nat page 2 - Dave's Blog

As the title suggests, spoilers for The Interview follow.

Towards the end of the movie, after Dave Skylark is shot, he miraculously has a bullet proof vest, blows up Kim Jong-un, finds a random tunnel and is picked up by Seal Team Six. These are the same details of the unbelievable scenario that Dave Skylark describes to Agent Lacey at the beginning of the movie.

This isn't a coincidence. Everything after Dave is shot is his fantasizing about how things should have gone as he dies in the interview chair. Unsurprisingly his fantasy closely matches his original ridiculous thoughts about how he would assassinate and escape.

This is similar to movies like Brazil in which the later fourth of the movie is the main character’s romantic fantasy as he is tortured and killed in real life. Or Total Recall where the end of the movie matches the description of the memories that the main character will have implanted at the beginning.

Its safe to assume that after Dave is killed, Aaron and Sook are captured and also killed.

Applied game theory 101: Valve’s Steam Summer Sale involves a meta game with teams of Steam users competing for daily prizes. On Reddit the players join together to take turns winning daily. Valve gets wise and performs an existential attack, changing the rules to make it harder for players to want to coordinate.

Still, that all the players joined together to game the system gives me hope for humanity. Its a self organized solution to a tragedy of the commons problem. Only in this case the tragedy is by design and is updated to be more tragic.

mostlysignssomeportents:

More than 90% of Americans believe that the US government is unduly influenced by money, and the Mayday.US super PAC is raising $5M to fund the election campaigns of politicians who’ll pledge to dismantle super PACs and enact other campaign finance reforms. They raised more than $1M in 30 days last month, and this month, the goal is $5M. It’s the brainchild of Lawrence Lessig, who’s going to run prototype the project by running five electoral campaigns in 2014, and use the lessons of those projects to win enough anti-corruption seats in 2016 to effect real change.

Again, I’m not able to contribute to Mayday.US, because I’m a Canadian and Briton. But I ask my American friends to put in $10, and promise that I’ll put CAD1000 into any comparable Canadian effort and/or £1000 into a comparable UK effort. We all win when countries embrace evidence-based policy guided by doing what’s best for its citizens, rather than lining the pockets of corrupting multinationals.

Mayday.US

Please reblog!

URI Design & Ownership - On the issues with and alternatives to requiring well known filenames and extensions in URIs. You must love the draft’s URI.

YouTube - Dead Man’s Bones (Dance)

Nathan Barnatt has some great videos

Does it betray my innocence that I’m shocked by the amount of exec($_GET you can easily find on github? Hilarious comment thread on hacker news: 

This is awful. Shell commands are not guaranteed to be idempotent, people! These should all be of the form exec($_POST, not exec($_GET.

ephemeralgomi

The Wall Street Journal was first to report that The Federal Communications Commission will propose new open Internet rules this Thursday that will allow content companies to pay Internet service providers “for special access to consumers.” Under the new rules, service providers may not block or discriminate against specific websites, but they can charge certain sites or services for preferential traffic treatment if the ISPs’ discrimination is “commercially reasonable.” Bye-bye, Net Neutrality, and the internet as we know it.

You’ve gotta watch this Super Smash Bros. Melee documentary that follows some of the top players in the scene—it’s quite good. Accessible, too: you don’t need to be a fox-only no-items final destination type player to enjoy it; they break the game down wonderfully.