Viewing profile — splonk

It's interesting that the page actually uses minimax to determine black's play. I kind of assumed it would be a simple lookup table given the small state space of the game. I suppo…

Maybe 20 years ago a build system at Google was called "grunt". For some reason I came across a CL description that said something like "make the build 10% funnier." It made the bu…

I am exactly the type of nerd that is super excited about this kind of engineering, to the point where I visited a couple years ago and rode a boat on the wheel when I happened to …

I was part of the team that built exactly this. It launched in 2010. Some Googlers of that era are probably still annoyed at all the internal advertising we did to get people to se…

It's a fairly meaningless stat without knowing the number of the players at the table. At a quick glance he seems to be playing 6-max, but sometimes 3-handed. In any case 40% is wi…

Not on a feathered shuttlecock, the feathers overlap in a pattern. Curious if it works with a plastic one.

Looks it tries to identify Apple devices and goes to Pixel for everything else. const platform = navigator.platform || ''; const userAgent = navigator.userAgent || ''; const isAppl…

You can sign up as an affiliate with both Booking and Expedia to get API access to their data. It's meant for people who are going to run their own hotel booking sites with Booking…

It is very common to test stolen cards at gas stations (relatively anonymous and available, and easy to just drive away if the card fails). If that car wash was attached to a gas s…

There's also a bot you can play against: https://human-ai-interaction.github.io/cuttle-bot/ (Supposedly linked from that site somewhere, but I got it from the reddit thread linked …

The casino has no problem just telling you, "you're too good for us". Depending on the situation and the mood of everyone involved, you may be told you're welcome to play other gam…

Here's the press release from Eurojust: https://www.eurojust.europa.eu/news/crackdown-illegal-stream... The claim of 250M/month or 3B/year in revenues seems staggeringly high, and …

Card counters (and advantage players in general) are much less likely to tip well compared to the average gambler. The sort of people who think they're making money on a game also …

The author is u/restricteddata on Reddit. This appears to be the thread that inspired this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclearweapons/comments/1f85zpi/mk4...

It seems the search would be useful for Europeans who manage to gather airline points, but that would be much less common in Europe than in the US, due to the lack of credit card a…

I had similar issues with SFO-LHR on August 14th, and the issue (probably) was that the result had mixed cabins (business SFO-LAX, economy LAX-LHR), and the airline site (Qantas) d…

If I see a thread with too many comments from high volume posters, I assume it's low signal. Most of them are very good at commenting in a style that is convincing sounding and pop…

For people who like this kind of thing, I recommend the Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb. There are a lot of objects from, well, broken relationships, and often some highly…

It's helpful to look at past history to get some idea of your chances of arriving on time - for example, here's the eastbound California Zephyr's times in Denver for the past month…

I concur with this. I've spoken with friends at Reddit who tell me that overall post volume is basically back up to normal, but my participation was mostly in smaller subs. Some of…

I also appreciate how some of the examples randomly put the bad examples at the end instead of the beginning. I'm not going to say people with glass houses shouldn't throw stones, …

IMO too slow/fast doesn't matter a ton unless it's extreme (e.g. some steep ramps become impossible with weak flippers). Tilt to the left/right is a much bigger issue, especially i…

I would echo the sibling comment about wizard mode - it's difficult enough on modern machines that you'll most likely take a long time to get there. If trying to "beat the game" mo…

The Pinball Hall of Fame is notable for having a working Pinball Circus[1], of which there were only 2 ever built. I try to give it a play every time I'm in town. It's also got qui…