“Altogether, my analysis shows that political affiliation can help to predict outcomes in over 90% of circuit court cases.”

NBER

The Pervasive Influence of Ideology at the Federal Circuit Courts

Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating resear...

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Marginal REVOLUTION

Monday assorted links - Marginal REVOLUTION

1. “Altogether, my analysis shows that political affiliation can help to predict outcomes in over 90% of circuit court cases.” 2. Who b...

Potion Explosion I want to like this game. The marble dispenser is clever and pleasant to the touch. The explosion mechanic of coloured marbles falling together is fun, but the rest of the game is mediocre. It goes on too long, there's no interaction and it is repetitive. I didn't feel there was a lot of skill involved, but the top players at BGA have ELOs in the mid 600s, so there must be plenty. #boardgames

ZÈRTZ Two player abstract. Feels similar to Draughts (Checkers), but you place the pieces on the board, the board shrinks and the winning condition is based on the number of coloured pieces you capture. Not much more to say, but it looks and feels great - despite my terrible photo. #boardgames

Primal arriving is like when Google arrived when all we had was Altavista, Yahoo and Dogpile

Concordia Slow-paced learning game with 5 players. This is my kind of game. Middling complexity. Lots of interaction without being too zero-sum. Keen to try again. Mac Gerdts also designed Antike and Imperial, so I am now definitely a fan of his work. #boardgames

When openai's Whisper came out, I tried it's audio transcription capabilities out on my PC. It was OK but slow. Tonight I tried again (after getting a new AMD GPU), using this Windows port of Whisper and it works *far* better. Easy to install and fast to use. No need to pay for otter.ai or anything else.

GitHub

GitHub - Const-me/Whisper: High-performance GPGPU inference of OpenAI's Whisper automatic speech recognition (ASR) model

High-performance GPGPU inference of OpenAI's Whisper automatic speech recognition (ASR) model - Const-me/Whisper

Primal is a game-changer. So much better than the alternatives - at least once you figure out that you can only login with the Alby brower addon. The "My Tribe" filter should be the default.

Anyone got a #bluesky invite?

Playing Ra and Acquire was the best possible antidote to Food Chain Magnate. Both fast-playing, elegant classics with plenty of interaction and skill, that don't grind the losers' faces into the dust. The new deluxe version of Ra is *gorgeous* but I'll hang onto Priests of Ra and print player aids. #boardgames

My nostr private key is a 64 character hex string and does not start with nsec1. How do I convert to that format? #asknostr

Food Chain Magnate I learned this yesterday. No milestones, but otherwise full game. I knew it was heavy but I'm amazed at how unforgiving it is. Losers get blasted. Amazing system, but there's no safety net. Too much for me. #boardgames

😂

Keyflower Worker placement mixed with auctioning your workers for better action options. Very involved and clever. Looks like multiplayer solitaire, but there is some brutal indirect competition. Lovely art in a simple but effective production. Delighted I finally got to play it, but it's the last time with 6 players. 4+ hours in a learning game was painful. 90-120 minutes on the box is a joke. #boardgames

Priests of Ra This is essentially Ra but with different scoring. We would have had a lot of fun, but the rules were a wall of text with no illustrations and the scoring prompts on the board were illegible and ambiguous. This led to us playing wrongly. I'd like to try again with decent player aids. I have heard Ra has simpler scoring, so I asked a friend to bring his copy next week, so we can compare. #boardgames

Thor My last play of this was November 2004, which I was amazed by. Deserves to be played more often. Knizia has made several iterations of this game - Wildlife Safari, Quandry, Loco, Botwana, Flinke Pinke and others. It is simple and elegant and you should make your own set. Thor is only different because you have a few special action cards which are fine but do not add much. A great little pub game/filler. #boardgames

Maskmen Maskmen is a clever little climbing card game, from Oink, with shifting suit values that would be good, if the rules were more regular. We were asking rules questions all the way through two games. I'd rather play Gang of Four or Frank's Zoo or even Asshole. #boardgames