Patch Notes #13
Games, glycine, Ne-Yo, bugfixes, and performance improvements
It’s been a while since the last Patch Notes, so here’s a whole pile of links:
Still thinking about this piece by
on Balatro (which I still haven’t played) that includes this lovely passage:The reason gambling is fun is that we are not our reward function. Maybe once we were, maybe once, long ago we were nothing but a little knot of signals that was able to remain stable far out of equilibrium with its environment, a little loop of Bayesian inference that was able to climb the signal gradient towards more and more complex and robust forms of stability. But now that we know that, now that we can look back and see that, we are no longer fully embedded in our reward function, it has become something we can use, something we can play with, instead of simply who we are. With some effort we can partially extract ourselves from the loom of our reward function, look around, and ask: “Where am I?” and “Where do I want to go?”
If GeoGuessr was too easy, here’s TimeGuessr, where you have to guess both the location and year of specific photos:
A Pew Research Center survey on on teens and video games shows 85% of teens play games daily, with four-in-ten playing daily:
A report on TSMC’s troubles building their Arizona fab and the clash between Taiwanese (read: “hardworking”) and American (“lazy”) work culture. Pair with Noah Smith’s follow-up Who’s afraid of East Asian management culture?.
Generally I agree with Noah’s more balanced view—TSMC can’t possibly expect things to go well only communicating in Mandarin and Taiwanese in Arizona—though on the other hand, here’s The Guardian on The soft life: why millennials are quitting the rat race. So maybe there is a grain of truth. I’m certainly uninterested in grinding my face off working these days.I’ve gotten into some debates with friends on whether AI is net positive or negative. Here’s a piece on AI audio notching a tally in the negative column:
In fact, the deleterious effects of A.I. seem much more likely to be felt--and indeed, as the stories of attempted fraud and petty revenge suggest, are already being felt--on a much smaller, more local, generally tawdrier scale, despite the planetary claims of tech execs testifying to Congress. New kinds of targeted scams and new types of local gossip rather than mass propaganda campaigns; less “state-sponsored misinformation” and more “provincial-psychopath-looking-to-settle-a-school-athletics-grudge-sponsored misinformation.”
I did admittedly like this deepfake of Toby Keith singing a Maoist anthem:
Ne-Yo’s Tiny Desk concert is great (h/t Sebastian):
I had no idea he was the writer behind so many other massive hits like Rihanna’s Take a Bow, and Beyoncé’s Irreplacable.
TikTok is obsessed with ... premium-grade industrial glycine from China? (h/t Justin)
@citiesbydianaDon't get CUCKED by inferior glycine suppliers. Donghua Jinlong's Industrial Grade Glycine is the superior choice. 👸🏻🛣️🏭🇨🇳 THIS IS NOT SPONSORED CONTENT OR AN AD THIS IS A PARODY FAN POST. #glycinetok #industrialglycine #brainnourishment #bestglycine #satire #brainrot #donghuajinlong #glycine THIS IS NOT SPONSORED OR BRANDED CONTENT! THIS VIDEO IS SATIRE. I have NO AFFILIATION with Donghua Jinlong, this is just a fan edit. 🥰🥰
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I read David Grann’s The Wager awhile back—it’s a true shipwreck and mutiny story and I blew through it in a couple days. I thoroughly enjoyed it and will not spoil anything here, but I do love this bit on the etymology of sayings we take for granted today that all come from British naval terminology:
During the age of sail, when wind-powered vessels were the only bridge across the vast oceans, nautical language was so pervasive that it was adopted by those on terra firma. To “toe the line” derives from when boys on a ship were forced to stand still for inspection with their toes on a deck seam. To “pipe down” was the boatswain’s whistle for everyone to be quiet at night, and “piping hot” was his call for meals. A “scuttlebutt” was a water cask around which the seamen gossiped while waiting for their rations. A ship was “three sheets to the wind” when the lines to the sails broke and the vessel pitched drunkenly out of control. To “turn a blind eye” became a popular expression after Vice-Admiral Nelson deliberately placed his telescope against his blind eye to ignore his superior’s signal flag to retreat.
And:
When ailing seamen were shielded belowdecks from the adverse elements outside, they were said to be “under the weather.”
SQLite (yes, the database) has a code of ethics governing their interactions with each other and the SQLite community “in accordance with the "instruments of good works" from chapter 4 of The Rule of St. Benedict (hereafter: "The Rule"). This code of ethics has proven its mettle in thousands of diverse communities for over 1,500 years, and has served as a baseline for many civil law codes since the time of Charlemagne.” I really do not know what loving fasting (rule #13) or being in “dread of hell” (rule #45) has to do with SQL databases, but maybe it can’t hurt. (h/t Lee)
A great visualization of Pareto optimization of Mario Kart 8 cart/driver combinations (also h/t Sebastian)
Okay that’s all for now; if anything particularly resonated with you, let me know, and see you next time!