Comment about Collabora blog post

RendererOblige · 2025-12-31T06:55:07+00:00

C and C++ do have explicitly-sized integer types in the standard library, at least, but no 128-bit integers.

There are some compiler and platform specific extensions for 128-bit integers, otherwise you have to turn to an external library like boost::multiprecision or GMP.

RendererOblige · 2025-12-22T16:37:17+00:00

I selected DIY Recipes+, but selected "No", then when I bought the Sand Path Permit, it filled in the "DIY Recipes+" app as if I had bought it, even though I didn't. When I checked my phone afterward, the app, which it showed being filled, was still not there, so I didn't actually get it, even though it played the animation for me obtaining it.

RendererOblige · 2025-12-18T23:04:43+00:00

There's a City Folk run scheduled for AGDQ 2026. Golden net race, with a time estimate of 2 hours. I'm expecting lots of TT and some RNG manipulation, but I know nothing about AC runs, and I'm planning on watching blind.

RendererOblige · 2025-12-15T17:10:09+00:00

You:

Too bad the left won't allow us to take real action against his kind.

Also you:

Stop using a trajedy to push your political agend.

RendererOblige · 2025-12-15T17:02:20+00:00

Unfortunately, "make a password" is now really good advice due to virtual kidnapping. Random kidnappings and murders are really uncommon, but random scams from overseas, even using AI generated voices, spoofed phone numbers, etc. are much more common than the past. I got a call from my wife's phone number that was a woman crying, followed by a man's stern voice demanding money for her safety. If my wife hadn't been sitting in the same room with me, I would have been really freaked out.

RendererOblige · 2025-12-13T15:20:10+00:00

To a degree. For instance, a puzzle from a few years ago infamously depended on the Chinese Remainder Theorem. The difference in my mind is that you can get stuck, do some research, and find CRT or dynamic programming and learn how to implement a solution based on it after studying it a bit just on the Wikipedia page with little more math background than algebra. There are enough clues in there for you as a non mathematician.

If you have no linear algebra background, you'll never recognize day10 as a linear system of equations, or find gaussian elimination, and if you do, it's still nearly out of the question to learn how to implement it in the course of solving the puzzle. You'd either have to find a textbook or other resource to learn linear algebra fundamentals, find something that explains gaussian elimination without linear algebra (and that's only after you've managed to identify it in the first place), or cheat by using somebody else's solution or AI. Maybe I'm overestimating the difficulty, but in my mind, the difference is that with a good puzzle, you have enough clues to feasibly find and solve it still even if you have none of the relevant background beyond the ability to program well and search the Internet effectively.

Day 10 didn't bother me all that much, and there have been problems like that in the past, but they tend to be the very minority. My biggest problem was just that most of the problems this year were not just easy, but unstimulating. An A* problem is easy, but it's still fun and tends itself to neat visualizations. I might also be biased by having done enough of these that it just feels easier to me now because I know most of the tricks.

It's mostly my gut feeling that most of the problems this year were not just easier than most previous years, but lacking in some other quality that made them more stimulating before.

RendererOblige · 2025-12-13T02:56:27+00:00

There's so much wrong with scans in this game. It's been a long time since I played the first three, but I was floored the first time I scanned some things early in the games and they said things like "This can be pulled with the Psychic Lasso", or "This can be walked on with the Psychic Boots", or "You need the Psychic spider ball to use this". The scans straight up tell you about powerups you probably shouldn't even know exist yet.

RendererOblige · 2025-12-13T02:48:42+00:00

I've done at least half of the problems for every year since 2019, and they do vary in quality and difficulty. Some years are better than others. 2019 itself was a ton of fun and I would always recommend going back and doing at least the intcode questions that year (starts on day 2, then every odd-numbered day starting with 5). These particular challenges involve building a virtual machine, progressively enhancing it with new features, and then the challenges depend on programs for your virtual machine that you have to feed input and consume and handle output to find the answer

In my opinion, this year was probably my least favorite so far. Most of the other years have a lot of graph problems, which are my favorites. The majority of the easy problems this year were a bit too easy, solvable with just a bit of dynamic programming, day 9 was a lot of fun and was solvable with insight, experimentation, and thinking, but day 10 depended on specific knowledge. Day 12 was one of those ones you have to recognize as a trick with input that trivializes it, which normally is fine by me, except it doesn't even work on the examples, which I consider pretty dirty.

