swordsmanluke @ swordsmanluke @programming.dev

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2 yr. ago

Welcome to Bartovia. Our little burg on the edge of nowhere. It would be completely unknown but for one fact: Bartovia is home to the largest, unexplored ruin known to exist. Every year, dozens of would-be heroes try their luck and every year the lucky ones go home empty-handed, but a little wiser maybe.

Once a decade - or less - someone escapes with real treasure. A time-hopping artifact crafted by a half-mad wizard with an unspeakable name. A sword that speaks the date and hour of your death when drawn.

And that always starts another frenzy among the desperate, stupid, or both, who flock here to die in those cursed halls.

Of course, in their haze of greed and increasing desperation, more than one dumb bastard has tried their hand at robbing the inhabitants of our humble home. The young fools never stop to wonder - who would stay here? But for the ruins there's no industry. Too cold to grow most crops; No precious ores to mine; Nowhere near any of the good trade routes.

They don't realize - we are them. The same fools and try-hards of years past. We're the ones who pushed too hard; exhausted our funds; got injured; or just never learned to let go. We couldn't leave. But couldn't go on, either. We sold what we could part with...and then the rest. We got jobs. Opened taverns, inns, and supply stores to fleece the next round of idiots. Nevertheless, we are an entire city - if a small one - of adventurers.

Certainly, some of us are a bit long in the tooth - but woe betide the next poor bastard who thinks to pick a pocket in Bartovia.

"Top" could be so many things... So I'll go with

##Top 3 Games That Are Technical Marvels

These games aren't necessarily my favorite games, but each one showed me something that represented a major technological feat.

3. Tears of the Kingdom

Using what was essentially mid-tier, five year old cell phone hardware, Nintendo delivered an incredibly detailed physics engine that gave players a frankly irresponsible amount of freedom. (I cannot imagine how many edge cases they must have had to fix before launch.)

But that physics system not only works the way we humans generally expect things to work, ...it works fast as lightning and smooth as butter... Buttered lightning, I suppose. All while running AI, rendering a huge draw distance.

People give Nintendo crap for using weaker hardware... But maybe they should be turning that inside out - Look what Sony/MS have to use to mimic a fraction of Nintendo Power.

2. Half-Life: Alyx(2020)

A monument to the potential of VR gaming, HL:A still stands far ahead of the pack. If you've only watched a playthrough or played it with a pancake mod, you've missed out on what makes it special. Valve made us feel like we were truly inhabiting the world of Half-Life. Ransacking rooms is a lot more fun when you're doing it yourself vs pressing A-to-search.

It set a high water mark that has yet to be exceeded even four years after its release.

1. Kirby's Adventure (1993) This wasn't Kirby's first game, but it was the first to include the iconic "copy" ability. Kirby's Adventure was one of the later games released for the original NES and (for my money) is the most gorgeous game on the console. It pulls together parallax effects, detailed, multi-color sprites, clever animation cycles and surprisingly tight platforming.

I've never been "big" into Kirby games, but this one is the exception. It's one of my favorite NES titles. I'd replay this over either NES Zelda any day.

Fact: Swords are easy - the pointy bit goes in the other guy.

It's a little bit of both.

Iirc, Japanese iron was usually in sand form, gathered, rather than mined. So the raw material was smaller and contained less natural carbon than mined ore.

(Though nobody had near the advantage of Indian steel from the Damasc region - Damascus steel naturally had more carbon in their iron and it made for very high quality steel at the time.)

Anyway, at that time Europe had similar techniques for making iron into steel and normalizing the carbon. They would use more resource-intensive techniques, like stacking rods of wrought iron in a furnace with charcoal, then working the carbon-infused rods to distribute the carbon evenly.

That works great when you have access to millions of square miles of forest (for charcoal) and loads of iron ore.

But it's not really about whose steel was "the best", it's just that the "folding" technique was a metallurgical process and had no impact on the quality of the sword (except insofar as it was turning iron into steel).

So, I was curious and decided to look it up. Turns out most flying insects are dependent on air temperature! As long as the air is above about 50F, they can fly in it.

So... If the top of your screen is high enough that it's less than fifty up there, you're good! 😄

I'm a sword guy. I spent over a decade training in historical swordsmanship (mostly European longsword - a mix of Fiore and Lichtenaur; but also a little kenjutsu).

There are so many bad takes about swords out there, but I think my personal "favorites" are about the folded steel technique used to forge katana.

See, to make a good sword, you need good steel which is iron + carbon. More carbon = harder steel. Harder steel is better for holding an edge, but also less flexible and more likely to shatter. All swords, European, Japanese or otherwise had to balance those concerns.

Anyway, in Japan, their katana forging technique used steel with slightly differing carbon amounts wrapped in layers in the blade. This layering had a couple of important metallurgical effects:

1. It gave the core steel a more consistent quality. Since the method they had of producing steel contained varying levels of carbon, the repeated layering, folding, heating and hammering evened it out.
2. The layering also increased the strength of the steel. By adding layers of high and low carbon steel, the sword smiths could control the flexibility vs strength of the core.

Ok, so without getting too deep in the weeds, that's (basically speaking) why katana were made of folded steel.

But I have been "informed" by so many people that folded steel:

• Creates an edge like a thousand razor blades!
• Makes katana stronger than modern steel!
• Makes katana stronger than European swords! (steel-wise, it's a wash, though later blade geometry techniques like fullers arguably give European swords the - ha - edge in durability.)

