proteal

A place I used to work advertised a job by posting the listing in the break room, where only people with badges could get in to see the advert. Maybe there were ads elsewhere, but if that was the only posting, it felt against the spirit of the law.

One of my guilty pleasures in life is coming up with convincing conspiracy theories. A personal favorite of mine is flat moon theory - the idea that the moon is a thin disc, not a sphere. A surprising number of people struggle to provide convincing counter arguments. Next time I’ll link them this site!

Here’s my understanding as a native Texan with examples (don’t take this too seriously):

Y’all -> group of people (howdy yall)

All y’all -> everyone (all yall need to listen up!)

All’s yall -> only thing (alls yall need is another beer)

All y’all’s -> singular possessive of everyone’s stuff (put all y’all’s shit away)

All’s y’all’s -> plural possessive of everyone’s stuff (alls y’all’s cars are blocking me in). This one is a bit awkward and most people just use all y’all’s instead

What if instead the manager was saying: “hey team I need you to all buy as many lotto tickets as possible!”

I feel like that’s a better analogy. Some charlatans are buying fake tickets, but as a manager who wants to win big, I’m ok with some chicanery so long as the average person is trying to honestly meet my directive.

It sounds to me like the safe assumption with software is that no matter how solid your stack is, there are vulnerabilities, potentially catastrophic. A question to folks more experienced than me - if my business depends on software, and I know that my software is almost certainly exploitable, how do I posture my business in such a way as to minimize the impacts of exploits like these?

I’d like to point out that TF2 was part of the Orange Box bundle that included Half Life, Portal, and TF2. Those single player games were never given away for free, so as a purchaser of the bundle, I wasn’t miffed TF2 went free to play. In fact, quite the opposite. Because TF2 is free, there are like 50k people to play with me everyday. I think $0 is the right price for TF2.

I agree CS is icky re: skins and gambling. But to say “refuses to control” is disingenuous. They’ve done many things to curtail gambling, like preventing tourneys from displaying gambling sponsors and adding trade restrictions that hampered bot activity. Valve is between a rock and a hard place here- they recognize gambling is a net negative on the value of their game (hence the curtailing and remonetization efforts). Remember, valve didn’t create skin trading with the expectation of third party gambling, so this is something unprecedented they’ve had to figure out as they go. Despite its drawbacks, the gambling market has some positives that valve can’t ignore. It creates liquidity and demand for the skins. People who pay hundreds of dollars for skins hate to see their value plummet. So if valve nuked gambling today, it would upset a lot of folks. I think valve has done a phenomenal job balancing their business needs with the social obligations with the players.

Barbarians at the Gate is the classic LBO book. It gives a nice mix of story and financial mechanics.

Thank you for sharing! What are your thoughts on intentionally degrading service over the course of an hour instead of a hard cutoff? Like implementing an increasingly restrictive cap on download speeds/intentionally dropping a % of packets over the hour. Might be a little less jarring than a hard stop.

Hey - plugged this into chatGPT 5.2 and it seems to think this theory needs more work.

“As written, this looks closer to sophisticated curve-fitting (numerology with constraints) than a legitimate geometric unification, mainly because the claimed “ppm agreement” is often not assessed against experimental uncertainties and because several integer/constant choices function like hidden degrees of freedom.”

Thank you for sharing and happy holidays!

I think we’re in agreement, but I’m afraid I don’t have the philosophical language to precisely pin my mental model into words (what a meta conundrum lol). I’ll try my best here, but I may come back in a few days with an edit if I can more coherently write my ideas.

I take a slightly more narrow definition of “thoughts” that may be more akin to “expressions” - ideas that can be communicated, so excluding non-linguistic mental processes. I think that may be where we disconnect. A lot of my idea about thoughts comes from the Borges story, Funes the memorius (short story about a dude who could not forget - interesting read and really clarifies my feelings on my definition of “all possible thought”). In the story he talks about tree leaves, but instead imagine needing a unique linguistic scheme for every single unique snowflake you ever see. It would be a linguistic nightmare! Therefore language must generalize otherwise it becomes noncommunicable and that generalization to me induces the “lossy approximation” I attribute to language in my prior comment.

So, in my head Funes’s mind represent the abstract space of all possible thoughts. When we use language, we are stacking words/sentences/paragraphs/etc together almost like vector addition trying to reach a particular point in the thought vector space. Some languages have really clean ways of getting to certain thoughts while others take a mouthful and still don’t get you exactly there (物の哀れ example from link).

I agree with your statement on new languages being different thinking. As you follow that vector addition process to get to the “thought,” different languages will take you on different paths to get to your destination thought because languages encode those vectors differently, even if the destination thought is the same. In my mental model, the act of thinking is putting those language vectors together and tracing their path to get to your thought.

And if my comment still makes no sense - I might have to incubate this thought a bit more :) but I do recommend the story- it’s a quick, thought provoking read.

I tried the new battlefield game and it’s bizarre how some of my friends play it. There’s this expansive battle pass (pay $20/quarter for access, on top of $70 base game) where you’re given tasks in game to make progress towards cosmetics. My friends only play to complete these tasks - the actual combat gameplay loop almost feels secondary to their enjoyment of the game. The modern trend of games becoming chore simulators is worrisome to me because -call me old fashioned- I believe the core gameplay loop should be fun and addictive, not the progression scaffolded on, even if that gameplay loops is a little “distasteful” like GTA.

It has to do with how ATC needs to be able to communicate with all planes in the air, even ones built 100 years ago. They have to use radio so everyone can hear everyone else. There’s no other technology that is as ubiquitous as radio, so they have to work with what they’ve got. Upgrading to other stuff would be an absolute nightmare, though they are making progress on less critical fronts.

I understand the sentiment about a skilled user not needing this, but I think having a little buddy that I can use to offload some menial tasks would be helpful for me to iterate through my models more efficiently; even if the AI is not perfect. As a highly skilled excel user, I admit the software has terrible ergonomics. It would be a productivity boon for me if an AI can help me stay focused on model design vs model implementation.