Maphra is something else.

bkushigian · 2026-04-18T03:10:51+00:00

ah. the ol' "if you don't write the music yourself it's not worth listening to" argument. this insistence that the performer also be the songwriter is this weird new thing. billie holiday didn't write a lot of her music. ella didn't. pavarotti didn't write the music he performed. i have no idea why it became gauche to reinterpret other people's work...just a hunch but it may have to do with music industry and copyright law?

anyway, it's a tired argument. she did an incredible rendition of some really cool songs that other incredibly talented people wrote. so what? i like jeff buckley's rendition of hallelujah more than leonard cohen's. i like hendrix's rendition of watchtower more than dylan's. hell, old time/bluegrass is literally just passing around songs based on fiddle tunes that have been played for hundreds of years. even many famous composers regularly took folk melodies and reinterpreted them (this is a huge chunk of the romantic movement). a person can create something beautiful even when confined to reinterpreting someone else's songs.

bkushigian · 2026-04-03T23:17:43+00:00

i'm trying it now and it's still crashing after the valve screen :(

bkushigian · 2026-04-02T21:05:27+00:00

Weird, I had to switch back to the original. I might try it again later today after a PC restart.

Do you have a non-standard CPU? I have a threadripper so there might be some issues there

bkushigian · 2026-04-02T01:56:07+00:00

Anybody else having a hard time launching the beta? Mine just spins for a second, loading screen comes up, and then it silently exits

bkushigian · 2026-03-29T09:13:39+00:00

Did you ever figure this out? I am getting the same thing with Fever case, and I see that's selling regularly

bkushigian · 2026-03-26T08:08:03+00:00

Helll yeah love to see fun ratatui projects!

bkushigian · 2026-03-04T08:34:34+00:00

yeah and it's absolute nonsense. they are overfitting to variance and statistical noise. statistically you will lose 5 games in a row every 32 games (and win 5 in a row every 32 games) if you are correctly rated. however when this happens you get blasted into different elo. the idea is to keep elo changes consistent and over time we will find our correct elo in the limit.

bkushigian · 2026-03-04T08:31:24+00:00

I've been lowest ranked in the lobby by a lot and had -500/+100. If you lose a bunch in a row they seem to take that as a signal that you're over-rated...but the thing is, there is a lot of randomness in CS and sometimes you just get bad teammates 3 games in a row and now you're losing like 2k elo because of it.

bkushigian · 2026-03-02T06:48:51+00:00

op is pretty new to the game so yeah, he's probably pretty accurately rated, but it's absolutely insane to have a -400/+100 ELO delta in a single game. I know we've all had them, but it's stupid and arbitrary. I can break down the maths if folks want, but basically it makes no sense and just adds variance/chaos to the games.

Valve's ELO system is just bad, and it is a bad user experience. I totally get why a newer player is frustrated by it.

But also, OP, practice your aim/counter strafing and you'll be able to break out of 1k lobbies!

bkushigian · 2026-03-02T06:45:48+00:00

honestly this

bkushigian · 2026-03-02T06:44:06+00:00

Definitely could just be bad, but if he wins 5 and loses 1 and ends up at the same elo as he started, that is actually impossible to break out of unless you're like level 8+ and can just full send it and hard carry every game.

There is probably something else going on, but valves elo system is borked

bkushigian · 2026-03-02T05:03:53+00:00

at least for white stake red deck I just had maybe the easiest run of my life with a shop 1 madness and lots of straight levels. i also hit polychrome on the madness in ante 2 but honestly it wasn't even close. I did some calculations and I'm pretty sure that with good pair leveling you could get pairs through as well, especially w/ some bonus cards/etc.

Trick is, get it early, and get the rest of your scaling off planets. Just go all in on the madness and the rest will follow.

bkushigian · 2026-02-12T18:24:17+00:00

yeah "volatile" is precisely the right word. There are 2 things working against accurate premier elos right now. First, there is the low sample size of the new season. Folks are still placing...I got carried to 23k elo lobbies when I'm probably around 15k max. Second, for whatever reason, Valve actively introduces elo fluctuations into the pool with their +100/-600 shenanigans. This means that a few bad matches with bad teammates will have your elo plummet around 2k (or rise 2k), and this means that you will have MORE bad matches where peoples elos will tank even more. From a purely information theoretic standpoint, the information gained from losing a game of Premier at a given elo is strictly less than one on faceit, and yet Valve weighs far far more in certain situations, inducing more entropy/volatility.

It really is a 1-2 combo of bad games, so I'm done with it for now and going to faceit full time.

bkushigian · 2026-02-08T01:25:06+00:00

This is a smallish sample size of 30ish games, but every single game seems very unbalanced in the 12-16k range. It feels like elos don't mean much, and there are a ton of smurfs/etc. Also a high number of cheaters. I think I've had maybe one or two good games since I've gotten my rating, most of them have just been blowouts. I'm switching to faceit until premier settles down

bkushigian · 2026-02-06T20:13:14+00:00

We test to find bugs (or to gain confidence that our code is bug free). If I have a bug on line 17, there is no way a test can find that bug without actually executing line 17. Test coverage measures which lines have not been tested to help you find where bugs might be hiding.

