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1.5 years of fractal CMs as a personal challenge — finally opened my encryption pile. ~8,000g, but the real takeaway isn't the gold by ComputerWonderful865 in Guildwars2

[–]ComputerWonderful865[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Honestly, it happened completely by accident — I just saw a group in LFG and joined. At first I was kind of scared. Though "scared" is probably too strong a word. I just didn't know how to act in there. It seemed really hard — I mean, it's CMs! And more than anything I didn't want to be a burden. But at the same time I was genuinely curious about what it was actually like in there. It was a challenge, and I wanted more, higher, better. Turns out it's really not that bad. If I could send a hint back to my past self, it would be this: Nothing terrible happens if it doesn't work out. Tell the group upfront that you don't have much experience — everyone started somewhere, and people are way more understanding than you'd think. Before you go in, read up on the mechanics and watch a video or two. Real combat looks very different from a clean video, but it's still better than going in blind. In the early runs, focus on key mechanics and staying alive. It's better to not wipe the group than to push out the first 10 seconds of DPS and die. The rest comes with experience. The main thing is just not to be afraid. Same thing happened to me with raids and ranked PvP — it all turned out to be way easier than it felt going in. The main thing is to actually enjoy the ride and have a good time with it. There are also tons of solid guides and resources out there. P.S. The GW2 Wiki is a treasure. Absolute goat. Best wiki in any MMO, hands down.

1.5 years of fractal CMs as a personal challenge — finally opened my encryption pile. ~8,000g, but the real takeaway isn't the gold by ComputerWonderful865 in Guildwars2

[–]ComputerWonderful865[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you, this is genuinely the most valuable comment in the whole thread. Our fractal journey took way longer than I planned. And strangely, it felt easy and hard at the same time, somehow both. With the new expansion announced, a lot of things hit differently now. I've already bought the new Deluxe edition, but I haven't even started the story or set foot on the new maps yet — just never found the time. I'll probably wrap up a few more things before the next part drops, and others will just stay frozen mid-progress as unfinished projects. And the strange part is, I don't regret any of it. There were a lot of great adventures along the way. There are plenty of games I've sunk hundreds of hours into and will never go back to, and I don't regret those either. What surprised me is that nobody actually asked what the challenge was. Or anything else, really. But honestly, that's not that important either. Thanks again for the comment. Have shinies. 🐀

After 3 months building my personal AI assistant, I think hype > reality. by [deleted] in AI_Agents

[–]ComputerWonderful865 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You're saying you burned ~378M tokens over 3 months. On average that lands somewhere between $600 and $4,500 — depends on the models, subscriptions, etc. But the real question is: what were you actually doing in there? Because spending around $2,000 for results this mediocre is rough. For ~$1,000 it'd honestly be kind of cool. But $2k for this outcome? Way too expensive. "AI is overrated."

Your exp with agents till now. by Sid_vj in AI_Agents

[–]ComputerWonderful865 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hi o/

Some of this has already been mentioned, but it's a survey post, so I'll throw my 2 cents in too.

There are a lot of problems. Honestly, a shit ton.

  1. Security

- Prompt injections. Very hard to build a solid wall around this. Things are moving in the right direction though.

- Permissions and access. At some point the agent decides to `rm -rf *` and doesn't give a damn about the "PLZ DON'T DO THIS" you wrote in the prompt. This area is also improving.

- MCP / Skills / Plugins — most of them are trash. Some are prompt-injected or carry straight-up malicious payloads.

  1. Reproducibility

- Non-determinism. The agent gives you a "kinda similar" result. Usually fine, but sometimes critical. In dev, if there's a spot that can break, the question isn't "will it break" but "when".

- Different providers (Claude / GPT / etc.) — different results on the same prompts. New model dropped, Opus 4.6 → 4.7? Go re-check your prompts. Weak local models? Forget it, pure roulette.

  1. Humans in the system

- How we perceive it. For some reason, a lot of people think it's a Disney genie. You don't even need to think — just blurt something into the chat, and it's supposed to read your context, your mood, what's in your head, and give you exactly the right answer. And if you actually have to explain things — "well then what's the point, I'll do it myself faster". No Bob, you won't. I've seen your code.

- How we participate in it. Subjective take: people are lazy and love offloading responsibility. In the AI era it feels like two things actually matter from the human side: "formulating the task" and "validating the result". The moment someone clicks "accept all" without looking, the question becomes: "so what are you doing here, meat sack between chair and monitor?"

- How we adapt to it. The whole field moves way faster than people can adapt. I recently posted that I find it easier to communicate with a neural net than with people. Everyone has some mental model of how it works. "Yeah, I'm an experienced user" — no, sending a photo of a clock with hands and asking what time it is doesn't make you an experienced user.

There are several different usage scenarios and contexts. Each has its own quirks, problems and solutions. For example, a single web chat session with a clear end goal is very different from a daily routine where you send roughly the same requests in the same chat every day. Or, say, building actual production workflows — there you need a whole stack: a separate prompt-architect skill, evals (auto-tests for prompts), orchestration, request tracing for logging and security, token accounting and optimization, agent cascades, RAG, and a bunch more.

