HexesofVexes

Extra fact - in the USA almost all games use long weighted reels.

I believe this is by law, but may be misinformed.

Also, if you know the rng gen you can game machines: a very very clever group in Russia bought up old machines from defunct casinos, reverse engineered the games, and then developed an app that let a user photograph x number of spins to find out what the seed was for the next spin, and from there told them to bet high or low based on the upcoming game. They made millions, and farmed it out to make more. (https://www.wired.com/2017/02/russians-engineer-brilliant-slot-machine-cheat-casinos-no-fix/)

Never really worked with them (we never made them).

I think they’re lower prize threshold cat Bs.

In the UK, slot machines fall into 4 main categories. Of particular interest are category C machines, as these can remember a fixed number of previous games. I.e. the “myth” that a machine is “about to pay out” because “someone lost a lot to it” can hold for these games.

Cat A and B machines are completely random, previous games can have no impact on probabilities of winning (though pots can climb).

Online games have different rules, not always fair ones!

Oh, and ALL games (in a physical location) must (by law) show “RTP” (return to player) somewhere. It usually gets stuck it in a block of text in the manual since no-one reads them. (If it’s below 97.3% just go play roulette as it offers better returns).

The best we can say for that chart is that there is some relation (not necessarily casual) between GDP and mathematical education levels.

The causal factor could be anything - but it’s a damn pretty curve. It at least suggests that measuring a country’s gdp can give you a ballpark figure for it’s mathematical education levels.

Might be a novel premise for funding to explore if math is a causal factor.

When you have more tabs than a pharmacy, it’s time to worry!

You forgot to tell them that our head office is…

300 Funston Ave, San Francisco, CA 94118

…and all the play cards should be sent there!

Quick, someone pretend to be “the Linux company” and convince him to buy it!

Hah, jokes on them, my university is too poor to afford copilot.

Hello fellow bear, I don’t know why we’re talking about women either. Since we’re both fellow confused bears can you please direct me to the nearest top secret bear club, where we bears meet to eat berries and drink fermented honey while laughing at beaver related memes?

I think we don’t give gradual acclimatisation enough credit here. Most of my students have never heard of Firefox and tools like ublock origin because they’re acclimatised to the mobile ecosystem

“How do I install something? I use the app store.”

“Oh, but I already have the internet on my phone, why would I want a 3rd party app to use the internet” (think old people who mix up AOL with the internet in reverse!)

As soon as I show them, they convert in seconds - they’ve forgotten web pages without adverts can exist.

I mean, here is a thought, if an AI tool uses creative commons data, then it’s derivatives fall under creative commons. I.e. stop charging for AI tools and people will stop complaining.

I suppose it’s similar to the discussion older and more successful men have about avoiding “gold diggers”, “bear traps”, and “black widows”. Not all women are after a man’s money, but those that are will actively seek out such men, so you’ll never be safe. One wrong move and you’re suddenly working overtime the rest of your life to pay child support for a child conceived without your consent. Whereas, a bear would only run into us by chance, and would be more likely to leave us alone if we dropped our food and calmly walked away.

Edited note for clarity and posterity: Stereotypes are always hilariously offensive - I think some people just learned that.

I see the “bear shitting in the woods” index just went up again.

This comic made me realise that my Gameboy Advance SP is now older than my students… Where can I report this comic for making personal attacks?

The +5 charisma buff was too hard to pass up.

This isn’t a meme, it’s an emotional massacre…

Operation archive the archive?

Fun facts for night owls:

I’m sorry, there are no fun facts. It was a lie, it’s actually terrible. You just zombie through life unable to function without health destroying levels of caffeination ^_

https://www.statista.com/statistics/513049/alphabet-annual-global-income/

Let’s pause a moment and just appreciate how much money Alphabet actually make net (after expenses). $73,795,000,000 last year - higher than the GDP of entire nations, in profit.

The “bad” year, 2022 that drove all this change, they only made $59,972,000,000 net. Oh how terrible (!)

5 years ago, they made $34,343,000,000 net, so they’ve more than doubled profits.

Take a moment to appreciate that, and really consider if they “need” the money.

I would say mathematics is a consequence of, or branch of philosophy in its own right. The name intuitionism derives from the source of this branch of mathematics - “2 primal intuitions”.

1. Twoity - we are able to perceived time, and are thus able to split the universe into two, three, four etc parts. Counting is not something we just learn, it is something built into us as humans.

2. Repetition - we can repeat operations and not stop, just as we can never stop counting.

From these two (heavily paraphrased) ideas we can derive all of mathematics.

The first is actually enough to give us everything up to the rationals, the second grants us the reals and beyond.

While we lose excluded middle, we gain things such as “all total real functions are uniformly continuous on the unit interval” (Brouwer), the removal of the information paradox in physics (someone used Posey’s take on intuitionism to rewrite all physics to see where it led), and the wonder of lawless sequences (objects we cannot predict entirely, but still work with).

The intuitionist is very very formal “you are either alive or not alive” is a very nice statement to make, but entirely worthless if one cannot tell which you are! Excluded middle is not universally false in intuitionism; it is true for decidable statements, of which having an apple or not does seem to fall within (though here we can question how “apple-like” must something be to be considered an apple if we wish to be peverse). However, to argue it is true for any statement means your disjunct (or) must be very weak indeed - the classical mathematician is happy with this, the intuitionist demands that a disjunct not only present two options, but provide a way of determining which if the two applies on a case to case basis (hence excluded middle applying for decidable things).

Simplifying your example of an apple, you can think of it as a Platonist just having the statement that everything is either and apple or not. Meanwhile, the Intuitionist also demands there be a guide on how to sort everything into “apple” or “not apple” before they make that statement.

Classical mathematics does also have a huge unintuitive step - mathematics must exist independently of humanity. Every theorem ever proved, and ever to be proved, exists somewhere. Where you ask? The platonic plane of ideal forms beckons, with all the madness it entails!