That’s fair. A standardized stick measurement for shorter lengths, and a standardized wheel of diameter 1-stick for longer lengths. That tracks.

Yeah, I missed that he said 5 diameters, not rotations.

Though, it strikes me as odd that people would be making diameter based measurements with a wheel tool for the same reason it would be weird for people to be making measurements with the short side of a yard stick. Seems like a needlessly difficult way to get a measurement when your existing tool already has an easy and codified way of getting measurements.

I’m no historian or whatever, so maybe that’s something they did do in antiquity. But it seems unlikely to me, and if we have evidence that they did, I’d be interested to see it.

Ah, reading is hard. My bad.

Though, it seems like if you were measuring using wheels, to use the diameter to measure something would be a little odd? It’s way easier to roll a wheel a certain number of times vs trying to use it as a circular yardstick.

And if rotations isn’t giving you the granularity you want, just use a smaller wheel?

I don’t think that’s true though?

Like, if you have a wheel who’s diameter is 3.18m (10/3.14), it will have a circumference of 10m. So 14 wheel rotations will be 140m, and 5 wheel rotations will be 50m.

Comparing 14 rotations to 5 rotations (140m to 50m) doesn’t seem to yield pi in any meaningful way?

How are you suggesting that pi would emerge?

To be fair, the “change one” part is wrong. Two particles that are quantum entangled maintain the same quantum state when separated. But if you change the quantum state of one it doesn’t propogate. They are just in sync.

I would argue that nothing is ever an intrinsic part of one’s identity.

I think there are things society puts a lot of emphasis on, like career or sexual orientation, that are elevated in a way that makes us assume they have to be part of someone’s “identity,” but that’s not some universal law. It’s a societal construct.

I like peanut butter sandwiches. I would never say “I identify as a peanut butter sandwich fan.” But here’s the thing, some people do. There’s somebody out there who’s got 50 different “PB Sandos 4 Life” Tshirts, and has a YouTube channel dedicated to trying all the different brands of PB, and wants to be buried on the JIF plantation. For that guy, peanut butter sandwiches are part of his identity.

And in the same way there are plenty of gay people (who are born that way, to be clear, I’m not arguing being gay is a choice) for whom their sexual orientation are not part of their “identity.” They are unquestionably gay, but don’t participate in the larger gay community, and if you asked them who they are, being gay wouldn’t be in the top 10 things they say about themselves, any more than most straight people would list “heterosexual” in their top 10 things about themselves.

Now, that’s hard in our current societal context, as it puts so much emphasis on who you’re sleeping with in a way that drives people who don’t “fit the mold” to (very reasonably) band together for solidarity and support, but that doesn’t make it intrinsically part of your identity.

All that to say, identity is a tricky thing, and I would argue that it’s far too fluid to say that literally anything is intrinsically part of it.

I do think that any time you hire an intern, the only thing you can judge them on is vibes.

I used to be in charge of an intern program, and the thing is that you can’t really select based on experience or anything, because they don’t really have that. Instead, you end up asking a bunch of personality questions and trying to get a feel for if they’d be a good fit on your team.

Now, do I think “answers the phone” is a good test of that? Probably not. But then again, we used to ask people if they’d rather be a blade of grass or a doorknob, just to see what they’d say.

I guess my point is, if this was for a “real job,” I’d be a little more judgy, but for an internship, I’ve selected people based on wilder things than “did they answer the phone.”

Yeah, this one clearly reads as satire. The fact that people think it’s not is wild to me.

Sure, many games are tied to various Steam services, but that’s by the choice of the games developer. Steam offers various built in services that game devs can choose to use if they want. It’s not like it’s some kind of requirement.

You might as well complain that game devs use Windows binaries, locking their games to only run on Windows. Sure, I prefer it when they target other platforms, but that’s 1000% not Microsoft’s fault that the dev chose to dev for their platform. I’m not mad at Microsoft for so many games being Windows only. I’m mad at the devs.

And games that build themselves around Steam services are of course going to be tied to Steam. That’s a choice the devs made. If they wanted their game to run without needing the Steam client, they trivially could have built it that way. They just would have had to either reimplement all those Steam features themselves, or done without.

And if people want those Steam features, every store client who wants to run those games would have to implement those features in an interoperable way. It’s easy to say “have interoperability between clients,” but that’s glossing over the potentially thousands of dev hours required to implement all of the features needed. And that’s assuming they could all agree on a spec.

