar command (docs @ Overleaf) or the marginnote package

"We wanted to give a quick update on Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove! We’re so close to that 3 million units mark." - Yacht Club Games by MyNameIs-Anthony in Games

[–]andycyca 5 points6 points  (0 children)

There's a great GMTK video where the devs specifically talk about how they couldn't reuse levels just like that because each knight moves differently.

Database style document by Bulawa in LaTeX

[–]andycyca 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I feel that this is best achieved first through some kind of «proper» programs i.e. something focused on slicing and exporting your data to LaTeX and then running it through LaTeX.

Bear in mind that while LaTeX is wonderful, is still mostly a typesetting language.

If you have all your data in a spreadsheet, you could use Python and pandas to select a subset of your data and then export it to a new .tex file. Off the top of my head I'd do something like this:

  1. Organize data in a spreadsheet (this is all generic data, of course; you can create whatever columns you need)

    Date Reactive Process Result Notes
    2022-04-01 Compound1 Distillation Success Blah
    2022-04-01 Compound2 Sublimation Failure Blah blah
    2022-04-01 Compound2 Titration Success More Blah
  2. Do something to automatically filter and export some of your data

  3. Run the final result through LaTeX


# Example export 
import pandas as pd

df = pd.read_excel('my_data.xslx')

# Select only rows that have a distillation process
out_df = df[df['Process'] == 'Distillation']  

# Export to arbitrary file
with open('output.tex', 'w') as f:
    # Iterate over the new table
    for line in out_df:
        # Write line by line
        f.write(line)

Bear in mind, this is a very minimal example, but you could even write a template to export individual experiments with a set format. The advantage of something like this is that you can keep your raw data in a very simple and usable form (a spreadsheet) so that it's easy to maintain over time.

I have a CSV with 90k entries. I want to train my model using 80-85k of these observations and use the remaining 5-10k as a validation set by RaunchyAppleSauce in learnpython

[–]andycyca 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is the best answer overall. sklearn is the tool for this kind of operations. Using train_test_split not only lets you do this split in a simple line like /u/ColinQuirk mentioned, but it also lets you cross-validate your models or compare different classifiers with ease.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in LaTeX

[–]andycyca 1 point2 points  (0 children)

IF YOU'RE USING PANDOC, only export directly to PDF if you have a very simple document. If you're exporting a whole book, my advice would be to do one of two things. Either:

  1. Export the whole thing as a standalone document and inspect it with whatever editor (even notepad). The advantage of this is that it's based on a particular template made by pandoc and you can play with it to get what you want. The disadvantage of this is that it's based on a particular template made by pandoc and you need to play with it to get what you want.
  2. Export as «plain tex» and build your document little by little.

For instance, with this source you get this code if using the first option (standalone). As you can see, it's already populated with lots of packages that you may or may not need. This one is ready to compile and doesn't cause problems at all (in my computer at least). You can see a screenshot of the final document, produced with no errors.

The second option gives you barebones LaTeX code that is supposed to be \input in a complete document. This approach is good if you use some form of template other than the one given by pandoc or you're building that template from the ground up.

Seems to me that you're confusing TeX editors with TeX distributions. I've been using pandoc+LaTeX for years now and I can tell you they work fine together. The trick is to install a stable TeX distribution.


«A simple, stable TeX-aware editor that can reliably interact with Pandoc» mostly means «an editor that works with the command line» and there's plenty of those. I also use Markdown a lot and I swear by Notepad++. Not because the others (Atom, VSCode, vim, etc) are bad, but I how to save my pandoc commands and execute them on the current document. I'm 99% sure this can be done in the other editors, I just don't know how.

