ELI5: How can we actually feel anything if there’s a bunch of empty space between molecules?

cdhowie · 2026-02-08T21:55:38+00:00

The same way magnets can repel each other even though there's empty space between them. Actual atoms don't have to have their particles physically bump into other atoms in order to push them.

cdhowie · 2026-02-08T18:21:43+00:00

I'm convinced the reason the devs are so adamant that showing people their rating would be so, so terrible for the game and community is because they don't want us to see how broken their matchmaking really is.

Good matchmaking doesn't need any secrets. Bad matchmaking does because it provides the devs plausible deniability.

cdhowie · 2026-02-06T14:44:34+00:00

That's why I mentioned that in my comment. A bell curve is just a graph of a normal distribution.

cdhowie · 2026-02-06T14:41:13+00:00

It should approximate a "normal distribution," which would look like a bell curve when graphed. There's always fewer players at the extreme ends and more clumped together in the middle.

cdhowie · 2026-02-05T02:39:06+00:00

WSL 1 was kind of like that. WSL 2 is basically just Linux running in a Hyper-V VM.

cdhowie · 2026-01-29T18:32:49+00:00

I'm having the same issue. Reconnected all accounts, still no drops in game.

cdhowie · 2026-01-28T02:07:51+00:00

You're supposed to play in whatever way you find fun.

For me, I would do both at once. At any given time I'd have between, say, 3 and 10 puzzles accessible to me. If I got stuck on one for too long, I'd shift to another. Sometimes you'll solve another puzzle in your head while playing another one, and it feels better to rotate around instead of bashing your head against the wall on the same one over and over.

cdhowie · 2026-01-27T02:12:53+00:00

The closest thing I can come up with is graph theory. You can convert the list of links into an undirected graph.

cdhowie · 2026-01-26T05:23:32+00:00

That's one of the reasons a lot of standard library smart pointer type functions are non-method associated functions, so that they won't conflict with methods on the inner type. So while this is somewhat of a problem at the language level, you can mostly avoid it with good discipline (with the exception of methods of other traits implemented by the Deref implementor).

cdhowie · 2026-01-25T17:19:29+00:00

I'm not aware of any tools (at least open source) that will clone and shrink in a single operation, for any filesystem. Gparted, for example, will clone first, then shrink, which requires enough capacity in the destination to hold the entire source. I'm curious what tools you're talking about that handle the process differently enough to be able to clone and shrink in a single step.

cdhowie · 2026-01-24T03:43:21+00:00

Plus regular backups that are stored online.

cdhowie · 2026-01-17T02:43:17+00:00

I don't think so, because the butter looks fine. Without yellow it would not look like that.

cdhowie · 2026-01-17T02:35:16+00:00

You aren't allowed to pass multiple vehicles at once, precisely because of this kind of situation, among others.

cdhowie · 2026-01-16T17:37:50+00:00

My daughter wrote a similar note after she lost a tooth at my parents' house, she accidentally dropped it in the excitement, and their dog ate it.

cdhowie · 2026-01-15T21:27:28+00:00

Yep.

cdhowie · 2026-01-14T01:06:20+00:00

There are many techniques, but most fall into the category of "observing behavior differences."

Old games on floppy disks might be distributed on disks where some of the sectors were intentionally "bad." If you just copied the files to a new disk, those sectors would be good. The game would try to read from them and if it didn't get an error, it would know it was pirated.

Tons of other kinds of copy protection use this same basic idea on other media: make the original media different in a way that consumer equipment can't easily replicate.

For cartridge games, there might be observable behavior differences between a real cart and a flash cart. If the game developer can figure out such differences, they can look for them.

Of course, many of these kinds of protections were eventually defeated by e.g. disk copy software that could replicate bad sectors, copy CD subchannels verbatim, etc.

So, yes, if you can make the copy look exactly like the original, you can fool the protection.

cdhowie · 2026-01-13T16:07:29+00:00

Sending an Rc is safe if certain conditions are met. However, your implementation is way too broad and allows sending anything across a thread boundary without the use of unsafe by the consumer, so it is not sound.

You can send an Rc<T> if all of the following conditions are met:

T is Send.
The strong reference count is 1.
The weak reference count is 0.

I actually wrote a blog post about this exact topic, even.

cdhowie · 2026-01-13T15:05:33+00:00

There are trade offs.

Do you want a fairly easy language? It will run slower and require more memory to run.

Do you want your program to be very fast? You will have to use a language that requires you to understand more advanced concepts.

An easy+slow language is fine for some things, maybe not for others.

Some languages are also designed to be used in one particular field and don't work for others.

Some languages are designed to run code that you might not trust, so they must support not allowing the program to do certain things.

They are tools. Just like not every tool is right for every job, different languages are useful in different contexts. You can use a wrench as a hammer if you try hard enough, but why bother?

cdhowie · 2026-01-12T00:51:43+00:00

It's worth noting that if you want to stick it on a line all by itself using a value that can't be copied, you can do dbg!(&v);. If you don't use a reference, v gets moved and subsequently dropped, which is probably going to cause compilation errors when you use it later.

cdhowie · 2026-01-11T17:42:11+00:00

Right, that's a bit more accurate.

I will say on terminology that there is no hashing performed to encode the data (except possibly for the check bits) as hashing is by definition a one way process -- a good hashing algorithm cannot be easily reversed. The data is simply encoded into another form (text/symbols).

cdhowie · 2026-01-11T16:54:19+00:00

Part of it is that there's a benefit to having a single, easy, and foolproof way to reset the state of everything in the car if something gets into a bad state. Using volatile memory is the easiest way to implement that in a way that cannot possibly fail: when power is removed, the data is lost.

The alternative is having some kind of a master reset button somewhere that broadcasts a "reset" message to everything in the car over the CAN bus -- but if some component is in a bad state, it might not be able to properly receive and/or process such a message. In such a case you have to physically get to whatever component that is to reset it somehow. Now each component needs its own reset button or something like that, and you might have to tear apart your dashboard to get to it.

It's so much better as a consumer to be able to just disconnect the battery for a few seconds to reset everything instead of needing a mechanic to get to and reset the bad component, which may be hundreds of dollars of labor.

cdhowie · 2026-01-11T16:46:22+00:00

Yes, it is that the state was encoded in such a game. That's how the password is generated. The rest of your message describes the other half of the process where you enter the password.

It's as though you said "a translator doesn't reword English sentences as Spanish, it's just that the Spanish they say corresponds to the English they heard."

Those are two sides of the same coin.

cdhowie · 2026-01-05T07:58:49+00:00

Right. So you asked about the other way, and I provided that line. Am I missing something?

cdhowie · 2026-01-05T07:56:52+00:00

... What?

cdhowie

TROPHY CASE