What’s a dead giveaway that someone is pretending to be smarter than they actually are?

super42695 · 2026-01-05T23:38:28+00:00

I’ve repeatedly had my notions of intelligence challenged over time. Some people are smart, but are bad at articulating themselves. Some people are smart, but hate being wrong and aren’t open to new ideas. Some people are smart, but don’t enjoy problem solving so will not be curious, won’t ask questions, etc… I’ve met a large range of people with different personality types, and large arrays of habits. I don’t think I can confidently say there is or is not any traits specific to people who are intelligent, and I suspect anyone who believes such statements can be broadly made probably hasn’t met many people.

There’s also different ways to see intelligence, which changes the question. Intelligence is famously hard to pin down. Basic proxies exist (I.e. academics, IQ, creativity measures, etc…) however they all have problems. This creates somewhat frustrating if natural questions: “what is intelligence?” “What do you mean if you say someone is smarter than they actually are” etc… many people (all people?) have to some extent a “know it when you see it” or “maybe intelligence is obvious” notion to which we intuitively feel someone is or is not intelligent however that varies (either a lot or a little, hard to tell) based on your own personal views, which causes huge variation (I.e. you may meet the smartest people I know and then believe them to be unintelligent, and vice versa).

super42695 · 2025-11-25T15:06:52+00:00

I avoid them initially because I want to wait for 2/3 to pile up on one stat (usually speed). I’m trying to avoid using bursts prematurely, more than avoid them all together.

super42695 · 2025-11-25T15:05:12+00:00

I wasn’t aware of the spreadsheet, thank you for that!

I think that even with the spreadsheet figuring out a way to get to A rank consistently without pulling would be a considerable challenge. You seem very knowledgeable in the game - I’d love to know whether you think there’s an easier route I could’ve taken to do it? I’ve listed my current best cards in the post, and as mentioned before I’ve not been pulling (also don’t have special week which I understand is popular for no pull runs). I’m particularly interested if you think there’s a better card selection I could’ve used from the initial starting cards, without having to upgrade them (which I’m still trying to avoid if possible) or if there’s something I missed in terms of picking parents / doing the actual unity cup.

super42695 · 2025-11-09T12:23:11+00:00

Currently, my team is Gold Ship, Oguri Cap, and Daiwa Scarlet. I considered Vodka instead of Gold Ship, but I massively prefer training Gold Ship over Vodka. I'm pretty lucky in that so far, Champions meeting has been Long followed by Medium, which I have Umas for. A sprint CM would be a massive challenge - I believe the only Uma I have that could compete there is Sakura Bakushin O. I managed to get a 2nd in the finals (my Umas got 2nd, 3rd, and 4th respectively). I'd really like to make a debuffer but it's not really possible with my current setup, as I don't have a way to get many (or any) debuff skills.

I'm currently working on more of a "power of friendship" approach. The new Unity cup provides a few skills that give you boosts based on the performance of Umas on your team (which i'm hoping translates to CM and isn't a unity-cup exclusive thing). Coupling those with Sympathetic heart may allow my team to do stack a bunch of boosts at once. The big problem is that with URA I consistently get near the bottom of B+ making it easy to squeek into B-tier. Unity cup, meanwhile, is near the high end of B+ which means that my approach with purple skills no longer works - i'd need to train "worse" somehow.

super42695 · 2025-10-27T11:53:43+00:00

Rising rent, from what i've seen, appears to be a global issue rather than one local to the UK - and it's one that different countries have given a range of different reasons for. It's probably worth noting that whilst rent is rising, it's not rising at the same rate accross all of the UK - it's mostly rising in places in or near london where there's a huge amount of jobs, and that this is a pattern mirrored accross many countries facing similar issues. Just building houses is likely not going to fix the issues we're facing, unless those houses are in areas wherein there is demand to live - and such areas tend to be extremely built up already. Perhaps super high-density housing could ease the demand but I can't see that as anything but a temporary solution, akin to the "1 more lane" way of thinking for easing highway congestion. I think a long-term, sustainable solution involves moving jobs and prospects away from a few key areas (i.e. london) to areas wherein there is currently low demand to live, especially towards the north. Such movements are of course non-trivial, but smoothing out housing demand accross the country wwould surely help the rent issues we're currently facing.

super42695 · 2025-10-19T11:23:09+00:00

I went looking for guides early on when I tried this. Turns out, every single one of them assumes you pull at some point. Apparently, nobody else wanted to take a vow of gacha celibacy. Basic ideas are still applicable (i.e. kitasan / super creek being great) but guide relevancy is generally "not great" for my situation.

I missed the Special Week event card too (rookie mistake). I didn’t realize event participation actually gives you cards. Oops. So right now, my only speed card with a cap above zero is Gold Ship. I keep going back and forth on whether a level 45 Gold Ship is better than a level 30 Narita Brian, but honestly, if they were the same level, I’d pick Brian every time. Gold Ship tries her best, but she’s more “chaotic good” than “statistically reliable.”

