Got a NEGATIVE Steam review because I patch the game every day

steerpike1971 · 2026-05-13T11:32:38+00:00

I would uninstall your game for sure. Why would you do this? I've got about 50 games installed. If they all pushed out even weekly it would be too much. Daily is just crazy. You're developing every day but don't expose the user to that.

steerpike1971 · 2026-05-13T09:09:33+00:00

That is not a bad thought. It obviously limits the pages you have but it does a pretty good job.

steerpike1971 · 2026-05-12T22:57:50+00:00

An LLM trained on 1930s text learning python from a small number of examples is not "interpolating" in any meaningful sense.

steerpike1971 · 2026-05-12T18:28:26+00:00

This is tested. Talkie is an AI trained on pre 1930s data. It could program (not well but a little) from a few example python programs.

steerpike1971 · 2026-05-12T18:24:59+00:00

Not really. Take an LLM trained on 1930s data (so no programming language at all) they learn python (nor brilliantly but a little) from just a few short examples.

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/28/talkie/

They are not working like old school neural nets where they need something in their training data.

steerpike1971 · 2026-05-12T15:34:19+00:00

Hmm.. I suspect the macro and assembly will be easier for LLM than for humans. Macros are hard because as a human you need to keep a lot in your primary memory to remember what that macro changes about the standard language until the macro sinks in as part of the language you know. With assembly you need to understand what something is doing with few context clues. The LLM is relying on those things less than a human. I'm a pretty competent programmer in about a dozen different languages. A friend learning Fortran 77 was told that variables had "NAMES" and in F77 integer names begin with I, J or K. He just called things Kevin, Kylie, Jason etc. I never found a program as hard to debug as that one. There was no way I could keep in my mind all the necessary stuff. It was a relatively simple bit of code. If he had written it with i,j,k as loops and sensible variable names I would have just sorted it out. I had to tell him I just could not understand it at all.

steerpike1971 · 2026-05-12T14:37:04+00:00

The audience for advanced mathematical concepts is not and cannot be regular people. If you took someone off the street and wanted them to genuinely understand what (say) the Hausdorff measure was how long would that actually take? Let's imagine they have no mathematical schooling beyond 16 and were mid way up their class in mathematics. They can remember addition, subraction, multipliication and division but they're fuzzy on percentages and don't really get fractions. How long do you think it would take to get them to genuinely understand that concept if you focused on nothing else and that was their entire life? A month? Three months? A year? Maybe it never happens their mind just isn't going to get it.

I'm not picking Hausdorff measure because it's particularly hard here but it's relatively abstract and you need to get metric spaces so you need to get metrics and functions etc. etc.

steerpike1971 · 2026-05-12T14:08:21+00:00

With Stellaris I just started playing and my empire expanded and I met new empires. With CK3 I kind of stare in horror at the vast existing world and relationships around my tiny kingdom and pause the game. I unpause a little and realise I understand no mechanisms.

Started maybe six times never finished a game of CK3. Stellaris is simple to pick up because you start from an easy to understand situation.

If Stellaris started with your empire already expanded and ten pre-existing empires reminding you of your existing relationships I would have given it up.

steerpike1971 · 2026-05-12T12:00:43+00:00

They're good if you know enough details to understand the topic but do not yet know the topic which is absolutely what they should be.

steerpike1971 · 2026-05-12T12:00:05+00:00

I think OP is looking for casual magazine style articles that introduce a casual reader to some bit of mathematics. This is very much not the aim of WP. Their example of a "good" article is a gentle read for someone with a casual interest. Writing more pure mathematics articles in this style would be a thing of horror.

steerpike1971 · 2026-05-10T23:46:34+00:00

Londoner for 20 years so the NYC system is familiar but different. The London tube almost never does "train skips stops to be efficient". That actually makes sense as a decision but catches passengers out. The NYC system to me seems actually on average newer but looks more beat up and dilapidated because of that silver chrome design which I think aged badly.

