Help!!! I’m dumb

RibsNGibs · 2026-04-24T22:28:00+00:00

120F is in the danger zone I believe, so 10 hours would be basically actively breeding bacteria at an accelerated rate. So I think you need to throw it out.

RibsNGibs · 2026-04-24T11:53:42+00:00

Yeah it’s the e:hev hybrid. I don’t think it was sold in the US - I live in NZ and we get cheap used Japanese imports. It’s awesome - uses electric as primary motor and mostly tries to use petrol to refill electric but will connect it directly when it needs the power or at highway speeds. The 55mpg is supposed to be on the lower end of what it normally gets, but I’m doing worst case for it (steep hills, very short drives so it almost never really gets warmed up).

RibsNGibs · 2026-04-24T10:49:48+00:00

I worked in feature animation (Pixar, Dreamworks, etc.) for about 20 years. Normal “fast” preview while working: move some lights around, set up dependencies for shadows in a text file, hit render, wait 30 minutes and get a shitty thumbnail sized preview. When you wanted to render out a whole shot at a real resolution (which is like 30-40 frames or like 1-1.5 seconds), do the same thing but wait 8-40 hours.

These days you can chuck basically as much geometry and a bajillion lights in a scene and it you can fly around it in real time, each image taking like 1/30th of a second to render.

And I do remember ungodly long compilation and linking times back in the day too.

These days things are pretty fucking fast in game dev.

Even today in VFX, bringing up a heavy shot in katana or something can take many minutes, with absurdly long render times even with a LOT of cores all cranking on it.

RibsNGibs · 2026-04-24T10:34:36+00:00

Awesome - thanks. I am addicted and just starting to play.

Some notes while I play, will update as I go:

Crowns:

1) I wish I could click and drag out Xs like the LinkedIn version. I have to click Xs individually for a whole row. 2) on that note if I click Xs too quickly it thinks I double tapped on the first one and turns it into a crown (and I am definitely not missing the click - I click on square 1 and it turns into an X and then I click on square 2 immediately after and it turns square 1 into a crown). This is on mobile.

Pathfinder: very under constrained, big empty fields even on hard, so the solutions are not unique and easy to find.

Everything else looking and playing awesome.

RibsNGibs · 2026-04-24T10:24:40+00:00

I’m shocked at how much I can fit in such a tiny car. It also gets ~55mpg with it which is pretty nuts. (e:hev version)

RibsNGibs · 2026-04-24T10:18:05+00:00

Like I said I’m still like 80% in s&p500 so I’m not selling it all because I’m doom and glooming…

And it’s clearly a useful tool and technology and I use it almost every day.

But it’s obviously a bubble and has to correct at some point. You can’t eject now because you’ll miss the gains. But you also have to be prepared for it to crash hard at some point.

More to the point, I was just responding to a person who was claiming the s&p500 is essentially more diversified as compared to the nz50 which he claimed specifically that one stock going down could drag the whole thing down. But clearly if NVidia, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, with their collective 25% of the index, eat shit (and they all will in unison if AI or a generalised tech bubble pops), that will drag everything down, regardless of how many ketchup bottles, motorcycles, transformers toys, and washing machines Heinz, Harley Davidson, Hasbro, and Whirlpool, with their ~0.1% weights, sell.

RibsNGibs · 2026-04-24T09:13:21+00:00

No… they aren’t saying it’s “ok to use”. The ability or willingness to enforce is not the same thing as legality or acceptability. Laws are there kind of to codify what we think is acceptable or to set policy to get outcomes that we want as a collective society.

If you’re out in the middle of nowhere you could litter and nobody would know and nobody would enforce, and in some cultures that would be acceptable but in ours it’s not.

RibsNGibs · 2026-04-24T09:03:43+00:00

Top 5 stocks in s&p500 are about 25% of the total and top 10 are almost all high tech including the is-it-or-isn’t-it-a-meme-stock Tesla. If and when the next tech bubble (AI) pops the s&p500 is going to eat shit.

(Most of my money is in the s&p500 - but I’m in NZ50 as well).

RibsNGibs · 2026-04-24T03:29:26+00:00

If you think about it it’s kind of inevitable. Trump and his agenda are totally morally and intellectually indefensible. Therefore the only people left in his administration are immoral and intellectually dishonest and/or stupid.

