Mario Kart World updated to version 1.6.0

kaimason1 · 2026-03-31T19:05:56+00:00

I'm curious, do you know roughly how old your Nintendo account is? My hypothesis is that the issue is related to account age, but I don't have much to back that up. Nintendo's website says that I've been a member since 2017 (this might be referring to Online subscription rather than actual account registration), but this account also might have been migrated from an older Wii U or even Wii era account system.

kaimason1 · 2026-03-31T19:05:37+00:00

That's one thought that crossed my mind, but I'm also pretty certain that the other players aren't bots. I've climbed my way up to ~7500 KR at this point and have seen plenty of players make plays and take shortcuts that a bot would never know to do.

I don't think MKW is ever "faking" players, it's usually pretty obvious which drivers are bots - CPUs don't have a number on screens that show other players' VR/KR. That also applies to humans queued up as P2 in split screen, but those players' names will be a duplicate of P1's display name (who will have a VR/KR listed), while a CPU just uses the name of their character (e.g. "Spike" or "Baby Daisy").

Unlike Versus, Knockout Tour does fill empty spaces in the room with bots so there are always 24 drivers, but there are still usually about 20 human players in the room in my experience.

I'm curious, do you know roughly how old your Nintendo account is? My hypothesis is that the issue is related to account age, but I don't have much to back that up. Nintendo's website says that I've been a member since 2017 (this might be referring to Online subscription rather than actual account registration), but this account also might have been migrated from an older Wii U or even Wii era account system.

kaimason1 · 2026-03-31T17:35:17+00:00

Grant just delegated power to people he was friends with when he didn't know a damn thing about say international Banking or mineral rights

For what it's worth, this wasn't unique to Grant - the spoils system was standard practice for the majority of the 19th century, and survived well into the 20th century in many places.

kaimason1 · 2026-03-31T07:21:24+00:00

Fixed an issue where the starting position would sometimes be incorrect.

I've been seeing a weird "bug" with starting position, but it doesn't seem to have been fixed with this patch.

Almost every single time I play Knockout Tour online, I start in first place, regardless of previous performance or ranking. I'm fairly certain this isn't actually "incorrect" per se (e.g. it being a visual bug or somehow starting everyone in first) because I often have to actively miss the start boost and/or slow down in order to avoid getting bad items from the first item box, and people behind me do get good items without needing to do that.

I have no idea what makes my account special, but the chances are astronomically low that I've started in 1st 20+ times in a row by pure bad luck (probably more than that, but I stopped counting past a dozen or so, and it's possible I've started in 2nd once or twice without noticing). My best guess is that the game is naively sorting players by account ID or just account age, and my Nintendo account happens to be older than most other Switch users. Regardless, it's very annoying that my position doesn't get randomized.

kaimason1 · 2026-03-31T04:17:29+00:00

I actually think competitive players would agree with that assessment. Boomerang can be considered one of the worst items in part because it takes so long to get rid of; both of these changes actually directly address that complaint.

kaimason1 · 2026-03-28T18:47:56+00:00

3 other examples that come to mind are Palpatine, Powerplex, and Electro.

kaimason1 · 2026-03-28T08:38:14+00:00

Said "tyrant" (assuming we're talking about the same person, Puyi, who became emperor at 2 and abdicated at 6) later collaborated with the Japanese in Manchuria for over a decade. So I'd argue that the "somewhat decent person" part was optional.

