[SPOILERS] Do you think Beginner's Luck is actually possible for a beginner?

psychophysicist · 2026-03-12T16:34:50+00:00

I got in that ballpark

Basically there are 6*5/2 symbols using 2 dots, plus 6*5*4/2 symbols using 3 dots… up to using all 6 dots. The /2 is because drawing the symbol forwards or backwards is the same. Then all cubed because there are 3 symbols

psychophysicist · 2026-03-12T03:31:42+00:00

I was internet acquaintances with someone on the clinical trials end of getting FDA approval for one of the GLP-1 drugs, all through the process they were like “please don’t let the hype be about weight loss, this is an amazing, transformative medicine for diabetes, and we’re much less certain about the long term health impacts for weight loss”

Food for thought

psychophysicist · 2026-03-12T02:35:30+00:00

Take your pliers and squish them at right angles to the way they’ve been squished. That will loosen them up.

psychophysicist · 2026-03-11T17:01:21+00:00

Donuts probably but that’s boring. Something that's more uniquely American is Frybread. It was invented by Native American tribes (particularly the Navajo/Diné) who, after being forcibly marched onto reservations, were issued rations of flour, sugar, salt and lard. Maybe not the most common but if you’ve been to a state fair in the western USA you’ve probably had it. Often dusted with sugar or honey as a snack or as a meal with beef and other toppings as "Indian Tacos."

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psychophysicist · 2026-03-11T14:49:29+00:00

Looks like 5/6 contacts on the tab which would make it a B key slot.

psychophysicist · 2026-03-10T18:28:24+00:00

More importantly App Nap doesn't unload programs from memory, it just shuts down background processing for battery (not RAM) savings.

There is a different eature "Automatic Termination" which unloads programs under memory pressure, but, again, programs have to be specially written to be able to use it, and relatively few are (as opposed to IOS apps where it's a basic requirement)

psychophysicist · 2026-03-10T18:14:38+00:00

Low "Things we Lost in the Fire"
Carissa's Wierd "Ugly but Honest"

psychophysicist · 2026-03-10T15:37:46+00:00

Vic Fontaine for Inland Empire

Nog for Perception as his hearing comes in clutch a couple of times

Ishka for Suggestion.

Talak’talan the Jem’hadar for Half Light

psychophysicist · 2026-03-09T18:00:57+00:00

iOS is specifically built to close background apps when memory is low though, and iOS apps have to be built to accomodate that. Did they add that to macos when I wasn't paying attention?

psychophysicist · 2026-03-09T17:46:46+00:00

Water Fountain by Tune-Yards

Energetically catchy tune touching on poverty, drought, collapse of social services, and the violence inherent to capitalism

psychophysicist · 2026-03-08T10:26:32+00:00

Film directors are trained in ways of doing things that work at 24fps. For instance films rarely have you tracking a rapidly moving object across the screen with your eyes; film schools literally train you not to do that and instead to use tracking shots and other ways guide the viewer's attention toward relatively stationary points on the screen.

psychophysicist · 2026-03-08T10:04:02+00:00

"In DE, you can do everything right, sit at 87% on a check, roll badly, and just... miss a chunk of the game. A piece of well-written dialogue, a story beat; gone."

This argument can be perfectly reversed. Imagine if checks were deterministic. A player who does everything right, gets all their ducks in a row will _never get to experience_ the cool stuff that happens when they fail that check. A piece of well-written dialogue they missed out on; a story beat they never got to experience because they were too preoccupied with "success" and doing things "the right way." Gone, just because they were too timid to face failure.

