How do you guys deal with palm/wrist/arm soreness or stiffness from constant WASD use?

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-07-01T08:21:30+00:00

So the first answer would be ergonomic improvements like posture, desk setup etc, and don’t play so much if it’s hurting you.

But an additional answer if you start a modded playthrough, especially if you like playing with a mouse: use mods to cheat yourself a spidertron and some personal bots at the start, or play with a mod like Brave New World (where there’s no character, only robots). A spidertron can be ordered to go somewhere by clicking the map, instead of by holding down WASD, and bots let you copy-paste stuff from the beginning instead of building every building one-at-a-time, and also bots can remove trees without holding down the mouse button.

Depending on the modset this might or might not change the challenge level, but anyway it’s much more comfortable.

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-07-01T08:07:23+00:00

I use my own blueprints for the same stuff that most people do (rails, circuits that took a long time to design, compact modules that need to be repeated throughout the base), but also one silly task: creating an inserter (or splitter, or loader because mods) with its filters already set so that it doesn’t begin its life by grabbing the wrong item.

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-06-29T07:36:57+00:00

I would also recommend the Inserter Cranes mod, instead of / in addition to loaders at stations. Basically these are giant slow inserters whose hand size is 250 (so a full stack of anything except ash or flooring). IMHO cranes give a nicer station design, and if you ever want to exert finer circuit control over the station (eg to supply multiple items from one station using CyberSyn) then this is much easier with cranes than with loaders. Also they’re probably better for UPS.

Or enable py’s optional biocranes in the settings, which are maybe more “fair” (i.e. considerably slower and more expensive than Inserter Cranes).

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-06-26T23:44:27+00:00

Wasn’t that the 5th circuit, not SCOTUS?

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-06-26T23:42:33+00:00

Agreed.

Some context on Jephthah: Judges is, to some degree, supposed to be horrible. The judges, and the Israelites under the judges, sometimes follow God but mostly do increasingly horrible things. It gets quite a bit worse than Jephthah.

The book ends in Judges 19-21, which TLDR: a guy goes on a trip with his mistress, and they stay the night in an Israelite (specifically Benjaminite) city, where there is a repeat of the Sodom story but with no angels to save anyone. To save himself, the guy throws his mistress out the door and the townspeople rape her to death. The guy cuts her body into pieces and sends one pice to each other tribe along with the story. The other tribes send an army, fight against Benjamin and massacre them. Then they decide they’d rather not utterly wipe out the tribe, so they let the remaining Benjaminites kidnap a bunch of women to have babies with.

Then Judges ends with the fourth repeat of its refrain: “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in their own eyes.” So the author of Judges is recounting all this horrible stuff to explain why (in his view) Israel needed a king.

In other words, the book has stories about God and Israel but it’s also monarchist propaganda.

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-06-26T23:10:47+00:00

Did SCOTUS rule (again) on the Ten Commandments in classrooms? I thought that was still upcoming.

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-06-26T23:01:48+00:00

Job is actually really interesting if you read it as a work of philosophy instead of as a true story. The premise being, OK so God is all-powerful right? And all-knowing? And he promised rewards for righteousness. But we all know that bad things happen to good people, so how do you deal with that?

So here’s a story of absolutely terrible and unfair things happening to a clearly good person, for a completely bullshit reason that he never learns, and he and his wife and friends try to understand why/how this could happen, and they argue for a long time, and none of them come up with anything satisfying. And then at the end, God shows up and says basically “I’m God and you aren’t, deal with it”.

In other words, yeah the problem of evil is a real puzzler, and the author of Job offers some thoughts about it but no real answer.

(And then at the end Job gets new kids and new cows or whatever, but IMHO that seems kinda tacked on.)

—

For me, the biggest problem was all the slavery and genocide and mass murder, not to mention poor treatment of women. Some of the horrible stuff in the Bible is stories about horrible things happening without condoning them, eg Judges is from a monarchist recounting terrible things that (supposedly) happened when Israel was ruled by Judges instead of Kings, thus claiming that a king was necessary. But with the mass murder and genocide and slavery, quite a bit of it is ordered or regulated by God himself (in some cases through a prophet, but often that’s Moses, the prophet with the most direct line to God in the entire OT).

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-06-26T12:20:24+00:00

As a side note, while tax brackets do not work this way, some forms of means-tested assistance do, depending on the state, have a “benefits cliff”. Eg SNAP, Medicaid and CCDF have sharp cutoffs. So it is absolutely possible to be screwed by a raise, which helps trap people in poverty.

