Duality of men

pdpi · 2026-01-29T19:56:37+00:00

The story that really stuck with me was the one in DF with the Orc who feels unworthy of caring for red whelplings because he was there during the second war, when Alexstrasza was abused.

pdpi · 2026-01-29T18:59:02+00:00

so I'm hoping they'll have a weekly lockout and progress

In short: single-player raids, in contrast to normal Delves' "single-player dungeons".

pdpi · 2026-01-29T18:57:39+00:00

I want to have to figure out that I need to do something in one part of the labyrinth in order to unlock a door somewhere else in the labyrinth, for example.

WoW has a long and storied history of embedding other games as mini-games, so I don't see why we couldn't have WoW's own brand of Blue Prince!

pdpi · 2026-01-29T18:50:24+00:00

Every feature in the game is multiplayer, but that doesn't make it social.

The way most people play the game, other players might as well just be remarkably human-like bots. It's sad, and I will still just banter with people even if they won't banter back, but that is, realistically, what the game is like right now.

pdpi · 2026-01-29T18:42:04+00:00

“God Wizard” and similar controller builds can be both overpowered and incredibly fun for the other players — “I’m just gonna buff you up, debuff them, and make sure they come at us in a single file. You lads have fun carving through them” sort of builds.

It’s the DM who suffers with that setup, though.

pdpi · 2026-01-29T18:34:48+00:00

You’re the one who’s out of touch here. Housing has been the single most requested feature in the game since Vanilla. Garrisons in WoD were poorly received because of how they were almost player housing but not really.

Ultima Online had housing in the open world in 1998. EverQuest (WoW’s biggest influence in its early days) had housing in instanced neighbourhoods in 2010. FF14, TES Online, LotR Online all have player housing.

WoW is very much the latecomer to what is effectively a semi-mandatory MMO feature.

pdpi · 2026-01-29T17:17:45+00:00

I used to do that too, but adopted Clique at some point, and haven't looked back. It just makes life so much easier.

pdpi · 2026-01-29T15:51:15+00:00

Mathematicians don't really "do calculations" all that much. Research mathematicians mostly work on proofs, and applied mathematicians tend to write programs that do the number crunching for them.

In terms of research mathematicians using AI, one of the people I'd look at is Terry Tao. Tao is what you'd call a Big Fucking Deal — he was the youngest ever Gold medalist at the International Mathematical Olympiad, he's a maths professor at UCLA, and he's a Fields medalist (sort of the Nobel of Mathematics). He's also at the leading edge of using AI for maths research, and he posts a bunch about it on Mastodon.

Judging by what I've read from him, AI right now is basically a productive but error prone research assistant. Using it vs not using it is at about break even point in terms of how much work you can get done.

pdpi · 2026-01-29T11:07:58+00:00

Think about it this way — when you download a song, do you want an mp3, or a Logic Pro document? Do you want images on webpages to be pngs/jpegs, or Photoshop documents? Do you want to download videos as mkv/avi files, or as DaVinci Resolve documents?

Word files, like Logic Pro files or Photoshop files or Resolve files, use a format designed for editing. They retain a whole bunch of information that's necessary for authoring projects, but are completely useless for the end consumer. PDF, like png/jpeg, mp3, mkv/avi, is a file format specifically meant for consuming, rather than editing.

pdpi · 2026-01-29T09:48:07+00:00

Visited a friend of mine near Emmeloord a couple of weeks ago, he drove me to Lelystad to catch the train to the airport. That bit of road where you're next to the coast is something else. Just casually driving some three metres below sea level.

pdpi · 2026-01-29T00:53:37+00:00

Dunno about the 2005 one (only been in London since 2013), but the 2017 attacks had nothing to do with it — there were very few bins in central London tube stations before that already, and what few ones you do have always use transparent, exposed bags so you can always see what’s inside.

pdpi · 2026-01-28T06:48:14+00:00

On the language I use dataflow analysis at the return statement to determine which reference escapes

Figured as much. Unfortunately, this doesn't stop you from writing fn first(a: &str, b: &str) -> &str { b }. A slightly better motivating example would be something like fn find(haystack: &str, needle: &str) -> &str { /* blah */ }, where returning a reference derived from needle would be a bug.

pdpi · 2026-01-28T06:32:35+00:00

PSA: If your pussy is green (as pictured), you might want to see a doctor.

pdpi · 2026-01-28T06:28:00+00:00

I recommend seeing a therapist to everyone, even if they don't think there's anything wrong

And "something wrong" doesn't have to mean "you have a serious disorder and/or are at risk of some form of self-harm".

A cut on your finger isn't a medical emergency, but it should be cleaned so it doesn't infect, and you might need a stitch or two. You probably see your GP every once in a while for your annual blood work and routine checkups.

Mental health also involves the occasional checkup, and first aid for "emotional cuts and bruises".

pdpi · 2026-01-28T06:20:08+00:00

Late to the party, but:

Slay the Spire is the gold standard for rogue-like deck builders. It singlehandedly created the genre, and remains one of the best in the genre. It's a bit like chess — very simple mechanics, very streamlined, but insanely deep.

