dragontamer

None of the pros are doing useless APM outside of maybe early-game hand-warmups (before there's anything to do, a lot of clicking is just to keep the hands warm and ready).

Indeed, pros regularly go from 300apm average to like 800apm during critical fights, but only for a minute (maximum). Humans _can_ go well above the 300apm average and do so. (Indeed, keeping your hands warm and performing "useless" 300apm in the early game is critical to keeping the blood flowing and your fingers ready for the middle game).

Nonetheless, the ghost micro that Pluto demonstrated is demonstrably superhuman. No one clicks that fast or precisely with the mouse.

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Indeed: the only way humans reach 300apm consistently is because of _keyboard_ shotcuts. Tapping buttons on a keyboard (which don't move and are always consistent) still counts as an "action".

A "mouse action", which requires you to move the cursor, and then click accurately on a moving unit, is far more intensive than clicking "55" to recenter your map upon your starting Hatchery (assuming classic handstance: Zerg often put the starting hatchery on 5 and their middle or index-finger on the 5 so that their pinky can reach s and d, for "select larvae" then "drone").

The keyboard shortcut of "55sd" is 3 actions, but far easier to perform than the 3 actions of "select ghost -> lockdown -> target".

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I believe Slayer Boxer's famous ghost micro was accomplished with hotkeys 1234567890, so he could set off 10 lockdowns with 1l-click 2l-click 3l-click 4l-click 5l-click 6l-click 7l-click 8l-click 9l-click 0l-click. And that was a long time ago: it probably was a SlayerBoxer exhibition match (ie: he agreed with the opponent to go ghosts and the opponent to go battlecruisers before the match started, so that it was more of a crowd entertainment game rather than a serious tournament).

This is the human limit of ghost micro, 10 precise lockdowns into a nuke. And only if _EVERYTHING_ was lined up for it and the opponent is even (mildly) working with you to try to make the most entertaining game.

What Pluto is doing is so far outside of normal... that its nearly useless for us to study. I dunno, maybe some deeper analysts will look at some other tidbits of Pluto's build orders but I personally think its APM feats / clicking feats are just too far outside of human that there's no way anything else is worth studying.

I think there's an argument that Pluto's TvT game is at least somewhat realistic and maybe humans can learn from it. But the jury is still out, people are still trying to analyze these games and understand the techniques, strategies, and tactics.

Your statement is severely underselling Plutos APM.

Pluto uses Ghosts to counter Dragoons. Any SC:BW player should know how stupidly impossible this is for humans.

For the non-players out there. Ghosts have an ability called Lockdown that can stop mechanical units (like Dragoons) from attacking or moving for long periods of time.

The problem: it requires you to click on a Ghost, then click on a Dragoon.

No human in the whole history of SC:BW would seriously do this. At best, Ghosts in practice are used vs capital ships (like Carriers or Battlecruisers), because in smaller numbers humans are fast enough to click and perform these feats. (Carriers and Battlecruisers are very expensive, very very powerful, units. So they are weak to specialized attacks like this as you cannot build many of them due to their incredible cost in resources).

But dragoons? This is the mass production unit of Protoss. This is so far outside the scope of human-level APM that the games Pluto plays are useless. Lockdown simply isn't feasible to be used vs what amounts to the standard / stock infantry unit of Protoss. There's simply too many opponent dragoons to even click on.

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I dunno what kind of "APM rules" we need to give SC:BW bots to allow them to have a fair fight vs humans.

But the rules we have in place today do NOT represent a fair fight at all. Computers have stupid amounts of speed and precision far in excess of a human player.

I'm also a Poker player and the way Poker AIs solved this problem was by making the best estimate of the Nash Equalibrium and playing around it.

No human can possibly keep up with all the possibilities or combinations that are accounted for.

Games of incomplete information have been IMO soft-solved as of.... Maybe 5 years ago? As in, stronger than any human can possibly reach (ie: massive GB-sized matricies accounting for all information iterated over millions of iterations of "he thinks that I think that he thinks that I think that....")

