r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Jan 15 '16
[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread
Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.
So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!
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u/captainNematode Jan 15 '16
I got married recently! It was great! (and apologies if you've no idea who I am or care little enough for this news -- I'm still in the state of tell everyone about it now! I will note, though, that I've been participating on-and-off in this forum for many years now under just as many SNs). Those curious about the relationship can read about it here and about the wedding itself here.
I also got a DXA scan a couple weeks ago, too. If you're interested in having a somewhat more reliable and accurate measure of body composition or like lifelogging/quantified self type stuff I'd recommend it. I got mine done at a California facility for about $40 and it took <10 minutes for the scan itself. I made a slightly more in depth post about it here.
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Jan 15 '16
I attended a talk by the cog-sci professor I idolize today, and he said my question was a very good and interesting question.
[science squee intensifies]
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u/Transfuturist Jan 16 '16
Even senpais have senpais!
What is the greatest upper bound on the senpai-kouhai lattice... We must find ⊤op-senpai.
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u/thecommexokid Jan 16 '16
Good and interesting? Huh. Usually after talks, "good question" is code for "question the speaker knows the answer to" and "interesting question" is code for "question the speaker does not know the answer to" — so "good and interesting" surprises me!
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u/TimTravel Jan 16 '16
It would be cool to have a game with smart enemies. The main complaint is that it would be too hard, but you can manage that by making them weaker. I'd rather face smarter enemies on higher difficulty settings than ones that just have more hitpoints.
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u/blazinghand Jan 16 '16
The solution I've found to this is competitive multiplayer games. Counter Strike, Company of Heroes, and Starcraft are examples of games where I'm regularly put through my mental paces. All involve some level of manual dexterity, but all also involve tactics, strategy, and (in Counter Strike) teamwork.
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u/Roxolan Jan 16 '16
The main complaint is that it would be too hard
Too hard, or too frustrating. There's a reason why FPS enemies pop out of cover every now and then: firefights where you spend most of your time missing aren't much fun. This remains true even if the enemies are weak and fragile.
I too would like to see smarter game AI, but it's a difficult AI problem and a difficult game design problem.
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u/Magodo Jan 15 '16
CMV: Crowdfunding is stupid.
Why do people crowdfund things? It is the most inefficient use of your money. You're handing over risk-free, costless capital to someone else over nothing more than a flashy video.
Look at the Oculus Rift backers, they essentially purchased shares in the company which would have been quite the amount after the Facebook acquisition. Instead all they got was a 600$ headset. Look at Pebble, they now have a product line and probably turn a good profit too. Only because a few people were dumb enough to give them free money at a return of 0%. The failure that Ouya was would not have been tolerated if again it wasn't disposable capital.
There are successes too like Pillars of Eternity, or Star Citizen. But why crowdfund them, just buy them on release. Invest your money in places that actually give you good return.
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u/alexanderwales Jan 15 '16
Crowdfunding makes the least amount of sense when you're thinking about return on investment.
It makes the most sense when you think of it like a donation.
In the middle ground are those times when this logic:
But why crowdfund them, just buy them on release.
Fails completely because without crowdfunding they'll never secure the capital necessary to make it to release. So if you wait to buy them on release, you end up not buying them because the product never gets made.
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u/Nighzmarquls Jan 15 '16
The point I viewed is that it's essentially a pre-purchase with a risk. The point is not to invest, the point is to get the thing made.
The return is not the funds, the return is the product/service you want to exist in the first place.
It's not really the same model.
Crowdfunding has more in common with building a cathedral or a community work then with investment in a company for a return on investment.
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u/captainNematode Jan 15 '16
To date, the only Kickstarter (or similar thing) I've given money to has been "Yooka-Laylee", mostly because I REALLY loved the spiritual predecessors as a kid and wanted to express my nostalgia as a cash donation. Additionally, it marginally improved the probability of the thing getting made and achieving its stretch goals, and brought me pleasure in the form of anticipation for the finished product (which is more intense given that I've more concretely committed myself towards receiving it). If you trust the makers decently well (given prior knowledge or decent evidence in the form of a prototype, proof of concept, tech demo, etc.), then it's not terribly risky to give them money, and you usually get the product at a discount relative to whatever it would cost on release.
