iron_ball

Joined 18 years ago

Karma
1,532
Submissions
446
Member since
May 21
http://www.alanmacdougall.com
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Recent submissions

Comment · 3 months ago
The article mentions this strategy, and points out that when confronted with an emotional emergency situation, the victims simply might not remember to use the protocol.

Not a bad idea, but not a brick wall.

Comment · 1 year ago
No idea about the vibe-coding platforms, but systems like Claude Code have explicit allowlists for commands. Don't allow it, and it'll ask permission each time.
Comment · 2 years ago
Sure, can't argue with that. But there are plenty of stable points on the curve from 0% to 100% slavery.
Comment · 2 years ago
> corporations would pay zero and use slaves if they could

Honest question: why is this absurd? Slavery has been a widespread practice in history, and it is still ongoing in some places.

Corporations exist to make money. The brute mathematics of profit require costs to be reduced. To zero, if at all possible.

Comment · 2 years ago
I mean, can't it be both? Individuals have personal agency and are responsible for their own actions. Individuals also respond to incentives which, in aggregate, alter the observed distribution of those individual decisions. The problem can be addressed at both levels.
Comment · 5 years ago
It supports includes, so your p8 file can consist entirely of #include statements and you can write all the Lua files with the editor of your choice.
Comment · 5 years ago
Teela Brown from Ringworld. She was the result of a selective breeding program intended to create the luckiest human alive... but it turned out the _real_ lucky ones were all the "failures" who did _not_ get recruited for an impossibly dangerous mission.
Comment · 5 years ago
I participate in a Discord that is kind of similar. Not the same one, because my example has totally optional pronoun choice. But they have reason to be cautious of newcomers: before they added an interview/onboarding step, they were continually brigaded by trolls of various levels of sincerity. The internet can be a harsh place, and I understand the desire to create a refuge.
Comment · 5 years ago
True, but not strictly true. I played with 100% manual attacks and cures, but made heavy use of color coding to recognize threats in the rapid scroll of incoming text. It wasn't any harder than playing a competitive puzzle game: recognize colors, make matches, try to throw sand in your opponent's gears and make combos faster than they can.
Comment · 5 years ago
Depends on the item. Some of them were quite powerful, but even then, generally you'd get a 10% edge or an ability from another class. And people would often have macros to unequip all their artifacts for a fair duel.

The Lasallian Lyre is named after my character, but strangely enough, I never mastered the timing to make the best use of it. (A playable class was later based on some fiction I wrote for the official history, which arguably the most impact I've ever had on a product vision...)

Never thought I'd see Achaea discussed on HN. It was a deep influence on me, though my active time was a lifetime ago. Hi, Sarapis! Figured you'd like to know that Achaea, and of course Avalon before it (you were... Orthwein?) really did have a long-lasting impact. These games have always been deeply participatory: player-run guilds, player-run cities. At least at the time I played, you literally couldn't even get class abilities without joining a group and inheriting its political positions, friends, enemies. And although there were PvE quests, the majority of the game was about conflict between players, at the level of people, guilds, cities. That's a far cry from the theme-park nature of modern multiplayer RPGs like WoW.

Comment · 7 years ago
Thanks for that link! It's always nice to have access to the original language.
Comment · 10 years ago
Only barely; he includes it as the middle of a chain of hacks that highlight, not remedy, the deficiencies of Javascript.
Comment · 10 years ago
Warren Buffet's advice for retail investors—that is, people who are not particularly wealthy, have no special connections in the finance world, and do not want to cultivate special expertise—is to buy an S&P 500 index fund with very low fees and never make a withdrawal until retirement. He specifically recommends Vanguard's S&P 500 fund.
Comment · 10 years ago
See The Diamond Age, where the poor areas were covered in "toner", the remains of nanobots killed in an endless self-perpetuating war.
Comment · 11 years ago
In Neal Stephenson's Anathem, there was an entire faction of monks who researched intellectual history specifically to warn modern-day philosophers when they were treading dusty ground. In fact, one of the only open questions (in their mind) was whether literally every possible thought had already been conceived.

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