Relevant PBF

*Except cheetahs.

Sorry. Age gets us all! If it’s any consolation, depending on when you started reading we may not be more than ~10-15 years apart. I remember the 2004 ones being new and I’m in my early thirties.

I’ve been reading them for something like 2/3 of my life based on the first one I remember reading new. I feel old.

It’s one of my favorite games ever, but I wouldn’t say it’s the best game ever made. I would say it’s one of the most unique gaming experiences I’ve ever had though, and that’s valuable to me. Learning about this cute little star system one mystery at a time is an incredible experience IMO. But if you’re bored by the gameplay loop, don’t expect it to change much. It stays pretty constant. The point is learning one secret at a time and getting a full picture of what’s happening.

Flying is definitely clunky, but to me it feels intentional (or at least fitting). As others have said, always use auto-pilot to go between planets and cancel to move your trajectory around anything that comes in between and then re-engage auto pilot. Usually that’s either the sun or a moon (happens a lot if you book it straight to Brittle Hollow). When you’re near other things, match velocity is very useful either to stop next to something or get nice and aligned with the planet you’re about to land on.

When flying manually, less is more. There’s no friction to slow you down but there is gravity to speed you up.

Yeah, all it takes is one cat who goes for it and you’d have to adjust. I just don’t believe it’s super common the way common wisdom on the internet suggests.

I also think the amount of other enrichment your cats get can deter this sort of “naughty” behavior. I see that as them trying to find something fun to do. If they have other outlets I would hypothesize they’d be less inclined towards this.

Sheesh, now I feel actually attacked a little. I was being mostly hyperbolic, but you can do really useful things with complex figures in presentations. For example: revealing elements sequentially to build up to the final figure or altering opacity of different elements to bring the audience’s attention to specific parts of the figure.

This sequencing can sometimes very subtly alter the size of the figure as you change elements, so the default positioning will slightly change from one slide to the next. Most people won’t care or notice when a figure slightly drifts by a pixel or two during these sequences, but it bothers me tremendously so I add adjustments to keep every variation of the figure aligned on the slides.

Either I’m the luckiest person ever or this isn’t as universal as everyone always makes it out to be. My house was always a multi-cat household growing up and I’ve got one cat of my own now. In total I’ve lived with 8 cats and my parents have had another 3 come in since I moved out. We have always aligned the toilet paper over and not once that I’m aware of did our cats ever unroll it.

I feel personally attacked. Brb, making presentation slides in beamer and compiling 1000 times to get the figure to the exact right pixel.

I definitely won’t make any changes to the figure later that will make me have to adjust the position again. Why yes, this is better than PowerPoint, why do you ask?

Shoutout to Prestogeorge Coffee & Tea in Pittsburgh. Haven’t been able to find coffee I like better than their roasts. I get their Antigua Guatemala Continental (dark roast) and Nicaragua Shade Grown (medium roast) and blend them together when I grind.

They used to have a Nicaragua Honey Processed coffee I’d get, but it seems like they don’t carry that one anymore so I switched to the shade grown.

IMO, an agreement to get married should be a mutual discussion, not a surprise. My wife and I also decided to get married by having a discussion and then went ring shopping together. We went with a blue topaz. Super pretty and didn’t break the bank.

The user always lies. Or even if they don’t, they can’t intimidate the ghosts in the machine like you can.

I think I’m missing some context for what the left wing opinion was at the time considering I was born a few months into Clinton’s first term. Looking back, I can’t see him as progressive at all. I see Clinton as a catalyst of the party’s most recent shift to the right. My first presidential election was Obama’s reelection, which was fine but not very inspiring to vote for someone you were excited about 4 years ago when you couldn’t vote and starting to wonder when he was going to… uh… do anything.

I think you misunderstood what I was saying. I don’t dislike Biden because of the things I disliked about Hillary. I dislike Biden because he fits the same bill she did. I don’t like a moderate “incremental change” platform because that’s been the MO for a long while now and it clearly only lets the Republicans drag us right. I don’t like the lip service from the Democrats with no follow through time after time after time. I don’t like being told over and over that I have to be happy we have the “most progressive president ever” when half the things that are claimed about him are drops in the bucket when we need a faucet turned on.

I saw an administration holding student loan debt like a knife over people like me burdened with debt to milk extra votes out of us before proceeding to do very little about it and acting like they fixed the problem. I saw an administration do absolutely nothing to progress universal health care. Not even a plan. I recognize they don’t have the congressional votes for it now. But come up with a fucking plan to inspire us to vote for you so we know if we give you a mandate you’ll follow through. Instead, all we have to rely on is history which shows us the Democrats will implement a watered down, heavily means-tested version of whatever they do. Which means someone like me who makes over their threshold because I’m in one of the highest cost of living cities gets no help even though I’m barely treading water financially due to the yoke of student debt and goddamn groceries that cost over twice what they did 5 years ago. Meanwhile I haven’t been to a doctor in 10 years because I can’t afford whatever they’re going to tell me is wrong with me.

I actually have no clue what point you were trying to make in the first two paragraphs.

Frankly, I see no perceptible difference in platform between the two of them. The main difference in terms of election enthusiasm is the burden of history. This is now the third “most important election of our lifetime” facing the same boogeyman (that I do want to keep out of the White House, to be clear). In the meantime I’ve faced 8 years of the Democratic Party blaming me for 2016 even though I voted for their illegitimate candidate, saying my political group isn’t large enough to be listened to (simultaneous with being large enough to lose the election???), and refusing to take responsibility for any of their actions that have landed us here.

They propped up Trump as a pied piper, ignored progressives and polls warning them Hillary would lose, and started a pre-emptive smear campaign to blame progressives for the loss. Now, they are still contending with the man they propped up, are once again ignoring polls, and I already see the groundwork for blaming this on progressives. So I’m less enthusiastic because I’ve heard this song before and I dislike it just as much as the first time.

My vote doesn’t even matter since I’m not in a battleground state. Only my state and local elections will matter. But I’m gonna get blamed for his inevitable loss anyway. I’m just so tired of it.

As a progressive, it’s so fuckin’ funny to me to see liberals complain about media bias. With the amount of vitriol y’all spread every time we point that out, you should probably find a different tactic if you want sympathy from your left.

And also: I don’t need the media to tell me how uninspiring Biden is to people who think like me. Voting for Hillary in the 2016 general made me feel physically ill and still somehow Biden this election is less inspiring than she was. I’m mainly just exhausted from having bland centrist elites handpicked to be the only choice on my ballot.

I agree with your first paragraph, but unwinding that emergent behavior really can be impossible. It’s not just a matter of taking spaghetti code and deciphering it, ML usually works by generating weights in something like a decision tree, neural network, or statistical model.

Assigning any sort of human logic to why particular weights ended up where they are is educated guesswork at best.

I agree it cheapens it, but unfortunately it’s far too easy to imagine someone truly believing that.

You need to grapple with this and figure out how to acknowledge the damage the DNC did to the party in 2016. You are only continuing to hurt party unity by pretending it didn’t happen.

I’m not saying Bernie would definitely have won or anything. Chances are Hillary would have won in a fair election anyway. I’m saying the people were robbed of a fair election so we can’t know what would have happened. If you’re truly interested in justifying democracy you should be outraged by that rather than denying it.

But sure, a pithy “lmao” definitely does the trick too.

…In an unfair election with the organizing body tipping the scale all throughout the process. So no, you can’t point to the votes to wave away the corruption that influenced those votes.

Oh, come on. You can’t justify a corrupt process by pointing to the final results of the corrupt process.