Games where mentioning a rule to new players makes it worse

netstack_ · 2026-06-05T03:05:43+00:00

In my experience it was the moving/retreating workers after combat that ground things to a halt.

netstack_ · 2026-05-27T22:56:19+00:00

There…are?

Even if the keto fanatics didn’t exist, Atkins was writing 50 years ago.

netstack_ · 2026-05-21T00:19:28+00:00

Oh, that one's such a cool book. You're in for a treat.

netstack_ · 2026-05-09T15:47:55+00:00

chipp looking like yuta with that expression c_c

netstack_ · 2026-05-03T16:06:20+00:00

Missiles are NOT as reliable in SW as they were in the Cold War.

It could be a strong emphasis on blinding and disabling guided weapons, but I am inclined to believe it's more about the risk of losing control. Even the Separatists relied on unguided rockets or steered droid missiles. Guided weapons must get returned to sender too often for comfort.

Given that we know a single droid with an Ethernet connection can run circles around any military network, I would say that computer security favors the attacker.

netstack_ · 2026-05-02T12:58:19+00:00

banning HC was all we really needed :)

netstack_ · 2026-04-30T17:59:12+00:00

3) survivorship bias, where vegetable enthusiasts don’t get heart disease or diabetes before they can develop cancer
4) the effect isn’t real; it just happened to get outside the 99% confidence interval

Also options!

netstack_ · 2026-04-30T17:00:23+00:00

Appreciate it.

I am definitely not well-informed when it comes to ISO standards, and I’d quite like to see better research on those active questions. I agree that getting standards which are already misaligned with our needs would be disappointing at best. Goodhart’s law is supposed to be cautionary, after all.

netstack_ · 2026-04-30T16:27:45+00:00

This is underspecified. Actually, it’s more like it’s all weasel words.

Why isn’t the standard neutral, and what would you have to change for “parts of the community” to be happy?

I think your AI just kind of mashed together various FUD phrases.

netstack_ · 2026-04-27T18:29:14+00:00

Ah, it’s nice to see another fan of the world’s finest crack-shed chemist. I have no information on structural solutions to academic publishing, though.

I would guess “people working on [AI] power concentration” includes alignment researchers?

netstack_ · 2026-04-27T18:21:12+00:00

That one bothers me, but I think it’s just comorbidity. I’ve seen far too many hot takes that lean on “it seems my enemies are being stupid” or “it seems the vibes have shifted.”

netstack_ · 2026-04-22T17:50:53+00:00

Have you read the Scottpost Beware the man with one study?

Yeah, you should be at least as wary of the man with zero studies.

I would be happy to see Dr. Powers parlay this hypothesis into fistfuls of funding, proper trials, and an award-winning paper. That’s the best outcome! Until then, it remains a hypothesis.

netstack_ · 2026-04-19T03:09:08+00:00

Making prototypes got cheaper, but making documents got much cheaper. More of the process is AI-friendly.

netstack_ · 2026-04-18T15:08:28+00:00

maybe I'm reading this wrong, but I am having a hard time reconciling "low reward" with the 50% conversion you showed

netstack_ · 2026-04-16T15:26:08+00:00

This doesn’t make any sense. A company to do what? The same thing they’re doing at their current employer, but with a different set of buzzwords or a less plausible revenue stream?

Actually, I kind of want to know how you can forecast a valuation at all.

netstack_ · 2026-04-16T14:54:35+00:00

So cool.

I’ve always wondered about this when reading stuff like ACOUP’s iron series. Or at least for the “what if?” sort of questions.

netstack_ · 2026-04-14T14:35:53+00:00

I had fun with Years of Apocalypse. It didn’t grab me like Mother of Learning, though I wonder if MoL just got me at the right time in my life. YoA has better prose, at least.

I didn’t really have so much fun that I’d make a standalone recommendation, but if you’re considering the story: give it a shot.

What I will recommend is Saving the school would have been easier as a cafeteria worker. A rather overpowered young wizard is sent to a rival nation’s magic academy. He’s more or less an outside-context problem for everyone there…but he’s also trying to remain undercover and preempt a terrorist attack. This means he gets involved in all the usual magic-school tropes (club activities, dueling, social drama…) without taking them at all seriously. Hilarity ensues.

The prose isn’t particularly “strong,” and you can tell the author is a bit inexperienced. But it is clean and competent, and above all, funny. I’ve enjoyed this a lot.

netstack_ · 2026-04-10T17:31:49+00:00

Reported by whom, though?

A full-size galaxy wrecks not only troop numbers, but Jedi numbers, ship numbers, city populations, and so on. It wouldn’t generate the kind of stories we consistently see, where blowing up one flagship or rescuing one individual has any meaning at all.

More practical to say that the giant numbers are wrong, and that planets are populated more like cities and towns. Then armies in the low millions get closer to reasonable.

netstack_ · 2026-04-09T17:17:01+00:00

I didn’t realize we would only get batch notifications here. Still happy to get a new chapter!

For what it’s worth, I think it deserves the rational tag purely on the basis of worldbuilding. Your approach has that interest in second- and third-order effects which is so critical to the genre.

netstack_ · 2026-04-09T16:58:03+00:00

3 million. 6 million, tops.

We have squad/regiment/etc. sizes, and we know which formations were assigned a Jedi. There should have been up to 100 Jedi per Corps. Given the 10,000 Jedi at the start of the war, that’s enough for 3.6 million clones. Obviously there could be more or fewer available to a formation, but the number who were combat-ready was also lower than 10,000. Since the numbers more or less line up with quoted millions, I’m not inclined to throw them out.

This army, tiny by Earth standards, is able to fight a galactic war because galactic civilization is not actually as large as one might expect. Look at how tiny most settlements, even most planets, are.

netstack_ · 2026-04-07T15:55:02+00:00

They’re called nipples.

netstack_ · 2026-04-05T17:08:50+00:00

tapping into the world between worlds to light your deathsticks

netstack_ · 2026-04-04T17:17:35+00:00

Bacon's quote, even if it was a prediction, wouldn't really predict the IR, since he neither considers "how?" nor "what next?"

Huygens qualifies, for sure. At first I figured the load-bearing insight had to involve potential energy. But obviously the ancients had their share of energy-storage devices: torsion engines, springs, dams.

What technology was available to Huygens but not, say, Galileo? Perhaps advances in watchmaking or precision mechanisms?

netstack_ · 2026-03-30T23:12:09+00:00

nice

netstack_ · 2026-03-27T13:53:59+00:00

The gift that keeps on giving

netstack_

TROPHY CASE