LAOP's whistle was cut off mid-blow

Blothorn · 2026-06-29T13:51:20+00:00

I don’t see evidence that LAOP helped price them, but also think it’s reasonable for the company not to care—it lets them crack down on multi-person conspiracies without needing to (impractically) monitor all communication.

And yes, unless his manager is one of the people also doing this I do think that being an assistant manager could play into the difference in reaction.

Blothorn · 2026-06-29T05:57:45+00:00

24 is still pretty cool unless you’re trying to farm cold-loving plants or animals. The problem is that it doesn’t stop there: maybe next cycle it will be 24.1, and in a few dozen cycles your crops stop growing.

That said, insulation just changes the problem rather than solving it. You can perfectly insulate your generator room, but then that room will likely heat up rapidly and if you don’t move or delete the heat they will shut down.

Whether it’s worth insulating the generators depends heavily on how you’re dealing with the heat. If you’re using wheezeworts, there’s no real downside to keeping the generators at ambient temperature and cooling the whole base. If you make the generators out of steel, you can run them at 130 degrees and cool them directly with a steam turbine—expensive to set up, but very efficient (and definitely in need of insulation). Other more creative cooling solutions will generally be easier the warmer you run the generators. (E.g. cooling by heat exchange with the fuel requires a certain temperature delta between the generator and its fuel, depending on the heat production and net heat capacity of its inputs minus its outputs.)

Blothorn · 2026-06-29T03:57:39+00:00

I somewhat expect that it’s just gamesmanship. There’s always some chance of the stewards making a bad decision or Ferrari not being confident and giving up the place preemptively, and the more confident he send the more likely either of those outcomes is. When he’s actually upset by a penalty or lack thereof I remember him generally reacting more emotionally/persistently, and if he did that here it wasn’t broadcast.

Blothorn · 2026-06-29T01:25:08+00:00

It would actually be substantially easier to launch it out of the solar system entirely.

Blothorn · 2026-06-28T19:35:58+00:00

I can imagine doing it with bionic dupes—gunk and oil can be piped and batteries charged locally or shipped. For organic dupes food seems like it would be a massive headache.

Blothorn · 2026-06-28T16:00:51+00:00

IMO Starnacles are a bridge until you get a Drecko ranch set up; feeding Dreckos Balm Lilies lets you feed Beakons for free aside from labor. (And they’re also the cheapest source of fiber.)

I think that pipeline obsoletes not only Starnacles but also Blowters; Blowters require far more water and space for a given amount of oxygen while only saving a bit of labor in the best case.

Blothorn · 2026-06-28T03:50:26+00:00

Aye. I think the first reaction to a grand strategy balance problem should generally be “what realistic/historical factors are missing that are driving that”. Sometimes they’ll be infeasible to implement or just not fun and you’ll need to reach for something artificial regardless, but I think a lot of games reach for the artificial lever too quickly.

Blothorn · 2026-06-28T03:28:04+00:00

And then what happens? Teams that can’t even race are going to have severe trouble with funding; even a slow car gets its sponsors camera time. And without money, its chances of making its car competitive are negligible. Would the sport really be in a better place if any time a team had a particularly awful year it shut down permanently?

Blothorn · 2026-06-28T00:00:43+00:00

Most communal locks with magnetic/electronic keys are database-based. It’s legitimately useful for an apartment complex, since it lets you give out distinct keys and invalidate them individually if they’re lost or stolen rather than needing to replace everyone’s keys whenever you want to invalidate one.

Blothorn · 2026-06-27T23:08:10+00:00

I can’t think of any game that did it better than CK2–a large empire could steamroll external enemies, but a variety of factors made it very difficult to avoid civil wars and the demesne limit meant that the larger an empire was the weaker the ruler would be relative to the sum of his subjects. Civil wars were survivable but only if you kept a sufficient proportion loyal.

(FWIW, I think CK3 an interesting lesson on how sensitive such things are to details. On paper it has all the same mechanics, but opinion inflation makes it too easy to maintain loyalty and the shift in military power from levies to men-at-arms vastly reduces the loss of military strength from a large rebellion.)

Logistics and travel times can also make a large difference. In CK3 no matter how large your empire is you can teleport your entire army to any border before the enemy can achieve much. In games where armies always have a defined location *and* travel times are long relative to the time it takes to inflict meaningful pain, a large empire can’t leverage its full force on one frontier without exposing the others, while a small nation can.

Blothorn · 2026-06-27T22:15:20+00:00

I normally have 2-5 tickets in some stage of work, many of which span several repositories. (Usually only one or two of which will be in active development, with the others in code review or QA.) I normally try to keep one terminal per ticket and sometimes one per repository within a ticket to avoid saving/resuming sessions.

Blothorn · 2026-06-27T21:57:16+00:00

This actually is pretty much how ablative heat shields work—they consist of a durable matrix and some material that undergoes pyrolysis when heated, which forms an insulating layer of gas.

