Wow. AMA, you say? When do you prefer loops, or lines? Additional lines, or carriages? How much do you tear down at once? if you don't mind me asking
I'm like median on Metro, ~60 hours over years (though perhaps just the one hour, 60x, &c). Never too late to learn some strategy, I guess. Never played Motorways.
Loops vs lines: Loops only in a dense core where you can keep shapes alternating and include a square. Use lines for suburb<->core and river hops.
Lines or carriages: Early add lines, midgame add a loco, then carriages on the trunk that is actually redlining. Late add an interchange at the first overloaded transfer before more cars.
Tear-down: Hm... how much, not sure how to quantify. Definitely something you must do in every long running game but the extend is different. As a heuristic: Pause and rebuild when queues outrun a single weekly upgrade. Reorder shapes, make sure every line touches a square, split any mega-hub into two nearby transfers.
As you probably have guessed: There is no real silver bullet. Knowing the best move is basically impossible, the space is too complex. As a most useful general skill, it's important to recognize problems very early and optimize ruthlessly.
Crazy to think we'd pay for software, ask for source to run a Fortify scan & whatnot, and get told to kick rocks. "Proprietary ... trade secrets ... &c&c". Just mark it green
> Fira Code uses uniform length for +, =, and -. - and _ share similar length. The /\ characters join together and render smaller compared to the other fonts.
This "joining" is a ligatures thing, I'm almost certain, at least for `<>`. I can't for the life of me get anything on macOS to render `/\` as joined, though. Stumped. I've no preference either way, it's just weird to see a familiar font rendered so strangely. Maybe it's a Windows font rendering thing ?
A very fair comparison, though I'd argue legibility isn't always worthwhile; the MICR (?) fonts on checks are quite legible (perhaps machine-legible) but too weird to use.
also, TIL IntelliJ bundles Fira Code for quite some time now
Interesting to see the font rendering differences crop up, I haven't tested on anything except Linux. For context, I wrote a hacky shell script that uses Harfbuzz and ImageMagick to generate the comparison images in a Fedora 41 virtual machine. It's possible that something in that software stack causes the characters to render differently.
> one clear, sharp picture. Better than cable. Here's the reason. OTA broadcasts must meet a legally defined broadcast quality: they're all at the top quality that HD can provide
I wonder about this part. I think it's probably still true for the "main" station, like full 1080i for 9-1, but the "extra" stations like -2, -3 ... -6 are usually noticeably compressed.
From my limited understanding, all the extras are sharing the same bandwidth, and more channels = more ads, so it's more like 1080i + 5x 480i. Some channels will look 1080i on both -1 and -2, then maybe 720i on -3.
I don't live near an ATSC 3.0 station, but it would be cool to get 4K/2160p. Soon ... (naturally, I'm curious)
Maybe he "just" got it wrong. Maybe they're typos, and the manuscript was correct. Or...
Maybe Pemulis gave Hal an obviously wrong derivative, and when uncorrected, drove Pemulis to abruptly end the tutoring. Maybe Pemulis said it right but Hal heard it wrong. Or...
Maybe it's "just" another sign they're in an alternate universe where even the math is different. That's pretty much how I feel about it
> Maybe it's "just" another sign they're in an alternate universe where even the math is different
Unlike physics, there are no conceivable alternate universes with different math. That's what's so cool about math: it could not possibly be any different. There could be alternate universes where they've discovered different amounts of it, or named the discoveries different things, but everything that is "wrong" in math in our universe is universally (multiversally?) wrong.
> That's what's so cool about math: it could not possibly be any different.
Why not? There's not much tethering our axioms-on-paper to what is necessarily true, past what we can empirically observe. For instance, a universe that is "exactly like ours, except the truth of the continuum hypothesis is flipped" seems no less conceivable than our own universe, given that we don't even have any solid evidence for its truth or falsehood in the first place.