In summary: katana are great - but not magic! The folded steel technique enabled forging swords of high-quality, consistent steel at a time when that was really hard to do. But that's it.

/self looks at rant

Uh... Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

Thanks for the detail!

Fortunately, in this case I was using a brand new, low-quality nozzle I don't really care about.

After this, I did indeed notice that I hadn't tightened the nozzle fully tight and I had some mild "drizzle" escaping down the side.

Since then, I've

• removed the nozzle
• cleaned the gunk out
• put the nozzle back in
• leveled the bed
• rechecked my z-offset

and... It's printing fine again.

Even the nozzle was alright... entirely due to dumb luck. 🤦

Thankfully, It's okay. Ish.

My prints want to unstick a bit there, but overall it's still working! The poor thing.

the tin foul hat

Assuming this is a typo, I move we make it A Thing.

(To Wear a) Tin Foul Hat: When a source misinterprets or misrepresents information with the intent to mislead. One who is spreading conspiracies vs believing them.

I work in an adjacent industry. Establishing "is this person actually a resident of X" is really hard. It's much easier to just allow everyone to submit CPPA/CPRA requests.

So that's what everybody does.

Just because it's only required in CA doesn't mean you won't be able to make use of it!

Edit: At the start of 2023 the CPRA already established that CA residents (which really became anybody) can request their data be deleted. It looks like this new bill just mandates a central location to transmit those requests out to everybody from.

There are already services that do this (The article mentions Delete Me) for a fee. This is going to eat their lunch, but is going to be a major win for privacy!

I bought this back before the official dock was released and I'm still using it. It's worked perfectly for me. I have it connected up to HDMI out for my tv and I used to have two Steam Controller USB dongles, but I switched to using Bluetooth-enabled XBone controllers.

Anyway, +1 for the JSAUX dock.

The Physics vs Chemistry Wars will be brutal...

I loved the original back in the 90s. But hooboy, playing it now feels rough. Mouse look hadn't been invented yet (or at least, not popularized) and UI experimentation was still a thing. Remember, the OG System Shock released only a year after Doom (in which moving the mouse "up" moved your character forward.)

I love this reboot. It keeps so much of what made the original great and sands off a lot of the rough edges. I wish they'd made inventory management a little less clunky (it's a little too true to the original there), but that's really my only complaint.

If you like immersive sim games like Deus Ex or Dishonored, I highly recommend it.

Fair.

That was a super cool article!

...As it happens, I'm writing a parser in Ruby right now, so this is incredibly timely. Thanks!

Typically, the thing that sets ImmSims apart is that they have a number of interlocking systems that allow the player to solve objectives in different ways.

Stealth, Speech, and Shooting are the usual suspects, with hacking, gunplay and conversation trees well represented in the genre.

But generally, it's a philosophy about designing for extreme player agency.

On one end you have something like, say, Tetris. As the player, you can direct blocks, but you can't stop them from falling. The game gives the player little autonomy to direct. Blocks arrive and the player places them (or doesn't) until the game ends.

On the other, you have something like Dishonored, where you can choose to kill everyone or no one. You can choose to accept and make use of the magical powers available to you - or reject them all and fight with only human strength and your own wits. The world itself then reacts to these choices and the flow of the game changes accordingly.

I think Larian's Baldur's Gate 3 can arguably be called an ImmSim thanks to its insane level of player reactivity.

Basically, if your choices as a player can actually alter the game world and your path through the story, thanks to the emergent interactions of interrelated systems... It's probably an ImmSim.

I can live with the forced indent in Python, but I really prefer Ruby's "fluent" OO style vs Python's more functional style.

e.g. I prefer seeing operations in processing order like

    
get_all_foos()
  .map{|foo| foo.id}
  .each {|id| report("found foo #{id}"}


  

vs Python's functional order

    
[report(f"found foo {fid}") for fid in map(lambda x: x.foo_id, get_all_foos())]

  

(Also, Python claiming useful variable names like type and id deeply annoys me)

I get that. Ruby does do a lot under the hood for me. But I like that! Different Strokes and all that.

I guess, for general programming tasks, I enjoy when the language is "clever" enough to do The Right Thing for all the bits I don't really care about in the moment (like memory management) so I can focus on the logic that solves my problem.

Otoh, my last "big" personal project was a terminal multiplexer (and some supporting TUI widgets) that needed to run on a raspi zero W. I started in Python, then moved to Kotlin and finally Rust in the pursuit of performance. Once one of the parts I needed to care about became efficient performance, moving to a lower-level compiled language was the move.

Indeed, one app in particular took 1.5 min to run in Python...which ultimately dropped to 3 sec in Rust - and that was mostly network latency!

I love languages of all sorts. I'm currently writing an interpreter for a language I'm designing for fun. I'm starting off in Ruby while I figure this all out. I fully expect performance to be appalling. But Ruby lets me build faster while I'm testing things out and learning how interpreters work.

Once I've got my interpreter working though, I'm planning to port it to Rust for better performance.

Other than JavaScript I like Bash.

Oh man, you had me going until this part! Good joke!

If you ever get the craving, check out Automate the Boring Stuff With Python It's a great book that focuses on how to Get Things Done.

You won't learn theory or how to build the next ML sensation here, but you will learn how to make your computer work for you.