The Quixotic Ideas Thread
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@hungrier said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
@Tsaukpaetra But then you run into problems when you come into work without pants on, and for some reason your work is at your old high school and instead of work it's a test on a book you haven't read
Which makes it all the more not-boring and keeps your diversity broad!
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@Tsaukpaetra The diversity broad would be the first person offended enough to quit
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@hungrier said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
The diversity broad would be the first person offended enough to quit
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@hungrier said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
@Tsaukpaetra The diversity broad would be the first person offended enough to quit
That's a phrase I'm going to have to start using in insufficiently polarized political discussions.
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Let's just write every language with IPA symbols.
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https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/438422061753434112/572484428450889739/A1cI8hb.png
:it-all-makes-sense-now.png:
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@Tsaukpaetra If you really want to not sleep tonight, think what a truly wily and industrially-minded Grand Vizier would do with that. Whole barns full of de-winged and de-fanged dragons, kept in cages all their life, constantly fed a slurry of mechanically-recovered pink slime, and their shit is pumped away for conversion into coinage…
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@dkf said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
If you really want to not sleep tonight,
Come and see the hyperinflation inherent in the system!
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@boomzilla said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
Come and see the hyperinflation inherent in the system!
I'm not sure how often battery dragons fart on that sort of diet.
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@dkf said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
@boomzilla said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
Come and see the hyperinflation inherent in the system!
I'm not sure how often battery dragons fart on that sort of diet.
Slurry!
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pingfs is a filesystem where the data is stored only in the Internet itself, as ICMP Echo packets (pings) travelling from you to remote servers and back again.
It is implemented using raw sockets and FUSE
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@Zecc So they invented volatile memory for the cloud.
All of the disadvantages of volatile memory with all the disadvantages of cloud-based storage.
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@Zecc didn't they do something similar with DNS queries?
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@Zecc said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
pingfs is a filesystem where the data is stored only in the Internet itself, as ICMP Echo packets (pings) travelling from you to remote servers and back again.
It is implemented using raw sockets and FUSE
Sounds like a good way to get yourself kicked off of a network.
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Mini parachutes for cats and small dogs.
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@anonymous234 said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
Mini parachutes for cats and small dogs.
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Feeling anger about a certain design decision in Atlassian's mobile app? Enable this option and you can shake your phone to indicate your frustration, then give feedback:
The bottom link of this Atlassian sales mail points here: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-discussions/We-re-listening-Shake-to-Feedback-on-mobile/m-p/1213864
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This actually does sound a lot better than the movie we got:
https://news.avclub.com/turns-out-colin-trevorrows-version-of-star-wars-episod-1841002112In short: more focus on the characters and less on the MacGuffins and ridiculous gimmicks.
Ridiculous gimmicks spoiler:
Spaceships that can't tell up from down in order to take off from a planet.
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Ridiculous gimmicks spoiler reply with further spoiler
The worst part was when it turned out one of the ships had one of the ridiculous McGuffins itself.
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Read it. Now I'm sad this didn't happen, and I'm craving a proper ending.
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@Zecc For proper comparison, we need to see what the actual script looked like at the same stage of development as this one. I'm not trusting any Hollywood team to not manage to turn a reasonable first-draft script into a pile of shit.
Also some bits sound ridiculous even on paper. "The Sith master who taught Palpatine everything he knows" is alive and kicking and taking trainees? It's already ridiculous to have each bad guy invent a Death Star that is even more Death Starry than the previous one (and episode IX certainly deliver on the ridiculousness on that front), but at least you can hand-wave that as new technology being developed and building on the previous one. But a Big Bad Guy that is even more bad than the previous one and who has been alive all along but that no-one knew about? That's worse. And he'll just be the Old Zen Master to the current Big Bad Guy and play no role in the actual story? That's worser.
Also, "Rey’s parents (who were, indeed, “nobodies”" would IMO never have passed the Hollywood-trope-filling department. The first two episodes gave them too much existence for them to be discarded that easily. They had (again, from an Hollywoodian blockbuster view of movies) to have some sort of relevance to the rest of the story.
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This forum has
- A bunch of smart developers
- Admins with experience managing a relatively high traffic server
- Relatively high PageRank on Google (used to be very high but I think it's dropped since the double forum migration)
- Strong opinions on technology (that often go against what is considered "cool")
- A long time feud with Jeff Atwood and Stack Overflow
So... what if we installed one of the Q&A plugins in the Coding Help category, added a way to allow guests to post, got a few extra volunteer moderators and got @apapadimoulis to advertise it on the main site as "a down-to-earth alternative to Stack Overflow"?
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@anonymous234 You mean we'd have to answer questions for people instead of making fun of them?
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@mott555 Yes, it's work, but it will annoy Jeff Atwood a tiny little bit, so I'm sure the community will spare no effort.
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@anonymous234 As long as only @Tsaukpaetra is allowed to upvote answers.
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@anonymous234 said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
it will annoy Jeff Atwood
what do you need me to do? shit in his shoes? I can do that! easy!
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@JBert said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
Feeling anger about a certain design decision in Atlassian's mobile app? Enable this option and you can shake your phone to indicate your frustration, then give feedback:
The bottom link of this Atlassian sales mail points here: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-discussions/We-re-listening-Shake-to-Feedback-on-mobile/m-p/1213864
I don't think they originally came up with that idea.