It's not a true Nash Equalibrium, which remains outside of the realm of even computers to compute. But a computer can always reach a closer / better estimate of any Nash Equalibrium, which covers all games of incomplete information.

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For Poker, it turns out that a few types of bet sizes (3x pot, 1.5x pot, pot, half pot, quarter pot) covered enough betting patterns to reach superhuman.

And frankly, MtG is simpler than the bluffing game in Poker. Like MtG has bluffs but it's no where close to Pokers level.

There's no crazy deep game for Red Deck Wins vs Control. The game basically plays itself out (Red tries to win before Control comes online. Control tries to stall before Red Deck Wins). There are some games with complex board states but they're largely a game of bluffing + card counting (opponent holds 4 cards, two of which were since the start of game and 2 were top decked in the last two turns. He at best has only planned for 2 responses or got lucky with the other two newest cards. Do I have a play that beats two cards yet?)

There's only so many card interactions that strong players actually think about.

Ex: you don't really care if the opponent plays Giant Growth or Chastise. The effect is that the opponent is playing a combat trick, and combat has moved from attackers favor into defenders favor.

To defeat an instant speed combat trick requires a combat trick of your own, or a generic counter spell of some kind. Some have interactions (ex: Doom Blade beats Giant Growth but not Chastise), but the overall gist is that opponents can do things after combat is declared. You only need to keep track of how many combat tricks you think the opponent has.

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Other situations are card advantage (ex: 2 for 1. If the opponent spends 1 cards to defeat only 2 cards of yours). The traditional card for this is Mindrot, but well placed counterspell can turn a combat trick into. 2-for-1 reversal.

You don't necessarily keep track of how your opponent makes 2-for-1 opportunities. You just have vague gists of them.

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Good spells have huge applicability. Doom blade or Murder is high because killing opponent creatures at instant speed handles the vast majority of creature buffed combat tricks, and also serves as a way to stop enemy combos and other such tricks.

In contrast, chastise is very niche. If the opponent were playing like Swords to Plowshares (powerful white instant speed removal), it's pretty much always better than chastise.

If the opponent plays chastise instead, you take that as a win because you know they could have had a deck of better cards. But for whatever reason decided to play with weaker cards...

> why would you do a cash-out refinancing at a time of high interest rates?

If future interest rates are much worse much more quickly, it can be profitable.

IE: get a bunch of cash today locked at 10%, then lend out the money next year at 20%.

I dunno if that's the plan but there's so many possibilities in finance that it's hard to get what someone else is thinking even if their moves are public.

Oh yeah. I stop at 0.95V. which I consider fully discharged (but not so low that I'm damaging the cells). I'm about 10% off the manufacturers claimed specs but I'd rather not push the limits of testing. That's low enough to differentiate between good and bad cells

The discharge rate is currently regulated by only a 2.2 Ohm resistor. The next version of this circuit will be a constant current drain circuit to make all tests draw the same mA across the whole test.

Right now more current is drawn at 1.35V start and far less current is drawn at 0.95V end of test.

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The part that they don't tell you is that 0.95V isn't one point. When you disconnect the cell, it charges back up (kinda like a capacitor). This process can take multiple minutes (!!!!). I've defined the end as being lower than 0.95V for more than 30 seconds, even if disconnected.

First Triumvirate.

Crassus amasses so much wealth because Caesar helped him.

And Crassus was the rich man who was monopolizing all of Rome with his slave firefighters + real estate scheme. When the going got tough, they seekwd power from the rich guy, no one was stopping Crassus.

Did anyone ever stop Marcus Licinius Crassus from destroying the Roman Republic? (patron of Julius Caesar and Romes richest man ever).

Yeah, name brands like Energizers are consistent but slightly worse than Eneloop at roughly the same price.

I actually made a battery tester as a hobby electronics project. Fully dumps the energy while measuring mAh and seeing some measurements of internal resistance.