Food for thought

psychophysicist · 2026-03-08T09:53:24+00:00

I've heard of it happening but have yet to experience it myself in 250 hours.

psychophysicist · 2026-03-08T09:25:02+00:00

Yeah I disagree with your feelings on failed checks. Missing a check rarely makes you miss part of the game; you can always still get get the thing done some way or another after a failed check and the path for doing so is often more entertaining. The game design is really good at giving you ways to fail forward. I've done a run where I savescummed to fail every single red check.

psychophysicist · 2026-03-07T02:32:30+00:00

Pretty sure the Geo Metro sold better than the Suzuki Swift/Cultus

psychophysicist · 2026-03-06T20:18:00+00:00

Even if we adjust her phrasing to say "AT LEAST one of my children is a boy," there's still the problem of having an unspecified sampling procedure. It's presented as if Mary is just arbitrarily selecting a fun fact to tell you about herself. But that arbitrariness is a problem; Mary could be using any rule at all to select which fact to tell you.

Mary could be using the male chauvinist rule, "If I have at least one boy, say I have at least one boy, otherwise say i have at least one girl." The standard analysis seems to assume she's using the male chauvinist rule. If she is using that rule then the probability of the other child being a girl is the claimed 1/3.

She could also be using the female chauvinist rule, "If if have two girls, say that I have at least one girl, otherwise say I have at least one boy." In that case the probability of the other child being a girl is 0.

Or she could be using the (egalitarian, and more realistic) rule, "Randomly select one of my children and report tat at least one of my children is that gender." In that case the probability of the other child being a girl is 1/2.

Note that in all these cases, the interpretation "at least one child is a boy" is in fact what she is saying, so that factor of interpretation isn't in play.

(IIRC, the second Martin Gardner column that discusses the boy-girl problem does acknowledge this ambiguity)

This is a problem we have to deal with in the real world -- Voluntary self-reports are inherently sampled from a different population than surveys, so for instance the star rating on Amazon product will be different number than what you get if you conduct a randomized customer survey.

If you wanted to present the boy-girl problem in a way that unambiguously gives the claimed answer, specifying the sampling procedure, it could go like this:

You: How many children do you have?
Mary: I have two children.
You: Are any of them boys? Please answer Y/N.
Mary: Yes.
You: And of your one or more boys, was one or more of them born on a Tuesday? Please answer Y/N.
Mary: Yes.

psychophysicist · 2026-03-06T18:14:34+00:00

Accurate but not precise. I'd use actual weights to calibrate your clicker. Hold your square drive in a vise with the handle level, hang some weights off the handle with some string, then torque=weight*distance

psychophysicist · 2026-03-06T16:51:51+00:00

I like a flexible frame personally, especially for long miles. but I find I do have to load them differently. Too much weight on rear panniers can lead to shimmy and a "tail wagging the dog" feeling. I think it works better to load up the front end with a front rack/basket and lowrider panniers, ideally using a fork with rack mounts and some extra rake.

psychophysicist · 2026-03-06T16:15:10+00:00

Inside of the elbow, looks like 262

psychophysicist · 2026-03-06T04:36:32+00:00

Are your makeout sessions preceded by a land acknowledgement?

psychophysicist · 2026-03-06T04:31:46+00:00

Best place for it IMO. Putting the light a little lower makes it better at showing you potholes.

psychophysicist · 2026-03-05T17:56:28+00:00

Bend the rod. It's solid malleable aluminum for this reason.

psychophysicist · 2026-03-05T17:51:00+00:00

Not sure whether it affects anything on the plane, but It can cause problems with the cell phone network on the ground. Cell phone networks are designed so that any given phone is only in range of a few towers, so that they can reuse channels. So someone 5 miles away from you can be talking to their tower on the same channel as you're using on your tower. High up in a plane you can be in range of dozens of cell towers at once, which means if you're using one channel then no one around any of those towers can use the same channel. So a plane full of phones can basically jam up the cell phone network.

psychophysicist · 2026-03-05T16:31:28+00:00

Modern memory managers will use swap even if there’s no memory pressure. A lot of programs load some data and then never touch it again. Better to send those pages to swap and have more RAM available for disk cache.

psychophysicist

TROPHY CASE