作者逆向工程了《上古卷轴》天际(Skyrim)中扒窃成功率的计算公式,发现其中一个名为“Keymaster”的扒窃技能加成(描述为“偷钥匙几乎必定成功”)在实际数学上没有任何用处。 这是少数玩家群体里对游戏底层机制做认真剖析的内容,有信息增量(公式+结论),也容易在老玩家、游戏 mod 圈里引发讨论。
作者回顾自己大学时期关于经典“Ride the Bus”纸牌游戏的一篇概率分析,在重新查找原文时补上了之前遗漏的中位数结果,并顺手修复了早期模拟代码中的几处错误。 更关键的是,作者推导出了该游戏获胜概率的闭式解(closed form)。这是一篇数学爱好者向的个人博客更新,信息增量在于“闭式解”这一结论,适合对组合概率、随机过程或游戏数学感兴趣的读者。
For my 400 Divisadero series and to help track down some stolen property from my girlfriend I needed to figure out who owned a given building in SF. Here's the process I followed, using 740 Valencia S...
I wrote up a dump of all Venmo deeplinks back in 2017. I was recently looking through backlinks to the blog and saw this StackOverflow post trying to open a user's account based on their username. Fig...
Reverse engineering apps is made a lot easier with the source code, but apps distributed through the App store are encrypted with FairPlay encryption, making decompilation much harder. Our salvation l...
While Elon's purchase of Twitter knocked me off the platform for a bit, I returned for bad political takes, mediocre housing takes, good energy takes, and a surfeit of memes. A tweet recently caught m...
I will be the first to admit that I'm sometimes bad at responding to texts — but I'm not 112-unread-messages bad, as the notification badge on my Mac makes me out to be. It sits there mocking me, over...
If there's one thing that I've internalized from years of work, it's that if you do something twice, write it down. I reference stuff I wrote 6 years ago daily. I'm now hitting a lot of the same quest...
I have Captcha set up for comments on this blog but stuff can still get through. While Anchor became defunct in 2020 maybe there's someone else out there still using it who would benefit from this (an...
I am doing a series of blog posts diving into 400 Divisadero Street, a defunct car wash and gas station in San Francisco that they're trying to turn into apartments — and have been for over a decade w...
All of my websites and projects run off a single 18GB EC2 instance. This is cheap, but means that I do something stupid in one directory I can cause "No space left on device" errors when rendering the...
I have a penchant for having way too many tabs of Chrome open, and even though I keep buying more RAM I occasionally am still forced to interact with this screen, informing me that I have run out of m...
I am unfortunately spending more and more of my time interacting with LLMs through terminal interfaces. While the sentient silicon churns through thousands of tokens I find myself scrolling short-form...