conciselyverbose

joined 9 months ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

I think speculation and guesswork is perfectly fine. It's part of a path towards an answer. However, that speculation and guesswork needs to have its uncertainty clearly indicated.

I'll give an example using football.As "analytics" have emerged, everyone has their own model to give a guideline on decisions. This is done using things like "win probability" of all the possible choices and outcomes. You can do out the math, using a model, to say something like "going for it gives you a 35% chance to win, and kicking the field goal gives you a 33% chance".

And that sounds great. But, all the numbers that go into that math are incredibly noisy, with very small sample sizes. A great kicker has a better chance of making a field goal than a bad kicker, and they can account for that, to a point. But they can't really account for that, plus the specific weather conditions, plus the kicker is a little sore today, ...

And the chances of a stop, and of scoring if you're successful, etc, are even worse, because it's specific to how your offense matches up to that defense, plus the context of the game, the context in the game/moment, etc.

It's perfectly fine, and reasonable, to use a model as the best indicator you have and make a decision aided by that model. But the correct way to present statistical models is provide some guidance on how uncertain it is, in addition to the raw number. If you phrase that "35% +/- 10% if you go for it, 33% +/- 10% if you kick", you realize that there's a significant range where a better model might tell you to make the opposite decision, and it's a lot closer to a toss up.

But despite the inherent uncertainty due to the limited sample sizes used to create the models, you see "analytics experts" all over the place calling coaches morons for decisions that are pretty ambiguous because their specific model gives one decision a small edge and it didn't work out. If they had explicitly evaluated and acknowledged the uncertainty of their model given the factors it can't account for, they would have a much clearer picture of what the decision actually was.

Make guesses. Speculate. But make it clear (to others, and yourself) what you're doing so the guesses aren't given more weight than they deserve.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

That's less "seeking help on homework" than "having it do your work for you".

But it's incredibly bad.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 15 hours ago

All the time.

Pretty much never intentionally, though. I'm just bad at keeping up with people.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 22 hours ago

Your general explanation is all good, but it never seems like any of the platforms built for live events really have issues delivering content. I don't think the issue is so much that streaming live broadcasts is insurmountable as it is that Netflix specifically doesn't have their architecture managed in a way that works well with big live events. They lean heavily on having their content cached close to the end users and don't have a lot of experience at real time.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

I said it elsewhere but it felt like he meant for the final empire to be standalone, then was scrambling a bit in the well of ascension to keep the plot going.

But then some of the part I thought felt slow paid off in the conclusion, so IDK. I like the pacing in most of the rest of the stuff. It's just the introductions. Like Tress of the Emerald Sea, for example, it took so long for her to actually start her adventure.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I love his work and bought physical copies of all of Stormlight, Mistborn, and just a couple days ago the pretty "premium" hardcovers for the secret projects, just to have on my shelves.

My one thing is that his introductions are almost always slower than I'd like. Though ironically he did better in the Wax and Wayne Mistborn arc and I like the Vin arc more.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

I'm on the lost metal (7) and everything I've seen is flavor. Descendants of characters in the first arc, mythology around characters in the first arc, some involvement of ones who aren't impacted by time the same way, etc. You won't be missing plot points if it's not fresh.

I also read secret history after 6, and I honestly couldn't tell you the "minor spoilers" of the second arc he says it has. (Maybe an awareness of one character you're already aware of if you've read Stormlight or secret projects.) I'd personally say you're safe reading it without the second arc, and the different perspective on some key points in the first arc were pretty impactful.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (4 children)

Right now I'm way down a Brandon Sanderson rabbit hole, so I guess the Cosmere? I'd say Stormlight Archive, but Mistborn is really cool because they're set at the inflection points in the planet's history. The first arc is excellent, and it changes the world. The second arc is set in the future, with mythologies based on the first arc and scientific progress based on secrets uncovered in the first. The changes in the use of magic are really cool. There's a third arc planned to be set in the future from there.

But the Cosmere as a whole shares some core concepts and characters can move across it, and that comes into other standalone works like (3 of 4) secret projects and a bunch of other stuff.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

I don't think most do and for sure don't trust them and block them.

But they're also used to judge campaigns. You take a random, small subset of your mailing list, and a/b test by sending half one email and half a different email. The tracking pixels give you a good approximation of which gets more people to read it, and you use that headline for the rest of the list. You can also do the same thing just to generally keep an eye on what types of messages work best, etc.

But fuck them, I'm not giving up privacy I can protect.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Not at random retailers anywhere in the world, but yes, if you get the same quality story for a third of the launch price, that matters.

It's half the reason I never buy Nintendo games. Metroid isn't inherently "worse" than indie metroidvanias, but it's the same caliber game for twice the price (and the sales are less discounted by dollar value than the indies are on top of it). That does make it a much worse game for gamers, and it should get heavily docked for that.

Anything with microtransactions is cancer no matter how good the underlying mechanics are and should be completely banned from consideration.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Why wouldn't it be taken into consideration?

Bad monetization and excessively high pricing change the experience for gamers. There's not a lot of chance they're willing to say "microtransactions make a game ineligible" like they should, but cash grubbing microtransactions change what a game is, and they can't just not acknowledge that at all.

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