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Base point is like the minimum payout. All players agree upon a minimum payout (base point) ahead of time. E.g. $10 as the minimum for the first fan. A fan literally means doubling. A 4 fan win means the payout is $10x2x2x2=$80 from each losing party. It can go up very quickly.

We play with a base point being a dime or a quarter. Note also that the function from fan to points is subject to house rules, it's not always p(f) = 2^f (I've seen rules for example that start to "level off" the payout at higher fan values).

I'd add the note that the whole strategy of mahjong really only gets interesting when you play repeated hands (a full game has at least 16 hands, with each player acting as the dealer once per prevailing wind) and when you're gambling (or otherwise tracking points). Most house rules also enforce a minimum fan value for a winning hand, banning the "chicken hand" which wins but scores no points. We play with a 2 fan minimum. If you just play for mahjong (i.e. a a hand that "wins" the round regardless of score), the game is a pretty uninteresting game of luck, and you're not incentivized to gun for the higher scoring hands.


Yes. Many people set a limit on the maximum payout as doubling goes up very fast. A 8-fan win is $1280 payout, from each player. People usually limit the max to be 9 fan.

Looking from Earth at the stars closer to the center of a galaxy, they are found to be older. Looking from Earth at the stars closer to the edge of a galaxy, they are found to be younger.

I feel there should be a PowerToy applet to turn Segment Heap on or off.

This is a great idea, honestly. PowerToys is open source. There's a decent change that they would be open to such a contribution.

It is a crime that segment heap is over a decade old and still so underutilized. Gamers in particular go to such great lengths to tweak and optimize their windows machines for perf, but I still haven't seen that crowd discussing segment heap anywhere. It's more important than ever with the recent explosion in RAM cost.


Gen X was the last free range children. They ran wild after school without the tethering cell phones, playing in sand and drinking from garden hoses. The silent generation turned out to be a great generation building most of modern technologies.

If the engine failed due to missing oil change because of the difficulty, the whole car is gone. The waste in cost, material, and environmental impact far outweighs the savings in 2mpg improvement.


Glad to know in this hypothetical car scenario the owner decided to not get an oil change leading to the total loss of the vehicle. That seems very realistic and definitely something that car designs should be optimized around.

Or, we consider that 2mpg across 100,000 cars can save 3,500,000 gallons of gas being burned for the average American driving ~12k miles per year. And maybe things aren't so black and white. You're argument, in this hypothetical, is that negligent car owner who destroys their car because they're choosing to not change the oil is worth burning an extra 3.5millon gallons of gasoline.


To be fair, you are constructing an entirely hypothetical car scenario where oil filter placement leads to a 5-10% increase in fuel efficiency.

We're already in the land of the fucking ridiculous. Let's have fun with it.


I'm using this hypothetical to illustrate the point that: tradeoffs exist, and that you (we) may not have full insight into the full complexity of the trade space that the engineers were working with.

Putting some random number of hypothetical mpg improvement was clearly a mistake, but I assumed people here would be able to get the point I was trying to make, instead of getting riled up about the relationship (or lack thereof) of oil filters and fuel efficiency.


And he's using his hypothetical to illustrate the point that: even while some benefits may exist, there are other considerations besides one measure of efficiency.

That's the point you're not getting. People get your point. They're just pointing out that sometimes the juice isn't worth the squeeze. And for something that needs to be regularly accessed, it's better for it to be accessible than strictly optimal.

And during the whole debacle, you've demonstrated that you don't have much insight to the trade space at all. And you're so dead set on "not being wrong" here that now you're accusing everyone around you of being riled up. We're chill, dude. We're starting to worry about you.


> there are other considerations besides one measure of efficiency

Bruh that's literally what I was saying? Instead of how efficiently can you replace a filter in an engine, another benefit might exist instead. Said another way, maybe the "juice" gained from redesigning a fuel filter system instead of using an existing one form another car wasn't worth the "squeeze" of cost and development for the company.

Kinda feels like maybe you (the majority of replies to my original message) didn't get the point, and instead took this as some literal suggestion that I think engines need to have filters in certain spots.

The fact that so many people took this as literally as they did, and seemingly chose to ignore the underlying message of "hey maybe consider tradeoffs exist" makes me start to worry about you too.


No, you were saying that accessibility is subservient to efficiency.

And you were explicitly told several times that your hypothetical efficiency just does not exist. So constantly saying, "Yeah, but what if" looks like you're being obstinate for its own sake.

If the majority of people "didn't get your point", consider that maybe you aren't great at getting your point across.


> No, you were saying that accessibility is subservient to efficiency

Where do you believe I said that?

I don't recall saying anywhere that efficiency should be a priority over accessibility. I said "what if" to create a hypothetical to demonstrate that it could be. You know, trying to introduce nuance to a conversation. You can read that as obstinance for its own sake if you want.