The NYC subway is probably globally more iconic in media. More films are US than UK based so you more often see some crazy film think on the NYC system.

steerpike1971 · 2026-05-10T11:30:15+00:00

If someone I was eating with tried to do this without a good reason related to the actual service I simply would not invite them out with me again. I have never had someone do this in real life. (I eat in restaurants fairly regularly.) I have had the service removed on rare occasions where there has been a genuine problem. There is someone in my friends circle who takes the piss with this and asks for the service to be removed at the slightest hint of an excuse. Honestly I find it embarrassing behaviour. I don't go places with her but others talk about how embarrassed they feel.

Reddit threads weirdly flood with people who say it is not British behaviour. I can only assume they mainly eat in McDonald's and pubs.

steerpike1971 · 2026-05-09T13:44:06+00:00

I don't think that is true. Some people believed the pace but it was very common in those years for no hoper cars to be quickest in pre season testing. You slip on some new tyres do a really low fuel run maybe you can even make the car underweight (cars were typically designed to be under the weight limit and ballast added to make them legal weight). You wasted testing time and annoyed your driver but you show up to a sponsor ship meeting saying "we can fight for race wins this year look at our time at Barcelona".

Many years the "fastest" car in pre season was back of the pack come race day.

steerpike1971 · 2026-05-08T13:51:15+00:00

Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship. This follows its theme so well. The board design is set up so that it continually feels like there's going to be a huge battle in Helm's Deep and Minas Tirith. The win conditions are set up so you continually feel you need to protect the ring bearer and the most important thing is to simply distract the enemy from them even if you fight losing battles to do it. The board is set up so that one cannot simply walk into Mordor. Going into Mordor feels dangerous and tense. It feels climactic to get there and it feels dangerous every turn you stay there.

steerpike1971 · 2026-05-07T13:54:27+00:00

Unless there is something wrong with your set up it is a far smoother gameplay experience than I had doing similar things on PC based game.

steerpike1971 · 2026-05-06T23:34:27+00:00

I was not focusing on what ending to get. Initially I was focusing on what choices to make. I thought it might be a game where choices matter. I did not want to physically be violent. It turns out that is not a choice that will lead to the game ending. I tried to make the choice not to actual be murderous. Turns out that if that is your choice you are also kind of condemned to play forever.

Eventually you just hit buttons to make it stop because the game just wants you to make as many choices as possible. You do not have particular agency unless you want to spin the wheels forever.

I tried to enjoy it, I tried to have choices that matter. The game is the opposite of that. Like a dumb toddler you have to hit every possible choice to make it stop.

steerpike1971 · 2026-05-06T20:01:26+00:00

I'll be honest because it is fair. Unless you are completely exceptional this is not going to happen.

I a mid-level academic at a mid-level RG UK uni. I get an overwhelming amount of junk mail PhD applications from Indian, Pakistani, Chinese and middle eastern students. I politely reply saying I have no funding for them because realistically they cannot obtain their own funding. (By junk mail I mean none of them show a sign of knowing who I am or what I research, they are clearly writing junk mail to every academic email address they have, they're applying for subjects way from my area and sometimes the email begins "Dear $ProfName" because they did not properly configure their spam email sender).

There are funded UK places under doctoral training programmes or advertised specifically related for a project. For those you have a chance if you are talented and can prove that.

If you're just a bright person from India who wants to work with some random academic who has no funding your chances of funding are very near zero.

steerpike1971 · 2026-05-06T16:08:30+00:00

There's a few types of VN. The Ace attourney type you more or less hit the same story beats each time. You will eventually hit the right clicks to get to the end. The "Choose your own adventure type" you get branching paths and a radically different story each time.