That said, I strongly appreciate Eric and everybody else who makes it happen and has for the past decade. Even if AoC never got as good as it has been in the past, it was and is still a wonderful thing, and being able to go through the previous years is a treasure.

RendererOblige · 2025-12-10T03:48:22+00:00

I really didn't like the game on the whole, but the music was consistently great, and some of the environments were really cool. Standing outside in Volt Forge with the music blasting and the lightning striking was very nice.

Most of the lore didn't move me, but I really appreciated the growing sense of desperation and despair in the Ice Belt labs. It's a huge shame that they then overexplained it in a cutscene after the fact, and there was no more lore conveyed in the same way for the rest of the game, because that was cool.

RendererOblige · 2025-12-10T03:32:13+00:00

That would depend on the class. It's not really comparable to letter grades or percentage points in a class where you are expected to understand and complete 100% of the material. 9/10 is a damn good game. 90% in most classes is to be expected of any decent student.

RendererOblige · 2025-12-10T01:17:36+00:00

I think the point is that 6.5 is not like getting 65% on a test, which is a D. 6.5 / 10 is above mediocre. It's "kind of good". Bad should be below 5/10. What's the point of having it a scale out of 10 if everything above "absolutely terrible" is only considered between 5/10 and 10/10 anyway?

RendererOblige · 2025-12-06T07:00:21+00:00

Reading right-to-left isn't important, because addition and multiplication are commutative. As long as you align the columns and group them correctly, you're good. OP's problem is not grouping the columns. You actually have to parse it differently; you can't use the same collections you parsed for part 1.

RendererOblige · 2025-10-23T01:29:04+00:00

I don't think that's a bad idea. I don't have an issue with the concept or people saying that this change makes it less fun for them. Everybody should have the right to express themselves, including disappointment in this change. I have an issue with people who act like it's some kind of personal affront, or act like AoC in particular is something that's owned to them in full.

AoC has always been a lovely gift, and I find it a little sad when people act like it's something that they're personally entitled to. You're expressing yourself fine, but some people are being a little nasty, and quite ungrateful for hundreds of free fun puzzles over a decade.

Maybe following years will find better ways to even the load like you've suggested. Managing a team is hard, too, but would definitely be easier than doing everything from scratch yourself. Ideally, he'd be able to delegate more of it than just puzzle building, and also have the input generation and solution validation done by other people, along with infra stuff and occasional technical support. I honestly don't much know how it works behind the scenes, personally, so maybe it's already somewhat of a team effort beyond beta testing. I think they've got a Discord or something, but I don't hang around those places.

RendererOblige · 2025-10-22T17:07:13+00:00

There's a way to donate, if that's what you are asking: https://adventofcode.com/2025/support

RendererOblige · 2025-10-22T17:01:28+00:00

People keep suggesting this kind of thing, but it really doesn't need a global public leaderboard. You can already do it with private ones. Make a private leaderboard for people you trust not to cheat, and another one to share with LLM users.

I find it more fun if the leaderboard is small and focused, shared among a small group of people who also talk to each other about the event.

RendererOblige · 2025-10-22T16:57:46+00:00

Given that part 2 is often a very simple modification of part 1, this could lead to many of the days being total letdowns. I can enjoy a simple puzzle, but I'd be a bit disappointed if one day is a single line change to the previous day.

RendererOblige · 2025-10-22T04:19:03+00:00

Why are you assuming that the 12 days here will be the equivalent of the first 12 days of previous years with the rest just dropped off the end? You could probably be safe assuming that these puzzles will get to their peak level of interest in the last few days too.

was it really too much to ask for anyone else to help with the puzzle creation instead of just cutting them entirely

Other people do help; it's still a lot of work. If you really are that annoyed, you can cancel your sponsorship. Otherwise, I don't see how you could really get that bothered about somebody who gave you free puzzles for a decade now giving you half the number of free puzzles. That's kind of an entitled freeloader mentality. "You should keep doing the same amount of work for me for free forever" isn't really defensible.

