> I loved using it while watching Season 50, and it identified several interesting threads early on.
The ideas in TFA are interesting, but it’s important to keep in mind that when we watch Survivor, we’re not watching something that happened in real time and then was simply compiled together. Survivor is edited after the fact, once the winners and all the arcs of contestants are known.
And don’t get me wrong! I love watching the show even knowing that in my mind. But a model built on the edited material is necessarily biased due to the format of the show itself.
The first and third most correlated stats are completely out of the player’s control. The confessional stat is reasonable if you’re trying to guess the winner, but as a player, there’s no obvious way to control it.
Interesting to see Russel as the biggest upset. He is probably my favorite and completely changed some aspects of the game (idol hunting without a clue or game information about an idol even being present). He burned everyone, but his strategic game was flawless while his methods were still novel. Once they were known, however, his game collapsed.
Russell is famous for playing a different game than survivor, and then getting mad that he wasn't rewarded for it. His game didn't really collapse, because he was never going to win.
He was a rich asshole who personally wronged everyone on the jury in his first season, and carried by luck/ignorance/Parvati Shallow in his second season. Which stats capture that?
It’s been a very long time since I watched Survivor, but in the early seasons at least it was obvious that the producers were also manipulating the game as it went along to increase the drama.
Tribe shakeups, double/no immunity, second chances… usually just when a particular alliance seemed set on a strategy that was going to make the next few tribal councils predictable.
>Survivor is edited after the fact, once the winners and all the arcs of contestants are known.
That might make it easier for the model to pick up on clues from the editing process. Like winners get more on-screen confessionals or something like that.
> I didn't. I gave Claude Code the guest's screenshot and asked whether the problem was ours or his phone's. It answered that in twenty minutes and, while verifying the deploy, noticed the ten-second floor and kept pulling: the logs by hour, the 47 ms TCP measurement, the pg_stat_statements query, the arithmetic.
If your brain, dear reader, is aneurysm-proof, by all means go ahead and read TFA.
You won't learn much, though, but then again neither did its author.
Timely for me since I’m in the middle of Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel [0], and there’s a lot of backstory and historical context that I never learned in school. Certainly a fascinating time to read and learn about.
We've been over this for a couple decades now. The average consumer simply cannot tell the difference between lossless and compressed codecs. Even back 20-25 years ago when people carried around CD players, vanishingly few people batted an eye when those went the way of the dodo and devices started getting loaded up with shitty 128 kbps MP3s. The difference in quality mattered far less than the convenience.
There are many, many people who are even technically minded who would be surprised that their expensive AirPods Max cannot reproduce lossless audio from Apple Music when used wirelessly.
You can totally tell, at lower bitrates. People used to share songs as MP3 files using 128 kbps rates, and you could easily hear whooshy/chirpy artifacts in those at times.
Modern codec at a decent bitrate: inaudible.
Ironically, it could be the expensive DAC and headphones that helps the codec conceal itself.
That is to say, an audiophile who prefers gear that causes pleasant distortion might hear a difference through that gear, because the codec doesn't account for trying to mask its artifacts through equipment distortion (perhaps distortion in the ear itself only).
Say the codec removes something from the signal on the psycho-acoustic hypothesis that it is masked by something louder occurring close to before or after. That hypothesis is correct under hi-fi conditions, but suppose that the user's distorting tube power amp brings out that something, making it audible. Then removing it is potentially audible!
A lot of the time people were sharing transcodes because they didn't know any better. Same thing happens for video content today, e.g. most video on X looks like 240p because of it.
This is a hard truth many wish to deny. An article published every month decrying the poor habits or lack of good habits of children, with a not-so-subtle implication that it is the fault of the children themselves.
It is 100% true that "you have to model the behavior of X" to your kids, otherwise all bets are off and headlines like this should not be surprising in the least.
https://youtu.be/Hm3mDatFpNE?is=vKkBJs6XsypuD833
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