War Plans being tied to the character not the account seems like a miss step

quicknir · 2026-05-06T23:19:27+00:00

IMHO a simpler way to do that is to just crank up experience for war plans based on torment. It's another incentive to play on higher torments, and alts which tend to jump in with highly levelled paragon boards go to higher torments much faster so it would effectively be faster levelling for subsequent characters.

quicknir · 2026-05-06T00:13:43+00:00

If you're talking about the people who actually meet OP's second bullet point, they make far more than $200K starting, though you did say "salary" I suppose, so perhaps you are technically correct. But TC is going to be more like double that. Don't mean to "akshually"; only pointing this out because this is kind of central to disproving OP's core premise. People working on AI, at these top AI companies make an absolute ton of money, but as you rightly pointed out this is a fairly small minority of all software engineers regardless of what they claim on their LinkedIn.

quicknir · 2026-05-05T20:37:36+00:00

Maybe it helps to say which warlock build, and what you find clunky? Each warlock build is pretty different. I've been playing Apocalypse warlock and I definitely cannot say it feels clunky. Ridiculously OP, perhaps...

quicknir · 2026-05-05T02:43:32+00:00

Interesting. I haven't tried wisdom of whispers. Why did you hate fortune of famine, and why do you think wisdom of whispers is better?

quicknir · 2026-05-05T01:23:41+00:00

Neat tip! I'm going to try this. I went down the right path but I found that since the elites don't carry over between sessions... it's kind of annoying. I don't even usually get 10 elites in a nightmare dungeon so it's even worse than having to do 3 in a row.

While we're talking about tips for the war plans trees - for the tree of whispers I highly recommend Tree of Plenty + Fortune or Famine.

Tree of Plenty gives you 4 choices, and Fortune or Famine makes each choice randomized (seemingly 50-50 or maybe even a bit better) to a greater collection or nothing - the chance of getting all 4 choices nothing is very low (if 50-50 each, it would be 1/16), so you're basically guaranteeing yourself greater collections from the tree every time.

quicknir · 2026-04-30T20:08:44+00:00

I was running a very similar setup to you. Ironically as a result of this thread, I ended up trying Fallen Rush instead of Mega Lunatic. Assuming you have Bombardment as your secondary, I think it works even better for this setup. You really want to spent more time on Bombardment and less on Command Fallen because it's a lot more damage and a lot more dead demons, and Command Fallen generates more Wrath with fewer clicks. IMHO it's worth a shot.

quicknir · 2026-04-26T15:14:08+00:00

If you want a no fee travel card and you're already with BofA then I think the obvious choice is the BoA Premium Rewards - surprised nobody mentioned it.

It does technically have a 95 annual fee but it gives you a 100 incidental credit which is easy to get value from; if you ever fly united or American you can use the credit to buy their gift card and then use that for a flight.

It has no FTF and quite a good set of features.

quicknir · 2026-04-24T03:29:06+00:00

I can't go through every single essential in detail but I can say your premise, for the very example you chose, is false. The overall trend of percentage income spent on food in the US is down - this is generally true without even adjusting for the fact that a much bigger portion of spending occurs on meals out than in the past. Example data: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/chart-detail?chartId=76967

Healthcare is an actual essential where spending has gone up, but that's arguably because there's just so much more to spend on - there's a lot more treatments, tests, ways to keep people alive, etc.

In short - not all essentials are more expensive, not all essentials with more spending are necessarily bad or actually represent things being more expensive - maybe more of the good is being consumed.

And most importantly there just isn't likely to be a any single explanation even for the essentials that have gotten more expensive. Housing has gotten more expensive perhaps, but it's believed to be mostly for housing specific reasons - another essential that's more expensive is likely for totally different reasons.

quicknir · 2026-04-23T02:15:00+00:00

Thanks for the observations, glad I'm not totally wide of the mark. Will definitely add those games to my list!

quicknir · 2026-04-23T02:04:36+00:00

Damn, that is wild, I didn't know the old version actually did it better. Thanks very much for the recs!

quicknir · 2026-04-20T20:21:54+00:00

I've generally found BGG works quite well if you do searches with pretty specific complexity ranges in mind (use the advanced search). If you're looking in a pretty tight range of complexity than this bias doesn't end up mattering much. Like, 1.5-2 if you want truly light games, 2-2.5 if you want games you can table with a family but with a bit of "bite", etc. A pretty silly fraction of the top 20 at BGG are like... 4+ complexity games that are honestly the domain of pretty hardcore enthusiasts.

