Badabinski @ Badabinski @kbin.earth

Alt account of [@Badabinski](https://kbin.social/u/Badabinski)

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1 yr. ago

Playing it blind is absolutely like that. In retrospect, I'm surprised that I stuck with it. I usually struggle with hard games! The atmosphere and mechanics were enough to keep me playing tho. Totally understand though, it's not everything for everyone.

Starship landing was a success too! They landed right on target this time. There was still a bit of burn-through at one of the aft fins (much less than before), and it exploded a little bit after it landed. Hopefully they'll be able to land Starship on the ground next!

Holy shit, really‽ I had no idea.

I fukken love fat boys. Sometimes I'll mix up the name to introduce some fun to a situation. One time I turned to my partner and said "be right back I'm gonna absolutely fucking destroy a fat man" and she was deeply confused until I came back with an ice cream sandwich.

Smart Audiobook Player is different from Simple Audiobook Player. I actually didn't know about Smart ABP, it looks pretty nice!

I agree, I'd prefer a FOSS option that's self-contained. The only server I need is one that I can rsync books down from.

I haven't seen it mentioned here, so I'll rep for Noita. It's an amazing rogue-like with great atmosphere and a really compelling world to explore.

There's a chemistry/alchemy system in the game that is really detailed and fun to explore. The game's tagline is "every pixel simulated," and it's not an exaggeration. Noita is like those falling sand games that were popular in the early 2000s, where each particle of sand could interact with other particles. Imagine that, but you're a badass witch flying through the world and blasting motherfuckers who try to get in your way. Your wands can set things on fire or freeze them or melt them with acid or blow them up or other crazy shit.

The wand mechanics are incredibly deep. Like, it's not "turing complete" levels of deep, but the rules for spells interact in incredibly interesting and exploitable ways. The feeling you get when you discover a powerful combo of spells is incredible.

The devs also have a cool policy of turning bugs into gameplay mechanics. I really can't say much about this without spoiling things, so this one is hard to talk about. Basically, if someone finds an exploit, they oftentimes won't "fix" it. Instead, they'll take it and tweak it to add consequences for using the exploit, or they'll balance it a bit to make it harder/remove a bit of the benefit. It's a really cool approach and has lead to a great relationship between the devs and the community. They don't take our toys away, they just make them work better in the world.

I played the game completely blind until I got my first win (it took about 80 hours of playtime), and I'd highly recommend that approach for folks who are willing to tolerate failure and who like to experiment. If it's too frustrating then that's okay, there are a lot of guides out there to help out new players without giving up too much. Many people describe your first win as you beating the tutorial, and there's some truth to that.

It can be gruellingly difficult at times, but it's just so damn good, and there's so damn much of it. I have around 600 hours in in that game which is twice as much as any other game I've played.

I think they're all top-level responses too. I took a random sampling of their comments, and they never respond to anyone else's comment. That smells like someone being lazy and not bothering to iterate through comments when writing their dumb AI commenting script.

Like, just, what the fuck is this shit? There's one comment from 8 months ago that looks real. Everything else is from the past week and reads like LLM drivel. Why would you bother? Is it just someone who is bored and wanted to see how long they could convince people?

I love Simple Audiobook Player+. The UI is super minimal (and really maxes out the whole OLED black thing if you choose it) without compromising on features that are kind of essential for audiobooks (e.g. delayed pause/sleep timers, speed settings, volume boosting, an EQ). My favorite thing is the "undo seek" button. I'm an oaf who is constantly inputting accidental touches. When I was using Audible, I'd have to manually find where I was after accidentally hitting the next chapter button or moving the dot on the progress bar. SABP lets me just undo that shit.

It hasn't been updated in a while, but it doesn't need updating when it does its job so well. There are no ads, no marketing notifications, just books. It's like a program from coreutils in app form. It might be a bit ugly or outdated looking, but I'm about that.

Same for Utah. The politics are as ugly as the land is beautiful, and it sucks.

Thank god for projects like Valetudo thar let you break your stuff away from the cloud.

Semi-related story time. I bought a Midea Cube dehumidifier for my laundry room. My dryer has been broken for years, and I've found that air drying clothes makes them last a lot longer. It's hard to air dry inside, hence the dehumidifier. My plan was to control the dehu automagically with Home Assistant along with some fans, so people could just click a button to turn all the shit on to dry their clothes.

After buying it, I realized that the dehumidifier could only be controlled via the cloud, and the cloud control was unreliable as fuck. With the exception of tech people, nobody is willing to deal with my flaky bullshit. If the button doesn't work consistently, my partner, her other partner, and my FIL aren't going to bother. Luckily, a very industrious person made this thing that let me rip out the hardware responsible for cloud connectivity and replace it with a cheap microcontroller. Now, my dehumidifier talks to my Home Assistant server directly via MQTT and it just fucking works.

Give me local-only control or fuck off, I'll take control myself. It's not much to demand, and shit like what this article describes absolutely deepens my conviction around local-only control.

I don't want an AI shitting up my nice, clean, best-practice following bash.

