Agreed, I'm consistently inconsistent. I'll lift for a while, then mess around and not lift for a while.
Each and every time I've gone back to consistent barbell lifting it would only take me a few months to get back to higher numbers I've run into in the past. This is part of the reason why I love weightlifting so much.
I used to be an avid runner, and not running after a long while has made it much more difficult. Lifting is always easy to get back into (at least for me).
I'm not a huge smart home guy. I just have a doorbell camera, a camera, a smart plug, a smart switch, and a light bulb - all running through an Apple TV.
When I originally bought my home I was thinking of making everything smart, but I realized all of this was enough for me.
That being said - I'm absolutely STOKED that there are smart thermostatic radiator valves.
I will say for OP though - it may be worth having an expert come in and check on your radiators to help balance your system (or you could do this yourself).
Checking to see if radiators have the correct pitch, if you have the right sized radiator for your home, if you have the right pipes insulated, etc.
My impression was that if you get all the balancing right - you won't really need to fiddle with the valves again (unless of course you want to change the temperature in a room versus keeping it consistent).
I've also heard people say that it's generally a good idea to not have an adjustable radiator valve with the radiators by your thermostat - I think because when set wrong your thermostat will trigger and turn off the boiler.
I've been meaning to rebalance my home, with my first goal being to adjust the valves closest to the radiator so that they fill up the slowest.
We're in different countries so obviously you won't be able to use the contractors I used - but mine were wonderful. Their specialty is steam heat - nothing else. To get a new boiler they had me measure all of my radiators and say what type each one was. This helps figure out the correct boiler size, since most houses don't have the correct ones.
For anyone that used rye, it's worth noting that the creator of rye recommends using uv. Also, rye is going to be continually updated to just interface with uv until rye can be entirely replaced by uv.
My first career was at a fintech company that sold auditing data. All of our clients were accountants, auditors, lawyers, etc.
Every single person worked in Excel. It didn't matter how old our website was, how crappy our code was - all that matter was that we generated a CSV.
I used Excel often - I think many people underestimate how powerful Excel is and how much of finance / auditing relies upon it.
My co-workers used to joke that the world runs on Excel. That some of the most important economic documents are probably some .xlsx file named "economy-v3" that people send back and forth over email.
A fond memory I had as a teenager was making a potato cannon with my brother and dad.
The cannon was in a J shape, where the end of the J had a cap for spraying in fuel - like propane or hairspray. Near the end of the J shape we cut a hole to put in an elongated lighter.
This went against the design of the video we watched - the video suggested taking the ignition stuff out of the lighter and making it part of the canon. Cutting a hole and just gluing a lighter was the easiest option... but also caused a lot of problems - namely with ignition.
During the building of this, right as my mom came home, I looked down the PVC pipe (there was nothing in it thankfully) and asked my brother to click the lighter so that I could check to see if it was lighting or not. My father was not in the room.
This ignited the residual fuel in the pipe and burned ALL of the eyelashes off of my left eye. My father came running in and started to scold us, and then my mom came in the room asking what happened. We all hid everything, because my dad didn't want to get into trouble either.
We shot many potatoes that summer, and the whole experience made me realize how useful eyelashes are.
Slay the Spire is my favorite video game of all time. I have 400+ hours on my Switch, 100+ hours on my phone, and 100+ hours on my PC. I'm obsessed.
I think creating an AI for this game is quite difficult, but I'd love a chat bot to discuss decisions with - especially a bot that could take in the current state.
It isn't enough to just take in the cards, but you should also take in relics, the counters on the relics, the potions, and what ascension you are at.
For example, you may have the cards to kill an enemy now - but it may be more beneficial to wait - either to increment the counter on a relic, or to draw a card that does an effect on a fatal hit.
The main thing that’s fun about these games is figuring out how to gain insights about how to play better. I think offloading the theorizing and problem solving in any way would make the game less fun. See also: most (not all) use of strategy guides and walkthroughs
I 100% agree. At A20 I constantly find myself in situations where I have to pick a card I'd never pick because it is my best option at that time. This leads to me learning more strategies and insights.