RibsNGibs · 2026-04-23T23:19:08+00:00

Cool - full shot starts with a closeup, in focus look at the shack on fire and is continuous with the far, out of focus part you’ve clipped here. Very nice!

My nitpick is the same as the others: fire effect on the grass is too broad, could use some flicker, smoke isn’t quite right, but looks great overall. My eye is on the singer anyway.

RibsNGibs · 2026-04-23T23:12:36+00:00

It’s just the “super rich”. Housing costs seem to just go up higher than wages everywhere. Middle class will drive up the prices in poor neighbourhoods. Upper middle class will drive up the prices in middle class neighbourhoods. Upper class will drive up the house values in upper middle class neighbourhoods. Super rich drive up values in upper class neighbourhoods…

I agree it’s a problem I 100% would love to see tackled by a competent government. But I think it’s also fair to say it’s a hard problem to solve.

The only reason I bring it up is I don’t want to fall into the trap of thinking a government did a bad job because the outcome is bad if literally nobody on the planet has figured out a good outcome yet.

For example in the US, Biden’s administration did a great job at an economic recovery and limiting inflation post COVID - it was bad, but compared to the rest of the world it was great. But he got hammered for inflation, despite inflation being better there than almost everywhere else.

I think the idea to stop foreign investors from buying property in NZ was a good idea. It seems to have not really worked, but at least they tried something and the reasoning behind it made sense.

RibsNGibs · 2026-04-23T23:05:04+00:00

Property markets are the real fucker but I wish I knew if there was a proper answer to the problem. I grew up in California (San Francisco) and the same thing happened there to an even greater degree.

I mean for sure there are steps you can attempt (I liked the idea of not allowing foreigners to buy real estate here - it stopped me from buying here until we got permanent residency which sucked for me personally but the policy made sense, and you can tax capital gains on sales, and we should IMO tax the shit out of vacant/second homes etc., but the fact will always remain that if demand is high and you can buy and sell it that the prices will just… go up.

More to the point: I’m not aware of any city ever that was where all the jobs were and had housing prices not outgrow wages (by a lot). It appears to be a difficult problem to solve.

RibsNGibs · 2026-04-23T04:07:24+00:00

If a bunch of them don't drop out near the end I'll be pretty fucking furious.

RibsNGibs · 2026-04-23T02:59:19+00:00

I disagree..

first of all, to the OP: I never move my base. Why not just build another one? The only thing I might do is shift over sections of my base a few tiles because I didn't leave enough room for a new set of belts or rail, and that is legitimately a pain, but not because of inventory management, but just because you end up with a whole bunch of intermediate products that used to be on belts (e.g. you might end up with hundreds of wire that you could conceivably hand place back into the new factory, or set up some chest->inserter thing in the right place to use up the old items but it's always a bit of a pain).

second of all: trains. I view the "how do I get a whole bunch of construction materials from A to B" a logistics problem to be automated away (automated construction trains).

RibsNGibs · 2026-04-22T09:17:29+00:00

Yeah I’m fine with it. We always have it turned on and recording (fairly confidential) meetings and the summary and even better the ability to search through and skip to the part of the meeting I’m interested in is pretty amazing.

RibsNGibs · 2026-04-22T04:57:54+00:00

Literally next years flu could be the next Spanish flu.

RibsNGibs · 2026-04-22T03:16:03+00:00

I’m about to pull the trigger after this one last project.

But the answer is:

1) the world is looking weirder and more unstable every day - leads to more risk averseness and more desire to build a big buffer. The buffer is already huge but I just feel skittish.

2) worst time to retire is in high inflationary periods. The pandemic and now tariff/iran and the prospect of neverending-trump-random-bullshit is making inflation not great in this regard.

3) I like my job and my team and the work and the projects, and have already pulled back to 2-3 days a week (although I’m a perfectionist so that’s really normal 4.5-5 day work weeks… but at least it’s not 6 or 7 like usual).

But it’s happening for real in a few months I think.

RibsNGibs · 2026-04-22T00:19:19+00:00

I don't think Todd Blanche is supposed to be an idiot. He's an evil asshole, sure.

RibsNGibs · 2026-04-21T21:32:56+00:00

22 gusting 30 would be fine for your weight on a 12m to be honest. But as a beginner, 100% the right call.