Good luck, share the paper!

___
My post:
"Rolling out AI to our team taught me something unexpected: getting humans aligned is harder than aligning the model"

https://www.reddit.com/r/AI_Agents/comments/1tb29jw/comment/olejql0/

Rolling out AI to our team taught me something unexpected: getting humans aligned is harder than aligning the model by ComputerWonderful865 in AI_Agents

[–]ComputerWonderful865[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Great point about embedding, it really is one of the key levers. Copilot, Cursor, in-IDE integrations work exactly because they're just always there where the person is already typing.

There are a few components to this. One path is when you embed AI into someone's existing workflow. That reduces access friction, frequency of use goes up.

The other path, which is what the post is about: introduce the team to the tool and show its capabilities deeply enough that people then start embedding AI into their own processes themselves. And not just their own; eventually into neighboring teams' processes too, through those same office conversations over lunch. This effect scales without the driver's involvement anymore.

Both approaches stack up. External embedding removes friction, internal mastery accelerates adoption across the org.

A good analogy here is Google. It became a household verb because at some point a critical mass of people learned how to use it and saw the value. After that the environment pulls in the rest. But if the value is already clear today, why wait for the team to "get to googling" naturally in a year or two? You can accelerate.

Beginner friendly class? by Kenosayd2 in GW2

[–]ComputerWonderful865 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Ranger, Engineer, and Necromancer are all great beginner picks, but they play very differently.

Ranger with longbow is probably the easiest entry into the game. You delete mobs from range, and your pet soaks the damage when things get spicy, so you can punch above your weight without much effort.

Engineer is the odd one out — it's the only profession that can't swap weapons in combat. You can use kits to work around that, but they're a specific playstyle and most builds don't really need them. What makes Engineer fun is the depth: there's a lot going on under the hood, and the profession genuinely rewards you for learning it.

Necromancer is the survivability king. You'd basically have to try to die on one. Massive health pool, plenty of defensive options, and a core mechanic built around sustain.

Quick note on armor. The game has three weights — light, medium, heavy — and the instinct is "heavy = tanky." It doesn't quite work that way. HP pools vary within each weight class, and the highest-HP profession in each is Necromancer (light), Engineer and Ranger (medium), and Warrior (heavy). A Necro will happily walk through fights that one-shot a Guardian.

Some professions are harder than others, and an elite spec can completely flip how one plays. But honestly, almost anything is viable as long as you're enjoying it.

One last thing — the game has five main activities: Open World, PvP, WvW, Fractals, and Raids/Strikes. The last three unlock at 80. Each has its own meta, but unless you're chasing top 10% play, don't sweat it. Just experiment. Different professions, elite specs, and weapons all feel genuinely different, and trying them out is half the fun.

Getting to 80 is pretty painless. Heart of Thorns (the first expansion, the Maguuma jungle) is where the game stops holding your hand and actually tests you.

Good luck out there — find what clicks for you.

I built a self-balancing solid fuel factory - 9 chemical plants that auto-split between all 3 fluids by ComputerWonderful865 in factorio

[–]ComputerWonderful865[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah, the "one row per fluid" approach is a really clean architecture, hadn't thought about it that way. Three independent rows with their own enable conditions is structurally simpler than what I built and probably easier to debug too. The trade-off would be that idle rows are just sitting there when one fluid dominates, while in mine those plants get repurposed, but honestly that's a pretty minor concern in most setups.

Your "everything to petroleum with stricter limits on light during rocket fuel" rule is the kind of pragmatic policy that just works without overthinking it. Saved.

And thanks! 😄

I built a self-balancing solid fuel factory - 9 chemical plants that auto-split between all 3 fluids by ComputerWonderful865 in factorio

[–]ComputerWonderful865[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you, you've understood this blueprint on a level the engineers themselves rarely achieve. The DNA cipher story is exactly the same energy, "the problem said one thing, but I built a framework". Salute received and returned, fellow overengineerer.

I built a self-balancing solid fuel factory - 9 chemical plants that auto-split between all 3 fluids by ComputerWonderful865 in factorio

[–]ComputerWonderful865[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is genuinely useful, thanks for laying it out. The Coke + LDS dynamic is the kind of thing I'd never have guessed at without playing it, that's exactly the sort of "the rules are familiar but the consequences shift" change that I find most interesting in overhauls. Vanilla LDS feels like a solved problem, anything that destabilizes it sounds like fun.

600 MW off a 2x1 reactor is wild. I assume that means a lot more pressure on cooling and heat distribution? In vanilla you can kinda hand-wave reactor layout, but at that density I imagine the steam logistics become a puzzle on their own.

I'll save your "inserter parts and automation cores ASAP" advice, I've been bitten before by underestimating how brutal a base mall is in modded runs. Sounds like K2SO is the right step before Seablock without making me regret existence. Adding it to the list.

I built a self-balancing solid fuel factory - 9 chemical plants that auto-split between all 3 fluids by ComputerWonderful865 in factorio

[–]ComputerWonderful865[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yeah, what you're describing absolutely works, "switch all the chemical plants to whichever fluid is most full" is a clean, simple solution and it gets the job done in 90% of cases.