For example, in a previous A20 run I had I took Metallicize as Ironclad late in Act 1 because I was facing the Guardian and I didn't encounter other good block plans. Prior to that, I tended to avoid Metallicize to save spots for other block cards instead as it was too slow. This situation made me realize that having a Metallicize in your deck isn't that bad, especially if you need block NOW and you can counteract having it in your deck later on with draw/exhaust.
Metallicize is also strong because Ironclad has many powerful strategies that want a very thin deck - two dropkicks go infinite if you can get your deck small enough. Metallicize adds a solid block strategy to any deck and doesn't increase the effective deck size because powers don't really take a spot.
> For example, you may have the cards to kill an enemy now - but it may be more beneficial to wait - either to increment the counter on a relic, or to draw a card that does an effect on a fatal hit.
How is this any different than chess?
Solving this using a LLM is novel and interesting, but I'd feel confident in claiming that writing an AI bot for STS using "classic" AI methods would be pretty easy, actually.
I believe chess evaluation functions are always the difference between your opponent and you - i.e. it's "the same" to take a piece or avoid them taking yours. You must simply find any path to check.
STS, on the other hand, is about accumulating some resources while spending others. Which resources you want to spend and which you want to accumulate depend a great deal on your character and build. Skillful play often involves recognizing which resources you would benefit from losing at the current stage of the game. Training is also made much more difficult by how long you need to go to determine if you are on a winnable path. Power spikes are non-linear and many deck compositions would optimally play in a 'losing' way for a certain period of time before getting the pieces they need.
The game tree is both broader and deeper in Slay, so much harder to do tree search. Also very irregular; in chess you have very few situational decisions (eg en passant, castling) whereas many decisions in Slay are one-off (events) that are quite hard to weigh the EV. Finally you don’t have perfect information in Slay, which makes things WAY harder.
You’d probably want to look at Go AI instead of Chess, but better would be the Dota / StarCraft AIs. Very different architecture.
There's just a lot more variability due to the sheer number of "pieces" and the fact that you can combo moves... but maybe it's just a matter of scaling
There are more possible moves to consider in STS than Go? I've dumped a hundred hours into the former and thousands into the latter and I wouldn't agree.
Almost all the games you play on PCs have much bigger state spaces than Go.
To give an intuitve example on why StS's state space is large, imaging these two situations: In both case you have the exact same map, same deck, same HP, same potions and same relics. The only difference is in one case you have 100 gold and in the other you have 101 gold.
They're still two different states. And all the following states are different.
The size of space state doesn't necessarily translate to how difficult the game feels. Foundamentally Go has zero randomness while StS is full of randomness, so it's a little apple to orange.
Absolutely. Assuming you don't crack the deck prng, you have to furcate the decision tree for every possible order of cards whenever you shuffle the deck - that quickly gets to a number of states larger than atoms in the observable universe.
This also actually modifies strategy - top player Jorbs notoriously builds massive spreadsheets to crack tough decisions on important runs and deck order is huge for that.
To echo the other commenters - yup, there are so many possible moves in the game.
For example, there is a relic that gives you the status "Intangible" every 6 turns, and then it resets. "Intangible" makes it so that every incoming damage is only 1 damage point. This relic has a counter and the number of turns it counts exists out of individual fights. So for example, you could be on your 1st turn in a fight, but to the relic it could be your 3rd.
At first, you might think to yourself that you should stall each fight long enough where you can end the fight on the relic counter being 5 - so that any next encounter you start will be your 6th turn to the relic - meaning you'll be intangible at the beginning of the fight.
But - there are situations where you might want the counter to be at 4, so that you will be intangible not on the 1st turn of a fight but the 2nd. For example, there are some enemies that don't do damage on turn 1, or do more damage on turn 2. There are situations where you want the counter to be at 3, 2, etc.
To add onto this - it can be VERY difficult to stall a fight such that you get the relic to the number you want and you kill the enemy you are facing on that turn.
