Yes, I could see a lot of GMs being interested in plug in and go product that fills that niche. Implementing the right feature set is challenging, as existing dedicated virtual tabletops have already shown. But something like a simple Owlbear Rodeo extension that adds basic miniature recognition might be all we need.
Sure! It's smallish, but ttrpg players are accustomed to filling in with their imagination. You might even have a pan feature that would shift the map and show markers to help minis get replaced correctly. This might help with the size problem a bit.
My first thought was that it would be explaining Quicksort using an Ikea warehouse as a metaphor, to show how different algorithms suit different constraints.
As for the actual Ikea-style instruction pamphlet... I suspect that making it was very helpful for the author. But I don't think the result would have helped me as a novice. It took some work for me to understand the diagram, and I've used Quicksort.
> As for the actual Ikea-style instruction pamphlet... I suspect that making it was very helpful for the author. But I don't think the result would have helped me as a novice.
I have no formal CS background or education at all, but have been working in IT for... over 20 years now?
So I'm not a "novice" in one sense, but in another my education on "algorithms" is pretty light and mostly through osmosis. Quicksort specifically is something where I've looked at the Wikipedia article on a number of times to understand but never managed to grasp.
The diagram made it click for me pretty much immediately. Yesterday if you asked me to implement a quicksort I wouldn't have had any idea where to begin, today I can say pretty confidently that I could implement something that would give you back a sorted list.
I'm probably an outlier here--minimal algorithms background, but an intuitive comfort with things like recursion--but at least some anecdotal evidence that it _may_ be useful to a novice!
If you’re an outlier, I’m out there with you: I’ve also been writing software professionally for 20 years, I have no CS degree, and I’m not fool enough to reimplement algorithms like quicksort that are sitting right there in stdlib. I similarly found this explanation a lot more useful than anything else I have read about quicksort, and I’m confident I could implement it now, but couldn’t have before I read this.
If you guys like visual-explanations that are a bit more intuitive -- I put actually made guides on both data-structures and algorithms not too long ago which you can find here:
The visual is extremely hard to understand how it relates to the description, given that it looks to be 1-indexed, but the description only makes sense for 0-indexing (4th element stores the sum of the first 4 elements), not to mention none of the binary indexes seem to be storing the correct sums (or they're storing sums of a tree that isn't being presented).
The visual is directly from here (I recommend you give it a read if you want to grasp the full intuition on how a Fenwick tree works (page 97)): https://cses.fi/book/book.pdf
I should have included the full visuals which are included there and I can see your point on why people would get confused by that visual - so I'll make a note to include the full image when I have more time. Thank you for the feedback.
For me the key was just application to figuring out if any cards are missing in a deck by sorting it.
Assume spades < clubs < diamonds < hearts, and ascending order for cards for all suits. Once you know the principle you can switch to US playing card order if you want.
In your first pass, divide the deck into black and red cards. Then divide black into spades and clubs. Then divide spades into <= 7 and >7. Then insertion sort the cards <= 7, then insertion sort the cards > 7, spades are now sorted. Clubs come next, divide into <= 7 and > 7, insertion sort, and combine. Split diamonds and hearts, repeat with diamonds, repeat with hearts.
“What about the pivot thing?” Well, that's because we don't know the midpoint of our set in a typical sort. So instead you can just grab a random card and then go through the deck to find all cards < that card. If you want slightly fewer passes, use median of three.
Similary idea: I used to be a TA and every week I would sort ~50 papers or exams alphabetically to make it easier to verify accuracy in the grading spreadsheet. Sorting this many papers regularly forces you to find a good way to do it, and it's hard to avoid recursion.
Even better: sort something physically large like several bookshelves of books or a record collection. You can't hold the collection in your hand and you're forced to use piles. You may even decide to work bookshelf by bookshelf first.
These are all good ways to develop intuition for sorting algorithms. Personally I always just use quicksort until I've come to a part of the alphabet where I can immediately recall which letter precedes every other then I do insertion sort. You might decide to use another hybrid sort like timsort.
A lot of people have trouble with understanding recursion. Perhaps that's where they struggle with quicksort?
Luckily, there's a simple non-recursive quicksort variation. It goes like this:
Simplifying assumption: all items are distinct.
Invariant: Throughout our procedure, we will have a bunch of bags arranged in a sequence before us from left to right. Items in a bag are all jumbled up, but all items in bag A are smaller than any item in bag B, if A comes before B in our sequence.
Now, we start by stuffing all our items into a single bag.
We repeat the following:
- Pick an arbitrary bag X. Anyone will do, you can pick at random, or your favourite bag, or always the left-most or whatever. Only one condition: bag X has to have more than a single element left in it.
- Grab a random element E out of X as your pivot.
- Categories all elements of X into: smaller than E, E itself, and bigger than E. Stick these categories into their own bags and place them into our sequence in the appropriate order.
Repeat until all bags left have one or fewer elements.
So binary MSD radix sort is also just called "binary quicksort" by some authors; they are substantially the same algorithm. How can I explain?
