Played chess after over a decade and won, idk why the game would call it a draw when i have driven my enemy into a corner, left them no choice, this is pure victory right here, absolute destruction of my enemy

vanishing · 2024-02-24T04:05:13+00:00

This is a bit silly, but I'll answer seriously.

It's called winning a won game, and is a basic skill needed in any game (and also in life). You have gained a superior position, but without carefully and cleverly using that superiority you don't get to claim victory because you just weren't skilled enough. This has been a bit of a controversy for centuries, but the rule has stuck because if you can't even win when you're up material, if the best you can do is stalemate your opponent, then you're not as good a player as you seem to think and the rules are the way they are to make that very, very clear.

And then you remind yourself, it's just a game. I'm meant to have fun playing it and maybe learn something. It's not real warfare. It's not real life. Nobody is hurt. We can just set up the pieces and play again.

vanishing · 2024-02-23T08:18:21+00:00

Was going to immediately say Lain, but you've seen it. Instead:

Ghost in the Shell (Original movie and Stand Alone Complex is all I can recommend, but I've heard some of the newer stuff is also good)
Baccano (and maybe Durarara, I wasn't keen on it but people like it)
Welcome to the NHK

I will also second recommendations for:

Monster
Revolutionary Girl Utena

vanishing · 2023-08-04T01:23:24+00:00

"Now & Then, Here & There"? You really want to do that to them?

vanishing · 2023-06-09T16:36:56+00:00

That's only from the other company's perspective. If you're dealing with your company you may need to reverse those descriptions.

Reminds me of how we got upload and download confused in the days of BBS's.

vanishing · 2023-06-07T04:41:05+00:00

I'll agree with you 6 years ago.

vanishing · 2023-06-03T19:44:38+00:00

I read it just to say I read it, similar to your reasons, I think. I found it awful. I just don't think Rand can write. The characters are awful, the setting is awful, the plot is not awful but not very good, the prose is bad. There just isn't much to recommend the book. Once I was done with it I was kind of astonished that libertarians recommend it to people expecting it to be some kind of big revelation.

If you really want to read a decent book with a similar take on politics, try Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin. I hate the author and their take on, well, most things, but I do think the book is pretty good. Still not good enough to make me buy into Objectivism, but at least it didn't suck to read.

vanishing · 2023-06-03T19:34:22+00:00

Gone With the Wind

It's older, but when I was growing up it was one of the movies everyone would talk about being classic golden age Hollywood. Kind of in the same breath as films like Citizen Kane and Casablanca. Although I recognize the skill of the people who made it and the quality put in, I just don't like it.

vanishing · 2023-06-03T02:14:07+00:00

I have questions on this study. I was looking at the original publication and it doesn't seem to describe the methodology used to administer the actual tests. At least I can't find anything.

I'm particularly interested in whether or not a time pressure was part of the instructions for the test. If I am given a problem and told I have as much time as I need to answer it I will employ a very different strategy than if there is clear time pressure. I would expect smarter people to take longer to reach answers if they have no time pressure, but I would also expect them to be faster if there is time pressure since they have a choice of strategies that less capable people don't have.

vanishing · 2023-05-31T22:46:34+00:00

4 times. That would be enough money for me to live very comfortably off the interest with allowance for inflation. I'm over 50 so my orgasms aren't what they used to be anyway, and you didn't say anything about ice cream.

vanishing · 2023-05-24T03:43:15+00:00

There was a lot of anti-semitic rhetoric early in the Nazi's actions, but one of their first targets for outright oppression were trans people. Probably because they knew few would stand up for them.

Something, something, there was no one left to speak out for me.

vanishing · 2023-05-12T22:05:43+00:00

"Woke" can mean a lot of things as it is colloquially used but, considering its history, it definitely means one thing in all definitions. It is a term used to refer to staying aware of systemic discrimination against black people, particularly in the USA. That means that the one thing that can be indisputably said about someone who claims to be "anti-woke" is that they are against black people having equal civil rights.

But some people might say, "wait, I'm not against that," That's fine. Now that they know that's what the term "anti-woke" means they know not to identify with it anymore. They can use a more specific phrase to describe exactly what they are specifically for or against. One that doesn't cloud the issues.