EDIT: Sorry for this comment. I really need to deal with my anger towards AI. The sentiment expressed is what I think, but I'm not happy with the aggressive and dismissive way I communicated.

I feel like this has been a bad year for this shit. Boars Head had to recall 3500 tons of meat earlier this year, and 10 people died from listeria. Like, that's 17 million pounds or 7 million kg of meat that had to be thrown away. That's just from these two companies, so the real number is probably much higher.

I hate that it's so hard to get these people to agree to capex. My current company runs a few datacenters, and we have some teams that use them for their base load. It saves a shitload of money! Like, I don't get why this is a concept that MBAs reject. You don't have to go all in on capex for your infrastructure, just find a nice mix of capex/opex. If you're afraid that you won't use the shit you bought later on, then you should probably make sure that the market is there for whatever you're selling before you dive in headfirst.

No worries, I didn't think you were trying to mislead! I'm also very hopeful for fusion and I like to read about it. I don't know if magnetic confinement systems will be able to reach the temperatures and pressures required for ignition (versus those just for fusion) soon, but technological progress certainly has a tendency towards jumping forwards unexpectedly!

Ah, okay, that's what I was referring to with NIF. They absolutely have generated more power than they put in, but only in a way that is scientifically interesting. If you only consider the energy flowing into the hohlraum, then more energy was produced, which is crazy cool! They also achieved true ignition which is great. We've never been able to get things hot enough and squozed enough for long enough to be able to directly observe that in a controlled setting. The fact that they can now just do that means they can experimentally probe where the boundaries are and find the cheapest way for us to get to ignition.

However, they got the energy to the hohlraum using lasers. Those lasers (and all of the equipment around them) required (I think) three orders of magnitude more power to generate the laser impulse that triggered fusion. A productive fusion reaction did occur, but it absolutely wasn't productive enough to make up for all the power required to generate the laser pulse. Making lasers that can output at the required power levels and frequencies without all of the waste (i.e. 2.5 MJ of electricity to laser results in 2 MJ laser output) is a Hard Problem™ and is probably impossible with our current understanding of physics.

When you made your comment, I wondered if someone had achieved breakeven using a tokamak or some other form of magnetic confinement setup. Inertial confinement fusion is great for research but not practical for power generation, whereas magnetic confinement fusion is probably where the future is.

ICF is really good at putting the squoze on stuff, because the things you want to fuse are all stuffed in a tiny hohlraum and you're zorching it with a shitload of giant friggin lasers. Magnetic confinement fusion used in tokamaks occurs much more gradually by magnetically heating and containing plasmas. The nice thing about tokamaks is that they just constantly generate heat. With modern superconducting magnets, the infrastructure efficiency is also pretty decent, giving them a chance at truly generating more power than they use when you take the entire reactor into consideration.

Jesus that's a lot of words. I should go do my damn job instead of distracting myself talking about fusion. Sorry for the brain dump.

Question for you, when you say that we've accomplished fusion, do you mean fusion that produces more power than took to generate it? Or simply the act of fusing atoms together in a reactor (vs the uncontained fusion present in thermonuclear bombs)? If it's the former, then like, holy shit, that's actually been accomplished‽ Like, I know NIF had their whole thing with breakeven fusion a couple of years ago, but that was only counting the energy that made it to the hohlraum, not all the energy that was lost powering the lasers and shit. When you factor all of that in (like you'd need to for realistic power generation) then it's very far away from breakeven generation. It's still an incredible breakthrough and will help us figure out fusion energy, but it's not a practical means of energy generation at this time. Did something else happen that I missed‽

If it's the latter, then we've actually been fusing atoms together in reactors since the 1950s. In fact, there's a community of people who build small fusion reactors as a hobby! I learned about this a few years ago when a 16 year old made the news by being the youngest person to build their own reactor. The main site I know of is https://www.fusor.net/

If you replace fandom.com with breezewiki.com in the URL, you'll either get an unfucked version of the page, or you'll get a redirect to a new wiki site that the community actually updates. It's crazy how fandom doesn't let communities remove a fandom site, so there are all of these unmaintained and out of date fandom wikis out there.

EDIT: as a demonstration, here's what happens when you use breezewiki with the Noita fandom page: https://noita.breezewiki.com/wiki/Noita_Wiki

If you replace fandom.com with breezewiki.com in the URL, you'll either get an unfucked version of the page, or you'll get a redirect to a new wiki site that the fandom actually updates. It's crazy how fandom doesn't let communities remove a fandom site, so there are all of these unmaintained and out of date fandom wikis out there.

Yeah, it's really not too bad. It's mostly boring. I brought headphones to my last root canal because I don't like the sound the tools make (there's some bone conduction going on, so the headphones let me drown that out) and that made the whole experience much nicer for me. I'm particularly sensitive to sounds, so sound has always been the worst part of any dental work for me.

This got me wondering what would happen, and ofc there's a relevant XKCD: https://what-if.xkcd.com/23/

which ultimately links to this from the NOAA: http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/C5c.html