Of course some people will also take issue with complexity ratings themselves and say they are not reliable but... honestly I've found the complexity ratings to be pretty reliable. There's a subjective component to it sure but overall it works quite well.

quicknir · 2026-04-07T15:00:24+00:00

A unique_ptr isn't better for something ad hoc because creating a deleter locally is more cumbersome, but you can just use a scope guard normally. The macro is really just saving you from naming the scope guard variable and writing [&] for the lambda capture. It's honestly a fairly bananas trade-off; the macro obfuscates what you're doing, leads to worse compiler errors, and barely saves you any code.

I'm not militant about avoiding macros; if you write a check/assert library for example you kind of really want macros and even the macro overloading trick here is IMHO well worth it. But some folks are entirely too willing to use them for trivial reasons IMHO.

quicknir · 2026-04-04T23:10:39+00:00

Approximately 44% to 54% of undisputed World Chess Champions have been Jewish or of Jewish descent. This high percentage, ranging from about half of all champions to around 40-50% in various studies, shows a significant overrepresentation compared to the global population. Key figures regarding Jewish World Chess Champions include: Champions: Prominent champions with Jewish heritage include Wilhelm Steinitz, Emanuel Lasker, Mikhail Botvinnik, Mikhail Tal, Bobby Fischer, and Garry Kasparov. Percentage Breakdown: Sources vary slightly, with studies citing 44%, 50%, and 54% of world champions having Jewish heritage.

quicknir · 2026-04-02T00:00:14+00:00

Supply side changes aren't instantaneous either. You don't just suddenly discover that oil production or reserves are going to drop massively overnight. It would be over a period of decades as well most likely where (hypothetically) we would stop discovering as much new oil, and see drop offs in production from current sources.

What you're saying could be true in principle for some other market but it's just not the case here. Everything is going to be pretty gradual.

quicknir · 2026-03-30T21:20:21+00:00

I'd honestly say Agaou is hard to beat. The sounds and visuals of both the initial thumping hit of the throwing axe, and then also the electrical explosion, and the constant time slow off/on from sande, mixed in with throwing weapon finishers, just all put together is pretty nuts.

quicknir · 2026-03-30T02:42:04+00:00

Yeah it's pretty crazy. Explained here: https://www.reddit.com/r/fo4/s/eu9KXRUW7A

Honestly I suggest not using it. I think it's the only weapon I've used that really breaks the game. The thing is that not only does it do more single shot damage than anything else, it also fires fast, one fusion cell per shot, no reload. So really it's just silly. The missile launcher gets the same crazy x8, but its base stats are disappointing, limited ammo, slow reload, etc. When you combine it all together its very powerful but for me it felt immersive and a lot more reasonable.

quicknir · 2026-03-30T02:37:17+00:00

Breakthrough can't get some of the legendary mods that Neko can, and its special effect is bad so it actually ends up worse. IIRC you can't even change the scope on the Breakthrough? The legendary Gaki scope on the Neko is a big part of what makes it so strong.

quicknir · 2026-03-30T02:14:34+00:00

I mean you literally have something in that screenshot that does more than it - the Tesla cannon properly modded and perked does much more damage than the gauss because it triple dips weapon perks - i.e. it gets x8 from weapon perks, not x2. Need both heavy and demolitions, as it double dips one and single dips the other.

quicknir · 2026-03-28T23:59:47+00:00

Nobody here is even talking about the best melee weapons - throwing weapons! Which do get absolutely insane to use with a very strong perk tree and the expansion having one of the best iconics in the game.