If we're willing to treat mathematical and logical ideas as physically contingent, then it's only a few further steps to "the concepts of identity and discreteness and measure in this universe are different than ours, so all our mathematical axioms are not applicable". Though it would be very difficult to translate any stories from such a universe into our own ideas.
> "exactly like ours, except the truth of the continuum hypothesis is flipped"
We can and do create two alternate models of math with CH and ~CH as axioms, in this universe, right now. No need for alternate universes. There's no reason to think the CH is either true or false in the natural laws of our universe -- what would that even mean?
I suppose it's distantly possible that models where CH is true happen to represent our own universe much better than models where CH is false, and that there are other universes that are better represented by models where CH is false. Even if that were true, all the math is still the same, we're just preferring some models over others.
Presumably something like "you can/cannot collect an uncountable group of points in physical space and still not have enough to fill a physical volume".
Anyway, the idea is that properties of 'ordinary' numbers and logical constructs could similarly just be models specifically useful for our own universe. E.g., propositional logic only works because our universe allows us to write truth tables that are causally valid, natural numbers only work because our universe allows us to count over discrete objects, etc.
There'd be no big gap between 'physics' and 'math': all 'math' that we can talk about would just be the 'physics' of things that work on paper in our universe. And in particular, 'the physics of math-on-paper' could conceivably work differently in an alternate universe, and our own ideas and discoveries would be inapplicable.
It's pretty hard to imagine what an "uncountable group of points" could possibly be, or how anyone could ever test for the existence of such a thing, but we're talking about any possible universe so I can't exactly refute what you're saying here. The very fact that we can even ask questions like "what is the cardinality of a 'set of points' that occupies physical volume?" shows that our math is not at all bound by the constraints of our own universe.
> propositional logic only works because our universe allows us to write truth tables that are causally valid, natural numbers only work because our universe allows us to count over discrete objects, etc.
No, none of this is true. Our universe also allows us to write truth tables that are not valid. We do not dematerialize upon writing down a logical fallacy. Our universe does not seem to contain any infinities at all, and if it does, they're almost certainly countable; yet we can still reason about uncountable infinities without ever having observed them. Our universe seems to exist in only 4 dimensions, yet we can still reason about high dimensional spaces. Why should the constraints of our universe matter to our math at all, other than making some things more obvious than others?
> all 'math' that we can talk about would just be the 'physics' of things that work on paper in our universe
That is just patently obviously not what math is. We have tons of math that is not describing the physics of our universe as we know it.
Why not? Exactly because there is nothing tethering our axioms on paper to what is necessarily true. You could formulate something wildly different from ZF±C/Peano/whatever normal axiom system, but we wouldn't call it "math", and what we currently call "math" will work under any conditions
Our 'math' will work under any of our conditions (as far as we can observe), but who's to say they can't have 'math' in another universe that will work under any of their conditions, yet still be different from ours?
That's what GP was saying ("there are no conceivable alternate universes with different math", and none with a different derivative in particular), but I see no reason why math-as-we-know-it couldn't just be inapplicable to different 'conceivable' universes.
> For instance, a universe that is "exactly like ours, except the truth of the continuum hypothesis is flipped" seems no less conceivable than our own universe
Really? For that to be possible, the continuum hypothesis would have to be either true or false in our universe, which does not appear to be the case.
That's fair, and perhaps my example wasn't the best, but my point is that just as the continuum hypothesis is an artifact of the models we use to describe our universe (we use continuum-sized sets to describe physical space), more basic properties like "how numbers ought to work" could also be artifacts of our models. In particular, it wouldn't be inconceivable for an alternate universe to be better described by entirely different models from the ground up, which could be fairly described as "different math".
> we use continuum-sized sets to describe physical space
But... we don't. We use integers to describe physical space. We have real numbers as a mathematical construct, but we have never applied them to even a single physical problem. That's impossible to do, because specifying a real number takes an infinite amount of information.
Exactly. By GP's logic, time zones are absolutist, and every town could & should observe solar noon independently.