And to your final point about being open source. First, it gives very “any musician who gets paid is a sellout” energy. But more than that, it doesn’t actually solve the problem you have. Even if Steam open sourced their tooling, that doesn’t mean other players in the space could integrate it. Steam has grown organically for the past 30yrs, and trying to extricate the deep inner bits and then graft them on to your own solution isn’t as easy as it sounds.

But they aren’t tied to a store? When you download a game from Steam, it’s just an executable on your box. You could put it on a hard drive and move it wherever you wanted. You don’t have to launch games you bought with Steam through Steam. They aren’t streamed. They are saved locally to your computer.

You can only download it from that store, sure, but that’s not apples to apples. If I buy a game from GameStop, they won’t give me another copy for free, just cause I threw away the copy they gave me. Once you download the game, that’s what they sold you, and it’s notionally your responsibility to keep track of it. Them allowing you to keep downloading new copies forever isn’t strictly necessary, and costs them money every time you do it.

And if you can run the games you downloaded without Steam, all you’re saying is “there should be other places to buy your games.” But there are. Those exist. Less people use them, sure, but what do you propose? Kill Steam because too many people use it to buy their games? Legislate that people are required to shop at other stores?

But this game is getting distribution through GoG and about a half dozen other platforms listed in the article.

Do most people game through steam? Yes. But centralization of the marketplace isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There’s a reason why people complain when they have to use other game stores an launchers. It’s the “I have 50 different streaming services” problem.

If Steam starts abusing that market position, then yes, we should care about that and they should suffer backlash. Which makes the question of “did they do the right thing here,” very much relevant.

Whatever kid did this messed up. Should have just added a way to bypass payment, then only told their buddies about it. Keep it on the DL and no one would have noticed.

While preventable child deaths are obviously terrible, I feel like this could be overextended.

Like, how many child deaths has McDonald’s caused vs guns. I’m too lazy to do the math like the other guy, but I’d presume it’s comparable. (Although I suppose by the time it catches up to them they’re no longer children.)

Idk, you see things like, “leading cause of death in children” and it makes the number seem huge, but it’s less than 100 kids a year. And it looks like around 400/yr die from drowning in swimming pools. So if we really care about the children, we should bad swimming pools? They kill 4x the number of kids than guns.

I’m not saying guns are great. But using child deaths as part of the argument just feels like a great excuse to ban literally anything you just don’t like.

This is satire.

Impossible Creatures was a masterpiece. I still go back to it every now and then.

Or they make it where if you have exact flag placement you’re good. So you can try putting a flag on each one in turn.

A little annoying when you end with 3-4 50/50 splits, but not too too hard to just brute force the 8-16 combos.

Probably, but if you’re interpreting user inputs as raw code, you’ve got much much worse problems going on, lol.

Takes one more turn. Pawn D4.

Bishop then takes that pawn for checkmate though, unless I’m missing something.

Sure, but he’ll be replaced by another boss. Then another. How many should be assassinated?

I have. I’ve worked on a campaign for my local congressperson (at the time) whos platform I believed in. I met them through the campaign and got to know them personally. They won and are still serving in Congress today, and have done a good job over the years in my opinion (though I’ve since moved states and lost contact).

It was shockingly easy to get involved. Literally just approached them when they were starting up their campaign and asked to help. I knocked on doors and helped at campaign events, and I like to think that my contributions (and those of people like me) helped to get them elected.

And, as I say, they were someone that I had the personal cell number of and could contact when I had concerns.

First, I think you’re completely underplaying all the huge gains people have made over the years by doing exactly what I’m talking about. Especially at the state and local level.

But yeah, if you think I’m defending the system as perfect and unflawed, of course not. Of course most people don’t want to have to dedicate their life to fixing the system. Of course they have other priorities. Kids, illness, etc.

And of course killing a man in cold blood is easier than spending years or decades fighting for the change you want to see.

But I’ve seen change accomplished by people who believe in the law and civic order. I’ve seen people make the system work. It is possible.

It’s not easy. It requires someone to basically make it their life, and that’s certainly not for everybody. But it can be done. And if you’re at the point where you’re throwing your life away by shooting a man in the middle of a NYC street, there are better ways to use your life than that.