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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • IMO Bethesda games are perfectly positioned to get a lot of initial interest because they look great and seem like they are full of depth, especially when in the midst of the opening quest chain, but the longer I look around, the more disappointed I end up with it all and then lose interest.

    It’s this weird mix of deep and shallow. Like in starfield, I walk up to a building and see a rich interaction between an NPC that wants to go in to talk with someone but the guard won’t let her in because he’s busy and no one can see him but then doesn’t bat an eye as I just waltz right past him and talk to whoever I want in there.

    Or I watch a confrontation between other NPCs and then try to interact with them after and it’s just generic responses, not a word about the heated argument that just ended.

    It’s like it’s in the uncanny valley, where it looks good enough to think you can RP at a certain level, but when you try to do so, it turns out to be all a facade unless there’s a quest.

    And in Skyrim, the NPCs were completely unable to handle stealth characters. You’d figure someone would have a magic spell or think to use a torch or raise an alarm when they get shot with an arrow. Nope, must have been the wind or my imagination that killed my buddy over there. I didn’t try stealth in starfield to see if they had improved on that at all.

    Each of their games feels like the same game with a new skin. It was fun for a while, but I’m over it now. I tried starfield on xbox game pass but have since cancelled. It’s on my steam wishlist but I won’t be grabbing it without a heavy sale, and even then I’m not really sure I want to allocate the disk space it wants to it.



  • That’s pretty smart, using it for legal documents. If the accuracy is high, it might be nice to just copy paste any tos or whatever to get the highlights in plain language (which imo should be a legal requirement of contracts in general, but especially ones written by a team of bad faith lawyers intended for people they don’t expect to read it and deliberately written to discourage reading the whole thing).



  • It would, similar to how the mass of each object does have an effect, even if negligible. But the question is if the radius of the bowling ball vs feather has a greater effect than the mass of the bowling ball vs the feather.

    You can adjust the value r in the universal gravitational equation by the radius of the bowling ball and compare the extremes (both plus and minus the radius) and the middle point to see the tidal effects.

    If the feather starts at the middle height of the bowling ball, the tidal effects would help the bowling ball. If it starts at the lowest point of the bowling ball, the tidal effects would hinder the bowling ball.

    But the magnitude of that effect depends on the distance from the center of the other mass.

    I think the main thing would be the ratio of the small mass vs big mass compared to the ratio of the small radius vs the big radius.

    Though, thinking of it more, since the bowling ball is a sphere (ignoring finger holes), the greater pull on the close side would be balanced by the lesser pull on the far side (assuming the difference between those two forces isn’t greater than the force holding the ball together), so now I think it doesn’t matter (up to that structural force and with the assumption that the finger holes aren’t significant).

    If they are falling into a small black hole, then it does become relevant because the bowling ball will get stringified more than the feather once the forces are extreme enough to break the structural bonds, but the math gets too complicated to wrap my mind around right now. If I had to guess, the bowling ball would start crossing the event horizon first, but the feather would finish crossing it first. And an outside observer would see even more stretched out images of both of them for a while after that, which would make actually measuring the sequence of events impossible.

    And who knows what happens inside, maybe each would become a galaxy in a nested universe.


  • I don’t think there is a finite number of monkeys that would be guaranteed to do so in the lifespan of the universe.

    Best we could do is calculate the expected number of monkeys it would take, assuming accurate probabilities, which I also don’t think is possible to determine.

    You can’t just take one divided by the number of possible characters that could be typed because monkeys can do many things other than typing away. A high portion of them would likely instead destroy the typewriter. In the infinite monkeys scenario, an infinite amount would destroy their typewriter in the middle of Hamlet’s to be or not to be soliloquy.

    Plus the odds of it actually happening are going to be so astronomically low that if you filled the known universe with monkeys, you’d end up with monkey stars and black holes before any Shakespeare.

    It really only works as a thought experiment about the nature of infinity.

    Unless there’s an infinite multiverse, in which case we are in the universe where a monkey wrote out the complete works of Shakespeare. That monkey’s name? Shakespeare. (And yes, many clapped when he did so.)



  • That’s the thing about infinity. If you have infinite monkeys, you don’t have to choose. You’ll have infinite instances of every possibility.

    Finding any of the monkeys that typed out something interesting (or did something interesting that wasn’t typing or more common interesting monkey stuff) is another issue. If there’s an 0.0000001% of something interesting and unusual happening by coincidence, then there will be 999,999,999 uninteresting or usual instances for each interesting and unusual one.

    Now if there were infinite copies of you searching the infinite monkeys for interesting and unusual events and all interesting ones get sent to an email address, the email server would overload in about the time it takes for the quickest interesting thing to happen, be noticed, and reported.







  • Yeah, people obsessed with car stereos are usually of the “I want everyone to know I’m playing music” variety.

    And occasionally of the “I want it to be dangerous to listen to music coming from my sound system” variety.

    Which I do kinda get, since I, too, thrive on wtf faces, though I generally don’t want to be a nuisance or damage my property in the process. Like it’s usually a wtf face from an unexpected combination that turns out to be better than one would expect, like saying I like chocolate sauce on sausages (which works because chocolate doesn’t have to be combined with tons of sugar).




  • Careful, reality might just destroy you instead to avoid the paradox. I suspect that’s how it avoids all of the paradoxes if time travel is possible in a single timeline universe. And this idea isn’t compatible with the multiple timeline time travel idea (otherwise the electron will end up in a different timeline each time it jumps backwards).




  • I think you’re overfitting to the average here with your expectations. Especially basing that on the experience level of people who would sign up for help learning how to use Windows products. And even then, the ones learning about copy/paste for the first time will likely make more noise about it then those waiting to see if you’ll teach them something new or any that ended up in your training because their work made them or something.

    While the majority might lack familiarity, the 40 - 80 age range includes tons of people that have been working with computers (windows or otherwise) since before Windows was even a thing, including many who worked on Windows and/or developed applications for it. Experience will range from not knowing what windows is, knowing it’s the OS but not knowing what an OS is, to understanding what goes on in the kernel at a high level of detail.

    There’s a lot of people on Windows just because of inertia and Linux can handle a lot of the use cases. It makes perfect sense to me that someone, once they’ve seen that things aren’t so scary and different on the other side of the fence, would wonder out loud about why they thought their inertia was so strong.

    Your skepticism is more baffling to me than that.