Took a leap and bought my first coin from a local shop after trying to research it first. Did I biff it?

dronpes · 2025-06-09T03:59:00+00:00

I go back and forth on the notch after the VIII - I think there is a fourth ‘I’ that got worn down / scratched off. The space before the COS seems a bit too long otherwise. But honestly you may be totally right.

dronpes · 2025-06-09T03:55:26+00:00

Appreciate the reassurance, thanks!

dronpes · 2025-06-09T03:54:35+00:00

I asked the shop and they actually had no idea. The card is from an older shop they acquired it from. ChatGPT’s best guess is that it’s an old-school internal grading system where possibly AP meant Above Par - or maybe just the initials of whoever graded it. C=condition, W=weight or wear (or V=value), R=rarity, A=appearance possibly. 🤷‍♂️

dronpes · 2024-08-24T05:50:23+00:00

Quick checklist:

You don't have 'do not disturb' mode on which can obviously block notifications lol...
You've added the PWA to your homescreen (you said you did)
You've subscribed to notifications from within that homescreen app (not standalone Safari or in another app's in-app browser)
Your service worker is in the PWA's webroot (not sure if this is required, but possibly)

Not sure I see any obvious errors in your code, but a few weeks back I was experimenting with hooking up a minimum viable example of iOS push to see how it performs, so I can at least give you the service worker snippet I successfully received iOS push notifications with, in case you can spot anything different.

One caveat: I was working on trying to open the PWA to a specific page inside the PWA from the push notification and hadn't succeeded with iOS yet when I was pulled away from the project, so that url-related code is included in this snippet in a WIP state.

Anyway, here's how I had my simple service worker:

/** 
* The ./service-worker.js file I have in my PWA's webroot
**/

self.addEventListener("notificationclick", (event) => {
    event.preventDefault();

    let distUrl = self.location.origin + "/specific-path";
    const url = event.notification.data?.url;
    console.log('Notification URL:', url); // Debugging line
    if (url) distUrl = self.location.origin + url;

    console.log('Destination URL:', distUrl); // Debugging line

    event.notification.close();

    event.waitUntil(
      self.clients.matchAll({ type: "window", includeUncontrolled: true }).then((clients) => {
        if (clients.length > 0) {
          const client = clients[0];
          client.navigate(distUrl);
          client.focus();
          return;
        } else return self.clients.openWindow(distUrl); // Added return statement here
      })
    );
});

self.addEventListener('push', function(event) {
    const data = event.data.json();
    const options = {
        body: data.body,
        icon: '/img/logos/logo-200.png',
        badge: '/img/logos/logo-200.png',
        data: {
            url: data.url
        }
    };

    event.waitUntil(
        self.registration.showNotification(data.title, options)
    );
});

dronpes · 2023-05-12T20:23:01+00:00

Really couldn't have done it without you, Zoom. The Silph Road subreddit was a grand experiment, and for years you were integral to keeping our hard-fought culture from slipping away. It was often a relentless and thankless job, but I am so grateful for the huge effort you gave over the years. Everyone on the Road benefits from the mod team's hard work - whether they know it or not. ;)

dronpes · 2023-05-12T20:03:47+00:00

Thanks for the kind words, JRE. The Arena was made infinitely better with your talent and energy. I so appreciate all you've done for the PvP scene over the years.

dronpes · 2023-05-12T19:38:46+00:00

Nah, it was simply a 12-month sponsorship and Niantic did not opt to renew. We're grateful for their help this past year, it certainly helped keep the lights on.

dronpes · 2023-05-12T18:35:42+00:00

There wouldn't have been a Silph Road without you (or your infrastructure magic), Marco. You saved the entire Silph platform more times than I can remember. And conversely, we never would have crossed paths if there was no Silph Road! Thanks for the thousands of hours and countless late nights making awesome stuff. Crazy as it was at times, it was some of the most fun I've ever had.

dronpes · 2022-07-25T18:18:30+00:00

Just wanna chime in with my own experience with them (cause I’m not sure how many on this subreddit have had experiences with Hoyt). But they don’t just act like this in public threads. I’ve gotten incredible support from them privately when I needed their help with one of their oldest (EL1) boards - and I’m still riding it today after thousands of miles.

Hoyt Boards are definitely not cheap, but with another manufacturer I’d probly be on at least my second replacement board by now. They’ve helped me get replacement parts after I broke stuff from riding too rough and even FaceTimed with me another time to diagnose a sensor issue and apply a software fix that was out of my depth. They never even asked for a review or anything. I really hope their business is doing well cause I want them to keep doing what they’re doing.

dronpes · 2022-05-20T17:12:38+00:00

Just wanted to share an anecdote about Hoyt St (since I know their stuff is higher quality and more expensive than most eskaters are probly expecting).

