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byronvickerson Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds

Thank you for linking this! I'm a big fan of Egan but had never read this particular short story. I feel like Egan is perhaps the only contemporary author who actually _gets_ consciousness.

byronvickerson Teenagers no longer answer the phone: Is it a lack of manners or a new trend?

Yes, I strongly agree with all of this.

Relatedly, I am seriously considering getting a landline again so that I (and my young children) can once again live in a world where the barrier to a "quick chat" with friends or family is lowered.

I'd love for my daughter to be able to just pick up the phone, call her friend, and schedule a hangout for that afternoon. (Or for me to be able to do the same with her friend's parents).

And having a dedicated landline for this means none of this needs to involve the mobile phone intruding on our home life.

byronvickerson Tunarr: Create and configure live TV channels from media on your servers

If you've got it working then obviously it must be possible, but I'm a touch confused because the ErsatzTV documentation says "A Plex Pass is required for ErsatzTV to work with Plex." (https://ersatztv.org/docs/user-guide/configure-clients)

Is it possible that you had this working in the past but Plex has since removed the functionality from their free tier?

byronvickerson Knuth–Morris–Pratt illustrated

Thanks for this - I need to solve exactly this problem on a toy project I've been working on; you've saved me the time to hunt down the appropriate algorithm!

byronvickerson There's Math.random(), and then there's Math.random() (2015)

Weird to see this show up on HN - I was just looking at this page a couple of days ago.

I have a little puzzle I've been trying to solve in my spare time; maybe someone here can point me in the right direction.

The puzzle is: given a float from Math.random(), suppose you know only whether it is greater than it is then 0.5 (i.e you only see the result of a coin flip which depends on Math.random()). What is a practical method to reverse out the state of the xorshift+ generator, given multiple such successive observations of the output?

Any input appreciated!

byronvickerson Farmer ordered to pay $CAD82k after confusion over meaning of thumbs-up emoji

This is absolutely my experience as well. I used to encounter this regularly in a professional context and ended up just replying with a confirmation that "option A" was what he'd agreed to. I was never mistaken.

byronvickerson So where are we all supposed to go now?

I'm very much a lurker in online spaces (this is the first comment I've ever made in HN!) but I've found the atmosphere on tiles very appealing.

I'd love an invite if you'd be willing to share. You can contact me at <my username> at gmail.