Shadows of Doubt

An alternate universe corpo city filled with generated crimes to solve. You get a case board, scan for fingerprints/footprints, talk to witnesses, look up sales records, check out cctv cameras among loads of other stuff. All of it is happening live in the city - everyone has schedules, an apartment, a workplace, an inventory, an email account, a blood type, a shoe size… - so that murder/kidnapping/robbery literally happened in the game while you were crawling through vents looking for an envelope with sensitive documents that someone asked you to steal. Just yesterday I got to a crime scene super quickly and caught a murderer leaving the scene of the crime with the murder weapon on their person. There are deus ex style body augmentations too.

One of my favourite cases was a woman who got murdered. I had the husband pegged for it but couldn’t pin it on him. His fingerprints were all over the place and he was on the cctv but they lived together so that wasn’t really evidence. The case went cold. A couple of days later the HUSBAND is murdered and I’m stumped. Just go looking for anything related to the guy and hope I stumble across something useful by accident. So eventually I break into the husband’s boss’ apartment and find a bouquet of flowers with a note for the boss from the husband. It turns out the husband is having a secret gay affair with his boss. The boss kills the wife so he can be with the husband. Husband doesn’t want to be with a murderer I guess so the boss kills him too!

It’s occasionally a little buggy still. I was supposed to follow someone, take a photo of a briefcase handoff, follow the recipient and get the briefcase back and have done this type of case before. Yesterday though the handoff never happened and I waited with the original owner for a few in game hours. My guess is the recipient is dead or was someone I knocked out earlier while I was solving another case and I messed up their schedule.

I don’t have thumbnails set on my phone so I only ever saw the full image. That said, I looked at it without my glasses with my arm outstretched and I’m going to guess they saw either buttcrack or titcleft

Yes I did mix up the order of the words cause of poor sleep. Thanks for correcting

My favourite language joke:

What’s the difference between a cat and a comma?

One’s got claws at the end of its paws, the other’s a pause at the end of a clause

*fixed order

No jesus was not a fuck baby, Mary probably was. Immaculate conception is not the same as virgin conception. Immaculate means God did not curse her for the sins of Adam and Eve (which God had previously done with everyone else), which is usually called “original sin”

This particular flavour of survivorship bias is also called the anthropic principle

In Ireland it’s Éire, while Iceland is An Íoslainn, so it doesn’t really work 😕

If we know the values of ln(-1)¹⁰ and pi¹⁰ we hypothetically could calculate their divided result as -1 instead of using strict logic, but it is missing a few steps. Moreover logs of negative numbers just end up with an imaginary component anyway so there isn’t really any progress to be made on that front. Typing ln(-1)¹⁰ into my scientific calculator just yields i¹⁰pi¹⁰, (I’m guessing stored rather than calculated? Maybe calculated with built in Euler) so the result of division is just i¹⁰ anyway and we’re back where we started.

Nope, everything they said is well established and correct

Truly it’s a hard game even if there were no cylons. Humans rarely win in my games. Alas, it’s out of print 😭. Its spiritual successor Unfathomable seems good as well, though I’ve only played it once

Then you discover the board game and it’s a whole new level of great

I have a colleague who is trying hard to do it, but it isn’t good enough yet fortunately. I point out as many issues as I can to deter him but it ain’t working.

No thank you, I don’t want to imagine this please

I have seen 1 called a trivial factor, but I have never seen it excluded entirely from a factor list: perhaps it’s a cultural thing like how 0 is/isn’t a natural number depending on where you are from.

On further research it seems like my earlier critique about requiring exactly two prime factors is a little off in any case, as it would exclude e.g. 4 (which only has one prime factor). It seems like semi primes must be a product of exactly two prime numbers so I think any definition based on number of factors is doomed to over- or under- define these semi primes as they could have either three or four factors.

Well primes themselves are the product of exactly two (natural) factors, only one of which is prime, so we need to specify semi primes as having exactly two prime factors.

*numbers that are the product of exactly two prime factors

With the way multiverses are so in right now, more likely he’ll reappear as Hawk from Titans

I like the idea that time machines are like phones in that you need a receiver to pick up the signal. A consequence is that you can only travel back to the time that the machine was turned on.

https://youtu.be/ia4YrCShFrQ?si=w5OYNEaNRpG8QvMZ for reference

In practice, this makes these networks very resilient to fraud.

Could like, 51% of the owners just coordinate to kind of, do a fraud?

Sybil attacks sound like the kind of thing you’re talking about. I don’t have the expertise to go into it, but one person (or a group) creates lots of nodes and uses that influence to do bad things to the network, potentially including fraud. Or as you suggest, legitimate users can just coordinate to do whatever they wanted (see ethereum vs ethereum classic if you want a chuckle).

I want to make a note that the networks are only resilient to a specific type of fraud - people trying to enter data in a way that doesn’t meet the criteria of the system. That’s all well and good for wallet to wallet transactions, but when you have transactions going off chain (like buying something, trading for other kinds of coins, doing anything with crypto exchanges), there are still plenty of other kinds of fraud that are possible and happen all the time, because while the chain is fairly trustworthy, nothing else about the system is. Most kinds of fraud involve doing things that technically you have permission to do, because you lied to people to access their password or promised them bigger returns in the future or missold a product or service etc and all of that is still possible under crypto. In some cases crypto is more vulnerable to these things because of having no central authority or regulator or laws or whatever.