Something I did notice was that crappy battery chargers can permanently damage even Eneloops. So don't cheap out on the chargers either.

The high speed chargers (2 hours or less) are on the edge of what is safe and could permanently damage a cell. The 4 hours or slower chargers are just way more reliable. There's probably someone out there testing different chargers (trying to find the safe fast chargers) but given how cheap NiHMs are (even the "expensive" Eneloops), it's just easier to use 4 hour or 8 hour chargers and have masses and masses of extra NiHMs laying around.

I have a similar story.

Amazon Basics AA NiMH was well known to test exactly the same as the top Japanese brand 'Eneloop'. Extremely good specs all around

Recently though, they are still called Amazon Basics but no longer test like Eneloop. They've changed manufacturers for the worse and are hoping no one notices...

I wouldn't worry about matching the exact model number of the battery. Instead, it's more important to get roughly the same chemistry and a capacity equal or maybe a touch greater (if technology improved in the last 10 years, capacity could be greater with modern parts).

Specific batteries go in and out of production. But as long as it's the same CHEMISTRY, voltage, and capacity, it's likely compatible. Chemistry tends to set the voltage, size sets the capacity.

Charge/discharge controllers and algorithms are based on these three bits of info.

In some cases, some chemistries are actually compatible with other chemistries. NiHM cells are largely backwards compatible with Ni-Cd chargers (but not vice versa). It's not good for the NiHM but they will actually take the charge.

Let's start with the basics. Let's ban unlimited money from politics first (ban SuperPacs and return to 90s era political rules).

If rich people want to influence politicians, there should be hard caps on money and advertising.

There's nothing wrong in saying too much money is now destroying too much of the good parts of our country. Starting one step at a time is better than trying to build a massive reform that goes no where.

Once money in politics calms down, the next steps should become more obvious as the noise from the Billionaires no longer drown out our attention.

I'm not talking about an audio-DAC chip attached to a MCU. I'm talking about the most basic of analog designs that would transmit data over 4-20mA (just controlling an OpAmp + Transistor passing some currents).

By the time you add that SPI-DAC to your design, you've spent more than any TI (MSP430, MSP erm... whatever cortex-M0+ version was), AVR, STM32 or PIC MCU. There's a lot of chips designed to do this, and they're all on the SDCC compiler for a reason. That's where the niche has been carved out.

Look, I know a lot of people like RP2350 but there's a lot of jobs that chip is just wholly unsuited for.

> STM32 is in most volume equipment now for a reason. Microchip screwed everyone on long-term pricing, and clown priced themselves out of key markets.

AVR16DD14 is 68-cents on Digikey, Mouser, and direct-order from Microchip right now (qty 100 or more). If you need more analog power, the AVR*DB line is closer to $1.20 but comes with 2x or 3x OpAmps (AVR32DB28 I think was 2x OpAmps)

RP2350 doesn't have a DAC or Comparator. ESP32-S31 has... none. No DAC, no Comparator, no ADC.

"Literally and completely nonexistant" is about as bad as you can get.

Like the reason to reach for a PIC or AVR these days is because of 4-20mA protocol or other such mixed-signal tasks. Read a current between 4-20mA (voltage A - voltage B, so you need a differential ADC) -> MCU -> Logic -> DAC -> controls OpAmp -> controls transistor (BJT or MOSFET) -> outputs a current 4-20mA.

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Of the three chips you described (STM32, RP2350, and ESP32), only some STM32 can do the jobs that PICs / AVRs are specialized in.

ESP32 and RP2350 have pretty crap or nearly non-existent analog. I don't think they even come with a comparator, let alone rarer analog parts like a DAC.

If you need a DAC, Comparator, ADC, and a couple of logic gates, its hard to beat an AVR DD (4x arbitrary gates called CCL. 1x DAC. Differential SAC ADC. I believe 2x Comparators and multiple "internal DACs" so you don' have to spend your 1x external DAC on internal parts). Also 1.8V to 5.5V support, as well as dual-power supply support (PortC is run off a 2nd power supply, but all the logic is compatible. This means PortC can run at 5V while everything else runs at 1.8V, or vice versa, making the AVR DD also a built-in level shifter)

Richard the Lionheart spent 10 years away from home and at most 6 months in Briton.

