T-hawk

But be careful about which way the causation goes. More guns don't cause less crime; more crime causes anti-gun measures.

You're correct, in that given a board state the right move can always be exhaustively computed, because the game has no randomness or hidden information. But enough computing power doesn't exist on the planet to iterate through all the possible states.

The word you're looking for is "deterministic", rather than solved. Solved is usually used to mean the exhaustive computation has been done. Deterministic would mean it could be if enough computing power existed, but for chess it doesn't.

The problem with prohibiting hate speech is that you can prohibit any speech by calling it hate.

It is the result of the free market of news. Bad news drives out good, just as bad money drives out good.

(Bad as in quality, not as in pessimistic. Bad meaning emotional and inciteful rather than informative and constructive. Humans have proven they respond more to the former.)

There may well have been a bigger delta in usage from Sunday Jan 3 to Monday Jan 4 2021, than for any particular pair of days in March-April 2020.

Of course 2020 saw an increase, but it was smeared over a week or a month rather than being a big jump in a single day after everyone's holidays.

Yes, but not right away. It took a while for the knowledge and processes to become established. Piracy wasn't what sank the Dreamcast. By the time piracy became commonplace, roughly mid-late 2000, the DC was already pretty obviously going to lose in the market to both the PS1 and upcoming PS2.

Right, the doubling cube is what sets apart the good players.

For every possible state, there is an expected value of your outcome, from the current state averaged over all possible continuations of the game or match, if you make perfect moves and your opponent also does. (This can be denominated in either cash/points value within one game, or in expected match-win value across a match of multiple games.)

The swing of backgammon is in the imperfect moves, and in how much expected value each one costs you. It's not that hard to study checker strategy well enough that you're rarely losing more than 1% or so of a game's value; even if you make imperfect moves, they're generally still pretty good. But the doubling cube can account for much greater swings; a mistake like doubling too early or incorrectly responding to your opponent's can easily cost 20% equity or more.

> If you're going to move where you live or significantly alter where you spend you time because of 0.4% of things above 30M, that's a real sign of just how far American greed has gone.

I would say this isn't any different than any other greed at any other place or time. It's simply a cost-benefit tradeoff decision. If people perceive that being in California makes more money than the wealth tax costs, they will stay. If not, they will leave. There doesn't have to be any moral or principled component to this, just simple self-interest.

Also don't overlook the deterrence factor. The wealthy currently in CA may stay there if moving represents a greater overall cost. But anyone not currently in CA would have a great disincentive to never move there.

I'll give you more detail of one way to use that trick then. The single-bit missile and ball objects are turned on or off by writing to their activation register, controlled by bit 1 of that register. Why bit 1, why not 0 or 7? Because that lines up with the zero flag in the 6502's flags register.

What you do is set the stack pointer to that video register, compare on the object's Y-coordinate, then push the flags register to turn the object on or off! So the code needs no shifts or conditions or branches. It's even cycle invariant which is a great property on this machine.

The video hardware was deliberately designed to do this (by chip legend Jay Miner), and Combat's code does. Also, the registers for the two missiles and the ball are adjacent, so you can do this trick to all of them in succession without resetting the stack pointer.

Yes. It's really that everything exists in both pages. The video registers exist at 0x00 through 0x3F and the RAM is at 0x80 through 0xFF, both in zero-page for the fast access instructions and in page 1 for the stack pointer.

It's not so much a mapping as a lack of mapping. The hardware simply doesn't decode address line 8. So accessing 0x002F and 0x012F are the same video register for example. If you push something to 0x01FF, you can read it from 0x00FF.

There are more duplications within the address space as well. Address lines 13 and above don't exist in hardware on the 2600, so 0x20FF and 0x40FF and 0x60FF etc also access the same thing. The video registers from 0x00 through 0x3F are also duplicated from 0x40 through 0x7F, by not decoding address line 6 either. The important one is address line 12, which enables the cartridge ROM instead of the video/RAM; in fact that line is wired directly to the chip-enable pin on the cartridge slot.

Multiplexing on the 2600 can't go nearly as far as that screenshot shows. The 2600 has two sprites per line plus a few single-bit objects. There's a particular way to reuse sprites within the same scanline, but only at certain fixed intervals which isn't what we see here, plus strobing the positioning register that fast requires every single CPU cycle so it's impossible to also write the color and playfield registers at the same time.