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I've seen a bunch of different class/level systems in different RPGs. Some of them, you have a single class, and level up automatically upon reaching certain EXP thresholds, granting new skills, spells, or abilities. Sometimes, you choose when to level up after having reached the EXP threshold, and depending on the system you may or may not be able to pick a different class to level in. Then you've got more exotic things like the Elder Scrolls system, where there's no EXP, your "class" just determines which skills you're good at, and you level by advancing your skills enough times.
One thing I don't think I've ever seen is a system where class is not a direct choice at all, but rather a consequence of your progression. For example, Bill The Sneaky is a level 1 Rogue. If he wants to become a level 2 Rogue, he'll need to level his Stealth, Pickpocket, and Dagger skills to a certain point, and once he reaches those thresholds, he is now a level 2 Rogue by definition. If he were to do some practicing with a bow after that, a few ranks would make him become Rogue 2/Archer 1, again by definition.
Any thoughts as to what the upsides and downsides of a system like this would be?
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@Mason_Wheeler said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
Any thoughts as to what the upsides and downsides of a system like this would be?
If ever I implement questing in Hypatia, I'll try it and let you know...
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@Mason_Wheeler said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
I've seen a bunch of different class/level systems in different RPGs. Some of them, you have a single class, and level up automatically upon reaching certain EXP thresholds, granting new skills, spells, or abilities. Sometimes, you choose when to level up after having reached the EXP threshold, and depending on the system you may or may not be able to pick a different class to level in. Then you've got more exotic things like the Elder Scrolls system, where there's no EXP, your "class" just determines which skills you're good at, and you level by advancing your skills enough times.
One thing I don't think I've ever seen is a system where class is not a direct choice at all, but rather a consequence of your progression. For example, Bill The Sneaky is a level 1 Rogue. If he wants to become a level 2 Rogue, he'll need to level his Stealth, Pickpocket, and Dagger skills to a certain point, and once he reaches those thresholds, he is now a level 2 Rogue by definition. If he were to do some practicing with a bow after that, a few ranks would make him become Rogue 2/Archer 1, again by definition.
Any thoughts as to what the upsides and downsides of a system like this would be?
The big issue is that you end up having to contort your skill use to end up where you want to be. CF "always jump everywhere" in Morrowind and the weird shenanigans for Oblivion. Their systems worked somewhat similarly without defining classes directly (the "class" just set which skills would contribute to your level up process). And, frankly, that was annoying.
There are table-top RPG systems that are more granular (less class/level-based)--the so-called "point-buy" systems. There are some where advancement comes through use, but those generally aren't class-based as strongly. My perception is that the two (class/level vs point-buy/use-based) are dichotomous--you do one well or you do the other well or you do both...badly. Trying to mix the two generally results in a bit of a kludge.
So yes, it's been tried. It's not my favorite and I usually played Morrowind/Oblivion with mods to disable that process and make it more straight-forward.
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Bringing back screensavers!
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Desperate times...
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@JBert said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
Fifth Person Dies Searching for Rumored Treasure in the Rocky Mountains
Because of the remote locations in which people hunt for the bronze chest, several searchers have ended up drowning, falling, or perishing after being snowed in.Just a thought here: Wouldn't they be better off looking in the summer? My 30-second perusal of the internet suggests that there are few if any places in the Rockies that have snow the whole year.
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@jinpa said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
there are few if any places in the Rockies that have snow the whole year.
There are certainly some peaks that have residual snow year-round. And mountain weather can change from pleasant to dangerously cold and wet in a matter of a few hours, if not less. But yes, it would be far less dangerous in the summer than winter or early spring. Traipsing around in high mountains during the winter is extremely foolish unless you have serious mountaineering experience and are fully prepared to be stuck there for a long time; then it's merely very dangerous instead of extremely foolish. And I rather suspect the people with the experience and equipment to have a good chance of survival are not the sort of people to go chasing after a rumored treasure.
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@HardwareGeek said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
And I rather suspect the people with the experience and equipment to have a good chance of survival are not the sort of people to go chasing after a rumored treasure.
I heard about the drowning earlier; a few broke college students thought they knew where to look, needed to cross a river, and decided that an inflatable rubber boat was the way to do it.
At some point, of course, you have to ask: "is there a treasure at all?"
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@Tsaukpaetra said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
@error said in THE BAD IDEAS THREAD:
But only if the AI can properly keep it topical.
I guess it could reply with a Markov chain of the thread.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
@error said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
a Markov chain
Statistically close enough!
Hard AI is going to end up being solved by a bot module.
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@error said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
I guess it could reply with a Markov chain of the thread.
We already have SpectateSwamp for that...
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@Zecc he tried to be funny and talk like a robot, but I could see a speech-to-text program generating phoneme sequences to actually lip sync better than lip flapping.
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@Tsaukpaetra Phonemes-to-lip-movements has been entirely solved thanks to (and CGI animation in general)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJUWJxBzW3YPorting Unreal Engine to... a face mask... might be a bit impractical though. Probably the easiest solution is to hard-code a few LED patterns for the major phonemes.
Or he could just have made the lip flapping smaller and it would look much better.
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@anonymous234 said in The Quixotic Ideas Thread:
Porting Unreal Engine to... a face mask... might be a bit impractical though.
Wouldn't need the whole engine, just the part that mangled sound to meme pairs, then display the pattern matches on the board.
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