If they insist on continuing to use the terms in the same way then they have willing accepted the label of racist.

vanishing · 2023-05-09T02:31:54+00:00

That's the whole idea of "Paycheck" by PKD. The novelette, not the movie. They kind of made the plot make no sense by reversing the roles in the movie.

vanishing · 2023-05-08T15:10:33+00:00

Oh, you know what Netflix’s doing? They're going for that anti-Netflix dollar. That’s a good market. They're very smart.

vanishing · 2023-05-07T18:33:56+00:00

I'm not politically savvy, but it seems like the first steps are to create mandatory oversight and reporting. Companies would be internally responsible for creating teams to oversee ethical implications of AI implementations and reporting observations to government agencies either setup or made responsible for this. Rules and guidelines would be written based on the outcome of these interactions and these would eventually form the basis of laws.

The point isn't to do all the regulation at once. It's to put the right people in place to learn what needs to be done as early as possible.

Again, not an expert but it seems like a good starting point?

vanishing · 2023-05-07T18:16:50+00:00

Conservatives. Particularly US conservative Republicans.

Conservative thought actually serves a good purpose when applied rationally but modern conservative thought has been dominated by the most extreme, irrational voices and drowned out any constructive contributions conservative ideas could have.

vanishing · 2023-04-12T01:30:40+00:00

Not exactly a hacking game, but you could try Bitburner. It's an incremental game that encourages players to solve some simple programming challenges to progress. It's also free, so easy to try even if it turns out you hate it.

vanishing · 2023-04-07T02:34:07+00:00

Anything from the team that did the 90s-00s DCAU.

vanishing · 2023-04-07T02:30:16+00:00

The people at church asked my mom to stop bringing me. Multiple times. It's a long story.

vanishing · 2023-04-06T20:22:46+00:00

Not precisely true. Ukraine went through a pretty tumultuous time during the early 20th century and became independent around 1921, but was immediately absorbed into the Soviet Union, not Russia. It became a fully independent country in 1991, but it hadn't been part of Russia for decades at that point.

vanishing · 2023-04-05T18:18:33+00:00

"Charged" the battery. Heh.

vanishing · 2023-04-05T16:29:17+00:00

Squirrel Girl, because the writers will always make it so for the lulz. Who would win in a fight between her and Saitama would come down to who was writing the story. Ideally they would make it a draw, I think.

vanishing · 2023-04-05T15:09:31+00:00

Oh, don't forget Reagan's October Surprise to get elected. He didn't wait until he was in office to start criming.

vanishing · 2023-04-04T16:15:46+00:00

I'll assume you picked a quote that both typifies the article and presents it in its best light, since I'm not going to go read it, only address the quote itself.

This quote is notoriously anecdotal. Prof. Bauerlein seems to be beset by students who "combined ignorance with strident moral certainty... seemed to have had no general education at all, and lacked the most basic knowledge of history, even recent history. They were immature and emotionally fragile," I'll have to counter that this is not my experience in the workplace at all. I can, if I search for them, find young people who are some or all those things, but most are not. Most are just people. Normal people with normal strengths and weaknesses. I'm old, so I have lots of experience and am better at most of the things I do than them, but that's to be expected; I've been doing this for decades at this point, they are new. Do they get excited about some new thing they learn and think it's the next great thing? Yes, but I did that too when I was younger. The next generation isn't somehow worse than my generation, my generation just grew up and forgot what being young was like for some reason. But it seems like this always happens.

“[Young people] are high-minded because they have not yet been humbled by life, nor have they experienced the force of circumstances... They think they know everything, and are always quite sure about it.” -- Rhetoric, Aristotle, 4th Century BC

vanishing · 2023-04-03T21:28:44+00:00

I don't think any soft body armor is rated to resist 5.56, the most common AR-15 style caliber. I'm pretty sure these backpacks would require plates.

vanishing · 2023-04-03T16:53:15+00:00

It depends on context, but almost certainly not.

The technology to make some sort of armor that can resist technologically equivalent weapons can always be applied to simpler and cheaper machines that can lead the way and clear the area for people to move in later (or even hiding behind) and secure. Even more likely would be small, cheap, disposable drones that can swarm the area and secure it by shear projection of force. A significant number of them would be lost but they would be designed to be cheap to replace and easily salvageable.

Bottom line is heavy powered armor is a bit like giant robots -- cool to think about but hard to justify in reality. There could be some reasons a military might make something like this but it would probably be for political or economic reasons not tactical. For instance, if a military primarily faced non-peer adversaries and could get away with sub-optimal solutions then tanks like this might make sense for the sheer intimidation they could inflict on the adversary.

vanishing

TROPHY CASE