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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • FP & OOP both have their use cases. Generally, I think people use OOP for stateful programming, and FP for stateless programming. Of course, OOP is excessive in a lot of cases, and so is FP.

    OOP is more useful as an abstraction than a programming paradigm. Real, human, non-computer programming is object-oriented, and so people find it a natural way of organizing things. It makes more sense to say “for each dog, dog, dog.bark()” instead of “map( bark, dogs)”.

    A good use case for OOP is machine learning. Despite the industry’s best effort to use functional programming for it, Object oriented just makes more sense. You want a set of parameters, unique to each function applied to the input. This allows you to use each function without referencing the parameters every single time. You can write “function(input)” instead of “function(input, parameters)”. Then, if you are using a clever library, it will use pointers to the parameters within the functions to update during the optimization step. It hides how the parameters influence the result, but machine learning is a black box anyway.

    In my limited use of FP, I’ve found it useful for manipulating basic data structures in bulk. If I need to normalize a large number of arrays, it’s easy to go “map(normalize, arrays)” and call it a day. The FP specific functions such as scan and reduce are incredibly useful since OOP typically requires you to set up a loop and manually keep track of the intermediate results. I will admit though, that my only real use of FP is python list comprehension and APL, so take whatever I say about FP with a grain of salt.


  • My character (who is called Korppimmies) has a similarly vague background. His backstory is in broad strokes, but I keep accidentally adding more lore because of my poor choice of words.

    The original backstory is that he comes from an isolated tribe which periodically exiles young adults whenever it reaches a maximum capacity. These young adults are then supposed to wander around and found their own tribes in different places. My guy never got past the wandering part and eventually reached “civilization.” After a series of foibles and arrests, Korppimmies became paranoid and started wearing a plague doctor’s outfit, as it is otherwise very difficult to hide the fact that you have a beak.

    Anyway, he’s barely got any skills in healing, but went from town to town as a travelling doctor until The Party™ recruited him to help fight a dragon.

    Unfortunately, Korppimmies was too smart for the sake of the campaign, and trapped the BBEG in the astral plane way before we were supposed to defeat him, and the campaign is pretty much over now.


  • I would’ve expected Nevermore to be a kenku, but unless you really plan out your sentences kenku don’t have any unique mechanics, but aarakocra do. It’s kind of a shame, to be honest. I’ve been playing a kenku recently, and I’m not planning out my sentences or anything, but I do have an unconscious tendency to mimic people’s style of speaking, so I at least have that going for me.


  • I think ‘implies’ asks whether it’s possible that A causes B to be true. In other words, it is false if there is evidence that A does not cause B.

    So:

    If A is true and B is false, then the result is false, since A could not cause B to be true.

    If A and B are both true, then the result is true, since A could cause B.

    If A is false and B is true, then the result is true since A could or could not make B true (but another factor could also be making B true)

    If A and B are both false we don’t have any evidence about the relationship between A and B, so the result is true.

    I don’t know for sure, though. I’m not a mathematician.


  • I can very much relate to feeling like a sociopath. But masking is a form of disassociation, so I can’t really help it if I don’t feel a lot of the emotions I put on. And after doing that for a long time, I started picking up on the grander strokes of conversation. It makes me very guilty that I ever even think about how I could manipulate the conversation when I’m detached from it.


  • I think you may have a bit of sampling bias. The only animes that were worth importing to the US, or watching years after their release, are the good ones. If you lived in the US in the 80’s or 90’s and were a boy, most cartoons available to you would be stuff like Captain planet or GI Joe, but there were other cartoons in existence in the US. Character growth was still lacking, but girl’s cartoons followed the assumption that girls wanted TV shows where people talk about their feelings, such as care bears or my little pony.

    I think what you’re talking about is the degree of serialization of cartoons. American cartoons mostly had self-contained episodes where everything reverts to the status quo at the end of an episode. This was so the children watching didn’t have to construct a timeline of they had seen the episodes out of order. Well regarded anime, on the other hand, was highly serialized which allowed for character growth across multiple episodes and was less restrictive.


  • Periapt of health: this is a small vial with a red liquid inside attached to a small chain. While wearing this, all diseases that you would otherwise contract enter the small vial instead. If the vial is broken, the closest creature will immediately contract all diseases contained within.

    Deck of many things (used): the previous owners of this deck got all that they could have wished for. The remaining cards might not be the best.

    Ring of mind shielding: the creator of this ring was a bit over-zealous. Along with the usual effects, this ring will censor violence, sex, and other uncouth things.

    Cloak of the bat: along with the usual effects, wearing this cloak will also make you speak bat. You will only be able to produce high-pitched squeaks.

    Portable hole: this portable hole is bottomless! Anything that falls down the hole is lost forever.




  • I personally think the change from master & slave was kind of silly, as far as I’m aware, it was a bunch of people with no background in CS who thought the application of the term to something that has neither race nor agency was an insult to black people.

