Me: Why Haven't I Bought This Game Yet

Personality; not just for humans

We usually see “elephants”—or “wolves” or “killer whales” or “chimps” or “ravens” and so on—as interchangeable representatives of their kind. But the instant we focus on individuals, we see an elephant named Echo with exceptional leadership qualities; we see wolf 755 struggling to survive the death of his mate and exile from his family; we see a lost and lonely killer whale named Luna who is humorous and stunningly gentle. We see individuality. It’s a fact of life. And it runs deep. Very deep.

Individuality is the frontier of understanding non-human animals. But for decades, the idea was forbidden territory. Scientists who stepped out of bounds faced withering scorn from colleagues. Jane Goodall experienced just that. After her first studies of chimpanzees, she enrolled as a doctoral student at Cambridge. There, as she later recalled in National Geographic, “It was a bit shocking to be told I’d done everything wrong. Everything. I shouldn’t have given them names. I couldn’t talk about their personalities, their minds or their feelings.” The orthodoxy was: those qualities are unique to humans.

But these decades later we are realizing that Goodall was right; humans are not unique in having personalities, minds and feelings. And if she’d given the chimpanzees numbers instead of names?—their individual personalities would still have shined.

“If ever there was a perfect wolf,” says Yellowstone biologist Rick McIntyre, “It was Twenty-one. He was like a fictional character. But real.” McIntyre has watched free-living wolves for more hours than anyone, ever.

Even from a distance Twenty-one’s big-shouldered profile was recognizable. Utterly fearless in defense of his family, Twenty-one had the size, strength, and agility to win against overwhelming odds. “On two occasions, I saw Twenty-one take on six attacking wolves—and rout them all,” Rick says. “Watching him felt like seeing something that looked supernatural. Like watching a Bruce Lee movie. I’d be thinking, ‘A wolf can’t do what I am watching this wolf do.’” Watching Twenty-one, Rick elaborates, “was like watching Muhammad Ali or Michael Jordan—a one-of-a-kind talent outside of ‘normal.’”

Twenty-one was a superwolf. Uniquely, he never lost a fight and he never killed any defeated opponent. And yet Twenty-one was “remarkably gentle” with the members of his pack. Immediately after making a kill he would often walk away and nap, allowing family members who’d had nothing to do with the hunt eat their fill.

One of Twenty-one’s favorite things was to wrestle little pups. “And what he really loved to do,” Rick adds, “was pretend to lose. He just got a huge kick out of it.” Here was this great big male wolf. And he’d let some little wolf jump on him and bite his fur. “He’d just fall on his back with his paws in the air,” Rick half-mimes. “And the triumphant-looking little one would be standing over him with his tail wagging.

“The ability to pretend,” Rick adds, “shows that you understand how your actions are perceived by others. I’m sure the pups knew what was going on, but it was a way for them to learn how it feels to conquer something much bigger than you. And that kind of confidence is what wolves need every day of their hunting lives.”

In Twenty-one’s life, there was a particular male, a sort of roving Casanova, a continual annoyance. He was strikingly good-looking, had a big personality, and was always doing something interesting. “The best single word is ‘charisma,’” says Rick. “Female wolves were happy to mate with him. People absolutely loved him. Women would take one look at him—they didn’t want you to say anything bad about him. His irresponsibility and infidelity; it didn’t matter.”

One day, Twenty-one discovered this Casanova among his daughters. Twenty-one ran in, caught him, biting and pinning him to the ground. Other pack members piled in, beating Casanova up. “Casanova was also big,” Rick says, “but he was a bad fighter.” Now he was totally overwhelmed; the pack was finally killing him.

“Suddenly Twenty-one steps back. Everything stops. The pack members are looking at Twenty-one as if saying, ‘Why has Dad stopped?’” The Casanova wolf jumped up and—as always—ran away.

After Twenty-one’s death, Casanova briefly became the Druid pack’s alpha male. But, Rick recalled: “He doesn’t know what to do, just not a leader personality.” And although it’s very rare, his year-younger brother deposed him. “His brother had a much more natural alpha personality.” Casanova didn’t mind; it meant he was free to wander and meet other females. Eventually Casanova and several young Druid males met some females and they all formed the Blacktail pack. “With them,” Rick remembers, “he finally became the model of a responsible alpha male and a great father.”