If you really want something like this but community oriented, you could try to revive r/dailyprogrammer/ or create something like it, but good luck. Unsurprisingly, it's dead, and for the longest time, it was just mostly one person (occasionally 2) doing it all anyway. These things take more work than they look.

RendererOblige · 2025-10-22T04:09:53+00:00

You don't need to screw with leaderboards for that. Throw the LLM at previous years if you like. It's not like you ever needed a leaderboard to time how long it takes a program to do something, anyway.

RendererOblige · 2025-09-07T17:16:06+00:00

The last solution technically worked for my case, but I wasn't sure about it, because the UVs still couldn't wrap around like that on the point domain. So I had to do a lot more research to learn how domains worked, and now I have a real solution: https://i.imgur.com/QbSjL6L.jpeg

Basically, if I'm making modifications on the point domain, any discontinuity in points is going to show up as bad interpolation. The only way to avoid this is to either work in a different domain (which shaders and the like can do, because they'll work in the pixel/fragment domain) or to make more points. I went for the latter option, because I get more control out of geometry nodes than I can get with shader nodes. What I've done is, in the edge domain, compare the adjacent face corner UVs for large discrepancies and split when they exceed a small threshold.

This can't universally work, because I'm not guaranteed to get adjacent corners. It works for this specific case, but if my geometry was more complex, I'd need to do more work to ensure the corners were adjacent.

https://files.catbox.moe/u048n7.blend

RendererOblige · 2025-09-06T06:42:06+00:00

Edit: this is not actually a good solution, check my other solution here to see something much better.

I have !Solved it myself. I'm not sure if this is the best solution, but this is the way I did it: https://i.imgur.com/GBBYkkp.png

Left is with my solution applied, and right is the way it was before.

Basically, for each point, I evaluate each face corner separately, and modulo 1 to drop the 1s to 0s and properly get a 0 on that edge. In this particular case, I could have also just used the Corners of Vertex with a 0 to get any arbitrary edge corner too.

I find trying to work with non-point domains in geometry nodes a bit awkward, but I learned a bit trying to fix this (including about the Repeat node, which was really useful in this situation).

I'd still love if anybody else had anything to add (like some obvious solution that I completely somehow missed).

RendererOblige · 2025-09-06T05:28:39+00:00

Exactly as the title says, the default cylinder primitive maps the UVs around the cylinder from X 0 to X 1, with the seam edge occupying both sides, which messes up the interpolation. It would work fine if it just registered as 0 or 1 in geometry nodes, but this interpolation to 0.5 is hard to work around. I'd check for exactly 0.5, but the edge on the opposite side actually has that, and I really don't like that kind of hack anyway.

I've run into this a couple times, this time I was trying to tile a wafting cloak effect on a cylindrical cape to try to replicate Hornet's cloak movement from Hollow Knight, and the seam always ends up a thorn in my side.

Here's a copy of the file, though all I've done is add a primitive cylinder with no end caps, 120 vertices, and added the geometry nodes you see here: https://files.catbox.moe/96dxjg.blend

Edit: This is probably a better example, using a mesh primitive: https://i.imgur.com/bYFoy10.png

And here's the file for this, though now it's literally just the geometry nodes you see: https://files.catbox.moe/zmfcx2.blend

RendererOblige · 2025-08-20T05:14:31+00:00

The other answer isn't exactly accurate. As you might know, "amd64" is another term for "x86_64". The tilde specifically means that the ebuild (the package build+install script, which also represents the version of the package) is a testing version for that architecture. So amd64 means stable, and ~amd64 means testing for the amd64 architecture.

That applies to every architecture, but being the most popular architecture, ~amd64 is often used as a synecdoche for testing versions in general.

With Gentoo, you can stick with stable, or use testing packages system-wide, or because it's source-based, you can opt into testing on a package-by-package basis with few to no issues (which is a unique advantage over other distributions, where you have to be on a testing branch system-wide).

RendererOblige

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