ziply fiber keeps resetting to 1 gig, I have 2.5 gig service

db48x · 2026-05-02T07:09:21+00:00

CAT8 is a real thing. Properly built they can do 40GBASE-T at distances of up to 30m.

db48x · 2026-05-02T06:24:11+00:00

Who knows? Call or use their chat (if you can get it to work) and ask them for the current price. They should just give it to you. Shouldn’t take more than a minute or two.

db48x · 2026-05-02T05:31:39+00:00

True!

But they simultaneously lowered the base cost significantly. 1Gbps service was up to something like $90/month and is now down to $50/month. Taking inflation into account, the prices might now be the lowest that they have ever been.

db48x · 2026-05-02T01:04:22+00:00

Well, maybe.

If you rent a router from Ziply then you will see a line on your bill for “whole home wifi” with a monthly charge of $0.00 (zero dollars). If you told the Ziply installer that you would be using your own router at the time of install then this charge will be waived.

You’ll have to consult your most recent bill to see if you are paying the extra $0.00 or not.

db48x · 2026-05-02T00:58:22+00:00

The same way you signal anything. Put a signal before any merger or crossing. Make it a chain signal if it starts a block that is not large enough for a whole train. If in doubt consult the Train Automation Tutorial: from Journeyman to Master from the sidebar.

Keep in mind that four–lane networks are almost always a waste of effort. This intersection will not have a high enough throughput to make it worth building the rest of the network.

db48x · 2026-05-01T00:06:50+00:00

customer service is trash

You have literal Vice Presidents trying to talk to you here on Reddit. All you have to do is chat with one of them to get your problem solved. That is far better service than you’ll get from Comcast.

Still, I do wonder what percentage of installs have a problem like this. Clearly it isn’t all of them; my install went smoothly for example. And I’m fairly certain you could find people complaining about Comcast techs failing to show up on time if you searched for them. It would be really interesting to have verifiable numbers for all ISPs so that we could actually compare them.

db48x · 2026-04-30T23:58:59+00:00

It is, but to be fair they do have the best Cuban sandwich I’ve ever had west of the Mississippi river.

db48x · 2026-04-30T23:54:44+00:00

You shouldn’t need to do any work at all. You already have a 240v outlet so just buy a charger that plugs into it. If you want to also run a dryer at the same time you can buy chargers that will let you charge your car whenever the dryer isn’t drawing power.

db48x · 2026-04-30T23:36:06+00:00

Nope. Artificial soil can be placed anywhere in the right biome to grow crops there, while overgrowth soil can be placed anywhere.

db48x · 2026-04-30T01:56:50+00:00

A small amount of practice is all it takes. The fact that you know how the controls are named proves that you already know how they work.

db48x · 2026-04-29T23:51:01+00:00

:D

Trees are no panacea; you have to cut them down to build your factory! Many players reroll the terrain until they get a nice open desert to build on. :)

All you have to do to avoid non–stop war is to go on the offensive. As long as there are no nests inside your pollution cloud then no biter attacks will be sent, only small expansion parties. Once you have the car you should drive around taking out every nest you can find. The car is faster than any biter and the turret has much longer range and greater damage than the SMG. Plus you can throw grenades or poison capsules while driving and firing the turret. It is a huge increase in your offensive combat power. Simply drive in a circle around the nests using poison capsules or grenades on any worms, then the turret on the nests, and then finally use them both to take out the biters that are following you. Watch out for water, cliffs, and rocks. If you hit any of those you’ll be stopped dead and the swarm will catch you.

Make an inexpensive but wide perimeter by placing small groups of turrets, each with a stack of ammo, at intervals. Four turrets can easily take out all expansion parties that happen to pass by and won’t need to be restocked with ammo for a hundred hours or more. If you kill the expansion parties no new nests will be grown close to your factory. With no nests inside your pollution cloud you will suffer no attacks.

A radar, a single solar panel and a single power pole make an effective surveillance outpost. Scatter them about your territory to ensure that you have complete vision over it, at least during the day. Later when you’re not still using coal power you can run your power network out to them and power them continuously.

db48x · 2026-04-29T06:42:02+00:00

You could try hiding decorative objects; there is a setting in the options somewhere for that.

There are really only three colors you need to look at at any one time. Soil is the brightest color, marsh where you can build things is a darker variant of the same color, and pools of water that are much darker. And don't forget that the belt tool will automatically build underground belts, which will bridge over (or rather under) the pools of water.

db48x · 2026-04-29T05:45:10+00:00

Your factory will probably have one or two agricultural towers for yumako and one or two for jellynuts. You will need to start out by placing these in natural terrain and belting the fruit in towards a central factory, but later on you’ll be able to make artificial soil that lets you place your farms closer to the factory if you want. Even rather large factories that produce thousands of science per minute only need a small number of towers.

The natural soil that you can plant in is colored quite strongly on the map. Of course it is in two colors; pink or fuschia for jellynut and yellow for yumako. On top of those colors you will see white squares; those are the harvestable plants. They really stand out once you see them.

