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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • There was a website where users could request something or other, like a PDF report. Users had a limited number of tokens per month.

    The client would make a call to the backend and say how many tokens it was spending. The backend would then update their total, make the PDF, and send it.

    Except this is stupid. First of all, if you told it you were spending -1 tokens, it would happily accept this and give you a free token along with your report.

    Second of all, why is the client sending that at all? The client should just ask and the backend should figure out if they have enough credit or not.




  • This is very heteronormative and gender binaried. Queer people exist and date.

    That said, anecdotally, from the handful of women I’ve talked about this with: many don’t like making first moves on these apps.

    Using dating apps is a skill, and if you haven’t been practicing sending messages you’re going to be bad at it. The vast majority of first messages I got from women were “hey”. Trash tier. Probably because they just haven’t done it very often.






  • I think most games get shut down when they still have players. Plus they could release server code so people could host their own games, like in the olde days of the 1990s. They don’t because they’re primarily concerned with profit.

    That aside, “it brings joy” is not sufficient on its own as a justification. Heroin brings joy, but you likely wouldn’t say that’s a fine gift for a child. Why is that? Probably because we recognize the potential harms and unhealthy habits. Maybe you accept the risks and harms of digital slop are acceptable. I don’t think I’d want to encourage that in children.












  • Imagine you roll 3d6. There’s exactly one way to roll a 3. You need all three of those dice to come up 1. But there are many ways to roll a ten. [{1,3,6}, {1,4,5}, {2,2,6} …etc]. You’re more likely to get totals in the middle of the range. If you rolled 3d6 many times and charted the outcomes, it would look like a bell curve. Most of the results are in the middle, with fewer results of the outliers like 3 and 18.

    If you roll 1d20 many times and chart the results, it’s a flat line. You’re just as likely to get one number as any other.

    Go play around with https://anydice.com/program/e6 if you like.

    I personally find the flat probability of 1d20 unsatisfying. I prefer when the average, most expected result comes up more often.

    Like imagine you’re throwing darts at a dart board. You probably don’t have an equal number of darts on the floor as in the bullseye, and also an equal amount in between. They’re probably mostly clustered, with some outliers.