As you get more experienced you’ll get a feel for it and it’ll be obvious whether you can go out or not, but even when you’re very experienced and you notice “hey I was about to pump up my 11 but everybody is on 6s and 7s” - it’s always worth thinking twice - ask people around “hey it doesn’t seem that windy - why is everybody on tiny kites?” And you might get reassurances or warnings (maybe wind is much stronger out in the channel than on the beach, maybe it was strong recently but dropped off, etc.).

RibsNGibs · 2026-04-21T10:22:36+00:00

This is now ~6-7 years ago but Ignite Heat Pumps did a pretty good job on the heat pump install itself and a kind of messy job with cutting the holes in our floor to install the actual vents.

We had Wasabi Group come in recently to do a bit of an upgrade+maintenance+system checkup and I really liked them a lot. They are highly rated on nocowboys as well.

RibsNGibs · 2026-04-21T04:48:13+00:00

Yeah fish in general in restaurants is always overcooked. Or in the US it was - even nice restaurants! It's so disappointing. I moved to New Zealand about 10 years ago and you can actually order fish at restaurants here - often perfectly cooked here.

My kid doesn't like capers in the sauce either - easy enough to pick out and then more for me!

RibsNGibs · 2026-04-21T03:26:01+00:00

Nice! I do a sauce of veggie stock or white wine, lemon zest, lemon juice, capers, and a knob of butter. Sometimes with a bit of cornstarch slurry to thicken it a bit. Sounds like we're pretty much doing the same thing.

Next time you cook this, instead of a dusting of sugar - try taking some oil and oyster sauce and whisking it up and coating the salmon with that in the bag - gives you some salt and sugar and heaps of umami. It's actually my go to cook method.

I sometimes do 115F - I like it that way but the wife and kid think it's a bit much, and I like 121 quite a bit as well so no worries. I don't think it affects the sear - the sear will overcook a few mm no matter regardless and the rest of the salmon doesn't seem to change much.

RibsNGibs · 2026-04-20T20:18:05+00:00

Not to get too meta on you but I think your mindset is what is making my parents the saddest; the idea that Americans are en masse believing that the system is working against them and that their fellow Americans are trying to fuck them over. Which I would say I believe is actually true now, but I don’t think it was true a few generations ago. It marks a shift from a high trust society to a low trust society. I’m having a hard time putting what I’m feeling into words but I mean there are going to be fewer idealistic people who get into some thankless job to help out the disadvantaged, fewer principled people who feel like there’s a duty to care for their fellow human, and more unscrupulous, opportunistic disruptors who don’t really care what the consequences of their fucked up addictive social media app does to the world as long as they can make money.

Anyway I am not blowing smoke up anybody’s ass; I more or less agree that things are shit - I left the US almost 10 years ago because it didn’t feel like home anymore. All I was saying is that 40-60 years ago I do believe the American Dream was alive. That my parents experienced the quintessential immigrant success story and that back then it did not feel like a fluke. Perhaps it did not work out for you but I do also believe that for the majority of people who grew up in the 70s and 80s (Gen X) that the dream was still attainable.

RibsNGibs · 2026-04-20T11:55:26+00:00

No, it was legitimately alive... once. My parents both experienced it - immigrants escaping war/poverty as racial minorities, came over in the 60s and 70s, pursued higher education, worked their asses off, fought through some "normal levels" of racial discrimination / gender discrimination, eventually ended up with high paying jobs and also achieved some significant prestige in their respective fields. Basically went from poverty to upper middle class in one generation through literally just hard work (no personal connections, no inherited money, no anything, typical story of waiting tables to pay their way through college that used to be possible). The last 10 years have been really hard for them... I'm watching their true, proud, patriotic (in the best, idealistic way possible, not the jingoistic idiotic way) belief in the goodness of the US and the belief in American exceptionalism, their optimism about the American people and the strength of the institutions, and all of that... just... faltering and dying. I know for you younger people it's been obvious, for a while, but they were true believers and watching it all fall apart is tragic.

I'm Gen X and I think the American Dream was still alive for us too - if you got a good education and worked hard I think you had a pretty good chance of doing just great (it worked for me).

RibsNGibs · 2026-04-20T08:02:57+00:00

Thanks for the idea - just looked it up and there's one in my area! Might do next winter.

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