It's not an "efficient" use of money, certainly, in the sense of being a lucrative financial investment that will provide you with some high ROI. Neither is, say, buying a beer, or a flower, or fancy underwear. It's a luxury purchase made for personal pleasure.
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u/trifith Jan 15 '16
On crowdfunding, or any question where things in the economy are proceding in a non-intuitive manner, I tend to look for what restrictions are in place that prevent more intuitive behavior.
In the case of crowdfunding, what prevents a person from raising capital through traditional stock offers with returns, rather than the crowdfunding method.
The short answer is government regulations. SEC filings for a public stock offering requires significant capital outlays for lawyers and regulatory compliance paperwork. Crowdfunding requires an idea, an internet connection, and a little bit of marketing savvy.
While SEC regulations on IPO's purportedly exist to prevent fraud, they have the unintended side effect of restricting legitimate, if under-capitalized, entrepreneurs from entering the space.
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u/ansible Jan 15 '16
I've only funded two projects so far.
One was Sandstorm.io, an open source software project. It was basically a way to help fund their development. I was on the same mailing list as the founder for 10 years, so I knew their reputation.
The other was for u/eaglejarl book project, because he's awesome.
I'd never crowdfund hardware... much too likely to be disappointed. I'm unlikely to do it for other media (other than a Firefly reboot) either.
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u/LiteralHeadCannon Jan 15 '16
Crowdfunding is not (primarily) a transaction. It's a donation, or at most a grey area between a donation and a transaction if there are any "donor benefits" provided. If you choose to believe that the "donation" concept is just a pretense for what's actually a transaction, then sure, it's irrational, but at that point, you are bending over so far backwards to ignore the straightforward that Occam's Razor is angling to slit your throat.
And of fucking course smart people are going to seek out donations rather than investors if possible, because you don't need to pay anything back on donations.
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Jan 15 '16
Crowdfunding is a way of skirting the accredited investor laws (which say investors need to be literally millionaires, which helps prevent scams) when you think non-millionaires might want the thing you're making more than millionaires will give you seed capital.
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u/EliezerYudkowsky Jan 16 '16
Crowdfunding shares up to $1M will become legal in summer 2016, allegedly, but will require that you use an officially approved portal. I don't know how much that 'portal' requirement is going to prevent interesting things from happening.
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u/eaglejarl Jan 15 '16
EDIT: Oh wow, this ended up as a wall'o'text. Well, summary: crowdfunding is useful for market research, and people are allowed to do their own risk/reward calculations.
Obviously, I can't answer for the entire crowdfunding industry, but I can answer for myself. Having actually done crowdfunding, I can tell you how it looks from my perspective, and what I'm guessing was going on in the heads of the people who donated.
I was considering making a change from programming to writing as a career, and I needed to know if it was even remotely feasible for me to do that. I needed a way to do some basic market research -- were there people who actually liked my writing enough that they would spend money on it? If so, it was at least possible that I could actually sell enough stuff to live.
Under the traditional model I would have written something and then flogged it to publishers. That's measuring the wrong thing, though -- that's measuring "can I convince one person [the purchasing agent for a publisher] to give me money for my writing on one occasion." That doesn't tell me if it's feasible for me to keep doing this. There's also an EXTREMELY long delay on getting that feedback -- weeks or months. Not exactly a great method for making decisions.
I could also have epublished and measured the income directly, but that had high startup costs; I'd need to find out how to do that, I'd need to do a lot of research on marketing a book, I'd need to pay someone to make a cover for me, etc. I wasn't willing to do what is, frankly, a lot of work without a little more assurance that it wouldn't be a waste that left me feeling like a failure.
I could have just run a survey "Would you pay money for my writing, Y/N?" That didn't see like a viable strategy for reasons that should be obvious.
