If you look at high stakes poker livestreams and a rich whale gets lucky and takes the stack of an experienced player and the whole table gets excited, that’s them pretending to be excited for the amateur when in actuality they’re jumping up and down because six figures just moved from a safe box into a piñata

look man I like the D&D Monk but we could probably just drop it from being a core class.

Is there ~*DiScOuRsE*~ or are we just Talking About Improvements?

apparently the monk is undergoing some changes for 5.5e

One nice thing about D&D monks is that despite being intended to be Eastern, many people including myself initially read them as being “monks” in the sense of, like, Franciscan Friars, and nobody can stop us from continuing to do so.

I just remembered an example of this concept being made explicit: the Dungeon Keeper series, which featured friar-type "monks" as unarmed combatants:

Whether they were inspired by the same read of D&D or were deliberately making a pun, I don't know, but playing Dungeon Keeper 2 as a child definitely reinforced my understanding of the D&D monk as being western.

People say playing Factorio is a lot like programming.

Certainly I've got some kind of programming-like, inverse second-system effect going on in my current factory, because I'm planning things out based on half-remembered experience from my last game, with Voxette, which had some kind of science multiplier and other mods active. This means things like saying to myself, "what's a reasonable amount of science production to have? 90 per minute, right?" or planning out my second smelter complex with enough space to hold 4 express belts worth of iron and copper production, 2 express belts of steel, and an express belt of iron gear wheels.

Which is, as I've since recalled, completely unnecessary to complete the vanilla game, and has resulted in me spending too much time treking across my mostly empty smelter complex, which didn't feel like a trek the last time I played, because the last time I built out a smelter complex of that size, I already had speed-boosting equipment and flooring.

Possibly a lesson worth generalizing after 4 years in the enterprise Java trenches.

I'm out here using a car to commute to and from the fluid items mall and my first oil refinery construction site.

Top left clockwise: Keith groover, Jordan Simons, Bret Crow, Harry Hansen

this is literally so fucking sick

so I'm reading Gankra's "Learn Rust With Entirely Too Many Linked Lists" and the introduction feels like

STOP USING LINKED LISTS

LOOK at what Functional Programmers have been demanding your Respect for all this time, with all the LISP machines & tape readers we built for them (This is REAL Computer Science, done by REAL Computer Scientists)

???????????

"Hello I would like element.next.next.next.next.next.next.next.next please"

They have played us for absolute fools

there's outliers, labor of love, sacred calling, but pretty much all work is mercenary work, loyalty is a happymeal for the immature or gullible

Is there any reason proper academic articles can’t be published anonymously or pseudonymously? Seems like it could be fruitful.

im p sure they I remember that gwern has been cited, as gwern branwen. dunno for authorship tho.

sure they can

A lower bound on the length of the shortest superpattern, whose primary author is credited as "Anonymous 4chan Poster".

lmao work takes IT security so seriously not only do we not have wifi on premises, my work laptop doesn't even have a wifi card

I love when the best method is to just go back to basics.

USB attacks arent an issue if everything is saved to CDs for passing around the office.

Keycard cloning isn't an issue if the auth system is a dude with a booklet of photos behind bulletproof glass.

etc

oh yeah we're not allowed to use any USB peripherals that haven't been vetted by IT and Security. if we need to transfer files into secure systems they are to be put on a vetted USB stick, which is then turned over to IT for destruction after being unplugged. we do have keycards but we do also have a dude behind bulletproof glass with his own bullets and gun.

>be me >go to rob kirch's work >security guard tells me to stop or he'll shoot >i don't stop >his bullets hit his own bulletproof glass problem.jpg

It's possible to make glass that's only bulletproof in one direction, known as one-way glass, or bullet diodes as I like to call them.

A power-plant concept I came up with while playing Factorio. You can't do this in that game but it would work in real-life, for sufficiently broad definitions of "work".

More than it's physical properties, this design is valuable because using both solar power and coal enables the operator to receive both ESG and anti-ESG financing, while the nuclear reactor is there to generate most of the actual power.

aren't there some heat gradients in this you can stick stirling engines onto

Mainly into the open air - everywhere you spot a cold source, it's cold on purpose to cool down something else.

Though I guess you could use the gradient between (cooling) and (thing that needs to be cooled)

Not really; if you're trying to cool something, putting anything in the way will make it less efficient. Everything else is optimized to get the working fluid to and from the turbine as efficiently as possible, because that's the stage optimized for extracting work. If the turbine exhaust still has useful energy, then the thing to do is to add more, lower-pressure turbines or turbine stages.

This unusual design, as depicted here, does have one major place where you could extract additional work without messing up the rest of the flow: the superheater exhaust. Since fluid enters the cold side of the heat exchanger having already been heated to the output temperature of a pressurized water reactor's (PWR) steam generator, which is somewhere around 530 to 600 K, the coal exhaust will still be much hotter than that when it leaves the superheater, having started at the temperature of a pulverized coal furnace, which is around 1480 K.[1]

So, the furnace exhaust still has most of its heat when it leaves the superheater, and so you could just stick most of a normal coal plant at the end of it.

[1] You might read this and think, "wait, coal plants operate at much higher temperatures than nuclear reactors? Does that mean coal plants are more thermally efficient than PWRs?" Well, kinda. The primary loop does add an extra stage that reduces efficiently as compared to a boiling water reactor. But the coal furnace temperature is not analogous to a PWR's steam output, but to its fuel element temperature, which is actually about the same. This design could be reversed, with the coal furnace being the first stage, which generates critical steam, that is then superheated by a nuclear reactor; you'd just need to pass the steam directly thru the core, at which point you have a gas-cooled reactor, which does operate at higher temperatures than coal or PWRs. However, the steam generator contributes far more energy than the superheater, so it makes sense to make the nuclear reactor the first stage. At least, insofar as this power plant can be said to make sense at all.