Month: June 2019
It’s possible to build a Turing machine within Magic: The Gathering
It may be a highly unlikely scenario, but a recent paper posted on the physics arXiv proves that it’s possible in principle to build a simple computer within this massively popular tabletop game using just the right combination of Magic cards. While the inputs must be pre-programmed, “Literally any function that can be computed by any computer can be computed within a game of Magic,” said co-author Alex Churchill, a longtime Magic fan who has been working on the problem for several years.
Anti-apartheid prog rock from 1980s South Africa, via Bandcamp.
Listdown: Are we in an RPG resurgence?
I could swear there’s more talk about role-playing games than ever. My gut tells me that popularity is rapidly increasing. A few facets of thought:
- Critical Role — a show chronicling the dramatic adventures of voice actors lead by the amazing Matthew Mercer as Dungeon Master — has been exploding on YouTube and Twitch.
- People are starting to 3D print their own game miniatures and have built strong communities on Reddit and YouTube.
- There’s a brand new Dungeons & Dragons starter set coming out, and it’s exclusive to Target (yeah, where you buy your hand soap and towels).
- LitRPG is a new fiction genre that’s only a few years old, but is growing and has become quite popular in audiobook format. The genre features stories about the characters players become inside a game, whether they know so or not.
It’s all circumstantial evidence and intuition on my end. What do you think?
How E‑Commerce Sites Manipulate You Into Buying Things You May Not Want
But “Alexandra from Anaheim” did not buy the dress. She does not exist. Instead, the website’s code pulled combinations from a preprogrammed list of names, locations and items and presented them as actual recent purchases.
What happens when you mix Swedish pop music, Japanese visual kei culture, and probably a few too many Anne Rice novels? This — totally this.
By the end of the song, you’ll be a dwarf digging a hole…diggy diggy hole…
Raspberry Pi Surprise
Coming out a year ahead of schedule, the new Raspberry Pi 4 was released today:
You can’t argue about 3x performance gains and more features, all for the same price. Gamers will be eagerly awaiting what rewards can be reaped from a GPU two generations newer on much better silicon — maybe even usable N64 emulation on RetroPie?
In reality, Uber’s platform does not include any technological breakthroughs, and Uber has done nothing to “disrupt” the economics of providing urban car services. What Uber has disrupted is the idea that competitive consumer and capital markets will maximize overall economic welfare by rewarding companies with superior efficiency.
The Personal Finance Industry Is a Scam
Personal finance is the prosperity gospel of cable news, happy to claim that you’ll end up with all the money if you listen to its experts, take their advice, buy their book. Not buying coffee won’t magically get you a house. Not buying avocado toast isn’t a retirement plan.