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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Yup. Rand() chooses a random float value for each entry. By default I believe it’s anywhere between 0 and 1. So it may divide the first bill by .76, then the second by .23, then the third by 0.63, etc… So you’d end up with a completely garbage database because you can’t even undo it by multiplying all of the numbers by a set value.



  • I actually enjoyed the story. Some of the themes and motifs were heavy handed, but that’s par for the course. Honestly, the biggest issue with the story is that players have come to expect a big plot twist. Bioshock 1’s twist hit first-time players hard, so later games have tried to replicate that. But the issue is that it only hit players hard because they never knew it was coming. They only remember it because it was truly shocking the first time you played through it.

    So now players have come to expect that from the series, which means the series can’t replicate it; When players are looking for a big plot twist, you can’t really hide it anymore. Because as soon as you start foreshadowing it, players catch on. And if you’re too subtle with your signals, then players who have been looking for it will say that doesn’t make any sense.







  • Yeah, I used to work a job where I was basically on call for 6 hours at a time, but didn’t need to do much unless something broke. I’d help set things up at the top of the day then tear things down at the end. But in between, I was basically just waiting for things to break. It’s safe to say that I used the fuck out of my gaming laptop and VPN at my desk. Because I obviously didn’t want to try playing games on a company computer.

    I played a lot of single player and idle games at that job, because those are easy to walk away from at a moment’s notice. Just hit pause and you can give your full attention to whatever problem has popped up. Then once it’s resolved, you’re right back where you left off.



  • It isn’t compressible at all, really. As far as a compression algorithm is concerned, it just looks like random data.

    Imagine trying to compress a text file. Each letter normally takes 8 bits to represent. The computer looks at 8 bits at a time, and knows which character to display. Normally, the computer needs to look at all 8 bits even when those bits are “empty” simply because you have no way of marking when one letter stops and another begins. It’s all just 1’s and 0’s, so it’s not like you can insert “next letter” flags in that. But we can cut that down.

    One of the easiest ways to do this is to count all the letters, then sort them from most to least common. Then we build a tree, with each character being a fork. You start at the top of the tree, and follow it down. You go down one fork for 0 and read the letter at your current fork on a 1. So for instance, if the letters are sorted “ABCDEF…” then “0001” would be D. Now D is represented with only 4 bits, instead of 8. And after reading the 1, you return to the top of the tree and start over again. So “01000101101” would be “BDBAB”. Normally that sequence would take 40 bits to represent, (because each character would be 8 bits long,) but we just did it in 11 bits total.

    But notice that this also has the potential to produce letters that are MORE than 8 bits long. If we follow that same pattern I listed above, “I” would be 9 bits, “J” would be 10, etc… The reason we’re able to achieve compression is because we’re using the more common (shorter) letters a lot and the less common (longer) letters less.

    Encryption undoes this completely, because (as far as compression is concerned) the data is completely random. And when you look at random data without any discernible pattern, it means that counting the characters and sorting by frequency is basically a lesson in futility. All the letters will be used about the same, so even the “most frequent” characters are only more frequent by a little bit due to random chance. So now. Even if the frequency still corresponds to my earlier pattern, the number of Z’s is so close to the number of A’s that the file will end up even longer than before. Because remember, the compression only works when the most frequent characters are actually used most frequently. Since there are a lot of characters that are longer than 8 bits and those characters are being used just as much as the shorter characters our compression method fails and actually produces a file that is larger than the original.