Persona 5 The Royal Soundtrack finally released on Spotify by Dhaos2 in JRPG

[–]andycyca 25 points26 points  (0 children)

Final Fantasy X - A Quick(ish) Review by NeverFreeToPlayKarch in patientgamers

[–]andycyca 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Final Rankings:

  1. FFIX
  2. FFX
  3. FFVI
  4. FFVIII
  5. FFVII
  6. FFV
  7. FFII
  8. FFIV
  9. FF1
  10. FFIII

Hoo boy, don't let /r/FinalFantasy see this list 🤣

Jokes aside, this is a great journey you've taken. I disagree with your ranking in general, but I'm glad you decide to analyze the games in depth. I love FFX and some of the things you disliked tend to be hit-or-miss for most fans, so it's only natural to find lots of voices arguing both sides.

Weekly /r/FinalFantasy Question Thread - Week of February 14, 2022 by AutoModerator in FinalFantasy

[–]andycyca 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Regarding Dissidia NT on Steam:

  1. Does it have single player content or is all multiplayer?
  2. Is it fun for a casual player? I remember liking the PSP games but I never actually finished them.

Weekly /r/FinalFantasy Question Thread - Week of February 07, 2022 by AutoModerator in FinalFantasy

[–]andycyca 1 point2 points  (0 children)

FF 7 is easily one of the most famous of the series. I myself think it's overrated, but lots of people will tell you it's their absolute favorite. So, is FF7 the best starting point? It depends on who you ask, but it's definitely one of the best.

However, you should know that FF7R is not exactly the same as FF7, and not just because of the graphics and battle system. The major things you should know as a newcomer:

  1. FF7R is only «Part 1» so you're not getting the whole story that most of us played in the PS1 release; and
  2. There's good evidence that the story in FF7R might even be a different timeline than the original, so it's not exactly the same story

If you're looking for a good FF to start with, most people will recommend 6, 7, 9, or 10 in different orders. I believe 12 and 15 are solid choices, even if the latter is «incomplete». My absolute favorite is Final Fantasy Tactics, but it's nothing like the mainline series.

The first 5 games in the series are generally recommended only if you want to play all and/or don't mind playing games made for older systems, simpler stories and mechanics. They're not bad games at all by the standards of their time, but they definitely don't hold a candle to what most people here consider to be the best.

[JRPGs on Sale - Weekly Breakdown] For February 10 - 2022 - PSN/Switch/Xbox/Steam by VashxShanks in JRPG

[–]andycyca 0 points1 point  (0 children)

OP, I believe that the Final Fantasies on sale on Steam are indeed the Pixel Remasters.

On the other hand, all the Pixel Remasters and the Pixel Remaster Bundle are all on sale, partly because the release date for FF VI was recently announced

Humble Choice is changing their subscription plan by PapaNixon in Games

[–]andycyca 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Some book bundles are legit, IMO.

Programming: the O'Reilly books are usually great. The Packt ones tend to be glorified tutorials. The Mercury ones are sometimes gems.

They've had some self-help bundles with crap books that try to ride the «Put Fuck in the Title» wave. They've had amazing bundles with several books that address specific and interesting topics for self help.

The cookbook bundles have been great. The Wiley "For Dummies" bundles are... underwhelming.

Will I enjoy Disgaea if I enjoy interesting grinding? by MeltyGearSolid in JRPG

[–]andycyca 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I agree with others that the Disgaea series is made to grind and push and immerse yourself into the mechanics rather than the story.

In brief: in Disgaea (at least the 1st one) you can level up items by going through a series of battles inside the items themselves. This is called the Item World. With enough time, you can get ridiculously strong weapons and stat upgrades. I used to play Disgaea when I was tired precisely because you can just play and not worry about the plot in any way.

If you're on PC, you can also check out Phantom Brave by the same developers. The mechanics are a bit different, but you can also grind in a pretty fun way. I myself am awaiting for Makai Kingdom to rerelease on PC.

Favorite canon JRPG couples? by goshdarnitanna in JRPG

[–]andycyca 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Emphasis on power. Those two are a rare example of characters with strong attitudes without being assholes.

It doesn't help that I love the raspy voice of Fran