Are opponents autopets-style opponents (e.g. recorded and replayed so you don’t have to wait?)
I’m confused about a lot of things about the game; I guess most particularly the letter draws — do I and my opponents get the exact same sequence of letters when traded in? Do we draw from the same (replaceable? Non-replaceable?) bag?
When I went to sudden death I saw very different words — in my case, I drew a J — was that it, since my foe only used a word with a G, I was basically guaranteed a win. Was that poor word choice on his part, poor or no trading, or a different tile set the foe had?
I think it would be nice to see all the possible letters in the ‘bag’ when we’re looking at trading.
Finally, is there a time component? It would be nice to get some indications about the opponent - maybe showing where they are hovering / clicking, or a clock countdown.
There's a "bag" just like Scrabble and you're both drawing tiles from it. You can see the bag too, definitely should be visible during swapping, great call.
CPU players have heuristics and different word difficulties they play - I want to do a new post on that soon.
There's no time component... we tried that initially but felt too rushed.
Monerites - what’s the state of play for fpga mining? I did not see anything in the light documentation of RandomX that looked like it was tuned to be “awkward” for a good sized fpga.
Very sweet story. Next, invite that guy and his girlfriend and maybe someone else over to your place, or out to do something. Reciprocation matters a lot.
Yes. That is, it is if you imagine a magically good self attention mechanism that could decide what in the context to attend to at any one moment. Then it would be like working with a polymath that has incredible memory. Or bringing in that aged but still senior Chief of Staff of a large company that knows where every body was buried, and why every decision was made at the time it was made, or a professor of film that has seen and can remember thousands of films.
Shockingly, we seem to have found a self attention mechanism of that quality, it just has the sad property of growing at O(N^2) where N is the context length.
Context is the vector of tokens (numbers) that goes into the first layers of the neural network.
When you train, you teach the model to, among other things ‘self attend’ to the input vector, ultimately projecting that vector into a large embedding space.
Thought experiment —- if 99% of the time the last 100,000 digits of your vector was zero, how likely is it that you’d have high quality embedding trained by doing gradient descent on those outputs?
Agreed that Marvin would find this (and everything about Earth) ridiculous.
I propose this would make sense in the animal kingdom though; large, lumbering fatty walks along. It has big claws, but … it doesn’t look like it can be bothered to be dangerous anymore. Meanwhile a pack of hungry successful hunters walk alongside. To take this down, they will risk pretty much everything..
It’s the same story. The shareholders provide a sort of bet on if the big guy has still got it, or the risk-on hunters do.
That’s why the operational results got attention in Cohen’s letter — he’s telling Shareholders: “I turned around GameStop. I can turn this ship around, too.”
With the approval of the board of directors (in most cases), a company can simply create new shares and give them to whomever they like.
I would guess that this information will bother you.
If it helps, because many public company executives are compensated on earnings per share, most C level teams are incentivized to buy back shares, thus decreasing the denominator for the EPS calculation without changing fundamental economics of the company.
If this also bothers you, you should guess what Buffet says and thinks about those two dynamics, and then read up on it, and you will learn something interesting about public markets!
… and the stock has not dropped 39%, in fact it’s trading about where it was a year ago. Shareholders have been content to let Cohen add to the balance sheet, adjust operations and make a large move. This is one such move. And GME is up 5+% in pre trading, so shareholders are generally positive about this idea.
If Cohen's "large move" was to buy EBay, investors could have done that themselves. They would have gotten a better deal on shares in the new company. Also, they'd be up 50% over 12 months. Partly because Cohen "adding to the balance sheet" has meant dilutions, and there will be more for this deal.
Yeah this is the funny part to me - if you thought EBay was an amazing business then you could have just bought that stock months or years ago. Maybe the combined company will really be worth more than both companies individually, but for the most part this is just GameStop deciding how you should have invested your money months ago.
Technically, we only know that the marginal non-shareholder is 5% more positive about the idea, since the price represents what the marginal buyer and seller are willing to transact at. The only shareholders involved in the increase are actually selling.
I operate under the delusion that it was a $400 gamble and there is no point selling stock that I forgot I even owned at all, when it's such a small amount.
There is, literally, nothing fishy about this offer. It’s a cash and stock offer from a public company to public company shareholders. We could call the financial or shareholder benefits to ebay dubious (I don’t hold any opinion about this) but this is a very aggressive offer, and allows the chance for GME to keep some cash - if enough shareholders of ebay opt for stock, then they’ll have cash available after. Plus they’d keep whatever current net assets ebay has.
ebay was at like 100 before the offer went out, it’s trading up to 120 or so in early hours this morning, so speculators and institutional desks do not find this offer fishy or dubious - they are pricing it as likely to be pretty well received.
As a side note, one of many plays you might make in this situation is what Cohen has done here; they bought a bunch of options. Those options are now worth a lot; before the letter if it was all options, they controlled $2b of EBAY shares, today that’s $2.6b. We might imagine the options at least doubled the underlying return. The market had not priced in a rapid jump to $120 when he bought them. If the deal closes, then this will put at least another billion or two of liquid capital into GME.
TD Bank also believes it will work, i.e. return them a profit.
They've seen the detailed plans and I haven't. But they're the ones with real skin in the game. It seems like an opportunity for them to lose their shirts.
So yeah, eBay shareholders should take TD Bank's free money and run.
TD Bank believes it will make them a profit. Their interests are not those of eBay’s shareholders: if they can juice the financials long enough to sell their loan, they don’t care if the company goes bankrupt the minute after that sale closes.
I’m confused about a lot of things about the game; I guess most particularly the letter draws — do I and my opponents get the exact same sequence of letters when traded in? Do we draw from the same (replaceable? Non-replaceable?) bag?
When I went to sudden death I saw very different words — in my case, I drew a J — was that it, since my foe only used a word with a G, I was basically guaranteed a win. Was that poor word choice on his part, poor or no trading, or a different tile set the foe had?
I think it would be nice to see all the possible letters in the ‘bag’ when we’re looking at trading.
Finally, is there a time component? It would be nice to get some indications about the opponent - maybe showing where they are hovering / clicking, or a clock countdown.
Also - fun!
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