There are so many decisions to be made surrounding this one relic. What I've described here doesn't really cover all the theory surrounding it.
You can find similar decision paths and theory around every card, relic, potion, enemy, boss, etc. in the game.
It's one of the many reasons why I love this game so, so much.
I have up Dota 2 the day my son was born. Probably one of the best decisions of my life .. ! I probably have more hours in Dota 1 than 2, but these thoughts could drive me crazy.
(more for practical reasons at the time, suddenly I just couldn't devote 30-60+ minutes at a time to a game, because babies scream at all the hours and anything I could do to help my wife out was the least I could do!)
> I'm very excited about STS 2.
citybuilder folk are meant to be all about Manor Lords this week! :)
At some point I stopped playing it (after, well, 100s of hours), because somehow I felt that its only getting harder without me getting any reward outside of the raw challenge itself - which then feels just like working.
Is there anything I didn't really notice that feels rewarding on higher levels?
I like that it requires a small amount of mental energy to perform the 'optimal' play in every situation. The obvious example is doing basic arithmetic to calculate whether you should block more or attack.
At first, the game feels like it's deterministic with sprinkles of randomness, however, at high ascension levels it is the opposite - random chance until you get a broken deck that makes winning trivial. It's a slot machine.
As the other commenter said, it actually isn't like a slot machine.
I recommend watching runs from players that are going for win streaks. Many of the runs in win streaks are not slot machine decks. Going for a win streak forces you to take cards that you otherwise wouldn't have.
Watching runs in general will also show you that players win without broken decks. It's just that videos with the highest views tend to have broken decks because those are the most entertaining.
For me, the reward is having a deck that works well enough to tackle anything thrown at you.
This means many different things, but basically amounts to having the right amount of cards or relics that give you scalability for your attacks, a plan to mitigate attacks (with statuses or blocks), and a plan to handle beating the heart.
After a certain point, grabbing cards to beat the heart leads to beating other things easily - including Sword and Shield and the double Act 3 boss.
Funnily enough, I have the opposite problem. I'm often building decks that can beat everything easily except for the heart.
> Is there anything I didn't really notice that feels rewarding on higher levels?
The thought that you put into strategy matters more when the game is harder.
Personally, I don't find it fun past ascension 17 but if I play at a0 it's a bit mindless which is not as fun anymore.
No, the point of the ascension mechanic is that it gets harder and harder so that you need to play more and more optimally to have a chance at winning, there aren’t any benefits past ascension 1.
If you aren’t the sort of person who wants a harder challenge just for the sake of challenging yourself, then there’s no point yeah.
I'm currently trying to beat A20+heart with the four characters, then I will lose interest. I've only beat it with Watcher so far. Working on Defect now, then Ironclad, then Silent (ugh). Watching Baalord's videos on youtube really helped.
I've been using Rye[0] lately, which has been pretty good. It's really just a wrapper around a bunch of underlying tools - it's nice to not have to worry about those and let Rye do it's thing.
All that being said, the creator of Rye is 100% cognizant of that XKCD comic, this [1] is a nice read.
I'm not super well versed in Python tooling at all. I've had to work a lot in Python in the past 6+ months, and I become super confused when I tried making a Python project in my spare time.
I settled on Rye because it just seemed to be the easiest to use.
I'd love to try this out, but I'm unsure how it would work with a language that has such different grammar from English. Would it just be vocabulary then? Or would it just be entire sentences in the language to accommodate for the grammar, and then would it switch to English?
Tagalog (a language from the Philippines) has many sentences that are the opposite order than in English.
For example, in English you'd say "The house is beautiful", but in Tagalog you'd say "Maganda ang bahay" which translates to "Beautiful the house" [0]. There's another free grammar book for Tagalog as well [1].
Each and every time I've gone back to consistent barbell lifting it would only take me a few months to get back to higher numbers I've run into in the past. This is part of the reason why I love weightlifting so much.
I used to be an avid runner, and not running after a long while has made it much more difficult. Lifting is always easy to get back into (at least for me).
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