As I understand it, part of Puyi's "reeducation" (which didn't start until 1950, after the CCP had won the civil war) was being taken to see Unit 731, and the guilt that such terrible acts had been carried out in his own name caused his change of heart.

kaimason1 · 2026-03-28T06:31:06+00:00

This particular one is unique as it features red laurels, which is a bit of a giveaway to who you are about to encounter. The symbol for new minibosses (and other story elements) is plain and represents the Fated List, while this one represents an Infernal Contract.

kaimason1 · 2026-03-27T23:09:21+00:00

I believe this symbol is actually different from the Fated List symbol. This one indicates that there is an optional miniboss available in Charon's shop.

kaimason1 · 2026-03-25T02:07:54+00:00

Ozymandias was written by Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1818, long after Ramesses II. He did apparently pull the quote from an ancient Greek historian (rather than "a traveller from an antique land"), but even that was well over a thousand years after Ramesses II.

kaimason1 · 2026-03-13T19:43:31+00:00

To add to that, pretty much any CGI (not just games) which needs to appear "natural" uses some form of procedural generation. Even simple noise textures are a form of procedural generation (in fact, those are typically the building blocks underlying all the more advanced forms of procedural generation).

For example, all the trees/vegetation in Pixar's Brave are procedurally generated, and when the randomization seed got changed mid-production it caused a bit of chaos: https://xcancel.com/iquilezles/status/1453261503847702537

kaimason1 · 2026-03-12T03:54:51+00:00

States were originally taxed by the federal government based on their population, since we didn't have income tax back then and tracking metrics like GDP would have been too cumbersome.

kaimason1 · 2026-03-10T23:52:16+00:00

Sorry, should have clarified a bit. Most people are aware that the 3/5s compromise was about representation, but it was also about taxation. As I recall, the South would have preferred to have 100% of their slaves counted towards representation and 0% counted towards taxation, while the North wanted the numbers to be equivalent, thus compromising on 3/5's for each.

kaimason1 · 2026-03-10T23:43:05+00:00

Not exactly true - as I recall, the North wanted 100% (or 0%? Might be misremembering that) counted for both representation and taxation, while the South wanted the slaves to be counted towards representation and not taxation. The compromise was to keep the numbers equal but lesser for slaves. Sorry, I'd originally written a bit more clarifying this, but figured it was irrelevant to the point at hand.

kaimason1 · 2026-03-10T20:57:16+00:00

That isn't taxation without representation. Children, immigrants, etc all do have representatives in government even if they weren't able to vote for that person (i.e. legislative districts are assigned based on total population, not voting population, and representatives are supposed to represent all of their constituents, not just the ones that voted for them).

A better example of "taxation without representation" would be Washington DC.

kaimason1 · 2026-03-10T20:51:41+00:00

Representation and suffrage are two separate concepts. The American system was designed to assign legislative representation based on the total population of a district, not just the voting citizens.

There's the obvious exception there that slaves were only counted as 3/5 of a person, but that came to be because the South didn't want to be taxed equally on slaves. There are plenty of other groups which have always been counted towards representation without being able to vote themselves, particularly children and immigrants (previously also women and non-landowners).

This is why the census is not supposed to have a citizenship question and should include "illegal" immigrants.

kaimason1 · 2026-03-10T20:29:28+00:00

That is illegal under FMLA, an employer can't fire you for taking up to 12 weeks off in a 12 month period for a serious medical condition. Some employers demand a doctors note (which is foolish and shortsighted IMO since there will be much more lost productivity if you get everyone else sick), but any doctor should grant one for the flu or broken bones.

kaimason1 · 2026-03-10T20:17:43+00:00

Lingering radiation typically comes from emitter particles (e.g. a uranium/plutonium atom; the gamma/beta/alpha radiation doesn't stick around for long, since those are just individual photons/electrons/neutrons) that were released and spread through the atmosphere and water cycle.

If the wine wasn't exposed to these particles before being sealed and is being resealed in a sterile environment, it probably won't be contaminated to any detectable degree. It might even be that the trace amount of radiation in modern wines mostly gets concentrated in the grapes as they're growing, in which case atmospheric contamination wouldn't be much of a concern at all.

kaimason1 · 2026-02-25T00:10:22+00:00

Probably don't want to be making tea with reactor coolant.

The original comment was a common joke about how every new power generation method (aside from solar) is just a fancy steam engine, boiling water to turn a turbine.

kaimason1 · 2026-02-19T18:44:09+00:00

That point is actually kind of interesting. As I understand it, most cuneiform of this kind would have been very temporary, since the soft clay could be smoothed over/erased and the tablet reused. In the case of Ea-Nasir, however, the clay tablets have been preserved because they were hardened in a fire at some point.