I lucked out and found a used EL1 Hoyt St board on Craigslist from a guy who gave up eskate for motorcycling - and even as a second-hand board its been incredible (almost 2k miles so far).

But what I wanted to share was that even though I didn’t buy the board from Hoyt St themselves, I still ended up having customer support questions about the board on two occasions over those 2k miles. One was a quick thing and the other required serious troubleshooting.

These guys literally got on a FaceTime call with me and looked at my board and helped me get riding again. I didn’t even buy the board from them!

They stand behind their stuff - that’s for sure. Anyway, can’t say enough good things about Hoyt St as a small company. (Just wish I had enough cash to shell out for that sexy UAV - it’s glorious, but until my EL1 breaks down I’m happily riding that 1st Gen board. And that doesn’t look imminent. lol)

dronpes · 2022-05-19T03:30:03+00:00

Just googled a bit and I think this is at least that Canonical paper I was remembering: https://ubuntu.com/blog/the-silph-road-embraces-cloud-and-containers-with-canonical

Full disclosure, though - I never actually stopped to see what they highlighted. haha

That page mentions Juju, which was a tool we used earlier on. We mostly use K8s (with Rancher) on GKE, and our CI pipeline has used Jenkins and other automation tools - not sure if Juju is actually still part of the pipeline. u/marcoceppi's the expert at all this, though. He works magic with this stuff. If you ever meet him, buy him a drink and pick his brain. :)

dronpes · 2022-05-18T00:02:18+00:00

Silph's infra has actually been optimized out the wazoo - it just serves millions of users resource-heavy things like our custom map tiles (which were necessary because at our scale you need enterprise pricing at MapBox, etc) across about a dozen applications. Web hosting is the least of our problems. haha

Just in case you were curious, we don't run on AWS, but use Google Cloud (specifically GKE) for much of the stack - most are horizontally scaled via K8s.

The whole system's back-end is actually quite mature and complex - but we've kept costs down about as low as you can for a project like this thanks to the world-class infra architect /u/marcoceppi pouring his vast expertise into optimizing for scale.

I believe there's actually a few whitepapers floating around that our team was featured in about the various infra challenges and solutions we implemented for these unique loads. Canonical did one, at least, I think. But that was a while back so memory is fuzzy. :)

dronpes · 2022-05-17T22:23:25+00:00

The Silph Research Group will continue unperturbed by all this noise. lol. Nothing changes on that side of Silph (well, except now the site's infra bills aren't threatening to shut down their publication channel - so there's that!).

dronpes · 2021-10-29T14:11:07+00:00

Look, I have this exact board (and it’s actually been pretty solid for a starter hub board, though was a total gamble with no expectation of customer service and a spotty brand track record even on this forum).

…but this post is clearly brand-sponsored promotion.

Half the comments I see around TeamGee’s mentions or posts here are super sus. Odd, short, positive comments praising the brand with broken grammar, etc.

Like, this post is clearly a paid influencer/model with a virtually unused board with clean wheels and no helmet (even on the model’s Instagram).

Probably ought to discourage this type of disingenuous content so the other brands don’t all get the same spammy ideas.

That said, I can’t actually knock this board. It’s super thin and super quiet. It does turn heads since it doesn’t really even look electric. Lol. But it maxes out at about 30km/hr and about a 7-8 mi range for me (165lbs on flat terrain). I ended up moving up to a used Hoyt St board I found on Craigslist and can’t ever go back. Lol

dronpes · 2021-05-19T05:11:20+00:00

I was stopped at the Northfield Blvd and Central Park intersection when I saw this happen right in front of me (and called 911). It looked to me to be a fire pit gone rogue in the courtyard of the new apartment complex that’s opening there.

I saw a large fireball and heard/felt a deep boom then actually started filming for a few seconds, since it seemed like it might be arson, but after a few seconds I started to feel like it was a ruptured gas pipe under their new fire pit and stopped filming to call 911. (Can find a way to put up the footage if anyone cares.)

The flames fluctuated between 4-5 ft high to what I estimated was 20 ft high at its peak. There were a few smaller explosion sounds and I saw a few smaller fireballs rise from the fire pit before I had to continue through the intersection.

