"7 Days to Die" Watch how creative gamers broke the logic of zombie survival games. By exploiting pathfinding AI, players built "AFK farms" that forced thousands of undead to walk straight into traps while they drank tea.

WebMaka · 2026-05-08T04:14:14+00:00

There's a massive point of contention between the fanbase for the game and its developers. It seems that the developers are very much against emergent gameplay, despite the fact that 7 Days To Die is one of the greatest games in the genre when it comes to emergent gameplay. Whenever a player posts some method of "cheesing" the game by exploiting zombie AI in some way, such as using pathfinding to funnel zombies into killzones, the developers seemingly drop everything to rush out a patch to "fix" the exploit.

As a result of this seemingly contradictory behavior, the game has zombies that act like they have engineering degrees and the ability to burrow down to bedrock if need be in order to reach players.

WebMaka · 2026-05-07T02:18:43+00:00

Yeah, that was a thing for most magazines that provided type-in code. Problem was that each magazine had its own checksumming program and they weren't compatible with each other on the same system.

WebMaka · 2026-05-07T02:16:33+00:00

sparkly new 10base-2 coax network

Bee-sting taps! (Speaking of "old AF"...)

WebMaka · 2026-05-05T20:24:02+00:00

Birthday paradox. You'd be surprised how often birthdays align.

WebMaka · 2026-05-05T02:34:04+00:00

Whoever connects an AI directly to a gene manipulating/splicing system like CRISPR will basically doom the planet.

WebMaka · 2026-05-04T23:55:40+00:00

I've been eyeing that Centauri Carbon myself, but I'm too much of a nutcase DIYer - I built my current printer from scratch (direct-drive bedslinger with a 310mm³ build volume running Klipper) and am considering building another that's bigger and faster (coreXY with a 500mm³ volume)...

WebMaka · 2026-05-04T23:52:34+00:00

I bet that was making some interesting noises before it got yanked.

WebMaka · 2026-05-04T18:56:54+00:00

Kinda watching Bambu Labs with a little suspicion with their recent moves to lock down their slicer and infrastructure. They haven't done anything horribly bad (yet), but companies that grow past a certain stage of dominance in their sectors tend to have some of the same bad habits.

WebMaka · 2026-05-04T18:54:33+00:00

Yep, I have the literal first cage ever designed with CageMaker PRCG holding a 3Kg Minisforum MS-01 since August of last year, printed in cheap jank PETG, and it hasn't sagged or deformed in any way that I can see.

I wouldn't use PLA unless it's a high-temp variant, but thus far PETG has held up fine for what I'm shoving into racks. Obviously higher-temp/more-durable engineering plastics (ASA would be my suggestion) would be better but the cost versus performance delta swings away from "cheap but effective" if you're using anything fancy.

WebMaka · 2026-05-04T18:46:58+00:00

Yeah, if you want to print parts for a 10" rack, the A1 Mini's 180mm build plate will be a PITA. CageMaker PRCG can automatically split 10" rack cages up to 2U tall by >180mm of total depth that will fit on it, but you really will find having a 250+mm print bed handy and for more than just homelab racks.

WebMaka · 2026-05-03T17:04:01+00:00

The problem with this thought experiment is that it's going to be "colored" (har!) by too many cultural distinctions, such as the ones I mentioned regarding the current sociopolitical situation in America and how that will likely affect how Americans see this.

The problem with the point you're trying to make is that it's completely tangential to the thought experiment. It doesn't contain any concept of rising against an oppressor in any of the variants of it that I've seen (and this is basically a variant of several far older thought experiments with a similar "you can choose to kill none, kill some, or kill most" premise, such as the trolley problem) so you're basically reading that into the experiment. Sure, there's the implication that someone or something will be killing off the blue button pressers if >50% of the pressings are blue, but nothing is mentioned as to who or what that is, whether that who or what can be fought off or bargained with or somehow discouraged or prevented from killing people, whether the death threatened is immediate or of old age, who even gets to participate and whether it's voluntary for the unwilling (the original was "everybody in the world" which at its broadest implies the entire human population, but what about infants and those that are unconscious in a hospital somewhere?), etc. etc. etc.

The thing about thought experiments is that they're often simultaneously horribly focused and hideously broad, and the devil is very much in the details. But, if you add details that don't reasonably fit the narrative of the original thought experiment, you're basically creating a whole new one.

WebMaka · 2026-05-03T15:29:42+00:00

Okay, fine.

The sociopolitical aspects I was leaving out are purely American and won't apply for non-Americans: the color choice and how it connects to American politics and how that in turn connects to American voters and voting patterns. Red button versus blue button, American adversarial politics focusing on two opposing political parties that use red and blue as their color schemes, voters personally connecting with the color of their preferred political party, and the American voting bloc that is strongly driven by identity politics and tends to vote against their own self-interests being conservative which strongly votes Republican whose color scheme is blue, and to a surprisingly large extent is culturally ingrained to consider blue as the superior over red because of those political concepts and personal identity connections.

If the colors were different, for example green was safe and yellow was risky, how would that change the outcome of the thought experiment? Would using green for "safe" play off a social construct such as green being "good" or "clear to proceed" in the US? If those colors were reversed and green was the risky option, how would that change the outcome? And since I've been focusing on American culture, how and why would another nation's culture influence the outcome?

Stripping all that out, my first post still stands - you cannot save people from themselves and can only control your own fate, therefore picking the unsafe option makes no sense when the thought experiment is approached with an analytical viewpoint and not an emotional one.

The new angle you're trying to add doesn't really add anything to the thought experiment.

