The happiest memory in my life is not one I could ever share with anyone else.  Because it isn't a moment from within my real life but instead one from within a dream, a dream that occurred almost ten years ago.

     In that dream, I spent my childhood in a quiet, abandoned town alongside someone who I seemingly knew all my life.  We would race neck-to-neck as we leapt from rooftop to rooftop, laughing maniacally as we tried to one-up each other, reaching higher and higher into the skies before eventually just taking flight altogether.  I miss having someone who flew alongside me, who raced me to the top rather than just passively followed, who shared my dreams rather than just cheered me on from afar.  I miss the rivalry, the playfulness, the genuine laughter, the look of excitement and anticipation on each other's faces, the thrill of seeing how fast and how far we could go without holding back.  If it seemed we flew too high...[More]

Just found out the #AI behind Black and White was in fact designed by @demishassabis, co-founder of @DeepMindAI. Too ironic given I often cite #videogames as most influential to my own ideas (incl. Tech Trader and Creating Sentient Artificial Intelligence). Was not expecting it to be so literal.
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Ready for rematch.


A lot of people have constantly tried to convince me multiplayer alone is a hard thing to do and VR in multiplayer is even harder, but I'm not finding that the case so far.  If anything, it's a lot of time and attention to detail, but nothing really seems to come across as overwhelming or rocket science.  I certainly wouldn't hire someone just to take care of multiplayer networking now that I know what it entails.

If anything...[More]

Transfat is supposedly banned as of 2018, yet I just saw transfat-free cookies at the store with partially hydrogenated oils in the ingredients.  I guess they just banned the name.

Finally got #UnrealEngine connecting over the internet for barebones multiplayer.  Documentation on just getting direct IP-to-IP connection w/o Steam, etc was surprisingly sparse.



Here's a quick step-by-step:
1. Go to Editor...[More]

If they're going crazy right now on how some random hashtag should be "statistically impossible," wait till two people generate the same wallet (which is not supposed to happen until the sun dies... "statistically"). #Bitcoin
https://www.coindesk.com/21e800-bitcoin-satoshi-mystery-twitter-obsessing/

Personal tennis notes for myself.  I am ambidextrous and play tennis with both hands (or two rackets), so I've had to come to my own conclusions on a lot of things.  I also trained initially under a coach who basically had me hit every shot with an extreme western(?) grip for top spin, even on serves both hands (which results in inside-out slice serve, I think - not sure what it's called), so most advice I get has often not been helpful (especially things like suggesting *not* to use such an extreme grip).  My grip is actually rotated to the point it is actually a continental grip, except I hit with the outside face instead which is the complete opposite and forces you to over-rotate to meet the ball and creates the kick in top-spin.  The hand motion without a racket looks like I am hitting the ball with the back of my hand instead of the palm.  I went through some phases in my life post-college where I was repeatedly told I was holding the racket wrong...[More]

Autumn Leaves by Drought on Mars (@droughtonmars)

Been stuck trying to figure out why #VR code in #UnrealEngine runs fine in the editor but not in a packaged build.  It turns out when packaged, the "Is Head Mounted Display Enabled?" function will not actually detect the headset until half a second or so after the game starts.  Janky way to fix this for now is to delay all VR code by a half second, but my worry is that this will vary depending on the computer we're running on.



Oh and for those who can't get even get the game to run in VR mode at all in the packaged game, you have to check "Start in VR" in the project settings.  This will still start in non-VR if no headset is connected, so it's annoying this isn't just a default option to begin with.

Tried to sign on to my remote workstation this morning only to get some error about "CredSSP encryption oracle mediation." It turns out my laptop installed Windows Updates overnight.  The below updates are what you'll want to uninstall and then restart to be able to use RDP again.  They're basically updates installed on 2018-05-09.
KB4103725
KB4103727
KB4338819 (July 2018)
KB4464218 (Sep 2018)
KB4462919 (Oct...[More]

It seems I can't get a dinner anymore without overhearing talk about blockchain. One point I keep hearing that irks me though is that government wouldn't restrict the crypto industry because of how much money they could make by letting it flourish.  That is just wrong on so many levels.  Whether a law exists or not has nothing to do with making money.  It doesn't matter if everyone got paid or the government gets a cut.  Otherwise by that logic, you might as well say the government should let drug trafficking and black markets flourish because of "how much money they could make."  It's like if a cop let someone go for stealing because the cop got a share.  As long as everyone gets a piece, what's the harm? Unfortunately this kind of thinking seems to be the norm in crypto and really just finance in general, where right or wrong is decided solely by whether money is made.

Marble Machine by Wintergatan (@wintergatan)

If a few hours on a larger planet with higher gravity can be years on Earth, then any advanced alien life is most likely from a smaller planet with much lower gravity than us, where each year for us can be millions for them.

Sound is just a concept, a label to a group of molecules moving together in tandem.  There is no "thing" called sound that actually travels.  It's just a domino effect.

After splitting my time evenly between New York, San Francisco, and LA for about three years, a semi-humorous comparison of the three cities.  I also have pseudo-memoires of my time in each written below:
- Talking to an Engineer in Silicon Valley
- Talking to Ivy Leaguers on Wall Street
- For LA, some acting instructor insisted that everything we do is because society says to, that if not for society telling us to, we wouldn't even bother going to the toilet and just sit in our own crap.  No further comment needed.

...

NYC	SF	LA
Money and 9-5 life.	Make the world a “better” place.	I just want to be “happy.”
Honor and integrity.

[More]

Another story I watched play out like a movie in my dream - ironically this one about a character dreaming...

A man lives his life through many lucid dreams.  In them, he is aware he is dreaming and can pick the setting or story he wants to live in.  One thing he can't control though is that the dreams seem to randomly end and reset.  While he keeps his memories from past dreams, no one else in the dream seems to remember.  Over time, he starts noticing a person who is always in the dream.  It starts off with them just passing each other by, walking in the same direction, or other small coincidences, but eventually they end up in the same scenes or situations as well.  She ends up being the only constant between each dream, and they share many adventures together.  However, whenever he tries to talk directly with her and figure out who she is, the dream cuts off.  It doesn't help that she also always forgets everything as well, so every...[More]

Watched Alex Garland's "Annihilation" and enjoyed seeing similar ideas as my Immortality essay about death as a programmed flaw in cells.
https://www.pftq.com/blabberbox/?page=Steps_to_Biological_Immortality

Seems all inspiring directors actually know many subjects well, as opposed to being specialized like schools keep pushing.  Just have to go down the list and look up the bios on Garland, Christopher Nolan, Hideaki Anno, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and others to find out all of them are extremely multidisciplinary.

Also interesting...[More]

Had #FLStudio freeze suddenly - I think while auto-saving. Almost lost my work but opened task manager, expanded FL, and killed just ibridge.exe, which disabled all sound but unfroze FL and allowed me to save + restart. In case this helps anyone, although it's probably case-specific.

Part of my frustration with all the focus on big data, statistics, quant, and numbers in general is that these are all forms of inductive reasoning.  Amidst all the hype around being more data driven, many seem to have to forgotten that inductive reasoning only provides an estimate of world.  It does not and cannot prove anything.  Evidence alone does not provide truth.  Data does not equal fact.

There are...[More]

After almost 7 years, there might finally be another entry to this changelog.
https://www.pftq.com/fortwars/hist.php