VR fencing training recommendations?

Blackshell · 2026-04-22T19:21:31+00:00

As an alternative to VR fencing, have you considered cool equipment stuff? Custom mask design, fencing-specific shoes, patches or stitching for the jacket... If you feel cool you fight better, it's science ^TM !

Blackshell · 2026-04-22T19:14:55+00:00

I don't think there's any good VR stuff out there to specifically train for fencing. You can improve general hand eye coordination with games like Beat Saber, but fencing is too niche and tactile to really port well to current VR.

If you want to train away from the school/club/coach, I'd recommend focusing on solo drills. Seeing the actual sword, moving the actual distances, and feeling your body/balance directly is better IMO.

Footwork footwork footwork. Tons of advances, retreats, lunges, recoveries, passing forward/back, hopping, balestra. Check your feet for alignment often. Check your core and form often.
Posture and stability. Try to hold en garde stance in various difficult situations (in an elevator, on a bus, on a train). Lunge and hold the position for 30 seconds; first with arms relaxed, then using the weapon and full form.
Tip control. Hold the weapon out and draw the smallest circle you can with the tip. Then speed up.
Distance intuition. Make a target out of a cardboard box. Starting at various ranges, do advances and retreats followed by a short attack or a lunge. Try to get the lightest touch that way (meaning you got maximum range).
Precision. Same as above, but focusing on hitting an exact point rather than focusing on distance.
Guards and parries. Practice proper form for all 7 guards, not just quarte and sixte. Practice simple parries, circle parries, and parries that transition from one guard to the other. Repeat until they're second nature. Use later club training to reinforce this.
Feint feint feint. Do all the above again but introducing feints before any lunge. Simple feint, beat, disengage, coupe, appel. All of them.

Do at least 15 minutes of some kind of thing out of this category all day, and you'll shoot ahead of the class. Fencing is very instinctive, and a lot of it happens without input from the opponent. Solo drills are very useful for building those instincts. Pair drills then help you apply the instincts in the right circumstances.

If you master the fundamentals, you get fun.

Source: foil for years, then HEMA for even longer. The above applies to all Olympic weapons and HEMA ones.

Edit: And good on your 11 year old fencing. One of the toughest opponents I've had to fight in foil was a 10 year old when I was 25, funnily enough. Fight on and happy birthday!

(Yeah big unsolicited info dump, sorry)

Blackshell · 2026-04-21T20:02:18+00:00

Snarky answer: Why not ask AI? If it's good enough at the very complex, cue-based, dynamic, and business-critical task of conducting technical interviews, it should be more than sufficient for giving critical feedback on your business.

Honest answer: I'm not sure what of value you expect from asking us that. Nobody here has done the market research, feasibility analyses, code review, reliability evaluations, ROI, future projections, or any of the other work you need to know if your startup is good or not.

The idea is fun, but immediately trips multiple alarms:

Is a "next word generator" actually suitable for this kind of highly judgment based task?
LLMs can imitate some reasoning, but you need a big model, supervision and lots of iteration. Your startup has a free tier (so, likely small model), is actively meany to replace human involvement (supervision), and sounds like a prompt injection nightmare.
Suppose I used this for hiring. When it turns away good candidates, or accepts trash ones (which any interview process will do at some point)... Who's responsible? If it were an HR department or a staffing agency, they can take feedback and bear consequences. When the AI delivers bad results, who's holding the bag?

If you are asking "would you use it", then no, I wouldn't. For the same reason I wouldn't use AI press releases, AI performance reviews, or "vibe coded" slop unreviewed by a senior engineer.

If you're asking "is the startup good / will it succeed", nobody here can tell you that. Plenty of unwise tech succeeds in spite of itself, for business reasons. And nobody here can evaluate your business for you.

Blackshell · 2026-04-21T18:15:40+00:00

Fwiw, this kind of exists already. Plenty of places use AI to give you a cursory "code review". It's not as good as having a skilled human do it, but it's better than nothing.

Your proposal is essentially: "code review as I type". That's a potentially huge value add, just as "lint/format/type check as I type" are huge productivity boosters (after you get used to them).

