For those who aren’t aware, AOE2 is thriving today with a huge player base, fan base, ongoing development and large international tournaments (recent Red Bull Wololo tournament in London, for example). I play this game regularly with friends and love it.
The most insane part of AOE2 is that I was a young teenager when I first played the game and the dominant players then are STILL the dominant players now - 27 years later
At the very top probably not, at least these days. But historically low APM players were often able to overcome that through better decision making and get to the top 4 or so. That’s generally still the case outside of the top 4-8.
Now the meta is quite established and it’s much easier to get better at decision making through practice than becoming physically faster.
It’s very complex though while the factions are mostly symmetrical there are over 30 of them and they all have marginal advantages/disadvantages. Games are more usually than not won through optimally utilizing them. So in tournaments drafting became very important since using the same civilization twice or by opposing players is almost universally disallowed. So to be successful you need to outwit the opponent by picking the right faction(s), be capable of making the optimal strategic decisions and be very fast/good at micro (which is also probably more important than in most other games since arrows are not heatseeking missiles and pathfinding is extra wonky)
Uh, dunno if I'd say that BW is dominated by "the young".
Top 4 at the latest ASL are all born before 1995 - they're all millennials. None of them are from the first generation of BW pros, but they've been in the game for a long time.
I think BW has the collapse of the infrastructure that used to support it as a ongoing televised event to blame for that one. It’s less popular among gen z so there isn’t the up and coming replacement and no one is paying them to do it as a full time job as even the mid-tier pros from its prime era were.
To add to that: it also works fine under Linux (Proton), which I feel is important to mention because many Linux deniers believe that Linux can't run competitive multiplayer games, but AoE2 proves them wrong.
Dota 2 runs natively in Linux, and it's one of the biggest competitive online multiplayer games. It worked in Wine (along with Steam), too, last I tried 10 years ago when I was dual-booting and did not have disk space for two copies.
Don't forget AOE4! It's really a great evolution of AOE2 - more unique playstyles per civ, has about 1/2 the playerbase of AOE2 but still plenty to play online and support its own pro scene (was also in the Wololo tournament).
I wouldn’t call it an evolution. The game might be good in its own right but its different in some very fundamental ways besides the historical setting. Especially on the competitive level.
The bowline has two variants, one being the cowboy version, which has the working bitter end on the outside of the loop, the "normal" bowline will have it on the inside of the loop.
To tie a bowline, make a loop in the working bitter end up about 2x the desired circumference of the loop you want to make. Your line is now segmented into the bitter end, and the standing line section.
Look at the loop. You want to put the bitter end through the same side of the hole where the bitter end overlaps the line/rope on the other side of the loop (standing section). If you use your right hand to twist the loop, and do so clockwise, you will insert the bitter end from the top. If you turn it counter-clockwise, then you will insert it from the bottom.
In this orientation, if you go around behind the right side of the standing part, you will form a normal bowline. If you go around behind on the left, this will form a "cowboy" bowline. Either works, but the cowboy one allows the bitter end to hang loose, which increases the odds of it getting caught up in other lines.
Finish by inserting the bitter end into the same hole from the other direction (obviously).
If you find the knot comes undone, you are putting it through the wrong side of the hole at the start. Just insert it in the other side and this particular problem solves itself. If you are on a boat, other problems may now be selected for attack. :P
When I was young I learned this cool trick to tie a bowline one-handed. Can’t remember who taught it to me but the idea is if you are hanging from a rope by your left hand, you can actually (with a bit of practise that you hopefully do beforehand) tie a loop around yourself with a bowline using your other hand. Moot in my case because there’s no way I could hold my weight using my left hand even if my life depended on it, but it’s a fun trick.
Strongly agreed, and thank you - TIL about the truckee hitch, I've always been using trucker's hitches and now I'm going to go try to reprogram myself.
I'd add a butterfly loop to this list for those times you need to add a tie-in point to the middle of a rope for whatever reason.
Hopefully running local S2T + LLM and native app with data fully stored on device. I can’t imagine anyone would be happy shipping their private personal thoughts to a cloud LLM + unknown backend service provider, especially because running this stuff locally is well within the realm of possibility these days.
I think it’s also think it’s interesting to consider from the perspective of side-channel attacks/information leaks. For the most part, I think text notes are well just text. But I shutter to think what other metadata, fingerprinting, or background conversations/information could be extracted from a bunch of audio. But maybe I’m just being overly paranoid.
I would never in a zillion years put things in Notion that would ruin my life if they showed up in a data breach. I don’t even keep a physical journal because I don’t like how hard it is to secure.
Am I in a bubble, or is it the children who are wrong?