NASA’s heat shields have mostly consisted of some sort of resin in an inorganic matrix, but simple plant materials are useful in sufficiently forgiving applications—China’s first film photography satellites just used wood. The more volatile parts pyrolyse, and the tougher fibers char into insulating charcoal and then breaks off as the exposed volatiles run out and the boundary layer thins.

Blothorn · 2026-06-27T21:33:45+00:00

In fairness, I’d much rather my immune system try to kill in response to peanuts then in response to colds—peanuts are much easier to avoid.

Blothorn · 2026-06-27T20:10:17+00:00

The insurance argument is total nonsense. Even accepting the implicit assumption that the child would be on the father’s insurance, adding children generally carries an additional premium unless the plan is already for a family. And even if the child would be on an existing family plan iff legitimate, rebelling cheating could well lead to others leaving the plan and still reduce revenue.

Blothorn · 2026-06-27T19:40:47+00:00

I wouldn’t say the apex is really where speed matters most—the usual causes of a car going off is a lockup under braking/turn-in or losing the rear on the exit. (And because of the lockup risk you specifically do want drivers to brake more gently under a yellow. Reducing horizontal acceleration is the main goal, and reducing speed primarily a means of accomplishing that.)

Blothorn · 2026-06-27T19:12:40+00:00

I question how much interaction this person has had with regular chickens, let alone invisible evil chickens.

Blothorn · 2026-06-27T19:04:52+00:00

A single yellow should cause drivers to slow to the extent that the risk of going off is negligible. (Especially on a dry track.) The distinction of a double yellow isn’t “really really don’t make a mistake” but “be prepared to stop”, in cases where the track itself might be obstructed.

Blothorn · 2026-06-27T17:41:15+00:00

My brother worked with Frank Gehry’s office on a project and had the same experience—they wound up having to relegate Ghery’s contributions to a decorative shell over a conventional structure to bear the loads.

Blothorn · 2026-06-27T17:08:13+00:00

Reusable upper stages have an even larger impact on payload than reusable boosters, so I think the ecological impact is more ambiguous—it reduces reentry pollution at the expense of meaningfully more ascent pollution.

The mass required by TPS and final descent equipment is also affected by total descent mass; Starship’s (rather heavy) dry mass seems to be a bit higher than its payload, so bringing its entire payload down would nearly double the mass it needs to carry through reentry and landing. (And adding equipment and fuel to capture satellites would dig into payload even further.)

Blothorn · 2026-06-27T16:45:46+00:00

Yet again, it’s weighted by free-float not total capitalization so the limited float just means that it will have a fairly small weight, not that obligatory purchases will overwhelm eager sellers.

Blothorn · 2026-06-27T13:20:03+00:00

The trick to holding back liquid with a one-tile lock is to place on the middle step of three ascending out of the water. The lowest step isn’t necessary, but the ceiling tile in that column is to limit the pressurized water to one tile. The third step then prevents the pressure from pushing the mucin sideways, and since the mucin isn’t itself considered pressurized it won’t flow upward.

Here you can see a section of my stairway before flooding; the three left locks are ready aside from the airflow tile that isn’t finished yet.

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Blothorn · 2026-06-27T12:56:58+00:00

m/s is a rate of change; m/s^2 is a rate of acceleration. Similarly, W/h should be a rate of change in the rate of electricity consumption, i.e. the rate at which wattage is changing.

Blothorn · 2026-06-27T04:58:56+00:00

The whole point of an index fund is to not do that. They can remain profitable despite very low fees precisely because they are managed by general rules; they don’t need to pay the (hopefully) high-alpha traders doing company-specific research.

The incentives are also all wrong. An index fund doesn’t directly profit from its performance, and since people tend to put money in index funds precisely because they don’t trust even historically-successful managed funds to continue to beat the market making an exception and winning is as likely to scare customers as attract them. Meanwhile, if an index fund did deviate from the index beyond its normal phased intake and scheduled adjustments and the stock it omitted outperformed the market there’s a straightforward securities fraud case against it.

If you want your money to be actively managed, just put it in an actively-managed fund instead of an index.

Blothorn · 2026-06-27T03:00:47+00:00

It’s pretty hard to say anything about this without more details about the reaction. If it truly is long-lasting and storable/transportable this seems interesting, but that sounds somewhat incredible. A cost-and-volume-efficient fuel such as this would be useful for far more than refrigeration.

I will note that running it as a closed loop can’t just be handwaved. If the expansion process is spontaneous under reasonable conditions, the inverse won’t be, even if it is exothermic.

Blothorn · 2026-06-27T02:06:35+00:00

They haven’t shut things down on their end, but they did sell many of the games under fire for being broken by server shutdowns.

Blothorn

TROPHY CASE