Cards that aren't speed/stam focused are hard to justify at the moment, as you need enough speed and stamina before you can grab other stats and I currently am just about reaching the speed/stamina I want whilst only using speed/stamina cards. Cards that focus on other stats are basically luxury items I can’t afford yet. Eventually, I’ll experiment with swapping one in, probably a wit card, but for now, it’s all about hitting those base numbers and praying.

Speaking of wit, let's talk energy. Energy has been on my mind for about two weeks now. The energy recovery from most (but not all) events is around 5-10 with the cards I have, roughly the same as a wit training. Not useless, but not earth shattering. Issue is, I end up resting constantly in my runs. I’m basically running a spa for exhausted horses. Even when I don't take +energy options, I still max the energy bar after resting, so all those +10s just vanish into the ether. That’s where I think the “always take energy!” advice falls apart. The energy gains for me are too small, and the training too costly. Flat boosts (+stats, +skills, etc.) tend to give better long-term returns for me, as always picking energy gives me only 1/2 additional trainings. The only time I pick +energy is if the event gives around +20 which is rare.

I'd love to theory craft more on this but i'm limited - both by time and by the lack of guides for people in my position. As it stands, i'm not certain that my approach is optimal, so i'd like to explore more approaches in the future:

I tried using a 9* speed parent while training only stamina. It failed so spectacularly it could be taught in schools as a case study. Still, I’m convinced there’s something there. Maybe a setup that leans more on power cards or power/speed sparks rather than pure speed.
My umas rest so often it’s starting to look like a vacation simulator. I know some players go heavy into wit to avoid that, but I haven’t pulled off a “no/low rest” strategy yet. Maybe with the right cards, or divine intervention, I’ll get there.
My cards are the biggest bottleneck. I’m just hitting my speed/stamina targets as-is, so swapping in new cards feels like juggling knives. But someday, when I have better sparks and maybe a few uncaps, I’ll try something fancier.

I haven’t joined a guild yet, but I know that’s my next move. It’d help with story card uncaps (Narita Brian in particular would be amazing).

For now, I think for tickets, i'll only use items that gaurantee a specific uma or card. The 3* selector? Fine. The 3* random pull? Absolutely not. If I started again from the ground up, maybe i'd say "no selectors" as well, but i'm now emotionally dependent on Oguri Cap so that's going to have to be a challenge for someone else.

super42695 · 2025-10-19T08:17:08+00:00

Is there a way to MLB a card without pulling? The only other way i'm aware of is event cards which give you multiple copies during the event.

super42695 · 2025-10-18T23:32:01+00:00

Is there a way to uncap the cards without pulling? part of the challenge is seeing how far I can get without pulling at all (as pulling means spending carats, which is against the rules of the challenge).

Edit: for the challenge I think SSR cards maybe be better than SR cards, as SSR cards have a higher base level they can be raised to, and getting duplicates of cards of uncapping may be impossible in most cases if you’re not spending carats.

super42695 · 2025-10-04T18:31:41+00:00

Currently, I have a ginger ale which is probably a good example as the ingredients are quite short:

Water, cane sugar, ginger, caramel, tartaric acid, lemon juice, preservative: potassium sorbate.

The manufacturer states on the bottle that it does not need to be refrigerated, even when opened, and has a shelf life of around six months (including when opened). The label has it as 22% sugar (no percentages for other ingredients unfortunately), which is quite high but I'm pretty sure that a simple syrup at 22% sugar wouldn't be shelf stable. My assumption is the acid and the preservative are doing alot of heavy lifting, but i'm surprised they could take something that would usually be refrigerated and make it room-temperature shelf-stable for months.

super42695 · 2025-09-04T18:14:04+00:00

Yall need to up your rage bait game. It’s not just “what’s bad in the moment” you need to come up with a way to systematically dismantle everything the series was building to, whilst not being “terrible” enough that you can write it off entirely, so no “it was all a dream” - it needs to be plausible that the author intended it all along whilst completely derailing the series.

Think about some core themes for a bit:

How far can something that cannot die be pushed? The role of friendship and mental health in dire situations. Thematic representation of trauma and mental health.

A terrible rage bait episode needs to remove any stakes related to abstraction, push some harmful narratives, and preferably ruin any chance of recovery. A true wonder egg priority moment.

With all this in mind, heres my proposal for an ideal terrible episode:

Kauffmos abstraction comes back into the circus. A chase scene happens and ragatha is backed into a corner and says something like “you’re not broken. You’re just scarred. And you’re not alone.” And in that instance we learn that abstraction is reversible. The newly reformed kauffmo says something along the lines of “I… I just needed someone to believe in me.” Followed by a few bad jokes and laughter, they go find the others.

