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qiemem

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One of my favorite death concepts is the Death Alternative[1] mod for Skyrim. It weaves "death" into the narrative. Instead of dying, you're robbed and left for dead by bandits and then can go on a quest to get your items back, or you're captured and enslaved by vampires and must escape (or, IIRC, join them). I love that it makes defeats part of the story. They become part of your character's history, helping define who your character is. It makes death meaningful, more so than checkpoints or saves, but not as frustrating as permadeath, while being a powerful mechanism for procedural storytelling. I would really love to see it in more games, by I believe Death Alternative is the only place I've seen it done.

[1] https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/45894

GP for NNs has, but this isn't GP; "self-reproduction" (as in the original title) here means that the neural network is learning to output a copy of itself. In other words, the NN is learning to be a quine (as indicated by the current title). This is a very different than just applying genetic programming to NNs. In GP, you're updating the NN (or whatever) by copying it with mutations/recombinations. Here, the NN itself is learning to create a copy of itself.

The fact that they manage to also train to the network to simultaneously perform somewhat complicated tasks is super crazy.

One of the strengths that's getting overlooked here is that crowd-sourced news seems to be more reliable than news from any one source. Everyone is biased, but if enough people are talking about something the bias tends to cancel out.

The problem with this is that people only have time to check a limited number of sources. Furthermore, many orders of magnitude more sources means that there are many orders of sources that are dangerously wrong as well. Thus, if someone sees a number articles/tweets/posts/whatever from a variety of people espousing that the Texas church shooter was an antifa commie starting the revolution, they are much more likely to believe it.

On top this, with so many sources, people need methods of filtering, and, of course, one of our primary methods of filtering is to find communities/people we tend to agree with. Thus, the now cliche echo chambers are born. These communities are furthermore highly susceptible to manipulation (see the russian facebook ads).

Furthermore, this makes the system fairly easy to take advantage of. If a number of people that seem unrelated online engage in a coordinated effort to spread a particular message, they can do it with ease, since when you see the same message from multiple, seemingly unrelated sources, you're much more likely to believe it.

So while you're right that we used to rely on gossip and hearsay, simply amplifying the number of sources in no way implies that we're getting a less biased message.

I don't follow. This would only work if the distribution of numbers was predetermined and influenced the distribution of mines. I was under the impression that the mines were uniformly distributed though. So in a "T" scenario, it really is 50-50. The fact that 4s are more rare doesn't matter at that point. Sort of like in a series of coin flips, of you've flipped 5 heads in a row, tails isn't more likely to come since 6 heads are rare: it's still just 50-60.

What about fingerprints? You don't need to buy anything, phones and such are already coming out with fingerprint readers and the technology is improving all the time. Finally, you can't lose your finger print (except in the case of extreme accidents, which exist for any type of security).

Facebook PathPicker 11 years ago

The fact that it just outputs to stdout means you can run any command with output from fzf as well. Just

anycommand $(fzf)

I think that particular slide was poorly worded. He's actually introduction a consequence of the rules, but not saying it's an obvious consequence. Slide 19 shows how (1∠90∘)2 = -1.

First, accumulation would be the wrong way to think about it. Once the two agents are engaged in transaction, it doesn't matter which is which.

Let D be the difference in wealth post-transaction divided by the total. The expected value of D is 1/2. That means that we should expect that one agent will walk away with 75% of the pot and the other with 25%. Thus, although the expected outcome for an agent is 50% of the pot, we're still pretty much guaranteed to get very uneven splits.

Next, note that a person's wealth affects the payout of the next transaction. In other words, the person who takes 25% is almost guaranteed to be able to make less on the next transaction than the person who walked away with 75%. Suppose all our agents start out with 100, and that the 75%/25% splits are guaranteed. If each agent engages in exactly one transaction, then half our agents will have 50 and half will have 150. A 50's next transaction will either be (50, 50) or (50, 150). A 150's next interaction will either be (150, 50) or (150, 150). The expected outcome for (50, 50) is (25, 75). The expected outcome for (50, 150) is (50, 150). The expected outcome for (150, 150) is (225, 75). None of the expected outcomes even things up. It just gets more and more spread out.

Hyperloop 13 years ago

The pumped air is also used to create an air cushion around the pod to keep it suspended at high speeds. Also, solar panels line the top of the tube so that it is self powering.

From the article:

> While Sync uses BitTorrent technology, people’s files are not accessible to outsiders. Only those who have the unique private key can access the shared folder.

>

> “All the traffic is encrypted using a private key derived from the shared secret. Your files can be viewed and received only by the people with whom you share your private secret,” BitTorrent explains.

I didn't immediately see what guaranteed that the binary search would run in polynomial time. In case anyone else doesn't see it:

There are O(V!) possible paths. Assuming binary search actually halves the search space each iteration, it will run in O(log(V!)) = O(log(n(n-1)...*1)) = O(log(n) + log(n-1) + ... + log(1)), which is clearly polynomial.

The Nature of Lisp 14 years ago

For whatever it's worth, this article actually convinced me to take plunge when I first encountered it.

Capping the depth gives you O(1) gets and sets though. Note that compact-arrays grow breadth-wise whereas ropes grow depth-wise. Breadth-wise growth trades insertion speed for random access speed.

Travelling around India, Indonesia, Laos, and so on, I found that even if someone lived in a shack, there was still a good chance they owned a cell phone. Now, that's just anecdotal obviously, and typically not smart phones, but still, it may the number may be higher than you expect.