    But I digress. It led to better guidelines in the Linux kernel, which I think are useful. You should tailor the terms you’re using to the specifics of the task. If you have a master process that only has outward interfaces through the slave processes, you could use the term ‘director’ and ‘actor.’ if the master process is managing slave processes which compete over the same resources, you can use the terms ‘arbiter’ and ‘mutex holder.’ If the slaves do some independent processing the master does not need to know the details of, you can use the term ‘controller’ and ‘peripheral.’

    Basically, use a term that is the most descriptive in the context of your program.

    Edit: also, I don’t know why no one mentions this, but you can also use master/servant. Historically, there wasn’t a difference between servant and slave, but in modern days there is, so it’s technically different, technically the same.


  • Unused memory is not useless, it is just unused. If I want to pull up a guide on how to giggle the grables in my favorite game Grable Giggler, I would be very happy if I had unused memory which I can now use for my browser.

    Also, smaller RAM usage generally correlates to smaller file size, which is very useful on computers with limited storage.

    And finally, there’s also low spec gaming and accessibility. Minecraft, at least prior to the microsoft acquisition, was a very low spec game. I wouldn’t say it was optimized, but a game of minecraft took less ram than chrome. There was nearly no computers at the time which couldn’t run minecraft. At the time of minecraft’s early boom, kids were getting low-spec hand-me-downs, and so minecraft was one of the most open-ended games they could play. What I’m trying to say is that minecraft—and Doom for that matter—owe a large part of their success to low memory usage.


  • This is an old project of mine. I made it a few years ago, so it’s pretty out of date, but I can tell you my experience with it:

    When I was playing around with it, characters tended to be very one-dimensional. They all had a single personality trait, and the AI made sure you knew about it. The particular way I set up the dialog system, multiple AI characters could interact with each other, but that ended up to very long conversations which quickly got off track and everyone forgot the original goal (which is a little bit too realistic) The AIs also found clever ways of speaking for other characters.

    As for an AI DM, it just wasn’t there yet. It didn’t have the initiative to actually switch from one scene to another, and wouldn’t create any NPCs to talk to. I often had to manually edit what the DM had printed so the session could move forward.

    It was an interesting project, and my friends seemed to love it, but I think their love is mostly due to the custom characters I made for it.



  • “Yes, okay, my name is… kllllaaaarrrrrg… i-ifer. Klargifer Caltrop.”

    “Klargifer is a strange name for a halfling.”

    “Yuh- yeah. Yeeesss. I suppose it is. That’s why I hate my parents.”

    “Yeah? And what are their names?”

    [Suddenly, a wizard or something appears and casts silence on everyone. So you can’t ask that the question anymore]




  • I’m not sure I understand your feelings, but I’m going to offer uninformed advice anyway.

    First of all, what does an ‘alternative option’ mean? Does the rest of your family pick a single thing off the menu, and you’re embarrassed you don’t want to eat the same thing, or is it more like you go by the drive through of another restaurant than everybody else? Picking different options off the same menu is generally the norm where I am, so I don’t think other people would find it that weird. If it’s the latter, I think most people would interpret that as you making a strong effort to engage and be supportive of your family, even it’s difficult for you.

    As for your family being concerned about the amount you eat, there are a couple ways you could approach it. The easiest way would probably be lying about having eaten before. People are very unlikely to be concerned about you eating too little if you say you already ate beforehand. It can be a little bit rude if you know someone will be cooking in advance, though.

    The second option would be saying you have a slow metabolism. This option wouldn’t completely stop your family worrying about your food intake, but over a long period of time your family will probably pick up the hint.

    The third option would be to increase your metabolism through exercise, so you’re more hungry and eat more. This is kind of a weird option, but it also gets close to the root of the problem.

    Regardless of which option you take, it seems like your family is trying to accommodate you, even if they’re doing it poorly. In these situations, being direct and honest can be very useful, since they are likely to accept your feedback. First of all, try to examine all the support they are already giving. If there are any situations when they anticipate your needs accurately, tell them that those situations are very helpful for you. If there are any situations where that isn’t the case, try and tell them why it went wrong and if you actually want support in that case. A very useful phrase is “I need to learn how to do X on my own.” It both explains why you want them to stop, while at the same time it doesn’t imply they’ve done anything wrong. Lastly, regarding the restaurant thing, try to be clear about your feelings, why you are embarrassed, and if you want help trying to solve that issue. They will probably try to brainstorm different ways to ease your embarrassment, and they might have different ideas than you.

    If your family is being earnest about trying to help, the best thing you can be is earnest about the help you need.


  • What’s your preferred default pronoun? As far as I’m aware, there isn’t a universally accepted replacement, since any pronoun comes with drawbacks. ‘he’ & ‘she’ are gendered, ‘it’ typically refers to non-sentient things, and ‘they’ can cause confusion about number. Of course, there’s also neopronouns, but people have come up with a billion, and there’s no consensus or standard, so I can’t confirm the person I’m talking to will understand.