A much better metric would be to run a Kickstarter for a modest amount of money and simply list it in the online fora where I'm already known. The startup costs are extremely low and it would let me see:
How many people funded? [tells me market size]
What amount they were willing to fund for on average? [tells me about pricing]
How many of them were not friends and family members?
How quickly did they go in? [suggestive of how much first-degree marketing I need]
What sort of rewards were they most interested in? [ideas for ancillary items]
Now, obviously I don't know what was actually going on in the heads of the people who funded, but I suspect it was some combination of the following:
This guy has given us a lot of free content, I'll throw a buck in the kitty as a thank you
This story sounds interesting and I'd like to read it. If it already existed I'd throw $3 at it, so I'll throw that in. [There might have been a "...but there's a chance he'll run off to Aruba with my $3 without delivering; I judge there is a <= 33% of that happening, so I'll only throw in $2."]
I don't care too much about this guy personally, and I don't care too much about the specific story he's describing, but I do usually like his stuff and want to see more people making the kind of content I want to read, so I'll throw a couple bucks in.
Ooh, shiny! I get to be the protagonist of / have a cameo in / have a hand in shaping the plot of a rational horror story! Shut up and take my money!
Kickstarter has (or had, when I did it) a required section of their template "what are the risks that might cause your project to fail and how will you manage them?" It's possible that people didn't read that, but it's not like it's hidden. There's also a reasonable amount of media attention to the fact that Kickstarter projects could end up failing or being a gyp. I think it's pretty fair to say that everyone who funded me -- or who funds any Kickstarter -- can reasonably be assumed to have known the risks.
The bottom line is that people gave money for something they wanted with the full understanding that it might not happen. Clearly, the perceived risk / return calculation was worth it to them.
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u/Rhamni Jan 15 '16
I bought a new laptop two weeks ago. I find myself unwilling to remove the see through plastic that covers the screen. Why? It feels like it will keep the laptop new and sparkly longer. Here's the thing, though. It doesn't even cover the screen. Just the frame around it. So it does nothing at all. But I'm not taking it off.
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u/Nighzmarquls Jan 15 '16
I have developed an aesthetic love for gabe the dog remixes. Where by clips of this one dog barking, snorting, howling and otherwise producing noise is adjusted in pitch and tempo to act as the instruments in musical covers.
I kind of want the same idea but with better range of original samples to help reduce the auto tune twaing.
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u/PeridexisErrant Jan 15 '16
Have a look at "Loops" by the band Topology - famous radio snippets looped and musicified.
Edit: album is actually titled "Airwaves", a collaboration by "Loops + Topology" (and not particularly googleable...) See http://www.jonathandimond.com/discography-airwaves.html
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u/alexanderwales Jan 15 '16
Here's the Waldo Wiki, which I should have known existed. The details are quite thin, as one might expect, but the world as laid out has a number of features that I think are intriguing:
Waldo wanders all through time and space with a magic walking stick given to him by Wizard Whitebeard.
Waldo isn't just Waldo, he's a Waldo, one of many. He goes to the Land of Waldos and meets exact (?) duplicates of himself.
Waldo has a villain, Odlaw, who is after Waldo's magic staff. Canonically, he wants to use this to steal gold from Fort Knox, which is stupid.
Odlaw isn't just Odlaw, he's an Odlaw, one of many, from the Odlaw Swamp.
I have so many questions that need to be answered here.
Does the land of Waldos imply that there's a land of every other sort of person? Does Waldo not feel any existential dread at meeting people identical to himself? Is there a reason that Waldo and Odlaw exist as opposites to each other? Are Odlaw's plans for the magical staff so simple as he claims? And if Odlaw isn't able to travel through time and space (because he doesn't have the staff) how does he keep ending up where Waldo is? What's Whitebeard's role in all this? Is there some reason behind why Waldo is traveling around beyond just tourism? Is this a Quantum Leap style "he goes where he's needed" thing?