unfortunately the six active players bit is a joke

this is one of the wildest articles I’ve ever read

yah there we go. gauss-jordan to reduce to rref

on a side note, I notice this passage in the review:

Wolfram refers incessantly to his “discovery” that simple rules can produce complex results. Now, the word “discovery” here is legitimate, but only in a special sense. When I took pre-calculus in high school, I came up with a method for solving systems of linear equations, independent of my textbook and my teacher: I discovered it. My teacher, more patient than I would be with adolescent arrogance, gently informed me that it was a standard technique, in any book on linear algebra, called “reduction to Jordan normal form”, after the man who discovered it in the 1800s. Wolfram discovered simple rules producing complexity in just the same way that I discovered Jordan normal form.

this is certainly mistaken. I think the author or teacher must have meant RREF or something to that effect, not Jordan normal form

http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/

horrifying

that’s quite appealing to me ngl

introduced the mtg players to Ed zitron

https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/1gdd083/magic_the_gathering_is_an_example_of_the_rot/

There have been people making posts like this for years.

🤔

if you live near rhode island hit me up to play haha

netrunner is super not exploitative though!! also god it’s just so very cool and well designed

for every one of me that shit my pants the AGI is simulating ten million of me that didn’t, so on average i’m doing pretty ok

too many banned cards to list. the errata’d mechanic is companion. the busted commander card is nadu. the format dissolving card is jeweled lotus. the sticker card is a sort of nameless goblin sometimes referred to as “sticker goblin”

Genuine question: is the fact that banned cards skew towards the newest sets a new phenomenon in Magic?

yes. if I made a chart by year of the number of cards banned, before recent times almost all years would have zero bans, and then there would be big spikes in years where they fucked up. in recent years you’d still have the huge spikes, but you’d also have a substantial base rate of bans.

Knowing the kind of shit that goes on in YGO, Magic’s trajectory seems downright conservative. Then again, a comment Iheard about that game recently that resonated with me was “the only thing more intricate than the OTK combos in this game is the fucking banlist”.

this comparison doesn’t really work because YGO’s typical formats are eternal (for readers: the standard format in mtg includes only relatively recent cards; this keeps the power levels in a place lots of people like. in yu-gi-oh the entire history of cards is allowed). mtg does have eternal formats, but they’ve pretty much been priced to death, so they’re not really in the conversation anymore. but if you include them, you see a playstyle and level of craziness that’s very similar to what YGO offers.

I might be an outsider, but I quite like the special format cards.

I like those too. they’re kind of the opposite of the licensed ip content in that they’re creative, cute and clever

I don’t doubt that the game has enshittified, but for this one I might hazard a “it took you until now to realize”?

https://awful.systems/comment/5154463

i mean i describe it as a gacha game in the third sentence, i’m pretty clear about that. mtg has always been exploitative, they’re just taking it to another level now

yeah it’s comical. again, i haven’t played in ages, but from my understanding the worst part is that the usual combos are not perfectly guaranteed, meaning everyone has to sit there watching you flip over the top card of your deck like 40+ times before finding out if you fizzled or not

https://scryfall.com/card/mh3/193/nadu-winged-wisdom

apply shuko etc as needed

my condolences on the likely death threats. I’ve been there before and it sucks

I heard openai execs are so scared of how powerful the next model will be that they’re literally shitting themselves every day thinking about it. they don’t even clean it up anymore, the openai office is one of the worst smelling places on earth

they wish this technology didn’t exist

this is supposed to be invalidating, but like… yes? what’s wrong with that?