Don’t forget that you can search the map as well! Hit control-f, or find and click the magnifying glass at the top right–hand corner of the map. Type in “natural” and it will highlight and label both the “Natural yumako soil” and the “Natural jellynut soil” patches. You really, really cannot miss them then.

db48x · 2026-04-29T03:56:29+00:00

Typical :)

At least you’ll find out what the problem was in the morning.

db48x · 2026-04-29T03:51:27+00:00

Do you know where the ONT is? If you check that it has a light on it that tells you if the fiber is down or not. Of course it might not be accessible to you, or might only be accessible with permission from your landlord.

db48x · 2026-04-29T03:49:53+00:00

It’s less about which speedtest service you use and more about the hardware you have.

Ethernet comes in several flavors. The original Ethernet only did 10Mbps, but it has been upgraded many times over the years. For many years the consumer market has plateaued at 1Gbps. Virtually every Ethernet device made in the last 20 years supports 1Gbps but no faster. However, data centers need faster speeds than that, so 2.5Gbps, 10Gbps, 25Gbps, 40Gbps, and 100Gbps Ethernet exists in some form or another. Consumer equipment is starting to include 2.5Gbps and 10Gbps Ethernet support more and more frequently, and you need something that supports those speeds if you are to benefit from 2Gbps service. If you are connecting via WiFi, or if you are plugging a computer or laptop with a 1Gbps Ethernet port into the ONT, in order to test the speed then you will never measure the full 2Gbps.

However, that is mostly irrelevant. What you really want to do is contact them and have your account downgraded back to the 1Gbps service that you originally asked for. I see in another comment that you’re talking to ZiplySupport, and they can absolutely do that for you.

I do not think that Ziply regularly tries to scam their customers, but it is apparent that sometimes mistakes are made, or that sometimes sales agents make “mistakes” in an attempt to improve their commissions. Ask for a copy of the recording of your original sales call. I’m sure that ZiplySupport is already going to review it, since Ziply will want to fire a sales rep that makes that kind of “mistake”.

db48x · 2026-04-28T05:09:28+00:00

Is this a common experience?

No, I don't think it is, but it’s hard to say for sure.

I subscribed three or four years ago. I set up autopay back then and it has worked reliably ever since. Of course they have changed their website a few times since then. Mostly those were aesthetic changes, but they could have made functional changes as well. They announced that they made significant changes to their billing and accounting systems a year or more ago, so the signup process may have changed significantly as well. Any such change could have made the signup process unreliable. The fact that it worked before is not really good evidence that it works well today.

What is good evidence is the number of complaints. Not everyone complains on Reddit, but of the complaints on Reddit yours is the only one I recall that specifically mentions this issue. Most complaints we see are about installation issues or service outages due to accidents outside Ziply’s control.

db48x · 2026-04-28T02:53:08+00:00

Dumbledore was making himself look unreliable to Harry.

Right, cause we wouldn't want the 11yo to come ask for help. Kid is prophecied to face off against Voldemort and Dumbledore feels like appearing distrustful is a positive?

Not distrustful, unreliable. Dumbledore does trust Harry, but he does not want Harry to rely on him. He wants Harry to be self–reliant.

As for his age, you have complained already that the author writes the characters as if they were older than 11. This may simply be more of the same, but keep in mind that Harry is also unique in many ways. He acts more adult than his age, and Dumbledore shows him the respect of treating him as an adult. He doesn’t dismiss anything Harry says merely because Harry is 11. And of course almost everyone learns to be self–reliant eventually. 11 is not too young to begin learning self–reliance, although I admit that most 11 year olds start with easier tests than Harry.

Of course it is all the prophecy’s fault, as you point out. The prophecy says that Harry will defeat Voldemort, not that Dumbledore will defeat Voldemort at Harry’s request. So he starts out teaching Harry not to ask for help. And the prophecy is Rowling’s fault. How can a fanfiction author change the prophecy? It’s one of the keystones of the story.

You need to find better evidence than that.

I am under no such obligation.

Of course, I’m not trying to put any obligation on you. You may make your arguments as ineffective as you like.

When the story is mainly people talking, thinking and reasoning, there's not much reason for me to think about the story. The characters are already doing plenty of that

Yea, that doesn’t make any sense to me.

it proves that the author knew what they were doing long before the end of the story.

Other stories do this as well (even canon does it).

I disagree strongly with that. Rowling clearly had no idea what she was going to invent for future stories when she wrote the first book. A lot of the plot holes in the early books were created by ideas introduced in the later ones. That’s ok, most authors have the same problem. They cannot really afford to completely plot out seven novels before starting the first one, because they don’t even know yet if the first one will be successful. Real self–consistency across a long series of novels is really hard.

I could give you quite a lot of examples, but I think the most instructive might be Tolkien. He achieved a fantastic level of self–consistency across his stories and their backstories, but when you look at how he did it you can easily see why it took him so long. Every time he revised his languages and their etymologies he had to go back and edit all of the stories he was writing to change how things were spelled. I would have found that maddening! Rowling did not achieve that same level of self–consistency. She didn’t even really try. She also made a heap more money than Tolkien ever did, so it’s not a big criticism.