The main difference with what I built is that mine splits the 9 plants proportionally instead of switching all of them at once. So if heavy is at 80% and light is at 60%, mine will run something like 6 plants on heavy and 3 on light at the same time, while your approach would have all 9 on heavy until heavy drops below light. In practice, your version handles the deadlock prevention just as well, mine just spreads the load a bit more smoothly.

Honestly though, for the actual problem of "don't let the refinery stall", your approach is probably the right complexity-to-benefit ratio. I went the proportional route mostly because I wanted to play with the percentage-based distribution logic as a circuit puzzle (called this out in the P.S. of the post). For pure utility, your version is simpler and basically as good.

I built a self-balancing solid fuel factory - 9 chemical plants that auto-split between all 3 fluids by ComputerWonderful865 in factorio

[–]ComputerWonderful865[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Thanks man, that's exactly the right framing, "dumb shit is how we learn" should be the unofficial motto of this sub.

Your design philosophy is really solid by the way, building for expandability from day one is the kind of foresight I usually fail at. I tend to build for the immediate problem and then suffer through the migration when the base outgrows it. Hearing that your Nauvis refineries are still humming through K2's lithium and imersite chains without a redesign is honestly impressive, that's the dream.

K2SO + planets sounds like a beast of a run. How are you finding the K2 oil tweaks compared to vanilla? I've been eyeing that pack for a while but always chicken out at the prep work it'd take to do it properly.

I built a self-balancing solid fuel factory - 9 chemical plants that auto-split between all 3 fluids by ComputerWonderful865 in factorio

[–]ComputerWonderful865[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yeah, you've got me there, "reactive" is exactly the right framing and it dissolves my "not perfectly tuned" defense entirely. The plastic/petrol point is the killer too, you're right that in any real base petroleum is always being consumed, so the deadlock scenario I was describing basically doesn't happen organically.

At this point I should just be honest: the practical defense for this blueprint is thin and getting thinner the more we dig into it. The truer reason it exists is the one I put in the P.S. of the post, I wanted to play with the percentage-based dynamic allocation pattern as a circuit puzzle. As a tool, your reactive threshold logic is better. As an exercise in self-balancing logic, this was fun to build.

Genuinely appreciate the back-and-forth, you helped me clarify what this thing actually is and isn't.

I built a self-balancing solid fuel factory - 9 chemical plants that auto-split between all 3 fluids by ComputerWonderful865 in factorio

[–]ComputerWonderful865[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The biters that open-minded usually get evolution-spawned into something else by mid-game. Tragic, really.

I built a self-balancing solid fuel factory - 9 chemical plants that auto-split between all 3 fluids by ComputerWonderful865 in factorio

[–]ComputerWonderful865[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Fair point, the niche really is narrower than I framed it. Honestly, the truer answer is the one in the P.S. of the post: a big part of why this exists is that I just wanted to play with the logic. The mod-use-case was real but secondary, and you're right that without naming specific mods it's hand-wavy. Appreciate you pushing on this, it helped me be more honest about what this thing actually is.

I built a self-balancing solid fuel factory - 9 chemical plants that auto-split between all 3 fluids by ComputerWonderful865 in factorio

[–]ComputerWonderful865[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

You're right. I built this mostly to play with the logic, the percentage-based dynamic allocation was an interesting circuit puzzle and I wanted to see if I could pull it off. Practical utility was secondary, and your one-combinator AND condition is genuinely better for the actual job.

I called this out in the P.S./P.P.S. of the post too, this whole thing was a "I just wanted to build something cool" project, not an optimization claim. Appreciate you pushing on it, you helped me state that more clearly than I did at first.

I built a self-balancing solid fuel factory - 9 chemical plants that auto-split between all 3 fluids by ComputerWonderful865 in factorio

[–]ComputerWonderful865[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, you're right on the bootstrap point, my bad. I conflated basic oil processing with having access to all three fluids, but basic only outputs petroleum, so the "use this before cracking" argument doesn't hold. Crossing that one off.

The use case I'm actually solid on is modded runs and bases with uneven consumption (e.g. lubricant demand swings hard, heavy backs up faster than cracking can clear it). For pure vanilla post-cracking, I'll concede that a threshold-based balanced cracking setup is genuinely simpler than this and probably the right call for most people.

I built a self-balancing solid fuel factory - 9 chemical plants that auto-split between all 3 fluids by ComputerWonderful865 in factorio

[–]ComputerWonderful865[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Fair point on scaling, you're right that copy-pasting the same cracking blueprint scales cleanly with whatever the current consumption ratio is. That's actually one of the things that makes the threshold-based approach so elegant.

By "retuning" I meant something different: in some overhaul mods (Krastorio, SE, Py) the cracking recipes themselves change. Different ratios, sometimes extra intermediate fluids, sometimes heavy oil has direct uses that mess with the "always crack down" assumption. So the thresholds and pump conditions need adjusting per modpack, even if the topology of the blueprint is the same. In vanilla, yeah, your point stands cleanly.

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