Your personal one is the correct one from my perspective (as someone that knows a lot of math and is familiar with statistical mechanics as math and not physics). The ODEs that we get from classical mechanics are typically reversible: we can write down an ODE that does the same thing but backwards.

You cannot do that for the PDEs that arise in statistical mechanics and the result is the second law. These PDEs arise from approximating many copies of deterministic systems as continuous distributions of states. Entropy is not a concept that makes sense when discussing single trajectories of systems — only the macroscopic view of many copies of that system evolving according to the same dynamics.

Is the mania with this game really just that people are hungry for anything pokemon-like?

I tried the game the other day and played it for 4 hours. I knew nothing coming into it besides “pokemon with guns” and I just found it to be awful

From what I've seen, a better description of Palworld is "Rust/Ark with Pokemon".

Describing it as "Pokemon with guns" overlooks the entire open world/survival/crafting part of the game.

I don't know anything about pokemon and I've been enjoying it.

Do you like crafting / exploration games?

I find it interesting that you dislike the combat in the originals but like Pokemon Stadium which only features combat (and horrid mini games).

Also I’m not really sure what exploring you’d want to do in those early games. I guess if you wanted to explore, I’d be annoyed by the constant fights, but that never occurred to me. The point of leaving a town was to get into a fight for one reason or another. That style of random fights outside of towns was also a staple of a lot of top down RPGs at the time.

I haven’t played a pokemon game in 20 years, but I think you might have been barking up the wrong tree a bit. Outside of the combat, there isn’t much to do. If you don’t like the combat, then it’s just not your game.

I mentioned exploring because I had a similar conversation a few weeks ago, and a friend mentioned they liked the exploration in the game. Maybe what I should have said was that moving around the game world was painful, but moving around the game world should be exciting and interesting (in my subjective view - again, totally possible that this just isn't the game for me, I mean no disrespect). Eg, the caves full of puzzles and such felt like a chore. But the puzzles should have felt intriguing and challenging. But I didn't feel like I was moving the pieces of a puzzle around, I felt like I was moving through molasses made of Zubats.

The fights in RPGs don't take you to another UI, play a long animation, just so you can try to run away from the fight. The wild pokemon are just constant. Way too constant to be interesting. It just felt like the game was trying to slow my progression with busy work - there's no challenge in pretty much anything expect the final fights, so why I should I bother? RPGs drop you right into the combat, so it doesn't break the flow and feels exciting.

Pokemon Stadium was more fun for two reasons. There wasn't any grind, you could get right into the combat. (I don't recall if there was a campaign and I don't recall the mini games, I just played free play.) And I wasn't fighting brain dead trainers who had no strategy, or yet another level one Pidgey; I was fighting my friends and family members. When I won it was because I played well, when I lost it was because they played well. It felt more like Smash Bros.

If there weren't so many wild pokemon and if the trainers steadily gained in strength instead of being totally flat until the difficulty rose like a brick wall, the game would be much better, in my opinion. Maybe instead of a model where you're constantly assaulted and need to be repel, you could be lightly peppered with wild pokemon unless you used an expendable to attract them.

That's just my game design criticism, if someone is enjoying Pokemon I wouldn't want to rain on their parade.

I like this tutorial because it doesn’t get too bogged down in abstractions and has numerous examples. When I’ve tried to learn differential geometry in the past, standard texts get very abstract very quickly and it’s hard for me to envision what the generalization is doing for me.

It turns out that PhD holders are a diverse group of people with many different personality types!

We don’t do that with all compounds though. It’s really more a cultural thing. At a certain point a pair becomes so common place that it becomes one word. Beehive, for example, isn’t semantically different from bee hive but the pairing was common enough the space got dropped.

Oh I’ll say beefs when referring to cows as a joke. TIL it’s an actual word!

It’s probably like a harmonica. You won’t sound that bad with it because it prohibits you from playing off key, but a good harmonica player knows what they’re doing.

He makes some sick beats. The overlay is just for the vibes

I used to hang out in an IRC channel, and the big CL proponent there was a Norwegian that would disappear for long periods and go boat / hang out in the woods on his own. Apparently those are common hobbies in Scandinavia but it also makes a lot of sense for a CL lover in hindsight.