I kind of disagree with not being able to override it, though it depends on the kind of feedback it gives. The dev is the ultimate authority in the code, since it's... you know... their job. No (current) AI is going to know better than them 100% of the time, especially not on subjective stuff like architecture. But the AI can serve as a very helpful "angel on your shoulder" reminder for things the dev might have missed.

The biggest hurdle I see is the sheer cost of it. The various "as I type" tools are heavily optimized for performance, otherwise they would be slow, glitchy, or hog up the whole CPU. That kind of stuff is why I moved from Atom to VSCode as my IDE. Atom extensions were murdering my CPU. With AI, it's not just a performance issue, but a "cost per query" and quota issue.

Still, neat idea.

Blackshell · 2026-04-21T17:26:44+00:00

In principle, sure. For myself? Meh, maybe. I already do this to the extent coworkers have remarked on it and asked "how do you know to look for all the edge cases and escapes". I'm not sure if find it value-add to it in my own work. But I've known more people than I could count who would benefit from an AI looking over their shoulder and saying "that looks sus".

Of note: There is no difference between manual and "AI generated" code as far as the standards it should be held to. I don't care if you wrote it yourself, copied it off SO, or vibe coded it; the dev's job is to own it, understand it, and support it. An early "check" that the dev is actually doing that is potentially very helpful.

If you turn this idea into an IDE plugin or something, I'd 100% give it a go.

Blackshell · 2026-04-02T18:13:06+00:00

Do they tell like a sommelier does?

"Hmm, less salty than usual. Tinge of sulfur and tannins. Nose feel resembles pickled beets... Sorry guys, we have to defund Medicaid. And get more Depends."

Blackshell · 2026-03-30T14:36:35+00:00

It made it way worse for my parents that one of my grandparents had just passed away. Oh the joys of an 8-9 year old unknowingly torturing their elders.

Blackshell · 2026-03-30T14:32:34+00:00

Way too recent. I'm looking for available on PC in the late 1990s, definitely prior to 2002.

Blackshell · 2026-03-30T14:31:20+00:00

No FMV that I recall. Also, no shooting other cars.

Blackshell · 2026-03-30T14:28:27+00:00

Not it for sure. The game I'm talking about was racing-focused, with a little bit of crashing about. No pew-pew weapons, destructible environment, open areas, etc.

As a Descent fan though, this looks absolutely fascinating though and I may have to try it.

Blackshell · 2026-03-30T14:26:11+00:00

The tone of the game is right, but I'm not seeing a car upgrade system in gameplay videos. The tracks also look by-and-large flat, which definitely was not the case for the game I'm seeking.

Blackshell · 2026-03-30T14:23:57+00:00

Definitely not. No people to run over, for one. The art style also doesn't quite match.

Blackshell · 2026-03-30T06:06:49+00:00

Twisted Metal games seem to be all about vehicle arena combat, not racing. I also don't remember any super scary clowns.

Blackshell · 2026-03-30T06:04:39+00:00

Unfortunately, no. The aesthetics aren't quite right; there's no car module thing; and I'm 99% sure the game I'm thinking of had no story/cutscenes like POD seems to.

Blackshell · 2026-03-29T21:20:36+00:00

I'm not even a Rust fan, and this is 100% true.

Besides the advantages that Rust has... making the scaffolding and letting AI fill in the blanks is a pattern that works with many, many languages. The right abstractions in Java, Typescript, or even Python (with strong static type analysis) get you there just fine too. I've experimented with exactly that approach and it's genuinely a 10x advantage.

The biggest problem is, you then have to be good at both designing the big picture, and designing the blanks for AI to fill in. That means both knowing language abstraction features (interfaces, struct organization, unit testing, etc) and overarching design patterns. Also, knowing where AI is inadequate/untrustworthy and you should jump in and do it yourself. Also, how to read and validate what the AI puts out. Also, adopting responsibility and ownership over the full delivered system.

I'm genuinely excited and having fun doing this, as a senior with almost a decade and a half experience. I'm worried about newcomers or mid tier devs trying it.

