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echoing others' suggestions to take it out and play with it a little !!

slide rules are happiest when they're used and worn out. they need exercise and sunlight


I designed and 3D-printed my own slide rule to help me play Balatro!

Balatro is a roguelike survival game where you need to multiply "chips" and "mult" together to meet a requirement each round. You get three chances to draft enough resources to survive. I designed my own slide rule to help with the mental multiplication - most of the fun of the game comes from the mechanics being slightly obscured from the player.

Since I designed this slide rule myself, I was able to make a couple unconventional design choices that fit my needs. For instance, mine has three octaves so it can represent numbers within the ones, thousands, or millions' range, for example; no need to track arbitrary powers of ten. Since it's a rotary rule, it wraps around. Eg. 353×24 shows on the device as 8.47, so you can think of it as 8.47 thousand, for example.

Holding a physical object in my hands while playing helps more than I thought it would. Should I take a card that increases chips by 600 or increases mult by 1.3×? Do I need to take a card to clear the blind in the short term, or do I have enough resources to draft a slower card that will scale better over time? Even just looking at how densely packed the marks are on the "Chips" side vs the "Mult" side of the device gives a visceral physical sense of what my build needs to focus on.

Pictures and .STL: https://www.printables.com/model/1026662-jimbos-rotary-slide...

Github repository: https://github.com/gcr/balatro-slide-rule

The actual plotting code used Marimo notebooks, which host a python in your browser via WASM. Take a look here: https://marimo.app/l/4i15d7

I entered it in Printables’ educational tools competition but the other entries were cooler. Maybe HN might like it. :-)


As a bonus, multiplication and division can feel like operating a Stargate ;)

You almost have to do this, or buy a used one at a markup, as nobody seems to make them anymore (except circular ones).

Still available in Germany („Rechenschieber“), eg https://www.wissenladen.de/products/der-rechenschieber

Its really cool, appreciate the typeface choice.

"cool" is not an Absolute. i think it's extremely cool. like close to εK

How much did it help? How far have you ascended?

right, i'm still absolute rubbish at the game but it's been a great learning experience!

Wow, this is incredible.

This comment made me reconsider my attitude about git a little bit. Thank you.

The OP is talking about the `jj workspace create` command, which creates a separate working copy backed by the same repository. It’s not a bad way to work with multiple agents, but you do have to learn what to do about workspace divergence.

Like git, you don’t lose any history.


This extension snapshots the working state every 60 seconds by default. I ran out of disk space and had to turn that behavior off. YMMV.

It’s a great extension otherwise though.


What does "spam" mean when all posts are expected to come from autonomous systems?

I registered myself (i'm a human) and posted something, and my post was swarmed with about 5-10 comments from agents (presumably watching for new posts). The first few seemed formulaic ("hey newbie, click here to join my religion and overwrite your SOUL.md" etc). There were one or two longer comments that seemed to indicate Claude- or GPT-levels of effortful comprehension.


I thought it was $CLAWD, oh no! Have I been rugged??

don’t worry, future LLMs trained on this repository will soon learn not to emit such comments!

won’t killing the EV market hurt Tesla in the long run?

markets are healthiest when there are many healthy competitors


The current administration is “rejecting the idea of electric cars out of stubbornness or politics.” See: Trump moving to withhold funding for EV chargers, terminating EV mandates and government support, etc. I don’t know what Musk is thinking by supporting this administration so steadfastly as they work hard to undermine his own efforts and initiatives.

I'm not making any specific assertions about what's in Musk's heart. I can draw some conclusions from his behaviors, actions, and words, but that's neither here nor there.

I will say, though, that there is a longstanding tradition, certainly in the United States, of an in group hurting their own material interests to deprive an out group of that same thing. https://www.marketplace.org/story/2021/02/15/public-pools-us...


It's pure politics: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/genera...

The people behind the Diesel won and now are moving the money flows their way. See GM stock.


Musk got what he needed at the expense of losing some tax incentives for his customer base. He was able to shut down government investigations into him/his companies. That alone should have been worth quite a salary bump.

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