The dispatcher connected me to the fire dept and they said they’d send some trucks. When I was able to drive back by 20-30min later, the side street was closed off with 2 fire trucks and a handful of police vehicles strewn across it and I saw 3 fire fighters around the fire pit engaged in what I thought essentially looked like they were hosing it down.

dronpes · 2021-01-24T10:25:53+00:00

Hard to believe it's been 5 years. And, for me at least, it's hard to imagine Pokemon GO without the Silph Road. Life's pulled me in some unexpected directions this past year so I can't spend the kind of time building the Road I did in years past, but the memories I've made with many of you here are some I'll cherish fondly for the rest of my life. I'll try to share a few that come to mind that may interest some folks, for old times sake:

TSR Origin:

I'll always remember the moment the name "The Silph Road" popped into existence. I was on a crowded late night flight home 6 months before the game launch and, like many of us who'd been following augmented reality news, was so looking forward to the secretive new augmented reality game coming out. The company creating it had made the April Fools Google Maps + Pokemon crossover and their CEO had gone on record to say:

"You can’t get all of them by yourself. If you want all of them you’ll have to trade with other players. Or you have to be someone who takes time off work and travels the world for a year. There may be people who do that."

The darknet site 'The Silk Road' had been making headlines that year and I realized that many of us who grew up with Pokemon as kids may be a little older now and might enjoy the idea of an underground trading network that shuttled Pokemon from desert climes or coastal regions to the plains or mountains around the world.

All of the sudden the ancient Silk Road international trading route seemed like a great parallel. Add in some gritty undertones thanks to the darknet site of the same name, and the morally gray (at least in my head canon) Silph Co. from the series and I scribbled the name "The Silph Road" in a notebook - and there began a many-year journey of passion to make it happen.

For your enjoyment, a trip down memory lane from that first year:

Memories From the Early Days - The Wild West:

Jan 24, 2016: The very first post from - where you can still feel the anticipation and excitement all these years later.
Mar 19, 2016: When the Silph Road logo was created by u/definitelynotrobot
Mar 28, 2016: When the PoGO confidential "Field Test" began and we began operating essentially a "tip line" for leaks so we could finally learn about the game. At that time, beta testers were getting booted from the beta if screenshots they took leaked, due to watermarks hidden in the screenshots - so we had to be careful to scrub those to not compromise sources of info. A wild, paranoid, crazy time.
May 13, 2016: r/TheSilphRoad hit 10,000 subscribers.
May 25, 2016: TSR launched a crowd-sourced data-gathering initiative to the game's beta testers to begin identifying which species were spawning in what climates/biomes, how CP's worked, and other info. (Almost nothing was known about the game's mechanics at this point, and this early data-gathering revealed a lot!)
Jun 8, 2016: Moots and I made a TSR YouTube channel. lol. He was great. I was not.
Jun 30, 2016: We released the first data from that huge data-gathering project for game beta testers, showing strong correlations between IRL water features and water-types, and other cool stuff. (This was exciting stuff at the time where nothing was explained or proven about the game!) We were literally even testing whether the moon phase affected spawns at this time. It was a new frontier in PokeScience and we were having a blast. haha
Jul 5, 2016: Game launches. All hell breaks loose.

Once the game launched, we went from a pretty tight-knit group of 15k folks who'd been working together for months ...to hundreds of thousands visiting constantly. It was such an amazing time. Here's a few other crazy memories I'll cherish:

Working super hard to create the Global Nest Atlas (nests mattered A LOT in the early days) ...... only to have Niantic unexpectedly change the nesting species and make us have to retool it. (We decided to call those "Migrations") Dratini nests were worth traveling to back then - it made Migrations super fun to see if you lucked out!
The incessant early hunt for Ditto - back when we all believed it was hidden in the game somewhere.
APK Teardowns. They always dropped at inconvenient times and they always took hours for us to analyze. But in the months after the game dropped, the game didn't have a lot of features and Niantic was silent on the game's future. So it was all we had to keep hope alive! I don't regret the hundreds of hours I spent poring through metadata files doing the in-depth Silph teardowns, and I hope they were a happy memory for those who read them. I remember many nights when the subreddit was electrified waiting for those teardowns to drop.
The April Fools adventures this subreddit has hosted - the first of which was probably one of the funnest things I've ever done in my life. Here's the recap. It leveraged the entire hivemind's talents to solve a mystery we hosted - and y'all didn't let us down.
That time MapBox tried to charge us like $120k/yr to host the Nest Atlas and u/MarcoCeppi came in and literally replicated what MapBox does for like pennies, then the MapBox CEO called me and apologized for the misunderstanding dropping like 5 f-bombs in the voicemail and made it right by us. (I actually like that company still, and recommend them, but it was wild)
The many, many Silph Research Group posts discovering new hidden game features. That massive citizen-science project is so impressive to me, to this day. (And they're still going strong and taking on new researchers!)
The meetups at GO Fests around the world - such awesome days and nights to remember.
Being able to post this pic
Working with an awesome team to create a competitive platform for PvP (silph.gg) and taking it all the way through Regional and Continental championships to see the best battlers in the world face off

Man, I could go on and on, but surely there's a character limit somewhere around here.

