I love this because it gets to the heart of information theory. Shannon's foundational insight was that information is surprise. A random sequence is incompressible by definition. But what counts as surprise depends on context, and for text, we know a large amount of it is predictable slop. I suspect there's a lot of room to go along this style of compression. For example, maybe you could store an upfront summary that makes prediction more accurate. Or perhaps you could encode larger sequences or some kind of hierarchical encoding. But this is great.
Yeah, the author wants a story saying there wasn't enough continuity between scenarios or motivation to continue, but that was a non-issue for me personally. It's been many, many years, but my memory is that while RCT didn't have a completely open sandbox like TT to boot, each scenario was effectively its own sandbox with restrictions that made them interesting. New rides became available you progressed, and each park enabled creativity in different ways. When you finished all of the scenarios, I believe there was a completely open sandbox that became available, and that was like a nice reward. There really was no need for a story, and I think that would have detracted.
> It's been many, many years, but my memory is that while RCT didn't have a completely open sandbox like TT to boot, each scenario was effectively its own sandbox with restrictions that made them interesting
Also a very long time ago I played it, but I seem to remember that you could continue any scenario for as long time as you wanted after completing it, you didn't need to exit the scenario once completed. Maybe I misremember? If not, that'd basically mean every scenario is also a sandbox once the goals were completed.
See, this is the thing, I don't think there is. Like, maybe low single-digit percentages, but Trump is very good at getting his people to fall in line, and balancing the budget, for most Republicans, seems to be more a kind of symbolic creed than an actual goal.
If one was serious about balancing the budget, why would one vote for Trump, who, remember, _already_ massively expanded the deficit in his first term?
I wonder what red tape we're talking about. SEC regulates disclosures, but pretty sure NYSE and Nasdaq decide when to allow trading, halt trading, APIs, what gets listed, and more, and after you spend time in crypto on-chain trading, it all looks like BS. You wonder... Why can't I buy 24/7? What do you mean GME trading was halted 6 times today? I can't get out of a position because the market is limit down? I can't transparently see who is buying what and when in real-time? I can't earn multiple % per day providing liquidity? Just to name a few. I don't want any of this so-called protection. But my sense is it's going to be irrelevant soon anyway as stocks and commodities get bridged as on-chain tokens. Maybe there's still room for a more centralized exchange that's good for HFT since global blockchain networks will take hundreds of ms of latency to settle, but I don't know. On-chain trading on Solana is pretty great today and liquidity will pool together.
PS: There are so many shitty comments in this thread adding nothing of value. So you don't like Texas and have different political views. Fuck off. Some of us actually want to discuss this.
Fun read! Along the way I was trying to guess the cause and my best guess was TTL-related. However I don’t quite understand the actual cause! If the connection timeout is 3ms in practice, shouldn’t that be for a packet round-trip? So ~250 miles? And wouldn’t we expect at least a small delay on the remote SMTP server to process the packet?
The issue isn't the possible noise in non-covid deaths. It's this rather bold statement:
"None of these deaths were considered related to BNT162b2 by investigators"
How would they know? What investigators and what criteria? If there was a 20% increase in seemingly-unrelated deaths, would it be detected? These are the questions that Pfizer should have explained but instead we just got this one pithy sentence. Also remember, this is industry with a history of fraud and criminality. GSK was fined billions for covering up heart deaths in a diabetes treatment only a few years earlier and Pfizer is up on the list too. Our FDA needed to be our advocates and a lot of people feel let down seeing this rubber-stamped.
AOL lumbered on but what finally killed it was broadband and cable. They just didn't have the pipes and the luster was gone by then anyway. DSL gave it some life support but by 2002 or so everyone I knew had switched to cable. AIM use continued for few more years after that until texting killed that too.
I remember clearly making this transition. The value add of the AOL keyword content and other features like chat rooms just wasn’t enough to make the service make sense after the dial up era.
The innovation of AOL was making such an easy dial up program with so many functions. But when I got DSL it was just money for nothing.
The major lock-in for me was AOL Instant Messenger, which was free as a stand-alone app. Email wasn’t hard to transition because it wasn’t such a dependency for your life like it was today.
So, when DSL came around, AOL was gone. If they could have anticipated something like Discord or Slack, they could have transitioned their users into that free + premium model.
Quite understandable that they didn’t see that coming.
AOL was killed by Internet ISPs. They had to switch to an unlimited usage model, a blow to their bottom line from which they never really recovered. By the time 1995 rolled around there was really no denying it, the Internet and especially the World Wide Web was the place to be and services like AOL were the buggy whip manufacturers of the dot com era.
It is interesting that the data silo model they used is sort of coming back with Facebook and other social media.
AOL offered the ability to connect to it through a 3rd-party internet provider. I did this for probably two or three years before finally giving up on AOL. By that time, the web had evolved quite a bit and AOL's content and communities were no longer worth the extra expense.
And information. I remember telling so many people that aol was not 'the internet'. Most swapped over to a local isp...with vaguely similar cost but very, very open.
Of course, then they all went and jumped on facebook.
Very similar story here. I was in middle school when the follow-up Tricks of the Windows Game Programming Gurus came out [0]. I read it cover to cover and proceeded to buy as many Premier Press books I could get using money I'd save from doing chores around the house. This wasn't pre-Internet but the best material was by far still in books. My dad would pay $5 per hour so if I worked hard I could buy another book after a weekend of yardwork. Those middle and early high school years were incredible. You could still understand the cutting-edge and a single person could still make something big like RollerCoaster Tycoon or Doom. I made a bunch of games, isometric ones, worlds in D3D and OpenGL, physics sims, learned CS algorithms, made pixel art and 3d models in 3ds max, and even made my way to a game developer's conference as an awkward teenager. The only downside to all this is it pulled me away from schooling. I probably could have gone to a better university and had an easier time the first few years of career had I put just a little more effort into classes, but that's life. No regrets.