The personality of a wolf ‘matriarch’ also helps shape the whole pack. Wolf Seven was the dominant female in her pack. But you could watch Seven for days and say, ‘I think she’s in charge,’ because she led subtly, by example. Wolf Forty, totally different; she led with an iron fist. Exceptionally aggressive, Forty had done something unheard of: actually deposed her own mother.

For three years, Forty ruled the Druid pack tyrannically. A pack member who stared a moment too long would find herself slammed to the ground, Forty’s bared canines poised above her neck. Yellowstone research director Doug Smith recalls, “Throughout her life she was fiercely committed to always having the upper hand, far more so than any other wolf we’ve observed.” Forty heaped her worst abuse on her same-age sister. Because this sister lived under Forty’s brutal oppression, she earned the name Cinderella.

One year Cinderella split from the main pack and dug a den to give birth. Shortly after she finished the den, her sister arrived and delivered one of her infamous beatings. Cinderella just took it, as always. No one ever saw any pups at that den.

The next year, Cinderella, Forty, and a low-ranking sister all gave birth in dens dug several miles apart. New wolf mothers nurse and guard constantly; they rely on pack members for food. That year, few pack members visited the bad-tempered alpha. Cinderella, though, found herself well assisted at her den by several sisters.

Six weeks after giving birth, Cinderella and several attending pack members headed out, away from her den—and stumbled into the queen herself. Forty immediately attacked Cinderella with was, even for her, exceptional ferocity. She then turned her fury onto another of her sisters who’d been accompanying Cinderella, giving her a beating too. Then as dusk settled in, Forty headed toward Cinderella’s den. Only the wolves saw what happened next, but Doug Smith and Rick McIntyre pieced together what went down.

Unlike the previous year, this time Cinderella wasn’t about to remain passive or let her sister reach her den and her six-week-old pups. Near the den a fight erupted. There were at least four wolves, and Forty had earned no allies among them.

At dawn, Forty was down by the road covered in blood, and her wounds included a neck bite so bad that her spine was visible. Her long-suffering sisters had, in effect, cut her throat. She died. It was the only time researchers have ever known a pack to kill its own alpha. Forty was an extraordinarily abusive individual. The sisters’ decision, outside the box of wolf norms, was: mutiny. Remarkable.

But Cinderella was just getting started. She adopted her dead sister’s entire brood. And she also welcomed her low-ranking sister and her pups. And so that was the summer that the Druid Peak pack raised an unheard-of twenty-one wolf pups together in a single den.

Out from under Forty’s brutal reign, Cinderella developed into the pack’s finest hunter. She later went on to become the benevolent matriarch of the Geode Creek pack. Goes to show: a wolf, as many a human, may have talents and abilities that wither or flower depending on which way their luck breaks.

“Cinderella was the finest kind of alpha female,” Rick McIntyre says. “Cooperative, returning favors by sharing with the other adult females, inviting her sister to bring her pups together with her own while also raising her vanquished sister’s pups—. She set a policy of acceptance and cohesion.” She was, Rick says, “perfect for helping everyone get along really well.”

(This piece is adapted from Carl Safina’s most recent book, Beyond Words; What Animals Think and Feel, which will is newly out in paperback)

Report: Hacking Crews are all APT now

Report: Hacking Crews are all APT now

  The tactics of cyber criminal hacking crews are indistinguishable from those of sophisticated, state sponsored “advanced persistent threat” groups, the firm FireEye said in its most recent M-Trends report. In-brief:The tactics of cyber criminal hacking crews are indistinguishable from those of sophisticated, state sponsored “advanced persistent threat” groups, the firm FireEye said in its most…

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ive got an affinity for really zoomed in faces as reaction images

Some satisfying codes

I hope you accept imgur galleries :) !

http://imgur.com/a/MYdSP

I’m writing a scene manager for my java game engine, using LWJGL3 with modern OpenGL. This is some methods from the parenting system. And nope. JAVA ISN’T SLOW (well, when you know how to use it properly).