If you really want to replicate the exact swaps and pivoting in the most common form of quicksort, what your fingers will actually do, looks like this.
1. Cut the to-be-sorted deck-portion in half so that you can peek at the first, last, and middle card. Choose the median and swap it to the back of the deck.
2. The deck now sits in your left hand and your right hand conceptually contains two empty stacks of cards, the one between thumb and forefinger is a stack <= to pivot, and between forefinger and ring finger is the stack > pivot.
3. You are permitted two operations: (a) deal a card > pivot from the left hand onto the back of the second stack, or (b) deal a card <= pivot from the left hand onto the back of the first stack, but to make it a conceptual swap you now have to pick the card from the top of the second stack and put it on the back of the second stack.
4. Process the whole left hand this way; at the end the pivot you selected will be at the back of the first stack in your right hand. Separate it out and recurse on the two remaining stacks.
So if you do this enough you'll start to appreciate these two things:
- "with cards I don't really need to rotate that second stack card by card whenever I add to that first stack -- that's not affecting correctness, it's just needed for array sorts to be in-place"
and similarly
- "with cards I sometimes get these really stupid starts where like the median is 10 of spades and I'm going to split this like 9-1-42, eff it I'm just going to pretend that the median was the king of clubs, that's what I needed to split the damn deck in half."
and those are the optimizations performed in the above description of quicksort.
Might be useful to add tags. The more complex credit-based services often have categories (e.g. ec2, s3, etc). It could be useful for the dev to track service usage by spend, the client can get visibility into their own spend breakdown, and free trials often break out the free credits amongst different services.
> Art is ... mostly about surfacing the inner world, and only in part about skill.
I like the phrasing of the first part. But what art is "about" is very subjective.
For me, part of what I look for in art is intentionality - the notion that the artist has crafted each element toward a purpose, consciously or not. The less an artist contributes to the final piece, the less meaning I assign to it.
In this case: I would say that the individual pictures being displayed are not "art" - they have no meaning. But I think the device in whole is a piece of art. That is a creation that surfaces the creator's inner world, because they designed the device, wrote the code, crafted the prompts to achieve pieces that reflected their notion of beauty.
Besides what you articulated as the "intention", I often think of the "story" behind the art -- whether an idea in the creator's head was expressed via the piece (or not) makes me go "yes, this is Art" (or not).
By that token, when I see automated projects like this, I think of the "installation" as art, but the pixels or arrangements generated by the piece itself is less art-like IMO.
Yes. I think we attribute the cost of the human sacrifice into the value of the art. It's a like owning 1/80th of a human soul and hanging it on the wall.
Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one. But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.
I wanted a Markdown notes app that I could access over the internet, and stored files in a files-on-s3 structure that would makes sense if I accessed it directly and would be stupidly simple to backup/restore.
Ended up with an Amplify app that had basic login, file upload with image thumnbnails, indexing of frontmatter, some query macros to list pages matching specific criteria, autocomplete for frontmatter and macros, and ability to make specific pages public if I want to. Apart from login, it only uses direct S3 calls, so I'm effectively only paying for S3 storage costs.
The statements "If it's complicated, it's probably wrong." and "Sometimes, problems have a complicated solution." are compatible with each other. In fact they're saying the same thing.
If a problem has a complicated solution, it is a complicated problem to begin with.
In this case, we have a much stronger guarantee of simplicity than, for example, with mathematical problems that are easy to explain but might lead into unexplored territory: a missing piece in Panini's treatise is something that he definitely figured out in his time, so it is well within the reach of today's linguists.
In Australia, the fees for a four year engineering degree is around $30k AUD, and that's with very humane packback rules. $80k a _year_ is mindblowing. Rich folk and scholarship students I get, but why would anyone else go there?
* 60 rpg material projects (adventures, systems, supplements, etc)
* 14 other media
I initially backed quick a few software and "thing" projects. But both seem to be prone to unexpected setbacks, delivering late or never. My only outright scam was a "thing", but quite a few of these have gone silent. Transparency in these projects was never great, but maybe that has improved since I stopped backing them?
Of the board games: I enjoyed half and still have 3. Honestly, this seems to be in line with the games I try in general. Kickstarter has practically become an official business model for the industry, with established companies using it regularly. The result is that there is a high standard even for amateur projects in terms of understanding the game they're making, having artists lined up, having reasonable ideas of manufacturing/shipping costs and delays, posting regular updates, etc.
Currently I mostly back RPG books. They're often useful and inspiring for my own games and I've found quite a few systems that I'm keen to try (fingers crossed, 2021 will let that happen). About half of these result in a product I like and keep, and for the rest... Almost everyone running these projects is an RPG nerd like me, looking for an excuse to take their crazy idea as far as they can. I can get behind that. Transparency on these projects has usually been very good.
On lateness: every project has been late, except the ones that were basically just a preorder for something already in progress. The best you can hope for is regular updates that are transparent about progress and setbacks.
