gizmo

17 ms·

181.
by gizmo 2y ago
HOMM3 is very unbalanced and I think it adds to the charm. Some spells are useless and some spells are so good they almost break the game. Same for some unit stacks. Discovering cheesy strategies that allow you to take on a horde of compute
182.
by gizmo 2y ago
The original HOMM was a very simple game. HOMM2 was released one year later, after learning what worked and what didn't in the original game. Then, after three more years of work HOMM3 perfected those game mechanics. That's how HO
183.
by gizmo 2y ago
> I don’t understand why much more of EU regulation and enforcement resources are not spent towards mandatory hardware re-use Beliefs like these are common in Europe and I absolutely despise them. Inefficiencies in IT exist for boring re
184.
by gizmo 2y ago
The top HN post talks about the importance of removing stuff, and based on this press release Olden Era takes the opposite "kitchen sink" approach. More heroes, more factions, more abilities, more spells, more character tree optio
185.
by gizmo 2y ago
Although this article doesn't make the point explicitly, this is really about how we can't discern right tails. The Olympics nicely illustrate this. In most cases we can only tell which of these world class athletes are best by ha
186.
by gizmo 2y ago
You really are not hearing me. Our legitimate traffic looks nothing like fraud traffic. Legitimate users don't sign up for a free trial, ignore our application, zoom straight to the payment form and purchase. 0% of our legitimate custo
187.
by gizmo 2y ago
> people use random sites to test cards to see if they can get away with using stolen CC details I already addressed this. By forcing people to use the product before allowing them to purchase you make drive-by fraud impossible. We use s
188.
by gizmo 2y ago
That argument is exclusively used for nuclear. Hydroelectric is far more vulnerable to bombing, but we don't pearl clutch about that risk. And yes, a capable military can -- if they so choose -- turn a nuclear plant into a dirty bomb w
189.
by gizmo 2y ago
A nuclear power plant has strategic importance like an airport or a bridge. Ukraine's military response is limited because the power plant is extremely valuable (monetarily as well as energy it produces) and they don't want to bre
190.
by gizmo 2y ago
Not all B2C is the same. If you make a product for professionals you won't get random chargebacks, incoherent emails, or general rudeness. One great way to filter for professionalism is by simply charging more. Another strategy is maki
191.
by gizmo 2y ago
Russia has five thousand nuclear warheads. If they want to turn Ukraine into a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland they can do so today. A nuclear plant getting bombed would result in some nuclear contamination but not _that_ much, and accid
192.
by gizmo 2y ago
In most cases the performance penalty of having an extra internal array to keep track of insertion order is minimal, and the whole point of built-in collections is so people can quickly write correct programs. When optimizing for performanc
193.
by gizmo 2y ago
Thanks to modern payment companies we are already living in the good place. Before Paypal you almost couldn't get paid on the internet at all. If you wanted to accept credit card payments it was a whole ordeal and banks didn't und
194.
by gizmo 2y ago
Endothermic and exothermic are different categories of reactions and both are also scalar. PMF is exothermic in this analogy. Growth produces more growth by itself, like a raging forest fire. Whereas regular business growth is endothermic:
195.
by gizmo 2y ago
You can't grow to 10s or 100s of millions of users without some kind of network effect or viral loop. It's pretty much impossible.
196.
by gizmo 2y ago
I think this article misunderstands the concept of product-market fit. Many mediocre products sell and with enough sales effort you can create a big business that only sells mediocre products. This shouldn't surprise anybody because mo
197.
by gizmo 2y ago
The problem isn't that margins should have a specific size but that the design as a whole should feel cohesive. It's the balance of padding, margin, font sizes, and text alignment that is all wrong. Not just one specific thing, bu
198.
by gizmo 2y ago
All software that interops with people, other businesses, APIs, deals with the physical world in any way, or handles money has cases that require human intervention. It's 99.9% of software if not more. Security updates. Hardware failur
199.
by gizmo 2y ago
Waterfall fails when domain knowledge is missing. Engineers won't take "obvious" problems into consideration when they don't even know what the right questions to ask are. When a system gets rebuild for the 3rd time the
200.
by gizmo 2y ago
The world runs on fuzzy underspecified processes. On excel sheets and post-it notes. Much of the world's software needs are not sophisticated and don't require extensive testing. It's OK if a human employee is in the loop and
201.
by gizmo 2y ago
How does a business person today decide if a system is fit for purpose when they can't read code? How is this different?
202.
by gizmo 2y ago
Much business logic is really just a state machine where all the states and all the transitions need to be handled. When a state or transition is under-specified an LLM can pass the ball back and just ask what should happen when A and B but
203.
by gizmo 2y ago
It's easy to imagine why something could never work. It's more interesting to imagine what just might work. One thing that has plagued programmers for the past decades is the difficulty of writing correct multi-threaded software.
204.
by gizmo 2y ago
My hunch is that LLMs are nowhere near intelligent enough to make brilliant conceptual leaps. At least not anytime soon. Where I think AI models might prove useful is in those cases where the problem is well defined, where formal methods ca
205.
by gizmo 2y ago
This is why AI coding assistance will leap ahead in the coming years. Chat AI has no clear reward function (basically impossible to judge the quality of responses to open-ended questions like historical causes for a war). Coding AI can writ
206.
by gizmo 2y ago
LLMs can write a polite email but it can't write a good novel. It can create art or music (by mushing together things it has seen before) but not art that excites. It's the same with code. I use LLMs daily and I've seen video
207.
by gizmo 2y ago
More like an insanely knowledgeable but very inexperienced programmer. It will get basic algorithms wrong (unless it's in the exact shape it has seen before). It's like a system that automatically copy-pastes the top answer from s
208.
by gizmo 2y ago
> it seems crazy to me to not try for profitability A business is worth the sum of future profits, discounted for time (because making money today is better than making money tomorrow). Negative profits today are fine as long as they are
209.
by gizmo 2y ago
People are not one-dimensional. People can lie and cheat on one day and act honorably the day after. A person can be kind and generous and cruel and selfish. Most people are just of average morality. Not unusually good nor unusually bad. Pe
210.
by gizmo 2y ago
Outlier success pretty much requires obsessive strategic thinking. Gates and Musk are super strategic but in a "weirdo autist" way, which doesn't have a big stigma attached to it anymore. Peter Thiel also benefits from his we

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