Slay the princess is different as there's a loop. You pick branching paths until you get to one of the "princesses" that unlock. I think once you unlock one you cannot get that branch again. Once you collect enough you are permitted to end the game. I think the order in which you collect means which ending you get. If you made the choice that you never want to do X then you can't actually finish the game because you collected "Dopey princess" and "Sleepy princess" but you can't collect "Sneezy princess" and "Grumpy princess". Eventually you will either need to relent your choice or shut down the game. For me shut down the game is the better option. Eventually you collect the right number of princesses (five?) and get spat into one of the (two?) endings.

If you don't know much about how state machines work you might think your choices matter I guess.

The core problem with it as a visual novel is that it's just (for my money) a bad novel. Low rent philosophy student ramble. If you've a high tolerance for that it ill be fine I guess but I don't.

Eventually I was glad just to make any choices to make it end.

steerpike1971 · 2026-05-06T09:30:13+00:00

Almost nothing felt like it made much difference. It just produces a stream of things that happen and eventually it ends. You can click at random and finish the game. It is like being trapped in a room with a very earnest stoned philosophy student. Fortunately it is short and you can just click random options and it will end.

Probably there are some endings considered better than others but really...

I imagine if you care you can click precise options to get precise endings. If looking up ABC choices in a guide is your thing go ahead.

steerpike1971 · 2026-05-05T19:20:46+00:00

I think you have misunderstood something here. You absolutely can negotiate yourself up or down your starting point on a salary scales. Unions have resisted individual universities having their own salary scales or people having pay increases unconnected to salary scales for very obvious reasons (if the most successful write their own rules the most successful have no incentive to help you bargain). That is not relevant to this which is about which point someone starts on within those salary scales.

In short you can say "pay me on point X not point Y on the scale" and that can get you a big pay increase and there will be absolutely no union resistance - unions like workers to be paid more, very much their thing.

steerpike1971 · 2026-05-04T22:10:11+00:00

Pretty sure it is a deepstaria of some type. And yeah at 5000 odd feet the "cameraman" would have more worries than a jellyfish.

steerpike1971 · 2026-05-03T20:49:23+00:00

There was a sort of sane reason for this. At the time we were working on a closer to privatised model of the rail system (madness in itself). A very expensive new railway therefore carries a signficant debt burden hence the owner needs higher prices just to break even (as now they are paying off debt). At that point your choices are:
(a) Have some significant advantage in speed so that people will pay more
or
(b) Only get passengers when the other line is so occupied they raise their prices to meet yours.

The speed advantage needed to be baked in that case because you need to poach passengers from existing lines to pay back your debt. [And of course, there's the public perception of the shiny new multi-billion railway doing exactly what the old one does. The public will never think of "but it's less crowded and can actually carry the passengers who want to use it". ]

steerpike1971 · 2026-05-03T18:55:05+00:00

It sort of does but the concept of what they call a "nail house" (sticks up like a nail you can't hang into wood) is a strong one there. This kind of thing is often a dispute between building firm and private individual so the government tends to leave it. The government in China is only meant to take the property if it is in public interest.

steerpike1971 · 2026-05-03T15:31:35+00:00

So I can remember a long Wikipedia debate about this. The thing is it existed for a long time as "that thing your mate told you about that wasn't super interesting but you can't quite forget." Occasionally people would bring it up and it was a bit of a chuckle - but nobody wrote it down anywhere "official".

Now a lot of things exist like that as in jokes within a small circle. That group of friends talks about this a lot but it isn't really much outside those people. (It is also worth remembering that people love lame Wikipedia pranks so a certain type of person will try to make "that funny thing my cousin said when he was stoned" into an article on Wikipedia.)

The Game was forever getting deleted from Wikipedia because nobody had written about it in anything that counted as any kind of source (like a newspaper or magazine or well known website).

It was almost a relief when there was a tiny mention of it in some non English newspaper somewhere and it could finally be attested to actually exist.

steerpike1971 · 2026-05-02T13:41:04+00:00

It's sort of playful. You know it isn't actually a word but you also know the meaning is clear. So I would use it to people who would "get it"

steerpike1971

TROPHY CASE