Lvxferre [he/him]

The catarrhine who invented a perpetual motion machine, by dreaming at night and devouring its own dreams through the day.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: January 12th, 2024

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  • Our US government would consider it anti-semitic not to use a nazi salute twice on stage in front of millions of people.

    I was almost going to mention Musk’s gesture as an example of how context dictates meaning, but removed it from my comment. Glad to see that someone else mentioned it though - that gesture can be only understood as a Nazi salute and as support to Nazism, nothing else.

    [I’m neither from Australia nor USA, but it’s clear that Australia got it right. Musk and his puppet, on the other hand…]



  • This is so fucking stupid that I had to check other sources on what he said, to confirm it. (It does.)

    No, it is not just immoral, it’s also fucking stupid. Why would he get the Palestinians or the State of Israel pissed, if he can get both pissed at the same time? The State of Israel doesn’t see those lands as belonging to some banana maize republic dammit, it sees those lands as belonging to itself.

    inb4: “but Netanyahu said he was thinking outside the box with fresh ideas! That it’s unconventional thinking!”. Well, his reply is superficially polite (likely to avoid the offend the other Nazi’s precious-oh-so-precious ego), but it’s non-committing and can be easily understood as “this is crazy talk”.

    It gets worse. So far the State of Israel has been trying to masquerade the genocide against Palestinians as a self-defence war. Now with Trump suggesting ethnic genocide, more people will ask “wait a minute… isn’t that what Israel is doing already?” (Yes, it is.)



  • Critics argue Trump’s aggressive diplomacy weakens trust, while supporters claim it reinforces U.S. strength.

    It might be worth to mention the concepts of soft power and hard power here. I’ll oversimplify it here:

    • soft power - “do what I say, it’ll be better for you”
    • hard power - “do what I say, otherwise I’ll go against you”

    The critics are focusing on the soft power, and they’re IMO spot on - Trump is ruining every bit of soft power that USA has (or had), by taunting allied governments.

    In the meantime, the supporters are focusing on hard power… and they’re completely off-mark. Hard power depends on your economical and military capabilities, and those threats are not improving either.

    “But what about the tariffs?”, someone might ask. Does anyone here genuinely believe that they’ll improve USA’s economy?


  • I’m proficient at Portuguese, Italian, and written English. I can also understand some Latin and German. Plus a few Romance languages through mutual intelligibility.

    Due to its relative simplicity, learning Esperanto effectively prepares your brain for learning additional languages, making the process quicker and smoother.

    Ah, the propaedeutic effect? I think that Esperanto shows the “guts” of the grammar faster than other languages do, and that helps learning languages with similar features.



  • I’m a sucker for crafting and breeding systems that allow you to customise equipment and/or characters. But it’s really hard to find good implementations of the idea, most have some obvious flaw:

    • Pokémon (breeding) - in early games RNG plays too much of a role, so it’s hard to get what you want. Late games don’t fix this, instead they allow you to skip the process altogether (see: hyper training).
    • Niche - the breeding part of the game is actually really good, a shame that the rest of the game is a slop. For example gathering food gets a PITA once you got too many nichelings, and yet you want them to support your breeding pairs.
    • RimWorld (Biotech; germline genes) - arbitrary restrictions that must be lifted through the usage of mods.
    • RimWorld (crafting) - now we’re talking. If you pay close attention to which materials you’re using for which tasks, it pays off in the long run. There’s some luck involved, but you can get perfect (legendary) stuff fairly often if you know what you’re doing.
    • Leaf Blower Revolution (leaf crafting) - the game encourages you to craft a lot of leaves and salvage most of them. That’s fine, it’s easy to get cheese anyway. The problem is the sheer amount of beer that you need to get the properties that you want in each leaf.
    • Monster Breeder (old Flash game) - the game is a bugfest, and the lack of any sorting system makes you have a hard time even knowing which monster you should be breeding with which.
    • Minecraft (tools and weapons) - vanilla has a really dumb system that doesn’t fit well in a game that encourages hoarding piles of materials into chests. The mod Tinkers’ Construct fixes this, and makes the system next to ideal.

    Plus a lot more that I didn’t mention. Sorry for the wall of text.



  • No, I only saw it after I solved the problem.

    my reasoning / thought process

    Initially I simplified the problem to one prisoner. The best way to reduce uncertainty was to split the bottles into two sets with 500 bottles each; the prisoner drinks from one, if he dies the poisonous wine is there, otherwise it’s in one of the leftover 500 bottles.

    Then I added in a second prisoner. The problem doesn’t give me enough time to wait for the first prisoner to die, to know which set had the poisonous wine; so I had to have the second prisoner drinking at the same time as the first, from a partially overlapping set. This means splitting the bottles into four sets instead - “both drink”, “#1 drinks it”, “#2 drinks it”, “neither drinks it”.

    Extending this reasoning further to 10 prisoners, I’d have 2¹⁰=1024 sets. That’s enough to uniquely identify which bottle has poison. Then the binary part is just about keeping track of who drinks what.


  • solution

    Number all bottles in binary, starting from 0000000000. Then the Nth prisoner drinks all wines where the Nth digit is “1”. have each prisoner drinking the wines where a certain digit is “1”.

    So for example. If you had 8 bottles and 3 prisoners (exact same logic):

    • number your wines 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, 111
    • Prisoner 1 drinks wines 100, 101, 110, 111; if he dies the leftmost digit of the poisoned wine is 1, if he lives the poisoned wine starts with 0
    • Prisoner 2 drinks wines 010, 011, 110, 111; if he dies the mid digit is 1, else it’s 0
    • Prisoner 3 drinks wines 001, 011, 101, 111; if he dies the right digit is 1, else it’s 0

    If nobody dies the poisoned wine is numbered 000. And if all die it’s the 111.


  • OpenAI was not the first domino, just the one that got the most attention.

    Yes, that is correct. And perhaps it got the most attention because of all the ruckus Pigboy did over “his” precious data (i.e. users’) + because it made the whole thing hard to ignore.

    Remember when you bought shit once and that meant you owned it?

    Yeah. I was talking about this with my mum today - the chat started with my cat refusing litterboxes, then “if this was the 90s old newspapers would do the trick”, then on how you don’t really own books you buy from the internet (unlike pirated ones). But it’s the same deal with some physical goods, if someone can brick them from a distance they aren’t really yours.

    [Sorry for the rambling.]





  • Initially I was thinking on how this is such a blatantly bad idea. I don’t think that it’ll attract chip makers to USA, but instead send the industries relying on those chip makers to other countries. Because as the text says it takes years to build a chip factory, and those industries downstream simply won’t wait.

    Then it clicked me - government debt. He might be trying to find new sources of income for the United-Statian government. They only need to last four years - if they ruin the economy later on, it is not his problem.