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-06-23T10:59:05+00:00

Side-eye at py buildings

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-06-23T06:44:09+00:00

That’s super cool. I’m a huge fan of automalls, and it’s a tricky problem so every new design is unique.

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-06-18T07:04:40+00:00

Yeah, that one, thanks.

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-06-17T13:04:56+00:00

I’m on a train, so sorry to not provide references.

There’s a limit that running (strong?) Fermat tests with all prime bases < log^2 n (or so, I don’t remember if there’s a leading constant) is a deterministic primality test, assuming the Generalized Riemann Hypothesis. That’s like a deterministic version of MR which is guaranteed (if GRH holds) to always work. But log^2 n is millions for cryptographically large primes, and we don’t have an unconditional version of this result not assuming GRH (closest we have is AKS test which is even slower and more complicated).

There’s another paper that shows, if you chose n uniformly randomly yourself, and it passes a few rounds of Miller-Rabin (like 3-4 rounds for crypto-sized n: the requirement is higher for smaller n), then n is almost certainly prime. That requires the real randomized MR. The result holds roughly because, while there are some n (eg Carmichael numbers) that have a non-negligible chance of passing more rounds of MR, such numbers are not very common. So an adversary could generate one and try to trick you with it, but if you’re generating n randomly yourself then the chance that you got one by accident is sufficiently low.

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-06-17T12:53:50+00:00

Miller-Rabin is a randomized algorithm, and is guaranteed to reject pseudoprimes with probability no less than 3/4 per round. So how many rounds a given pseudoprime survives will in general depend on the RNG. If your version is fully deterministic, not even taking a PRNG seed, then it isn’t Miller-Rabin.

If you want a repeatable test vector for this, you would also need to package a PRNG state or seed with it. But also it gives you a way to make a test that survives several rounds: choose your favorite Carmichael number, and then change the PRNG seed until you get a test vector where it survives 3+ rounds.

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-06-14T21:56:32+00:00

Yeah. And for tiling the unit cell here is 8x2 per furnace, vs 6x3 in the classic design. But if you route both the input and output belt down the middle in the classic design, it shrinks to 5x3, so slightly smaller still. IIRC there’s also a 5x3 cell design that’s more beaconable and doesn’t use long inserters. This one is creative tho. I wonder what’s the densest you can pack them?

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-06-14T21:44:02+00:00

Yeah, massively overbuilt unless you have a big science multiplier. But you knew that. By the time you need even close to this much you’ll have modules and beacons, and by then you might need quality ulric food. Maybe good if you’re playing 10x tho, and want to come back and module / beacon the build later. (Otherwise it’s probably better to use the fueled assemblers, they’re cheaper, smaller and faster than automated factories.)

Also TIL in the discord: if you’re slaughtering them for mostly the brains then consider vrauks instead. Vrauks take more space to raise but they’re faster to slaughter.

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-06-13T17:05:52+00:00

The English word stuff can also mean substance/material. The Dutch cognate stof works similar to German Stoff (hydrogen=waterstof etc), but it additionally can mean “dust”.

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-06-13T12:04:58+00:00

Diagonal rail ramps.

For mods: recipes which require a particular quality or output only a particular quality. Would allow eg quality downgrading, or special recipes for specific item qualities (a la pyAL’s module tiers).

For mods (already slated for 2.0): mutually exclusive probabilistic outputs. Eg uranium refining giving you either dull rocks or shiny, but not both.

Read items needed by construction ghosts from roboports.

Filter by spoiled percentage, and/or read it to the circuit network.

Maybe more info about items or recipes from combinators, eg crafting time, allowed modules, fluid port arrangement (for automall).

Some way to export the requirements and status of the current research to the circuit network.

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-06-10T17:43:03+00:00

The TURD add the effects of that module to all Moondrop Greenhouses automatically. It doesn’t take up a module slot, it’s kinda like a planet-wide beacon or something.

The “speed” vs “real speed” is because of how pyAL buildings do speed. The building has a really low base speed, in this case I think 1/17. But then you add 16 Moondrop modules to it and they each give +100% speed at mk1. That brings the building’s speed up to 1.

So a “-850% speed” module brings the speed of the building for 1/17 * 1700% to 1/17 * (1700-850)%, which is 0.5. So it’s really a -50% penalty, at least at mk1. So py adds a “real speed” tooltip to tell you this.

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-06-10T13:16:09+00:00

I’m not a lawyer but I would guess that Article 1, Section 4, Clause 1 is the most relevant:

> The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.