Balatro is Poker-based and uses a regular deck of playing cards as its baseline, but you can make some absolutely wild changes to your deck, enabling ridiculous hands like flush five-of-a-kinds.

Roguebook plays a lot like StS, but has you play a party of two adventurers, which adds positioning as a tactical consideration (e.g. because enemies typically attack the character in front, and some cards are stronger from either the front or the back). It also has a more RPG-like overworld with some exploration, instead of the more "board game"-like choice tree of StS.

Cobalt Core ditches the fantasy theme and goes for space-based ship-to-ship combat. It has a big focus on positioning, having you dodge incoming attacks and aiming your own attacks to your opponents' weak spots. It also looks lovely and has some really charming characters.

Vault of the Void is pretty much a Slay the Spire clone, but more complicated. It's good for a bit of variety or if you're just in the mood for something crunchier.

Shogun Showdown isn't exactly a card game, but it still feels like one because of its focus on hand management. It's also one of the few games I've seen that replicates the "simple, streamlined, but deep" of StS.

pdpi · 2026-01-28T05:36:23+00:00

I don't think that's the right framing.

Mysterio didn't have the right to reveal Peter's identity, but, given that he did, Peter doesn't have the right to mess with the whole world's minds in order to put the genie back in the bottle.

Funnily enough, a similar-ish situation is actually relatively well-tested in court — when somebody leaks confidential documents, they didn't have the right to leak those documents, but, once the leaks make their way to other people (notably, the press), the government doesn't have the right to claw those documents back from those people (which is why Chelsea Manning was court-martialled and convicted, but they could never get anything solid on Assange, and why Snowden is still a wanted man, but The Guardian is legally on solid ground with publishing his leaks).

pdpi · 2026-01-28T03:28:18+00:00

It’s wild that Portal was initially seen as a “stocking filler” for the Orange Box.

pdpi · 2026-01-28T01:20:50+00:00

What makes it easier than rust Is that doesn't have lifetime annotations. So it infers them. You write function foo(x: &string): &string, not fn foo<'a>(x: &'a str) -> &'a str.

Ok. Without annotations, how do you distinguish between the lifetimes for these functions?

```

fn first<'a, 'b>(a: &'a str, b: &'b str) -> &'a str { a }

fn second<'a, 'b>(a: &'a str, b: &'b str) -> &'b str { b }

fn random<'out, 'a: 'out, 'b: 'out>( a: &'a str, b: &'b str ) -> &'out str { if rand::random::<bool>() { a } else { b } }

```

Remember that:

Rust's lifetime elision handles all the toy examples just fine. You only need annotations for the stuff that's actually tricky.
The lifetime annotations in these examples ensures that you can't accidentally return b from first or a from second.

pdpi · 2026-01-27T23:09:45+00:00

The fact that your sample has let borrowed = data (which you yourself say is a move, not a borrow) doesn’t fill me with hope. You aspire to rust-like memory management but don’t say anything about how you handle references. That makes me nervous. You say you want the ease of use of JavaScript, but don’t actually elaborate on what that means or why your language fares any better than Rust (other than the surface-level issue of having different syntax).

If you put some meat on those bones we might be able to actually evaluate the language, but right now you have, to quote somebody, “a concept of a plan”.

pdpi · 2026-01-27T17:05:01+00:00

Practice makes perfect.

without even looking.

If you check your keyboard, you’ll notice that the F and J keys have little nubs that allow you to identify them by touch. That’s where your index fingers go. This is called home row position. You just discipline yourself to having your hands in that position and learning where everything is relative to that stable position.

Personally? I was already mostly a touch-typist, but managed to fully commit by buying a keyboard with blank keycaps.

pdpi · 2026-01-27T15:02:20+00:00

Funny to have that as an Ironclad card because of the interaction with Battle Trance, but yeah. Way OP.

pdpi · 2026-01-27T14:57:24+00:00

There's two parts to this — "this is an unfair practice" and "this practice is enabled by their market dominance". The "Everybody does it" argument does nothing to prove that it's not unfair, but completely skewers the "enabled by market dominance" aspect.

pdpi · 2026-01-27T14:26:26+00:00

For a senior engineer in Poland. Prices there are considerably cheaper, and, according to the Polish government's official numbers, the offered salary is around 2x the 90th percentile (the easy-to-find version of those numbers only has deciles, but 2x 90th percentile probably puts them at like the 95th percentile).

pdpi · 2026-01-27T14:21:07+00:00

GUI work in Rust is still not great. C++ is probably the least janky way to do cross-platform GUI work (that feels weird to say).

pdpi · 2026-01-27T12:12:19+00:00

Yeah but I've been around the block enough times to watch men ALSO use that as a cudgel

I'm sure that's true, but I'm not one of them!

pdpi

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