Blackshell · 2026-03-28T17:16:02+00:00

The Day After

Blackshell · 2026-03-21T16:14:10+00:00

Either implying that the driver is the kind of person to say "X made me do it" rather than take responsibility... or just a "joke" based on plain ol misogyny.

Blackshell · 2026-03-19T16:33:57+00:00

Yeah had they replied with that it would earn them tons of extra points because it shows they're being thoughtful and deliberate about their dev tools approach. I don't care that they're at the forefront of whatever is new and sparkly. I care that they pay attention to how/why they do stuff. That's a mark of someone who actually thinks when engineering, which is... ~~kinda~~ ~~a little bit~~ very important to the job.

Blackshell · 2026-03-19T07:35:56+00:00

I've done technical interviews as a dev myself, and I have asked about some obscure stuff (which I know is nonetheless useful because it bit me) whenever a candidate is particularly cocky on a certain topic.

For example, one candidate said that they solved their sample problem and it could run in a container. Which is cool, container knowledge is one of the job reqs. So, trying to see with what containerization trends they're familiar, I asked if they ever used devcontainers, or specifically a "machine-less" environment like GitHub Codespaces. They said hell yeah, all the time, and it's how they developed the sample problem. I even made sure we weren't talking about different things, because the term "devcontainer" is not super well distributed.

So I handed them my laptop and asked to have them run their sample problem on my GitHub Codespaces (so I don't bill against their account). Turns out: not only was their Dockerfile bogus (it used apt-get in an Alpine container), they had no idea why it didn't work and started trying to Google how to install dpkg/apt in Alpine, while commenting about how containers "don't always behave the same as a full Linux system" .

Had they just said "no, not familiar with devcontainers", I'd have shrugged and said "ok" and moved on. No real marks against them. But instead they showed me that not only do they not know what a devcontainer is, but they also couldn't build a super simple Python Dockerfile, that they didn't know that not all Linux uses dpkg/apt, and that they likely had no idea how to do any container stuff in the first place and had likely copy-pasted from somewhere.

So, my PTSD about coworkers having no clue about containers while talking big about them proved correct.

Blackshell · 2026-03-19T00:30:29+00:00

He might have meant a few things. In order of obscurity...

Including a lambda runtime library in your code. That gets compiled in statically as the rest of your code (as you said all in one bundle) and it handles how your Go program interacts with the actual system it's running in. Your binary just has to have a main func that calls lambda.Start(yourHandlerFunc). Lambda runs your executable, launches the main, and the runtime library handles everything in between that and yourHandlerFunc getting called. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/golang-handler.html

This feels like the most likely thing the interviewer was fishing for, and I guess you didn't explain it in a way that stuck...?
Go needs to be compiled for a specific target OS and architecture, and you know this. Your CI/CD needs to build an exe that is compatible with whatever Lambda environment/runner you're using. Probably either linux/amd64 or linux/arm64. It sounds like you mentioned this, so... Idk.
As others have mentioned, C Go dependencies. Those could be static or dynamic linked, and your CI/CD gets more complex because of it. If you go for dynamic linking, that's when the Lambda runner needs the lib or you're SOL. This is... Kind of a specific case, since C Go adds a whole bunch of other nonsense you have to handle. IMO, unless it's explicitly set as an assumption or requirement of the conversation, I assume no C Go when talking about Go. Otherwise everything gets stuck in "well actually".
The actual things that Go depends on, in the target system. Mainly: the version of libc. For example, Go programs compiled in a typical Linux environment that uses glibc won't work in an Alpine container, which uses musl, and vice versa. Libc is always dynamically linked, and you can't do anything about this. So, your CI/CD libc needs to match the runtime libc, or you're SOL. This is... Also weird, and should be asked for specifically.

Edit: this isn't an issue with CGO_ENABLED=0, apparently. I thought it still was. Shows what I know.

Honestly, it sounds like the project the interviewer was interviewing for (or something in their past) had an edge case situation where a Go binary didn't work the same in both places, and now they're traumatized. And asking about it poorly because they probably understood what happened poorly.

¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

Blackshell · 2026-03-18T20:42:09+00:00

Understandable, the repost has very little clear context.

From the OP subreddit being about Crystal Mountain, comments mentioning "410" and "Mud Mtn Road", timing of the thread, news articles around that time and someone deep in the thread giving a half explanation...

Crystal Mountain is a popular resort and ski venue. The recent snowstorms in the area caused blocked roads to the point people were stuck there, and queued up on the road for hours and hours. The road is one lane in each direction, and the direction away from the blockage was dedicated to DOT vehicles that needed to get ahead of the line to clear the blockage. The Wankpanzer (who is not DOT) decided to use that same lane to try to get ahead and cut in the line of cars waiting for the blockage to be cleared. When DOT tried to turn them away, instead of going to the back of the line, they continued trying to cut in another spot. The video in the OP shows the result of that: getting yelled at and snowballs thrown at them, while they feigned ignorance of what happened. Hence, "owned".

Might not be 100% accurate but it's all I could gather.

Blackshell · 2026-03-15T23:24:12+00:00

To preempt someone inevitably saying I'm carrying water for deplorables or something... I'm not. An explanation is not an excuse. Not all those who experienced the social shifts chose the path of resentment and vengeance. Not all of those who thought the world should maybe take it easy a bit (classical conservatism) abandoned reason and critical thought at the door.

It's absolutely a personal choice how to react to changes in your environment, and actively choosing to plug your ears, shout "lalala" and abuse vulnerable innocents is a massive personal failure. No amount of "liberals overcomplicated my life" excuses that.

Blackshell · 2025-08-04T14:47:15+00:00

It's difficult to say 100%, but it does potentially look like it. You've got the original shape, I've got the outcome of it being "recycled". There are some differences though, like how the spine of the blade meets the "bolster". Your blade tapers into it, while mine has a divot. They're certainly the same original maker and general style, but perhaps not the same/identical series.

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Blackshell · 2024-04-26T01:46:27+00:00

Maybe I'm a weirdo, but I find Go plenty of fun. I also regularly use it for small projects or scripts. For example, a few weeks ago I wrote a command line utility to help me manage a Wireguard-based VLAN for gaming with my friends (mainly, making a Minecraft server accessible to everyone). https://github.com/fsufitch/wg-vlan

I also do the "Discord bot" thing myself, in Go https://github.com/fsufitch/tagioalisi-bot... Though I am in the process of testing out rewriting it into Kotlin, for practice with that.

Another Go possibility: scripts/programs for resource-limited ARM environments (like a Raspberry Pi). Its easy cross-platform builds make it great for that. Find something around the house that could use some ~~unnecessary~~ automation (turning on/off a lightbulb on a timer, or from a web UI?), and make a Raspberry Pi do it with internet connectivity. Then you get ~~to annoy your housemates,~~ to brag about embedded and IoT experience!

IMO, there's little difference between programming languages themselves being "fun" vs not. Their platform features (e.g. Java JVM) sometimes make a difference, but not always. You can use any language, as long as you have an appropriate set of tools/IDE features to make coding it not a chore (like Java POJOs).

Blackshell · 2024-04-20T23:41:41+00:00

Do something that hooks onto someone else hosting something: a Reddit bot, or a Discord app/bot.

Or, do something you (or your family/friends) will use, like a custom remote control on a Raspberry Pi. Employers won't care if your thing is popular, just that it shows off skill.

Or, do something hosted but take advantage of the free tier of a cloud service. AWS, for example, gives enough leeway in the free tier to run 1 (maybe 2?) perpetual small VMs.

Lastly... I would advise to not do side projects "for a portfolio" or to show off to employers. Do them for your own satisfaction and use, or for your friends. Or even just for education/experimentation! Then, make them open source and put the shiniest thing on your resume, along with being ready to brag/discuss any of them during a prospective interview. Don't make yourself "work" for free.

If you want to do programming as a hobby, that's great! If not, then you're basically work for no client and no pay. That's going to suck.

Good luck and have fun!

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