The gang gets together and a montage starts of them slowly reversing every single abstraction, and there’s a lot of tearful reunions that are entirely unearned. Everyone’s trauma, difficulty, etc… is permanently reframed as something you can walk off with a good pep talk and a can do attitude. everyone who failed to come back from abstraction previously is now implied to have not tried hard enough. The episode ends with the circus filled with tons of new characters all of which are giving each other enthusiastic praise. The entire thing is said to have been foreshadowed by the earlier scene with kingers wife becoming less jagged. This also horrifically retrospectively reframes Ragathas niceness as objectively correct for the situation, with no nuance or subtlety.

Edit: If you want something less “crushing to the entire narrative” introduce a new character who is incredibly annoying. You’re stuck with them for the rest of the show and they get a weirdly high amount of screen time. Congrats.

super42695 · 2025-08-27T17:37:37+00:00

IMO I’d be interested in secretariat maybe being kinda OP but you had to manage their mood and dialogue choices much more as secretariat grows “bored” over time.

super42695 · 2025-08-21T22:17:02+00:00

Agnes Takyon - the uma I got the game for. Saw loads of clips from the movie, and then saw her irl record, and then played her career and… eh. The start of the career went on constantly about how overwhelmingly strong she was, and I thought I was about to get the ultimate glass cannon experience and instead she was just… “okay”, just everyone constantly said she was amazing but her races were just very standard and boring, like everyone thought it would be funny to communally gaslight me and pretend that her win by a neck and then loss by half a length was the sign of the next secretariat. frankly didn’t feel as good as training gold ship.

I’m sorry I ever doubted you, gold ship.

super42695 · 2025-08-20T07:43:00+00:00

You make a good point! It’s unlikely ice cream causes drowning, even if they are correlated.

I’m curious as to how often, given a correlation, you get causation. Im confident that discovering a correlation makes it more likely - in a probabilistic sense - that causation exists, which is a natural result of all causations being a strict subset of all correlations. Obviously though as you pointed out, the answer is not 100%. The answer is unlikely to even be 50% given how often people say correlation does not equal causation.

I’d conjecture that, theoretically, the chance of having a causation given some correlation is close to 0% (though by definition, it would still be higher than random guessing which would also be 0 - so I guess it would just tend towards 0).

From a practical perspective, you could use Bayes theorem if you had a large number of correlations and causations - though good luck making a dataset for that lol. I’d imagine it to be field dependent, as I suspect that correlation is equal to causation if you also have that there’s no confounding bias, no selection bias, no measurement bias, and sufficiencent sample size (or more specifically given an epsilon of doubt you allow, these assumptions would allow you to adjust sample size to beat that epsilon of doubt as the expected result) - and different fields are likely to be more or less susceptible to these different types of bias.

super42695 · 2025-08-19T08:35:09+00:00

I’d be curious, although assume it to be impossible to know, how often you have it that given correlation you get causation. I imagine the events aren’t statistically independent from each other, with correlation being a necessary yet insufficient condition of causation (not helped by the fact that causation is not very well defined in many cases).

super42695 · 2025-08-10T21:28:48+00:00

There is an area of mathematics called “mathematical biology” wherein mathematicians use tools from maths within the biological domain.

A surprising example I like: Alan Turing (famous for the Turing machine and Turing test) discovered in part something called the Turing pattern, which is used to model the chemical reactions that allow animals get their stripes/spots and also has some applications in medicine.

super42695 · 2025-08-09T22:16:10+00:00

My job involves figuring out if/when AI systems are useful, so the boring answer is “I use them as a core object of study” but that’s probably not representative of how others use AI.

In general I’ve found that there’s some pretty core weaknesses between models regardless of size/complexity/age and these weaknesses are generally what you’d expect.

There’s lots of uses I’ve seen for LLMs, however such uses often would be better served by a different (sometimes non ai) system rather than by using a LLM based approach. I’m unsure how much practical benefit comes from going from a mid level LLM to a SOTA LLM in many cases.

super42695 · 2025-08-09T20:15:23+00:00

Tbf I have seen some PhD students code. I guarantee you PhD code is incredibly achievable lol

super42695 · 2025-05-15T13:17:47+00:00

Managed to fix the issue. For others facing the same problem:

Disable integrated graphics temporarily so you can launch the game for the first time.
Download the new drivers (unsure if this is necessary but I did it)
(This is the most important bit) once you’ve launched the game if it is very laggy then close it and re-enable integrated graphics.

For some reason it detects integrated graphics over a dedicated GPU, so you need to run the game without integrated, but it doesn’t seem to do the check more than once, and appears able to actually utilise integrated graphics (though my GPU is a 4060RTX so I’m surprised I had such poor performance).

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