a magic the gathering engine + evolution algorithm to develop and playtest duel decks that were perfectly balanced, variable, and fun.
i don't want to spend my time reading through all the cards and playtesting with myself before printing some new decks to play with my friends, and i don't want to use online decklists because they're typically too competitive (filled with 4x of the best cards) and repetitive to play.
my library on shuffle has elicited some eye-widenings in me recently. tracks where the lineage is so obvious that it's… surprising they even changed the title. a sneaky spiritual cover.
KIND WORDS by Gretchen is one, of Horizontal Hold by This Heat. Everyone in that Calgary scene was obviously, famously inspired by This Heat but I hadn't heard these two songs back-to-back before to realize how direct it got. thanks shuffle.
I was listening to a podcast the other night where one of the hosts complimented Tim Urban on his knack for defining conceptual structures that help clarify a confused subject. Unfortunately, the given example was Tim adding Up-Down to the Left-Right political spectrum, where "up" is being educated and rational, and "down" is being primitive and emotional.
As far as poltical compass memes go... pretty bad.1
Still. Love a good model.
in arguments, i sometimes say “this is bad because it damages our souls.”
i think i got it from david graeber.
but what does it actually mean?
it's probably easier to understand what it does, which is, i think, create a sort of rhetorically unassailable position. what are you going to say? nuh-uh! it doesn't damage our souls! are we both just going to assume we know exactly what the other person means by that? no.
i searched "nominalism" on youtube, hankering to listen to someone discuss it as i ate sultana bran.
i clicked on the first video and a man sitting in front of a shelf of leather bound books started talking to me.
i thought he seemed a bit like Philosophize This! in his manner, except his leading example was a joke about how it's impossible to answer simple questions like "what is a woman" without having a biology degree these days.
youtube i love you, but you're bringing me down
in a bastardized interpretation of fitness landscapes, i've recently been thinking about how every decision i make is a step in some direction in an infinite mountain range. in this space, my altitude isn't environmental fitness. it's something more like "personal value" or "amount self-actualized" where you can imagine standing at the peak of a hill in this endless mountain range as being highly satisfied with myself, highly engaged in my life.
the other day i had some fun with poetic justice's less serious cousin
an evil man from new york
once stole a shipment of chalk
he was eventually busted
one could say done and dusted
when the cops caught him on the sidewalk
or
a fraudulent author from wales
faked sales with no paper trail
she was eventually booked
when the law had a look
Say I have a CSV with two columns:
country, users China, 113 Nicaragua, 29 Jordan, 89
and I want to aggregate these by continent. What's an easy way to do that?
Well I found this country-by-continent dataset by samayo:
[
{
"Country": "Afghanistan",
"Continent": "Asia"
},
{
"Country": "Albania",
"Continent": "Europe"
}
So I have everything I need except for a workflow. Let's evaluate some options.
I attached the two files and submitted the following prompt to ChatGPT 4o:
yu-gi-oh was so smart. transformers had already proven you could forcibly extract money from parents by pretending your advertisements for children's toys comprised a television show, but hasbro still had to pay for injection moulding. what if they just printed the money instead?
in the yu-gi-oh tv show1, the main thing that all the characters do is play the card game yu-gi-oh2. all disagreements are resolved via dueling3, and even though this is shown to favour the rich, at the end of most episodes the child protagonists justly win and you feel an urge to go to the toy store and purchase yu-gi-oh cards.
a classic thing that happens is someone says "i think the reason is blah" and then another person says "i think it's something else" and then a third person says "it's a bit of both" or "it's somewhere in between" or something like that.
it's such a reliable thing to be able to say and it takes so little effort, yet you can sound quite wise saying it. oh shit! it's both things?