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Sounds cool, I'll give the company a Google


Tbh, sewing machines aren't too difficult in the first instance - straight stitch, zigzag stitch, pedal for starting and stopping. Any kind of maintenance is beyond me, though, way too many moving parts for my liking.

I had a big RS problem a couple of years back... I'd played it in my youth (I would've been... eight? Maybe nine?), and revisited it out of 'nostalgia' shortly after I finished my A-Levels. In my third year of Uni I had a nightmare about no longer being ranked for my Fletching skill, and realised it was probably time to kick the habit.


Now three years clean, by which I mean "I find other ways to waste my time on the Internet".

I'm not an overly-sentimental person, and usually err on the side of "marriage is nothing but a tax arrangement", but these are GORGEOUS??? Like literally the most adorable thing I've seen all day. Congrats on making the wedding pretty!

My gran was a professional tailor, and made all her own clothes (and I mean ALL of them). I inherited all of her sewing gear when she passed away over ten years ago, but have just started to get back into it.


Her sewing machine is a serious piece of kit though. If I discover a quarter of its functions, I'll consider myself a success!


The purse is very pretty - what kind of kit was it?

We're not totally obsolete just yet, yay!

We could do a mini game-jam?

Keep the chain going or Ray Tomlinson, inventer of email, will d- oh wait nevermind.

TOO SOON.

We should forward news of his death to 10 people. It's what he would have wanted.

Flash fiction is a good call, though I want a ban on old fashioned fonts in publicity material to make sure nobody can read the F as an S. That would go badly.

I would clean up at competitive slash siction

I wonder if anyone's ever made a guide to Britain's second best second hand bookshops.

We should probably set a termination clause for this kind of recursive silliness, before we start on the databases.

I'd maybe be down for chess or Catan. I am also down for competitive Cards Against Humanity, but that's a less serious suggestion


As for writing, maybe flash fiction (generally accepted as 1000 words, can be even more constrained) around a theme?

I wonder if anyone's ever written a guide to the UK's best second hand bookshops...

Seems like a job for Google. And if they haven't, I see an opportunity...

In the efforts of clarity and in an act to 'show all my cards', I'm going to explain the two problems I had with the image. I know one to be subjective, and that policing on subjective opinion will always leave people upset one way or the other, but I think the other can be something fairly universally agreed upon.


My first problem, the subjective one, is that I personally found it offensive. I don't think serious, violent crime (rape, assault, murder, etc.) has much place being a punchline. But, like I said, this is totally subjective - everyone has a different threshold on what is 'offensive' and how far a boundary can be pushed before it goes too far. For me, it was too far. It was, at the very least, incredibly tasteless.


I think the more common problem, insofar as 'inappropriate content' goes, is that we are a community. For certain, seeing such images come up makes me feel on the outside of that community (which is, again subjective) - I think the objective bit comes in that we shouldn't, and I believe for the most part don't, want to present that kind of image to the outsider. We all want to enrich this community, right? We actively want more members, more contribution, more of that sense of camaraderie (although, I suppose, what kind of contribution you want to make and what kind of community you want this to be is a strong indicator of which side you'll take in this debate).


For the second reason, I think the mod was right to step in. I think I should make clear once again that "I'm offended" is not the same as "it's offensive" - however just because I was offended does not mean that the mod should or shouldn't have stepped in. They *should* have stepped in - because it's their responsibility to help enrich the community.


As a side note, the issue of free speech goes both ways - just as you have every right to post whatever you want, other people have the right to not listen. Although, I do think the mod should have contacted the poster directly and explained exactly why they were taking the action they did.

For starcraft at least, I think it depends on whether when programming an AI they account for every human move or if the AI can learn on the fly what to expect. I frequently watch the tournaments and follow the pro scene and the pro players make an educated guess on what style of play their opponent is going for based on sometimes the first building built. It takes a combination of knowing what the player has done before and which matchups they've been practicing. An AI would have to have a library of past games for their human opponent and be able to make a judgement call on when a timing attack would be most effective or who to rush against and who to turtle up against.

I'm actually working on something that might be able to do this. Not for Starcraft because that armadillo's complicated, at least not yet anyway.


But yeah, it's a well-known fact (at least amongst AI specialists and games developers) that AI for things like FPS games start off near-perfect and you have to make them stupider until you get to a point where they're beatable.


As for things that learn from other players... they're only as good as the people they've played. And the efficiency of the algorithm used to train them/perform the move calculation.

If I'd seen this sooner, I would've listened.


Because yay, that's two of us to have been on Burn FM!