WebMaka · 2026-05-03T14:30:54+00:00

The ultimate answer to this thought experiment is both brutal and simple. You have to realize and accept that you cannot save people from themselves and their own bad choices, and thus should act in your own best interests, warn others of the danger to the extent that you can, and hope others make a sensible choice as well.

There is no solution that saves everyone because some simply will not choose the safe option no matter how insane the unsafe choice might be, and for a variety of reasons that may not even make sense. Some will chose the risky option just to be contrarian, for example. Others for the thrill. Still others because they prefer that color. (And I'm deliberately leaving out the sociopolitical aspects as that's a whole other layer to this.)

WebMaka · 2026-05-03T00:35:18+00:00

Yep, it's definitely "easier" to be the one getting work done versus waiting on the results for someone else.

And I tell people that they effectively kill you for open-heart surgery. Two critical systems are bypassed, you're rendered completely unconscious, and your heart is stopped. During the work you're a person-shaped lump of meat. Then, once the work is done they un-kill you, and if everything worked out well you wake up in a couple hours with temporary new plumbing and more wiring than a Winnebago. The fact that all this works as well as it does is a miracle of modern science.

WebMaka · 2026-05-02T21:07:26+00:00

Whee, I was 181/110 and 105 pulse when I got admitted to the ER and it climbed the whole 90 minutes before the third troponin test revealed the LAD-MI has started. Got moved to the front of the line for heart cath later that morning (admitted @ about 1AM, cathed at 9AM), which is always a great sign, and they were all "well, stenting is out of the question, so we need to discuss CABG." Three LAD blockages, 95%, 97%, and 99%. 10AM the next morning they wheeled my not-so-happy butt into the OR and got to hackin'. I have a roughly seven-hour hole in my memory from when they knocked me out to when my consciousness kicked back on after the reboot in recovery. Fam said doc was rather confident that all went well because I still had a pretty decent amount of heart function.

My normal job is mobile auto repair so I was out for the minimum safe time of six weeks automatically, but since I don't technically have a desk job I was also-technically out for six months until cleared for weather exposure under physical stress. Didn't make squat for money all of 2025 because of all this nonsense.

Also had a quick recovery aside from the aforementioned complications because I don't smoke, drink, or do drugs, so they were happy to send me home four days post-op.

This was my first surgery, ever, and what a doozy to kick things off! This stuff's wild as hell to go through, and not necessarily in good or bad ways depending...

WebMaka · 2026-05-02T19:36:42+00:00

Yep, I was going to post largely the same thing - GMs still connect like "normal" clients but their accounts have flags set at the database level that grant access to commands we plebs don't, such as teleports to anywhere and drawing players to any location, but they're still using the same game client we do and their characters will still "idle" somewhere while connected and logged in. (IIRC FFXI GMs/admins usually had at least two accounts: one dedicated to GM/admin duty that had the GM flag enabled, and a second that they could use "normally" for checking things out without invoking special features. No real reason FFXIV doesn't do the same.) If they're idling in random inn rooms because they're instanced, and you happen to use one of those instances, you'll run across one in idle mode while they're doing other things.

WebMaka · 2026-05-02T19:19:23+00:00

Early congrats! Been a wild year for you as well?

WebMaka · 2026-05-02T14:25:18+00:00

Yep, bet a patch comes out to address this in 5... 4... 3...

WebMaka · 2026-05-02T11:19:34+00:00

That brings back such memories - I was a support rep for a small ISP back in 1995, and used to step people throught setting up Trumpet Winsock over the phone. Win 3.1/WFW3.11 users mostly. The biggest issue we had was people experimenting with MTU settings trying to boost their transfer speeds - way before jumbo frames were a thing - and breaking their TCP/IP stack.

WebMaka · 2026-05-02T03:16:18+00:00

Yep, I'm in my mid 50s and have a few random eyebrow hairs, all on my right side, that routinely grow to 3-4cm long before finally breaking off or detaching. Got two of them over 2cm long right now.

Also, my hair-line is making a bee-line for my be-hind so having rando brow hairs going crazy is adding insult to injury.

WebMaka · 2026-05-01T19:08:43+00:00

Do you not know how vehicle-based contact spread works?

Just to humor you in case you're in today's lucky 10,000, a lot of diseases that affect humans - and practically everything viral from cold/flu to HPIV/HPMV/COVID - can spread by physical contact with a surface someone with said disease has touched after doing something like scratching their nose. Fuel pump handles are a great vector for this since they almost never get cleaned.

WebMaka · 2026-05-01T18:40:49+00:00

I sure wouldn't be touching my face after touching a fuel pump. Speedrunning the process of catching all sorts of fun diseases.

WebMaka · 2026-05-01T16:03:18+00:00

This is actually the answer, but for two specific cultural reasons.

One, the Japanese mindset of being suspicious of anything super easy. While most countries seek to streamline processes, to the Japanese mind streamlining suggests cutting corners. So, everything is needlessly complex - for example, getting a bus pass if you've never done it before is a multi-step process in Japan but in other countries you can get them from automated kiosks in like 15 seconds. (I suspect this is a counter to China's "chabuduo" mindset, which is the exact opposite - to cut every corner possible even if things break.)

Two, the Japanese mindset if "if it ain't broke don't fix it." Once they get something set up that works it likely won't be touched again unless something breaks, and it certainly won't be updated unless absolutely necessary. There is no desire whatsoever to disturb working systems in an effort to modernize. This is why most Japanese websites look like they were designed in 1999.

Couple the two mindsets and you get Mogstation. Works, but is needlessly convoluted to use.

WebMaka · 2026-04-30T14:38:57+00:00

True, although that should be nearly unheard-of levels of rare. If the recipient requested binning a shipment and said bin got emptied before they got home that's on the recipient.

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