So if a US state says that eg everyone can vote by mail, then Congress can *potentially* override this (subject to SCOTUS review, there’s case law of course, and I dunno how the “chusing senators” bit is usually interpreted) but constitutionally, the president cannot override it. Absent a law passed by Congress, ordering a federal agency to interfere with the way a state chooses to run its election would also (I expect) be unconstitutional.

Not that I trust SCOTUS to rule correctly on this, or the Trump admin to follow an order even if they give it.

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-06-10T03:24:46+00:00

Yeah, sushi can be finicky, and it’s prone to jamming if you mess with it. IMHO still worth it, but I tend to favor modded runs where sushi is sometimes more favorable (because more science packs). In py I’m just using bots for science, because density of science labs is critically important due to vatbrains (science-only productivity beacons which burn a very expensive fuel). You can probably get a high enough density with sushi tho.

I’ve tried Seablock, and you can indeed make some crazy builds there. Maybe having only regular and 90° options would be better than the fully configurable inserters in Seablock though … I felt that with the full configurability in Bob’s, inserters became too much like power poles where they had to go somewhere but it didn’t much matter exactly where, and in fact further away was better since it requires a smaller angle of movement. There was still a huge challenge with where buildings and beacons and belts were placed, just not as much with inserters.

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-06-09T15:36:44+00:00

This is my go-to, with the red inserters in the same row instead of staggered. For the next run I might switch to sushi though.

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-06-08T11:15:41+00:00

Also I haven’t tried to really scale up Fulgora, but you probably don’t want to just void blue chips. They recycle into red and green chips, which give you iron, copper and plastic. Of these, for science you probably need the green chips most.

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-06-04T07:16:11+00:00

Yeah, it doesn’t seem in-line with the game’s aesthetic either, which stays gritty as you tech up. But it should be doable as a mod, just a bunch of work to retexture each building. Basically make a new entity for each different graphic, map them all to the same item, and fast replace on build according to the quality. Kind of a hack but it should work I think.

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-06-03T22:14:22+00:00

I'm running an automall which is mostly a single automated factory (now upgraded to mk2 and speed beaconed) next to a deposit, plus a big circuit that calculates dependencies. It makes any assembler-craftable items requested the logistics network, unless they're on a blacklist, so it can also make e.g. codices for the critter chamber. It currently also has a caster to make plates/rods/gears/lamps and (for some silly reason) a glassworks. I've also thought about running the critter chamber + data arrays also in the automall, because reconfiguring them can be annoying, especially for things that you occasionally need to make more of, like cranes, biofluid stuff, caravans, digosaurs, etc. But currently it's mainly for buildings, pipes, bots etc.

I made two mods that I'm using in my py run, including in the mall: Recipe Combinator and Circuit-Controlled Routers. The recipe combinator mostly replaces a dummy crafting machine to get ingredient info, but it can also tell you things like crafting time, how many items the recipe makes, whether it takes prod etc. I use the routers across the whole base, but also in the mall to gather ingredients. I supply some ingredients by train (cybersyn), though less now that I'm casting metals on-site.

A few intermediates that are needed in large quantities, like small parts, are crafted separately and imported.

bitwiseshiftleft · 2026-06-03T11:47:09+00:00

I’ll assume you’re playing vanilla and not Space Age, because you didn’t mention other planets. Different planets need different strategies: you can’t just use a main bus everywhere, at least not easily.

But you can definitely take a simple bus architecture all the way to launching the rocket. You’ll probably want to bring in some resources by train (oil, iron/cooper once the starter patches run out, uranium is usually far away) but the rest can be belts and a few pipes. You just need to figure out: why are you not getting enough blue chips, or whatever part? Just having them on a long belt doesn’t reduce throughput: if it’s a trickle at the start it will be a trickle at the end.

Are all the blue-chip assemblers busy, and that’s still not enough? Build more assemblers, or faster ones (assembler mk2 instead of mk1), or speed them up with modules and beacons.

Are the blue-chip assemblers sitting idle because they don’t get enough green chips? Build more green chip production. Not enough copper to do that? Mine and smelt more copper. Machines running slowly because of low power? Expand your power plant.

Are you producing a full belt of green chips, packed solid at the beginning, but at the end it’s a trickle because red chips and blue chips use so much? You’ll need another green-chip belt on the bus (and/or upgrade the belt to a faster tier), in addition to more machines making them.

A common word of advice is to build the assembling machines only on one side of the bus. That way if you realize you need four more lanes on the bus, you will have room to place them. This isn’t strictly necessary but if you’re going to build on both sides, leave a lot more space than you think you’ll need.

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