Do you know why he was fighting in wars in far away lands? It certainly wasn't about land or power (at least, not for Richard)

It was a Crusade. The 3rd Crusade to be precise.

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Also the whole Reconquista thing in Spain, coinciding with the Spanish Inquisition and all that. Plenty of major religious events that interacted with politics and brought glory to commanders.

And then things like the 30 Years War, which had substantial amounts of religious influence of Protestants vs Catholics.

I'm not saying every war was about religion. But Catholics have PLENTY of holy warriors that are even venerated for their battle prowess.

The King of England isn't in charge of the UK though. The power largely rests in Andy Burnham.

The job of the monarchy today is largely traditional. They pass and bless today's (better) government systems.

> The monarchies and Catholicism itself evolved, while Islam seems to have stalled.

Do you know the story of Iranian Democracy from 1960s?

There are... complications... to democracies in the middle east.

Good question.

Followup question: do you know the story of how the Frankish Kingdom of Charlemagne the Great got split up into Lombards, France and HRE (basically modern Germany) ??

Kings juggled the conflicting tasks of choosing an inheritor, as well as preventing their sons from rising up and... let's just say "William the Bastard-ing" everyone.

Yes, on occasion a random bastard son will take over all of Normandy and Briton.

So I don't really know what your question is. That happened, constantly. Brothers killed each other, and sometimes their fathers, in a mad game of power for damn near a thousand years.

But clearly the kings of the time thought the risks were worth the reward. A hereditary title of king means that your followers know who is charge if you died in battle. The risk of your sons deposing you was accepted, because the risks of dying for other reasons (disease, famine, war...) was greater.

That's mostly a feature of monarchies. Even in European settings, monarchs claimed divine right to rule.

That's why ex: El Cid (a great knight/military commander in Spain) was a threat to King Alfonso. (Doubly so because El Cid is a local hero who could raise a combined Muslim+Catholic Army, while King Alfonso was Catholic only. El Cid actually comes from Al-Sayyid, the nickname the Muslim locals gave to El Cid )

This happened enough in the Catholic monarchies that I have to believe it's really just the shape of Monarchies. Like the King of the Franks King Charlemagne the Great is basically known for his military exploits, with Paladins (his royal guard) forever influencing future Europeans and creating the image of an ideal Holy Warrior.

Did I say military exploits? I mean spreading Catholicism to the pagan Saxons. By conquest. During the Dark and Middle Ages, they spread Catholicism the old fashioned way, with the sword.

I do believe that Kim Jong Um military Uncle was put to death as well, likely as court intrigue and a preventative measure to prevent a powerful well respected General from overstepping his king.

Kings are always worried about their generals. Or better yet, Kings are themselves a general to prove their divine authority.

You know that GPUs are more flexible than just linear algebra, right?

GPUs are simply faster at fundamental algorithms like sorting (which has huge parallelism), and hashing. This is because both sorting and hashing benefit from endless growth of parallelism, offering enough "work" for these 10,000 SIMD-core systems to crunch work upon.

And because of modern algorithms/libraries with 'Mergepath sort' (a GPU-SIMD parallel sorting algorithm), its not even that difficult to implement anymore.

Naturally, this then leads to parallel Sort Merge Join, as well as parallel Hash-Join (two ways to implement left or right joins in a GPU that benefit from significant parallelism).

So yeah, Joins. https://www.kenchoi.dev/papers/gpu-joins.pdf (This paper also has a description of "Mergepath sort", a GPU parallel way of sorting)

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Even if GPUs weren't fundamentally faster at these kinds of operations... the RAM is simply 10x higher bandwidth and we all know its a RAM-constrained problem.