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Love it. More so for the colours. :) xx

VERY IMPORTANT PSA

DO NOT DELETE SYSTEM32!!! There is a post going around saying it’s a virus from 4chan but that is NOT true! It is a part of the windows operating system and if you delete it your computer will be rendered useless. So please, do not reblog the post and don’t follow it’s instructions!

Info about System32 so you know I’m serious here [x]

A software problem which has already been solved, but not everywhere.

In the early days of the WWW, some websites were a lot better than others. Some places you would fill out a form and it would log you out and forget your stuff; the meaning of icons varied across the web; ….

Nowadays, there are a lot of Standards. There’s a certain way things generally work. Visual cues consistently mean the same thing and work the way I, as a semi-daft user with a lisp and a peg leg, would expect it to, without any further thought or research.

How did this wonderful increase in usability and optimisation happen? I think it’s due to JQuery.

For those who don’t know, JQuery is a bunch of software libraries that do common tasks like “initiate twitter-like pagination” or “build a form” the right way. In other words, some people who had seen a lot of good and bad choices, wrote some functions that any other programmer can use, and wrote down all the best 500-line programs so that other people could do them with just 1 line. (If you still don’t understand what I mean by a “library”, look at the third or fourth lesson on an introduction to C++ tutorial – somewhere in the beginning the instructor will explain why sometimes you want to take a long program and split off bits of the code as separate functions.)

  So here are several problems that have all been solved very nicely. The problems were that:

not everyone has the time/funds to perfect every last nanometer of their website

not everyone has the expertise to do everything perfectly

consequently, users had a bad experience

consequently, less business was transacted online

many people were solving the same problem

too much code was being written to solve the same problem in different places

consequently, management’s and programmers’ interests were disaligned.

The problem was solved through specialisation, as well as programming techniques like abstraction, callbacks, encapsulation, so on.

How far can this Library solution be taken? I mean both in the sense of economic viability and in the sense of programmability.

If I’m typing in some random stuff into R, I kind of expect that sparse matrices are multiplying in the best way possible, or in general that calculations are being done as quick as they could be.

Wouldn’t it be nice if every data structure could automatically tap into any relevant mathematical theorems that reduce calculation time or provide insights? For example the computer shouldn’t literally add the numbers 1+2+3+…+97+98+99+100 because mathematicians already know that 1+100 + 2+99 + 3+98 + 4+97 … = 101 × 50, which is way quicker to calculate. Wouldn’t it be great if data structures could automatically “know” (via libraries) any theorem about curvature, graph traversal, Yoneda lemma, and so on, without the programmer having to be a maths textbook him/herself?

Is this impossible? Or has it just not been done yet?

The first computer was only capable of counting to nine. It had no other functions and often got 7 mixed up with 4. It was the size of fifteen Saturn V rockets.

Update: The New Yahoo Finance

By Michael La Guardia, Senior Director of Product for Sports & Finance

A couple of weeks ago we introduced the world to our new Yahoo Finance page.  As we told you then, our goal is to provide the same quality content our users have come to expect, with cleaner, more modern designs and a focus on increased personalization and community engagement.

At launch, we asked our users to share their thoughts and feedback, so we can continue to iterate and improve our product.  We heard from many of you, and one thing is certain:  Yahoo Finance inspires deep passion and loyalty. We appreciate how vocal the community has been since the redesign - both with pats on the back, some great suggestions, and some frustrations - and we’ve been listening to all of it.  We’ve contacted many of you directly to let you know we’re addressing these concerns, and we’ve made real progress based on your feedback.   

To date we have closed a number of major issues, and dozens of smaller ones.  Here is a quick list of what’s been done so far:   

We’ve addressed many data availability and quality issues.

We added back options data for the S&P VIX ticker.

We added analyst 1 year price targets to the right side of the Key Stats module.

We’re now live updating all standard quote details on the Quote Summary Page.

We are once again showing “Get Quotes for Top 10 Holdings” link for ETF and MutualFund quotes.

We’ve restored our databases and should now have the same level of historical data that we used to have.  We also made it easier to manipulate date ranges for historical data.

All recent SEC filings are available for tickers again.

We’ve added “Yield” back to tables for bonds.

