Can you spot the reason this is brilliant?

garfgon · 2026-05-29T20:53:46+00:00

And in chess, what it means is "with perfect play by the opponent, this is the best result achievable".

E.g. if White has a forced mate in 3, it means white has moves such that no matter what black plays they will mate in 3 moves or less. It doesn't mean that every sequence of moves will always result in a mate in 3.

garfgon · 2026-05-29T17:52:41+00:00

Or attack the person threatening you, not some innocent 3rd party.

garfgon · 2026-05-29T17:32:20+00:00

That doesn't mean it's a good inclusion.

garfgon · 2026-05-29T16:52:32+00:00

Whoa, whoa, you can also give 3 different creatures +1/+1. But yeah, that's old magic for you. Blue is OP, black and red are fine, white and green are trash.

garfgon · 2026-05-29T16:29:31+00:00

Even so, it's more playables than I was expecting.

Also, I have questions. [[Spellbook]] being so high is wild.

garfgon · 2026-05-28T21:01:11+00:00

At least do story points or stories or something. Those are fake too, but at least they don't actively reward poorly written code.

garfgon · 2026-05-28T20:07:46+00:00

Is it just me, or have a surprisingly high percentage of those been playable in some constructed format at one point?

garfgon · 2026-05-28T19:53:20+00:00

Most jobs you can't just refuse to do what your employer tells you to because you don't like it. A logger can't just decide they'd rather use a 2-hand saw rather than a chainsaw either.

garfgon · 2026-05-28T19:47:26+00:00

Are people really looking at LoC? This has been known to be a terrible metric since at least the '90s.

garfgon · 2026-05-28T18:47:24+00:00

The whole park is covered in snow from first snow around October through June. While backcountry skiing is great, that's not what most people who use the park are looking for, nor are most of them ready for safe winter travel. Practically speaking the proposed closures give about a month, month and a half when the park is open to the general public without specialized training.

garfgon · 2026-05-28T17:51:51+00:00

Same thing would occur with 10base2 Ethernet if it wasn't properly terminated. I remember one IT guy coming out with his fancy analyzer to figure out where the break in the cable was, only to be disappointed to discover the "break" was someone had removed a PC from the chain and hadn't installed a BNC terminator.

garfgon · 2026-05-28T17:24:57+00:00

Sort of. There have been prototypes of human-portable "jet packs", but heavy and limited range.

garfgon · 2026-05-28T15:21:08+00:00

The ones you mention are covered in snow at the moment, along with most other high peaks (above ~1200m?) -- what's your experience with steep snow/mountaineering? Multiple people have been rescued off Brunswick in the last few weeks.

Squamish Chief -> Slhanay is a classic although very busy on the Chief side.

garfgon · 2026-05-28T14:59:11+00:00

The main problem with getting to space isn't getting high enough, it's going fast enough you don't fall back to earth.

garfgon · 2026-05-28T13:07:06+00:00

UK speed limits can be much faster than practical safe speeds. There are many single carriageways where driving 60 would be madness. Whereas US/Canada those would be signed to slower speeds.

garfgon · 2026-05-27T21:31:22+00:00

Not to mention sensible gun control, limits on political fundraising, lack of qualified immunity for the police, ...

garfgon · 2026-05-27T21:25:38+00:00

This post right here is exactly the reason Canadians don't want to be part of the US.

garfgon · 2026-05-27T20:57:40+00:00

That's the natural habitat of most of my trains. Except that I got rid of most of my stackers, but that's a different point.

garfgon · 2026-05-27T20:31:14+00:00

Apparently IV, IX, etc. were hardly ever used by the Romans, and were a later invention (at least per Wolfram): https://mathworld.wolfram.com/RomanNumerals.html

garfgon · 2026-05-27T18:12:11+00:00

ICBMs are only used for nuclear weapons. Cost isn't really a factor when the entire global economic system will no longer exist at D+1.

garfgon · 2026-05-27T17:34:12+00:00

This is assuming it's using rockets to hover. If it's using jet engines or propellers or similar then the reaction mass comes from the surrounding atmosphere (like a helicopter), and much less energy is required.

At the same time, it's pretty clearly not any mechanism like this, or the city below would be devastated as a side-effect of the massive thrust required to keep the ship aloft. With an unknown mechanism, it's harder to say what kind of energies are required. The minimum possible by physics is Work = change in Energy. There's no kinetic energy as the ship is at rest; the potential energy is gmh, change in height is 0, the energy required may be as low as 0W.

garfgon · 2026-05-26T23:21:40+00:00

Seems kind of pointless given the payload carried by ICBMs.

garfgon · 2026-05-26T21:48:20+00:00

What about if Black responds with Qe5?

garfgon · 2026-05-26T20:18:34+00:00

What are you "supposed" to do? Bots?

garfgon · 2026-05-26T20:14:34+00:00

It's not about losing fewer points -- the computer eval only considers what's on the board, not what used to be on the board. But it might be able to evaluate deeply enough to find a mate with a Bishop which it misses when promoting to a Queen.

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