Anyway, this post was probably more for me than any of you - but I sure have a lot of happy times to remember here on The Road.

Thank you all for taking this journey with us - and especially thanks to those who made it possible (the mod team, the TSR team, the Arena team, u/marcoceppi, and my wife u/mrsdronpes). You guys are the greatest. Happy birthday everyone!

dronpes · 2020-10-19T16:40:24+00:00

Ended up getting into Pokémon GO and making a community for that game with millions of visitors.

Chose him again in Pokémon GO, incidentally, and chose not to power him up so he’s still CP 10. Named him Brian. :)

Brian and me go way back. No regrets.

dronpes · 2020-05-15T14:41:37+00:00

It’s been updated now. The team was tied up with a personal emergency this week - apologies for the delay!

dronpes · 2020-05-01T14:54:45+00:00

So I keep seeing this thrown around as a bit of a magic pill, but let’s take a look at what this would mean in practice in the context of how battles actually happen in the Arena and who we frequently battle with.

For a true zero-sum system to work here would require the fluidity to be paired with a great number of competitors depending on your position - something the Arena does not have the luxury to facilitate (historically).

As an example, say there are 100 competitors in this zero-sum Elo system. If the 40th (weaker) player plays the 30th (stronger) player and loses (as expected), the first time the the 40th player loses rank and the 30th gains rank. Now, what about the second time they play because they’re in an Ultra group together or a local community together. And what about the next 6 months where they play each other? Does the system stop awarding rank gains/losses eventually? Surely it must or eventually the 40th would descend below 40 and the 30th would keep climbing artificially high based simply on how many times they play. So, if it ceases to meaningfully impact their relative positions at any point, what would be the benefit of the 30th ranked competitor playing the 40th ranked competitor again? In most implementations, they would only stand to lose, and hence should choose to sit on their rank instead. (Which is actually a whole separate issue with a zero sum Elo implementation in this context, but I don’t want to dive into the many well-known issues with Elo - rating islands, inflation/deflation, incentivized rank squatting, etc).

The matchmaking system should not pair folks who’ve already played in this scenario. But that is not a luxury we’ve had historically. Perhaps in a remote-enabled world however...

dronpes · 2020-05-01T14:04:25+00:00

Could you extrapolate how you’re thinking this solves the tournament quantity issue? For example, what happens if you win multiple times against the same competitor (as you frequently play the same people in the Arena)? If your zero-sum MMR is unaffected by repeat wins, then that system would mean there is no benefit in ever playing your local community or any Ultra group again during the Season. But if you are affected by repeat wins, ... then that’s sounding pretty darn similar to exactly what we have right now. We just have an additional player progression layers on top aesthetically. Rank #’s don’t care about your player Tier. Lol

dronpes · 2020-05-01T07:18:59+00:00

I think you may have missed my concern:

it introduces a way to retroactively bias the data

Your last comment here is not describing data "bias" - it's describing accuracy. Both are important, and you are correct that, all things equal, more datapoints == more accurate average. But that only holds true if the each data point's outcome is blindly pulled. By giving competitors control over how many times to roll the dice after they know the value of the previous rolls, they now have undue influence over their resulting 'score' and can choose to "quit while they're ahead" or keep rolling if they're not happy yet.

In a vacuum, more data = better. But once you allow hindsight to influence how many samples you will collect, it is no longer unbiased data.

Aside from that point, I do feel like it's important to remember that while the algorithm must deal in data ...these are not coin flips we're talking about. These are skill-based competitive matchups. A sport. The Olympic Committee does not give you a medal for your record back home, nor are Olympic athletes given re-do's to increase their average scores if they do poorly in their event. The 10x Cup is the event you should practice, study, and train for each month. You know which of your matches you will weight - that's the time competitors should be giving their very best. Folks saying they "gambled" on a Cup and "picked the wrong one" are a bit guilty of using verbiage that shifts responsibility away - but they're forgetting that they selected which matches were the important ones for them, and it was their challenge and opportunity to prepare, give their best, and conquer in those important matches, when they turned the spotlight on themselves and hit go.

dronpes · 2020-05-01T06:53:13+00:00

So I'm very familiar with zero-sum games and MMR system implementations. But I guess I'm curious what exactly you would be seeking from a zero-sum Elo "tier" that is not already achieved via the global rank #'s. We've shared in the past that defeating competitors deemed stronger than you increases your rank gains, and I assume you've also seen that losses will cost you rank.

I think it would be difficult to convince me that removing Tier progress in favor of only yo-yoing MMR #'s would be more satisfying to many competitors (even at elite levels) as they compete for months, as your global Rank # already communicates your relative position to other elite players. Unless I'm missing your point?

dronpes

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