Your typical SQL query is going to need multiple joins, probably a sort and possibly some "group" operations. As long as you have more than 10,000 elements or so (IE: can saturate all 10,000+ SIMD-units of a GPU), you'll be able to at least benefit from the faster RAM.

If you have a LOT of joins (a recursive join or some other kind of deeply nested computationally complex query), you probably benefit even more from the greater compute-power offered by GPUs. These operations (joins really) are nominally over the entire set of data, and cleanly break down into obvious parallelism.

Parent post was talking about an 8GB dataset.

8GB isn't even CPU RAM these days. That's GPU super-mega-awesome ram. Ordinary Server CPUs are regularly pushing 2TB capacities.

GPUs are in the 8GB to 32GB typically, at least for smaller and more regular GPUs. This GPU RAM is also well known to be at least 10x the bandwidth of CPU RAM.

With a 4B parameter model that probably ran through 8GBs of RAM multiple times to run.

At a certain point we should seriously talk about CUDA accelerating Postgres instead.

NYC had a deficit of $12 Billion before the current mayor.

Leaded Gasoline.

If we don't like a technology we can easily get rid of it in practice.

And by that, I mean that Leaded Gasoline is infeasible to be profitable anymore. So no gas station serves it any more.

And please, it will be easier to regulate all public camera companies than to regulate all independent gas stations. So don't give me any crap about difficulties. Especially when said companies are all individually being purchased by government services like police.

So name one. These politicans have names, do they not?

We do have the name of one politician who balanced the New York City budget though. Its probably not going to please a lot of people to hear that guy's name though. But that's what people want, right? Balanced budgets?

But no. That's not what people want and we all know it.

Once upon a time, one of the largest companies of the USA, Bell Labratories, was declared an illegal monopoly and eradicated.

In the correct political environment, entire companies can be dismantled with one executive action. Not our current political environment, but in the 1980s one it could happen.

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Oh, also, companies were literally an act of Congress when this country started. We can change the rules back and dismantle any company that refuses to work for the benefit of this country.

Remember that one time when a large global company (The Dutch East India company) got a tax break from the king, and it angered the population so much that we took a bunch of tea (a symbol of the Dutch East India Company) and threw it into the Boston Harbor?

Ahhhhh yeah. I remember. Oh right, we teach that situation a bit differently today don't we? People probably don't remember exactly how easy it used to be or how this country used to treat companies that betrayed our values.

We can go back. But lets start with understanding that we _can_ go back. Step 2 is electing people who will agree with this political message.

Oh, and finally. AoE2 is played on "Random Map".

This means that scouting has a degree of importance. In general, you should scout on chickens maps, and you should mix up scouting vs luring on deer maps. Chickens cannot be lured, so scouting is your only option. Deer can be lured, meaning micro-ing your Scout to push a deer into your base and capture an early source of food. Luring is necessary for some builds (ie: rushes which need more food than other builds).

It also means that "SimCity" is based on map layout. Arabia (most common map generator) sometimes spawns "closed" (long woodlines that act as walls), which sometimes makes walling cheaper/easier.

Or sometimes Arabia spawns "open", or fat tree lines spaced far apart. In these, large "base walls" are impossible and people tend to favor "small walls" (maybe a few to protect farms, and like 8 tiles of walls max to protect gold). Top tier pros prefer "quick walls", only walling after the opponent's attack arrives. This is very difficult / micro/APM-intensive, so feel free to just small-wall by default and/or large base wall if the map generates something useful.

If you "large wall", integrate necessary buildings (ex: blacksmith, market, barracks) into your walls. Full scale buildings tend to have ~2000 HP or so, while palisade walls only have 250 or so HP. In fact, most players use "house walls" (the AoE2 equivalent to Supply Depos), because you need tons of houses ANYWAY, and because Houses have 900 HP, its usually better to defend with houses.

If you plan to make the jump from SC:BW to AoE2.... Some tips.

* Four resources. Stone runs out first and is the key for Castles, a 4000 to 6000 HP building that deals 11x4 damage. Strategically speaking, the castle locations DEFINE the middle game (aka the Castle Age) and still have huge influence for Imperial Age.