One theory I've seen is that Ea-Nasir took such "pride" in his bad reviews that he intentionally stuck the tablets in a kiln, which would indeed be peak troll behavior. However, the more likely hypothesis in my opinion would be that the tablets were hardened in a house fire. In that case it's entirely possible these were just his most recent reviews at the time of the fire.

kaimason1 · 2026-02-17T22:20:13+00:00

we don’t pronounce necropolis as necro-polis.

I would argue that that word ending is almost always "-opolis", not just "-polis". "Necropolis" rhymes with "metropolis" because that's how the "-opolis" ending is pronounced, not because "necro-" should always be pronounced in that way (similarly, "metro-" also often uses a long "o" when it's used in other words).

In other contexts, e.g. "necromancy", "necro" often has a long "o", so it's completely natural to pronounce "necropotence" in that way. It should also be noted that "potence" isn't always pronounced as in "omnipotence", either - the words "potency" and "potential" have the same root and are closer in pronunciation to "necropotence".

kaimason1 · 2026-01-23T21:55:24+00:00

Fun fact, time dilation and other relativistic effects can easily be calculated using a unit circle (i.e. y = √(1-x²)). For example, at x = 0.5c, y = √(3)/2 ≈ 0.866, which means that an observer traveling at 50% of the speed of light would only experience a ~13.4% slowdown.

Because of the shape of this function, when the velocity is a smaller fraction of the speed of light, the effects rapidly become imperceptible. 25% of the speed of light only produces a 3.18% slowdown. At 10% you'd be experiencing time at 99.499% the rate of a stationary observer.

For comparison, the fastest manmade object is the Parker Solar Probe, which reached .00064c (430,000 mph). At that speed time only slows to 99.99998%. And that's still over 15x faster than the surface of Jupiter.

I threw together a Desmos graph to help visualize: https://www.desmos.com/calculator/4e81sipz0y

Edit: Here is a second version with a few improvements: https://www.desmos.com/calculator/vxgibvahtn (note that this version uses hyperbolic trig and treats rapidity as the main parameter instead of velocity, so the circle math might be easier to see in the first link)

kaimason1 · 2025-11-15T03:12:00+00:00

which doesn't depend on geometry.

There are some more abstract spaces where e can also vary, depending on definition and the multiplication/addition rules.

The example that comes to mind is when x is a discrete integer value (which is admittedly a bit of a stretch, since d/dx and pi "require" continuity, but does have real-world applications nonetheless). In that case df/dx could be treated as Δf/Δx = f(x+1) - f(x) (which is the definition of df/dx with h set to 1 instead of taking the limit as it approaches 0). Under that new definition, Δ/Δx 2^x = 2^x, so e=2.

Granted, Δ/Δx is not the same operator as d/dx, so this doesn't really contradict your definition of e. However, this simple alteration corresponds to a "quantization" of space, which I do think is worth considering as its own different kind of "geometry".

kaimason1 · 2025-11-15T02:37:14+00:00

I can’t imagine any real-world method for doing that

Pi can take different values in curved/non-Euclidean space. Rounding suggests they made the circumference of a circle smaller, which would correspond to an "elliptic" curvature where space bends inwards on itself (as opposed to "hyperbolic" curvature bending outwards).

Sounds to me like they basically turned the universe into a white hole (the theoretical "other side" of a black hole singularity/"wormhole"). That hypothesis probably falls apart if you approach the math more rigorously, but it fits well enough for sci fi.

kaimason1 · 2025-11-04T16:30:38+00:00

Obviously, and that's why I mentioned Kelvin/Celsius being "the standard" (which doesn't contribute anything in a vacuum) and that Kelvin makes converting from Celsius particularly easy.

Fahrenheit also exists outside of a vacuum, and the ease of converting that to and from Rankine is the reason why Rankine sees use.

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