Source: I know the 2600 well, I wrote and published a homebrew game: http://dos486.com/atari/

2600 cartridges can contain any amount of extra RAM or even CPU hardware.

But this pretty well isn't real. There's no way you could drive a workable Ethernet connection just from an RF output. Also the "screenshot" is completely fake, the 2600 has nowhere near enough video objects to output all of that.

On the 2600, you can use a fourth register, the stack pointer. The 2600 as a machine has no interrupts, so if a section of code doesn't push/pop/call anything, stack memory is never touched and you can do whatever you want with the stack pointer register.

There's more tricks with the stack pointer on this machine too. Set it to point to the top of a sequence of video registers, and then you can rapidly write values to that sequence of registers just by issuing push instructions, which are faster than load/store/decrement!

Minor nitpick, that episode is Voyager, not Next Generation. And it was directly inspired by Dragon's Egg.

Well, there's the selection/survivorship bias there: You only see what was deemed notable. The stuff that wasn't isn't there for you to see.

(Unless you specifically go looking for it, in discussions about what was deleted or whatever.)

3% chance in a given year. And for how many years when it didn't happen have we been running this many lotteries? Probably right around 33.

Our sun is exceptionally stable - it has no close encounters with other stars that might disrupt planetary orbits, which does happen in galactic nuclei or globular clusters. We are in that nice little stable oasis.

They all cross the antipode, but not at the same time. There is no point where they all meet at the same time, if the planet is oblate rather than spherical, or has other irregularities in pressure or temperature or surface terrain.

There is the anthropic principle regarding that last: if the star wasn't typical and stable, life wouldn't have developed here to observe it.

It wouldn't be simultaneous. The difference in great-circle lengths based on nonspherical oblateness (tens of miles) would account for up to a minute difference in arrival times at the antipode. At most it would be a sustained rumbling.

And on a global scale, there are many differences in pressure and wind speeds and temperature that do slightly alter the speed of sound. I don't know the magnitude of that, but it would further disperse the arrival times at the antipode to at least some extent.

+1 for the TI-99/4A, that was my introduction to computers and Basic too. I spent quite some hours typing in program listings from computer magazines from the library... none of which had versions for the TI or ever worked in the TI's odd Basic dialect.

This is correct, Jennings said (a while back but probably still true) that he doesn't want it. Short version: he doesn't want to uproot his family from Seattle to LA or have to commute between them. He also doesn't really want any more of a showbiz career than he already has.

You might want to clarify that this is a devil's-advocate kind of point. I thought at first you were serious and apparently so did someone else.

This is it. The social media depression effect is that you're always comparing yourself to the top of the bell curve rather than the middle.

Suppose you have 52 friends who all go on vacation one week out of the year. Every week you will compare yourself to whichever one who is posting their fabulous vacation photos. This doesn't mean you're having a worse life or missing out, you're completely average. You just only notice the 51 comparisons in that direction and don't notice the 51 comparisons during your own vacation week.

Self-selection. The women who aren't chasing the top 10% find a workable match sooner and remove themselves from the pool.

It's the same adverse-selection effect as "why are all my job candidates terrible?" Because you're only interviewing the people who have failed to get a job.

Yes, your last paragraph is my natural position, with the elbows farther out. 'wefv' exaggerates the effect to demonstrate; the real position is about halfway between 'wefv' and 'sdfv'.

Am I the only one who just keeps their hands/wrists straight on a regular unsplit keyboard? I've always naturally done this and never had any problems with strain.

The best way to describe it is that the home keys aren't ASDF, but more like WEFV with my forearm angled so it's straight from elbow to fingertip. This exaggerates the effect but demonstrates it clearly; the real home positions are more like intermediate points between keys.

Also network effects. Facebook and Twitter aren't king because of their scalability, they're king because you use Facebook/Twitter to connect with the two billion people who are already on Facebook/Twitter. Not even Google managed to sustain a competitor to Facebook.

That has nothing to do with HTML. That's an HTTP header.

This thread has a surprising amount of not knowing the difference between HTML and HTTP. The original post is entirely about HTML and does not involve HTTP transmission at all.

HTML <meta> tags are a thing, to invoke browser behavior typically associated with HTTP headers. I'm not sure if that can get you there; I would guess that to visually output the meta tag would require the same * { display:block } shenanigan that the original post is about.

If it's truly a Sid Meier product, once you start, you'll keep doing one-more-page until it's suddenly sunrise :)