I think folks are averse to "world time" (for reasons, largely inertial), so maybe the baby step is try 1 timezone per country (like China's done for .. 75 years ?).
I'd even argue Local Time has only ~4 useful times: dawn, daytime, dusk, & nighttime. Where I grew up, the parks closed at dusk every day. Nobody complained
If I take a walk at 7:05:35 PM every day, it seems very precise but doesn't indicate whether I need sunglasses or a flashlight. It's meaningless precision, like 0.6235 slices of pizza. If I'm coordinating a walk with you, I might as well use UTC: it still won't tell light from dark, but at least nobody'll be waiting for an hour due to DST. It'd make more sense to schedule our walk at `1 hour before dusk`, or "just" settle for UTC, IMO.
China did that for political reasons. The Republic of China used five, and Russia uses two timezones across those longitudes. Similarly, I also find it quite weird that France and Spain are in CET. France shifted when it was occupied in WWII, but maybe it's justified to remain in CET to reduce friction with the economies of its eastern neighbors. Whatever. Vive la weird. Countries do that to themselves.
A deviation of half an hour from noon is barely perceptible unless you use a sunclock. People can roughly estimate when the sun will set by just looking at local time and considering the current season. What throws a wrench in the works is daylight saving time. I fully agree that DST a huge annoyance and that its benefits were always rather situational.
Wow, a 5060Ti. 16gb + I'm guessing >=32gb ram. And here I am spinning Ye Olde RX 570 4gb + 32gb.
I'd like to know how many tokens you can get out of the larger models especially (using Ollama + Open WebUI on Docker Desktop, or LM Studio whatever). I'm probably not upgrading GPU this year, but I'd appreciate an anecdotal benchmark.
- gemma3:12b
- phi4:latest (14b)
- qwen2.5:14b [I get ~3 t/s on all these small models, acceptably slow]
- qwen2.5:32b [this is about my machine's limit; verrry slow, ~1 t/s]
- qwen2.5:72b [beyond my machine's limit, but maybe not yours]
I'm guessing you probably also want to include the quantization levels you're using, as otherwise they'll be a huge variance in your comparisons with others :)
What do I picture? 2D pieces, to be honest. Computer chess is just so prevalent. I picture what I'd call "USCF style" [1] because that's what they'd use in the Chess Life magazine to annotate games. I also picture the "old style" pieces [2], used in other periodicals & some books (especially puzzles).
I bet a lot of people picture the default set on Chess dot com. I find it very hard to adjust to new sets, for whatever reason.
As far as real pieces, I picture plastic pieces & vinyl board. Either what I'd call the "triple-weighted set" [3] (my favorite), the plastic "Dreuke set" [4], or the "basic USCF set" [5].
I had no idea there were so many variations, especially in the last 100 years. Most I've never seen before. I still dislike the real abstract/bauhaus style but there's a lot of artistry in the sets.
A spinoff piece on the visual evolution of illustrated and digital chess pieces would be interesting. How they relate to specific physical designs, and the limitations of the format they're bound to.
Great article. Informative, qualified. I had not realized how splintered the [E]BNF syntax is, like in the way I already knew timestamps are (3339 vs 8601 vs mm/dd/yyyy &c &c).
Q: what's your ideal way to write Unicode characters clearly? In the W3C/XML spec they'll have stuff like [#x200C-#x200D] but I have no idea what those are, without like a dictionary on hand. Points for specificity, but it doesn't scream "readable".
Your point about standards-not-publicly-available is unfortunately similar to, well, laws. In some areas, "the laws" themselves are not public (!) though perhaps it's a digression better to not get into
In many cases I think the character itself is clearest. Thankfully most tools can handle Unicode today. That's not always unambiguous, so sometimes an annotation may be helpful, and if the spec is freely available you can copy amd paste from it.
I'm like median on Metro, ~60 hours over years (though perhaps just the one hour, 60x, &c). Never too late to learn some strategy, I guess. Never played Motorways.