>I can’t imagine anyone would be happy shipping their private personal thoughts to a cloud LLM + unknown backend service provider
you're in a tech bubble if you think this.
Do you think all the people on this subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/CharacterAI/ are keeping private thoughts to themselves when doing roleplay with their virtual companions?
No.. I think most people don't think about this stuff at all.
I am the builder. In our platform, voice data is not stored on our servers by default. It is used solely for transcription to text and is deleted immediately afterward. Users have the option to enable a feature that allows the storage of voice recordings along with the journal text, but this feature is disabled by default.
We utilize Microsoft's transcription APIs, ensuring that data is not used to train any models.
Additionally, we are developing an "Ask About Your Journal" feature that employs Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques. This feature is also disabled by default and can be enabled by users if desired.
> Some among the medical staff and social workers involved in the case thought that Jenn reacted strangely to the discovery of her children’s injuries. She didn’t show emotion or seem bothered. Her affect was “flat,” according to the D.S.S. report. The hospital’s abuse specialist concluded that the baby girl’s fractures were “diagnostic of physical abuse” and that the bruises were “inflicted.” D.S.S. concluded the boy’s injuries were also the result of abuse. A factor in this determination was that Robbie and Jenn did not have “a plausible explanation” for the injuries. “We had no idea,” Robbie told me later.
What’s perverse is that the state can take your kids away without a trial and on the basis of evidence this flimsy, and the expectation is that you are guilty unless you can provide an explanation they’re happy with. To add insult to this obvious injury, you will be held to account for your affect when dealing with the state apparatus charged with taking your children away and subjected to weird psychologizing by people without any particular psychological expertise (as if there is a correct way to respond to these questions in the first place). A tired and overworked social worker who just came from collecting six kids from a drug den can operationalize a gut feeling that your responses were “flat” and you’ll go to bed that night not knowing where your children are or when (if ever) you’ll get them back.
The idea that this only ever happens to bad people who deserve it is naïve in the extreme, and the annals of CPS are full of cases of outrageous mishandling and overreach.
> But we’re talking about kids, so people turn off their brains and assent to ann extra-legal task force that can swoop in and break up a family on a hunch.
I think the reality is that making an error in either direction can lead to tragic consequences.
Sorry, I deleted that part right after posting it, because I thought it was a little bit uncharitable. But I stand by the general sentiment, and I would just say that in our system of law and government, we have decided to solve this problem in one direction, which is to say that you are innocent until proven guilty. Taking an innocent person’s children away from them is an outrageous harm, and nobody should be subjected to it on the basis that extreme caution may save some other kids someday.
People should not feel guilty about saying plainly, no, you cannot take my children out of their home, just because an abundance of caution might help you prevent some real cases of abuse elsewhere.
His fixation is so intense that it extends to the dinosaurs. What if the real problem with that asteroid 65 million years ago wasn’t a lack of food, but the weak bones that follow a lack of sunlight? “I sometimes wonder,” Dr. Holick has written, “did the dinosaurs die of rickets and osteomalacia?”
Isn't the whole article by a long shot - certainly an interesting counter point, thanks for the links and your thoughts.
True, it's not bad as a thought, I threw it in there to tease others into the full article, it's the suspicion of zeal driven by funding that's the more damaging charge.
Still not as strong as the famous "Dinosaurs are thin at one end, much thicker in the middle, and thin again at the other end" conjecture.
Sure, it is vital, but he claims that lack of vitamin D underlies nearly all diseases of modernity, which isn’t well-established. Meanwhile he was making money selling vitamin D and not disclosing it, which makes his motivation seem suspect. It’s very easy for bias to obliterate the validity of research.
It was published in "Scientific Reports", a known low-quality journal. They are not necessary predatory like some of the truly bad journals, e.g., work in this journal still is supposed to pass the "not a low effort triviality and not obviously wrong" check and there are even some really cool things published in this journal. However, I generally take publications in this journal with a significant grain of salt.
Also, just FYI, "Scientific Reports" is not in a specific subfield -- I have published on quantum computing in this journal. That is not too strange, there are plenty of "generalist" journals that are good, but I thought it could still be useful context to know.
Well, it's been hand wavily described on 50 students with similar socio-economical backgrounds how much more replication would you like? There are also some references to statistics terms so it must have statistical power.
They didn’t address the possibility that some of those views on X come from bots. It depends on your goals, but I’d much rather have a post read closely by fewer humans who are really engaging with it, versus lots of fleeting engagement including from bots.
Click bait-y title, for a study about mice. I’m fundamentally skeptical about both click bait-y titles and studies about mice (and the inferences made about humans).