Gold is basically the same as Vespine Gas. Gold is +technology or +advanced units. The middle game is determined by your gold unit choice (usually either Knights or XBows, but some players choose mass Monks, Siege or other compositions). The end game is basically when Gold runs out and players are forced to play with so called Trash units (aka wood and food only).

Wood and Food are basically the equivalent of minerals, except Food is made from wood. (You first cut down a tree then make a farm and then finally food comes out). In many ways, it's best to think of food as processed wood, highly available on most maps but slower to gather than Gold/wood.

* Gold units set your main army, Trash units (aka: units that only cost food+wood) TEND to set up the counter to your opponent and are more of a reaction (or prediction). Remember, gold tends to be easier to gather than food in the middle game. Only in the late game does gold run out.

* As such, start the game thinking of Wood == minerals, Gold == Gas except Gold runs out. And you'll actually be pretty good for the feelings of which units are useful for what.

* Food == processed Wood is probably easy enough for you to figure out by feel. I don't expect issues for StarCraft players trying to understand food.

* Stone needs special consideration because nothing in SC:BW or SC2 feels like an AoE2 castle. My overall recommendation is to pretend stones make castles and nothing else important (Towers can be useful but beginner players should focus on thinking about the castle). Play with the Castle first, get some experience and then work backwards to understanding stone.

* Counters are far stronger and swingy in AoE2 than SC:BW or SC2. Let's take a Feudal Age engagement for example: 1 spearman ties with 3 scouts in an engagement... So we are talking about 10 Spearmen trading with 30 scouts in combat kind of counters.

Another counter: Monks counter Knights. Knights are like Battlecruisers if Battlecruisers were the 2nd fastest unit in the game and appeared in the middle of the tech tree (Castle age) ready to go with very few necessary upgrades.... Like seriously Knights are good. Fast, high damage, high armor but costs a ton.

The counter unit... Monks.... their ability is to convert enemy units to your side. So uhhhhhh, hard counter. Monks appear at the same time as Knights (Castle Age) except Monks need a few more upgrades to really be useful.

Depends on the unit: XBows vs Elite Skirmisher or Mangonels is closer to StarCraft levels of counterplay. XBows can win vs equivalent Mangonel with elite level micro / mistakes from the opponent, but most agree that with "equal micro" Mangonels/Onagers/Skirmishers should usually beat XBows.

Speaking of which: AoE2 micro is defined by arrow dodging, Mangonel shot placement (manually predicting the future location of your opponent and aiming there), and finally quick walls / villager shenanigans.

The Red Bull Wololo is the #1 tournament each year for AoE2.

> But I always felt that it SC2 was more successful in taking out APM and "Deathball" mechanics

On "Deathballs", no. SC2 always allowed the player to select all military. SC2 always had smoother patching and better programmed "flocking" behavior.

In SC:BW, it's an APM feat to simply control 12 Dragoons/Goliaths/Siege Tanks across a bridge. Meanwhile, a hundred SC2 Stalkers can easily chain-blink across the same terrain no issues.

In SC:BW, the bad patching and bumping is part of the balance. In SC2, all units moved too smoothly and too easily, as such deathballs are always easier to setup.

SC2 allowed players to easily control Deathballs, so then they tried to balance that by making splash attacks more powerful.

In contrast, it's literally impossible to control a deathballs in SC:BW, because you can only ever select 12 units. Literally impossible to control more units (and even then, those 12 units were extremely wonky around bridges or other terrain features).

In SC:BW, the deathballs debate is innately moot. No human can control a deathballs anyway so it's not even a debate. Like controlling 48 zerglings is a feat reserved for top pros.

Further, because control of 48 zerglings is so hard, pros who COULD do it use the 4x groups of Zerglings on increasingly divergent points of the map (harassing multiple bases), rather than concentrating their efforts in one area. Might as well "tax the opponents APM" by attacking multiple locations if you have such good unit control or APM.