My hypothetical not existing doesn't mean that some similar scenario isn't true. That's kind of the point of a hypothetical, it's an imaginary example to demonstrate a point. My suggestion that fuel efficiency could be effected may not be correct, but the efficiency of using a pre-existing design to save on new parts/labor very likely is true.

Again, people choosing to latch onto a hypothetical and tear that down instead of treating it like a tool for illustrating a point like it's intended to be is really odd and related to:

> If the majority of people "didn't get your point", consider that maybe you aren't great at getting your point across.

As I've said in other replies, I've already noted this- a specific mention of a hypothetical 2mpg that seems to really have distracted people lol


Yes. Winget is getting better support on Windows apps. The other day I tried to download the latest version of ImageMagick but all the links on the official site were bad. I tried Winget and it had it!


Years ago. I dabbled in generative art. I even wrote a small Forth-like language to control the generation. It's basically controllable chaos with math or chaos within bounding patterns. The results were often unexpected. Some examples: https://imgur.com/a/UjWLy7s


You may like https://c50.fingswotidun.com/

It's what I doodle with to generate images using a stack based program per pixel.

Every character is a stack operation, you have 50 characters to make something special.


That's pretty neat; some of output are beautiful!

Mine is also pixel coloring at the lowest level. I have a shading kernel in GPU doing the low level work, mainly applying colors recursively like fractal. I got sick of writing shader code so I make a high level language supporting math operations in concise expression that are compiled to shader code in GPU. The main thing is it supports functions. That let me reuse code and build up abstractions. E.g once I get the "ring" pattern settled, it's defined as a function and I can use it in other places, combine with other functions, and have it be called by other functions.

One of these days when I get some time, I'll formalize it and publish it.


This is beautiful. I'd really love to see some serious discourse about the place that generative art should have in our society and about what art really means in today's age of overconsumption.

I'm not sure art is still meant to be a widely shared experience and smarter people than should tackle this idea.


Thank you!

I'm glad people are interested in art discourse and exploring arts in general. Art is a very personal thing. Different people see arts in different ways. Yet there's some recurrent themes time after time.

I got my insight in art in musics and on why people love them so much. Musics and songs are basically repeatable patterns with slight variations in multiple dimensions, in pitch, in beat, in tone, in rhyme, in lyrics, etc. The human mind is a super pattern processing machine, as part of our evolution survival traits. Pattern brings structure, abstraction, and comfort. But strict repetitive patterns bore the mind. Human love patterns, but with variation and imperfection.

The human mind is very good in filling the missing pieces in a pattern, again from our evolution survival traits. Our ancestors could look at the tail of an animal and filled in the blank that it's a tiger hidden behind a big rock. The filling of missing pieces is by experience and learning. It really is the original generative AI.

I believe the variation and imperfection in patterns trigger the mind's filling the blank function, which triggers the generative function, which can run wild generating wide range of imagination. That's why arts can have different reaction from different people as each has their own life experience and thus different generated result.

I think art is patterns with variation, imperfection, and blanks at the most basic level. Computer generated art thus needs to fulfill that basic requirement at the least to be called art.


> I'd really love to see some serious discourse about the place that generative art should have in our society

For me (and many others), the “how” of art is just as important as the “what”, if not more important. There are installations that reflect this, many of which are interactive and allow the observer to become part of the art itself.

And if you extend the definition of “generative”, it can include many other methods, like swinging a paint can with a hole in the bottom over an empty canvas to create random patterns based on pendulum movement. Myself, like many others, recognize the amount of creativity and effort that goes into this type of “generative” art, especially in comparison to others. I also appreciate the creativity and complexity of the grandparent’s generative system.


These are sick. Color, contrast, composition, patterns, etc. Really inspiring stuff. Reminds me how digital art used to feel ~20 years ago.


These are really cool!


The problem is in power transmission. Transmission fee is a big part of the cost. Anything helping for at home generation should be encouraged.

Right now plug in solar is starting to appear. It is big in Germany. Utah has passed a law to cut the red tapes to allow home owners to install plug in solar themselves. More states should follow.


The rub is that people don't want transmission networks to go away. They just don't want to pay for the maintenance.

In many US municipalities the cost of infrastructure is rolled into the per unit fee meaning high consumers pay more. This works fine until folks adopt solar and their consumption goes negative.

The right answer is a connection fee based on the cost to maintain your hookup to the grid.


As is the case in Australia. We personally pay around AU$2/day grid connect fee


This is huge. Sony is trying to make Cox into law enforcement to do their biddings. The Supreme Court struck that down.


Should have called it A^3I^2 - Arm Agentic Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure.


I'd throw in an Inference there for the AAAIII symmetry. At a certain point it starts to just look like a scream haha.


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