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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 6th, 2023

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  • With poker the house takes a “rake” from each hand so they get a certain % of whatever is being gambled for hosting. Since the game involved skill they have to do this to ensure they are making money regardless of who wins.

    Pretty much every other game is like you describe; people being bad at maths and conditioned to keep going with inconsistently timed rewards.


  • I had friends who used to play online poker in uni. They’d have 5 or 6 screens open at once and just play the dominant strategy for each hand. Was good for some extra beer money.

    Also work with a dude who is a former professional poker player. Although when he explained his schedule to me it sounded a lot like a regular job. Good years he could make £40k out of it but not crazy money.







  • Choosing the least emotive example is a trick from my old philosophy studies. If we were talking about moral philosophy and weakness of wills, then the example would always be an extra slice of cake as opposed to an extra bottle of whisky, or something else that could elicit a strong emotive response. The idea would be that you’d get closer to the heart of the issue if you can find a neutral example that doesn’t cloud your judgement by immediately giving you strong intuitions.

    I can tell from your writing style that you are a romantic person though, which is awesome because it allows you to live which all of that colour you’re describing. I’m personally maybe a bit more detatched/analytic (or something like that), which I realise sounds depressing/boring but I don’t find it a source of negative emotions.



  • No one can look into someone else’s soul and divine their intentions. IMO it’s most likely that people’s internal states are a mixture of various emotions and intentions when they are doing a gesture like you’ve given examples of, probably not all of them coherent with one another.

    It seems to me that it’s more a matter of perspective and you can choose to ascribe self-interest or choose to ascribe altruism but in both cases you are projecting, since it’s just unknowable.

    I think free software is quite a nice case study if you want to discuss it in a relatively emotion free context. Organ donation has a lot of other moral “baggage” around it as an issue. These people are giving up their valuable skills and time to create something which is for the benefit of others. Contributors also get to put it on their CV and get status in an online community. Often the more self-interested people drop out quite quickly and the ones who want to support their community stick around longer.



  • Nothing could get me to switch off gentoo at this point. It’s so flexible that you can use package managers from other distros (if you’re crazy and like to create problems for yourself). Creating your own packages is very easy with their ebuild system. In terms of the packages they offer the USE flags are an absolute killer feature that let you install only the parts of the program you want. They even have binary versions of larger programs like firefox or rust that you can install if you don’t want to compile them.


  • O tempora, o mores! A lot of it is Gen-Z/Gen-Alpha youtuber/streamer trash but I’ve found that the recommendations improved after I started subscribing to channels I liked. Once I’d fed the algorithm enough of my tastes it’s started to do a reasonable job of recommending things. Like there’s this Louis Theroux/Vice knock-off called Channel 5 News which have a couple good videos that it just inferred I would enjoy from my history.

    Music recommendations surprisingly good too. Like it knows to go from Aesop Rock -> Lupe Fiasco -> Danny Brown -> Death Grips -> INSERT PUNK BAND HERE