We have made adjustments to the way the site is laid out and how you interact with it.

You can now copy data out of our Historical Data pages and paste it correctly into a spreadsheet.

We increased the density of the data table on the Statistics tab.

When you navigate from one Quote Summary Page to another, we now keep you on the same tab.  For example, if you were looking at Yahoo’s financials and navigated to the Alibaba Quote page, the new page would open on the Financials tab.

We’ve made many headers clickable for direct access to deeper information.

Clicking on an option strike price now shows all options available at that price.

We restored the link to the Currency Converter tool.

We fixed bugs that you pointed out.

The Recently Viewed list no longer gets wiped out.

You can now select MAX time frame on historical data.

Adding a symbol to multi-quote now no longer wipes out the whole list.

Our products are constantly evolving, and we’ll continue to answer your questions and address your concerns.  There is still more to do, including some exciting new features that will be rolling out in the coming months.  You’ll be hearing from us regularly as it happens.  

In the meantime, keep your suggestions and feedback coming. 

Automating the Publish/Subscribe Pattern in JavaScript

The Publish/Subscribe pattern is one of the most used patterns in software, especially in User Interfaces with JavaScript. It is used whenever 2 pieces of a system need to communicate, but cannot or should not communicate directly. For example, a system receives data from a server at regular intervals that a bunch of components can use (which are added while the system runs):

var Publisher = function() { var self = { subscribers: [] }; self.subscribe = function(callback) { self.subscribers.push(callback); }; self.publish = function(data) { self.subscribers.forEach(function(callback) { callback(data); }); }; return self; } var publisher = Publisher(); // Simulate a set of data being returned over time var serverStream = function(callback) { Array.apply(null, { length: 5 }).forEach(function(unused, index) { var ms = index * 500 setTimeout(function() { callback('data-piece: ' + ms + ' ms'); }, ms); }); }; serverStream(publisher.publish); // Simulate components being registered over time. publisher.subscribe(function(data) { console.info('subscribe from part 1', data); }); setTimeout(function() { publisher.subscribe(function(data) { console.info('subscribe from part 2', data); }); }, 1000) // subscribe from part 1 data-piece: 0 ms // subscribe from part 1 data-piece: 500 ms // subscribe from part 1 data-piece: 1000 ms // subscribe from part 1 data-piece: 1500 ms // subscribe from part 2 data-piece: 1500 ms // subscribe from part 1 data-piece: 2000 ms // subscribe from part 2 data-piece: 2000 ms

The problem is that same pattern with almost identical code will be written over and over again in the same project. So instead of creating a publisher and subscriber with multiple message types each time this pattern needs to be used, it is simpler to just use new instances of the publisher object each time:

var messageSet1 = function(callback) { Array.apply(null, { length: 3 }).forEach(function(unused, index) { setTimeout(function() { callback('Hello ' + index); }, index * 500); }); }; var messageSet2 = function(callback) { Array.apply(null, { length: 3 }).forEach(function(unused, index) { setTimeout(function() { callback('World ' + index); }, index * 500); }); }; var MessageBox = function() { var self = { publishers: [] }; self.streams = function(streams) { self.publishers = []; streams.forEach(function(stream, index) { self.publishers.push(Publisher()); stream(self.publishers[index].publish); }); }; self.subscribeTo = function(index, callback) { return self.publishers[index].subscribe(callback); } return self; }; var messageBox = MessageBox(); // Use a trivial example to preserve clarity messageBox.streams([messageSet1, messageSet2]); messageBox.subscribeTo(0, function(data) { console.info('subscribe from part 1B', data); }); messageBox.subscribeTo(1, function(data) { console.info('subscribe from part 2B', data); }); // subscribe from part 1B Hello 0 // subscribe from part 2B World 0 // subscribe from part 1B Hello 1 // subscribe from part 2B World 1 // subscribe from part 1B Hello 2 // subscribe from part 2B World 2

A non-index based naming scheme could be introduced by passing more data into the streams call, but I wanted to keep the example as minimal as possible.

Github Location: https://github.com/Jacob-Friesen/obscurejs/blob/master/2016/publishSubscribeAutomation.js

Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.

Oscar Wilde (via story-dj)