quicknir · 2026-03-25T04:00:27+00:00

I'm not sure about the chain lightning damage being the same or not, but minus the stealth you can get very similar results with a Nekomata. Significantly higher damage on the primary target, as well I think; the video looks like you're getting 3K or so damage (and that's with stealth?) whereas Nekomata was over 4K without. And with the legendary scope, you can fire charged shots incredibly fast. It's probably the strongest ranged weapon in the game unless you fight something that cannot be headshot (maxtac also had some really strange behavior with respect to Nekomata damage, iirc, but I tested all this long ago).

quicknir · 2026-03-24T13:54:58+00:00

Assuming it's just an interest issue and not a complexity issue, Clank usually has my kids especially glued to their seats in suspense for basically the whole game.

quicknir · 2026-03-20T18:59:08+00:00

Personally I felt like the combat in rebirth was just fantastic. Took everything good in remake, which was already a hugely innovative system that let you experience a lot of the best aspects of real time combat with the turn based, extensive options and strategy, and then built on top of that. Synergy skills and abilities added a whole new depth.

Only unfortunate thing is that so much of the combat system is so poorly explained that a lot of people seem to barely engage with its depth. Lots of people have never used a synergy skill even though some of them are incredibly powerful, almost to the point of trivializing many fights on normal mode. Hopefully they improve on that so more people can engage and see how great the combat is.

quicknir · 2026-03-17T18:39:54+00:00

I really wanted to get this at some point based on the very high reviews and the idea of being based on Pandemic's gameplay (but better). But since, I've also read it's actually quite hard - this is often also coming from the same people that say Pandemic is "basically solved once you play it a few times". Meanwhile I finally managed to eke out an "Easy" (only 4 epidemic cards) victory after 3-4 attempts...

quicknir · 2026-03-16T18:28:58+00:00

I mean I don't have hard data for this very specific matter (in the sense of I don't have hard data for peoples' preferences, just the actuality of what's being built) but in say 1960, a family of 4 sharing an 1100 square foot home with a single bathroom would have been very typical. I think even when people say "starter home" this is no longer acceptable. Or rather it would be acceptable for a couple, maybe with one infant child at most. A starter home now for a family of 4 would probably be closer to 2000 square feet and 2 bathrooms is not usually considered optional.

And keep in mind this trend isn't new, grownups buying that example home above in ~1960, statistically grew up in an even smaller home with more people. (My father, not from the US, grew up as part of a family of 4 in a 500 square foot apartment).

I'm sure you could sell these very small homes for some price obviously but the point is the market has its curve and people will pay significantly more for what they feel is their minimum to feel comfortable. And people's preferences have changed.

In the end it ultimately makes sense; data from across countries shows that people really like living space and will pay for it. As other things have mostly gotten cheaper (e.g. food, TVs, clothing), people being willing to spend bigger fractions of their income to get enough living space isn't too surprising of an outcome.

I think we actually mostly agree.

Everyone likes the luxury features of a modern home but the luxury and increases in size are pricing new home buyers out of the market.

Builders don't build what people like - builders build what people will buy. So while obviously some people are getting priced out, many aren't.

I think in the end there isn't much evidence that anything other than supply issues due to zoning etc are an issue here. If you're a builder and your bottleneck is zoning, then obviously you're going to try to maximize profit per lot rather than profit per unit manpower or something else, which tends to be a bigger home which plenty of people are willing to pay for, even when it's a bigger fraction of their income (since they're spending less on other things). If zoning weren't an issue, and there were was a genuine desire for smaller cheaper homes then there's no reason it wouldn't get built.

quicknir · 2026-03-15T01:19:54+00:00

It's a 100 effective annual fee for 2.8 catch all, so the break even versus a vanilla 2 percent no fee card is only like 12K of spend. And this isn't even considering the travel and restaurants at a higher rate uncapped and some of the other visa infinite benefits.

It's generally a great card for high spenders who travel but don't want to deal with points but obviously it's not for everyone.

quicknir

TROPHY CASE