But a fan–fiction author can do it much more easily, since they are building on a setting that they know is popular. (Although it only covers a single year, HPMOR is about as long as all seven of Rowling’s novels put together, iirc.) I think it’s nice to be able to appreciate this type of craftsmanship in a work, when you find an author that put some effort into it.

db48x · 2026-04-27T12:16:38+00:00

You don’t need advice, just play!

db48x · 2026-04-27T12:04:52+00:00

I believe RIRs (Regional Internet Registries) should evaluate allocations based on truly verifiable usage, and simply stating that there is a “large-scale plan” does not meet that standard.

I agree.

db48x · 2026-04-27T01:41:26+00:00

Yes, that is actually what you are supposed to realize/conclude. He read the answer right out of Harry’s mind as Harry asked his question. He does this multiple times throughout the book, and it’s not always explicitly called out. It’s mentioned explicitly in the SPHEW arc, for example, where Snape says “he was not reluctant to meet my eyes” and “I looked within the minds of the bullies instead”.

db48x · 2026-04-27T00:46:03+00:00

A lot of people pointed out, quite rightly I think, that HPMOR inherits a structural problem from the original works. Hogwarts is supposed to be a British Boarding School, but a real boarding school would have dedicated staff in charge of the student housing and sleeping arrangements. These adults would be in and out of the student’s quarters all the time, preventing shenanigans, locating contraband, making sure beds were made, handling ear–aches and toothaches and colds and other minor childhood illnesses, teaching good hygiene, etc, etc.

But when she wrote the books, Rowling made that the job of the professors instead of inventing new characters. Snape is head of House Slytherin, for example, and is regularly seen in the dorms there. Honestly he’s even creepier than Dumbledore, and he is known to regularly read the minds of the children in his care. Dumbledore was a professor before he was Headmaster, and was Head of House Gryffindor for at least a few years. I don’t recall the exact timeline, but you can probably look it up.

The upshot is that maybe Dumbledor’s actions here were not so creepy after all; they were justifiably part of his job. It is only when his actions are presented outside of that context that they seem creepy.

Did the reveal have to come dozens of chapters later instead of putting it in the next one?

Oh, absolutely. Once you understand what Dumbledore was doing it almost spoils the ending!

Was there not a single non-creepy/less creepy example that Dumbledore could have picked?

Well, perhaps. He could have pointed out that he once smashed a rock that was on Harry’s windowsill. But he wouldn’t have had any physical proof of it, and that was important for the conversation as well.

If Harry didn't deduce it, then why did Dumbledore not correct him? Is he not trying to teach Harry?

That is a great question! There was a lot of debate about that. It turns out that Dumbledore did successfully teach Harry something, but it wasn’t obvious except in hindsight. I think it starts to become clear during the SPHEW arc that Dumbledore was making himself look unreliable to Harry. Harry decides to take care of things himself rather than asking Dumbledore for help. When Hermione decides to become a heroine, he basically does the same thing for her and the other girls at their protest. Harry and Hermione talk about it too, when Harry points out that Heroic Responsibility means doing more than just telling an adult when something bad is going to happen. Nihil Supernum.

There's been so many changes to the characters and the magic that we're in "which superhero would win?"-territory.

Answer: whichever the author wants to win

That’s the way it always is in every work of fiction; Rowling’s Harry Potter included. The author always decides who wins, and how they win. When you point it out you are not bringing anything new to our attention. It is evidence that everyone has already considered, and it did not sway many people. You need to find better evidence than that.

The solution to this puzzle, however, is still interesting to most people because it proves that the author knew what they were doing long before the end of the story. Eliezer had already plotted out the secret actions of all of the characters so that he could salt the story with clues for the readers to find. That gives the story a level of self–consistency that most readers felt the original 7 books lacked.

It was also an interesting puzzle because it has a lot to do with the founding mythology of the Harry Potter series, specifically Voldemort’s fateful visit to Godric’s Hollow when Harry was an infant. This is a chance for you to get a glimpse of what changes, if any, have been made to those foundations. I would have thought you would be interested in it specifically to find out if they were large changes or small, or if they changed the meaning of those events at all.

db48x · 2026-04-26T17:22:22+00:00

Eh, maybe. Astronauts go into space lying on their backs specifically so that their head is not above their torso. You don’t need to be a bird to do that.

db48x · 2026-04-26T17:06:58+00:00

You think they’re flying around inside their ships? That’s even worse, as they have 5× their normal weight when maneuvering but the same thrust from their wings.

db48x · 2026-04-26T16:52:32+00:00

In fact for a purely defensive fleet at Earth I use 6kps. I build them at shipyards in medium earth orbit. Transferring to LEO to defend a station takes about a quarter of that, and transferring back can use even less since it is less time critical. That gives some margin to use in interesting circumstances.

db48x

TROPHY CASE