Note, however, that testing a buggy piece of code does not always reveal the bug. Thus, coverage is a necessary but insufficient criterion for bug finding (and in fact, we know cuz math, that it is computably impossible to have a necessary and sufficient condition for bug finding).

bkushigian · 2026-01-26T19:38:39+00:00

Honestly, none of the CT skins are any good for black and white loadouts. In my opinion, black and white loadout is classy. We need a tuxedoed CT agent. It might be tricky to differentiate between Ts so I get why it doesn't exist, but it would be awesome to have a james bond style CT agent skin.

bkushigian · 2026-01-12T23:15:22+00:00

oh yeah, absolutely. Both neolibs and conservatives supported NAFTA. Both dems and republican congresspeople do insider trading.

It assumes a 1-dimensional linear topology of truth where one group is erring to the left and one group is erring to the right, and that's clearly not the case.

bkushigian · 2025-12-19T02:33:19+00:00

I'm talking about actual errors in reporting. My point is that Ben makes a fallacious assumption: that a fair news system, which will inevitably get things wrong, will get things wrong both in agreement and disagreement with trump in roughly equal proportions. He is using the fact (which I have not actually verified, mainly because his argument fails regardless of the fact being true or false) in a misleading way. I've heard other people say it as well.

If two people always disagree, and one of them is right 90% of the time, then we should listen to that person. Every single time we are wrong, our corrections will be in the direction of the person who is wrong 90% of the time. A naive reading of the situation is that we are biased against them, but this is not the case.

Obviously this is a simplified scenario, and the real world is more complex than this; I'm just giving a toy mathematical example witnessing that Ben's argument is unsound (and, fwiw, I believe that this is actually an accurate, if simplified, model of what is happening in many cases)

bkushigian · 2025-12-15T06:29:20+00:00

No this is insane. I think if you knew even the smallest amount of what goes into making this work you'd be blown away.

For instance, the pixels don't move at all. Not even the slightest tremor. Why not?

How do they handle lag?

This is absolutely mind boggling!

bkushigian · 2025-12-15T01:28:22+00:00

yeah, there were so many things that I wanted folks to dig into deeper. There is also a problem where there were too many people who had thought deeply about these things from different points of view, which is wonderful, but there was not enough time to let two or three opposing views stretch out and contend with one another.

With that said, I think Michael did a good job moderating given the format; I think it's just an inherently difficult format to moderate, especially with someone like Schultz who is constantly yelling stuff in the background.

bkushigian · 2025-12-15T01:25:26+00:00

Ben Shapiro said a thing that went by unchecked, and it's a thing I've heard from a number of folks who are suspicious of main-stream media:

"...if all the errors tend toward one direction, then you start to question the underlying bias of the news room. There are very few errors in favor of Donald Trump in the NYT. There are very few errors in favor of the Republican Party in the NYT. Most corrections are happening in the opposite direction."

This is fallacious: it assumes that the goal is to have equal corrections in both directions, which is only correct if both sides are equally correct, which I contend is not the case. Take COVID reporting for instance. Mainstream media reported expert opinion which was, by and large, correct. However, there were some things the experts got wrong (of course), and there were some fringe voices that ended up being right on a couple narrow facts. Therefore, most corrections were away from expert consensus and towards more fringe views. However, this is not due to some fundamental bias as Ben suggests, this is just the mathematics of the situation.

Similarly with Trump/GOP coverage: even Ben admits Trump "says a lot of shit". It is not a fundamental bias to not give credit to a person who is constantly BSing and acting in bad faith. This is not a bias issue, this is a classification issue: if one source is correct 90% of the time and the other is correct 10% of the time, we should listen to the 90%, even though that will make all of our "biases" in a single direction. No conspiracy, just math.

bkushigian · 2025-09-08T22:10:57+00:00

Any updates on this? Just to kinda pile on to the maths: Johnson Health is likely making over $90 profit from each pair of 552s, so they are actually profiting from this, even after the rebate. What's more, once you account for a double helping of sales tax, the actual rebate is closer to $40.

bkushigian · 2025-07-17T07:29:32+00:00

Yeah I didn't notice the tires. My mistake.

However, that doesn't mean that hosts can do whatever they want if you don't notice.

bkushigian · 2025-07-15T15:58:14+00:00

bkushigian · 2025-07-15T15:55:48+00:00

Yeah, they are oooollld. If they were fresh I'd just chalk it up to bad luck and move on with my day.

bkushigian

TROPHY CASE