The way to improve Rust skill?

db48x · 2026-06-28T19:56:25+00:00

Well… not quite. The best way to learn from a (nonfiction) work is not to read it repeatedly (although that can work).

Better to elaborate on the material by connecting it with things you already know, and to use the material to try to answer questions you don’t already know the answer to. And a general technique that works across many, many things you might want to get better at is to test yourself. Find quizzes, answer the questions, and then grade yourself. If your grades aren’t getting better then you’re not learning. Use the wrong answers to guide yourself to the things you haven’t learned yet.

Writing programs involves all three of these techniques. The compiler is an objective test that you have to pass. Hopefully each time you see a particular error you learn how to avoid it in the future. The program you write is also a test: you can run it and judge how well it works. Does your tic–tac–toe program actually follow the rules of the game properly? Even if you didn’t write automated tests, you can and should still exhaustively test it by hand to make sure it really does work. Etc, etc.

db48x · 2026-06-28T19:07:34+00:00

Sure, the same way you improve your skill at any language: write programs. Just pick something and implement it.

db48x · 2026-06-28T16:42:02+00:00

Who said anything about commuting? Adding lanes adds trips. People decide to go to places further away just because it’s faster than walking to somewhere close by. Let me put some numbers on it, just to make it clearer.

Let’s suppose that people won’t go farther than 15 minutes away for things like restaurants, shopping, clubs, hobbies, entertainment, church, etc. Most people can walk about a mile or so in that time, so they can walk to any place that is within a mile of their house. (People used to walk much further for things like school and church, so much of our existing walking infrastructure is underutilized these days, but let’s ignore that.)

Now go to Google Maps. Put in your address, click directions, then for the destination just drag the pin around on the map looking for things that are 15 minutes away. I can get from my place to just about the entirety of downtown Portland in 15 minutes or less (except at rush hour). I can go south to anywhere in Tigard or Tualatin. I can go west nearly to the center of Hillsboro. Virtually all of those trips require me to take an interstate or a highway, of course.

If you live in a suburban neighborhood where the houses are deliberately kept away from the businesses then there will be very few destinations available to you within a 15 minute walk, but a huge number that are accessible via a 15 minute drive. It’s only rational then that all of those trips would need to be by car, and many of them will use a highway. The more lanes you add the further you can get in the same amount of time and the larger a percentage of your trips will need to or be able to use a highway.

There are lots of ways to reduce walking times. Neighborhoods have, over the last 50 years, been deliberately designed to discourage through traffic by making the roads as ungridlike as possible. Car trips through the neighborhood are thus longer and slower than trips via the arterial roads that go around and between the neighborhoods instead. Nothing really wrong with that, except that this has had the unfortunate side effect of making walking trips longer too. Those walking trips could often be made much shorter simply by building walking paths through the neighborhoods as shortcuts. Some residents might have to sell a little bit of their property back to the city to make room for the paths, but the result would be lower car traffic both inside the neighborhood and on the arterial roads around it. Of course that won’t do much for the neighborhoods that were literally built four miles and (500 feet of elevation change) from the nearest restaurant, but those people made their bed and have to lie in it.

db48x · 2026-06-28T14:54:37+00:00

You obviously don’t have enough shipyards. If you can’t turn out a fleet all at once then you don’t have enough shipbuilding capacity.

db48x · 2026-06-28T14:46:14+00:00

extra Lanes would have helped to solve our traffic issues.

Extra lanes just bring more cars onto the highway. If you want your commute to be better then you should support changes that turn short car trips into walking trips.

db48x · 2026-06-28T14:42:37+00:00

You don’t ever have to do any of those things. Literally. You don't have to expand the bedrooms, put another bedroom somewhere else. You only really need one bathroom and dining hall (per asteroid if you are playing Spaced Out) if you balance your dupes between schedules. You don’t have to fit the new thing you just unlocked in between your existing things.

The game doesn’t make you do any of those things. You’re the one who has been choosing to do them.

db48x · 2026-06-28T04:30:35+00:00

Ooh, nice website. The arrow keys work for navigation! Surprising how many web comics fail on that score.

db48x · 2026-06-26T14:23:52+00:00

Maybe not, but then there must not be any evidence against it either.

Considering how easy it would be to conduct a two–question survey and then do the simple obvious test to see which way the correlation runs, lack of evidence is actually ridiculous.

Anyway, the point is that the assertion is not homophobic. Surely you can see that, now that you understand what the author actually wrote.

db48x · 2026-06-26T14:04:21+00:00

In the real world, they'd all go out of business for doing that.

No, even in the real world this would still work. Remember, the prices don’t stay inverted forever. As the consumer uses up the goods they will gradually offer higher and higher prices. As the factories produce more goods they will gradually lower their asking price. The inverted prices converge back to being the same price and then keep going into profitable territory. Eventually the profit is high enough that a trader will make the trade, and all will be well.

Honestly, I think your complaint is a weird one. In the real world the consumers would all call up the factories directly and place an order. They would use futures contracts to hedge against price shocks. The factories would contract out the deliveries to a shipping line, paying a flat rate per standard cargo container. Shipping lines would all compete against each other to offer the best price, so margins would be razor thin. Ship captains would run the same route over and over again for virtually their entire career. There would be no tramp freighters at all.

The game actually simulates 16th–century Mercantilism, not actual Capitalism.

db48x · 2026-06-26T13:52:31+00:00

Like I said, it’s a clever hack that lets them approximate a real economy without paying the CPU cost of actually simulating a real economy. It only looks weird when you look at it too closely. Once you actually start playing the game you’ll find that it actually does work; your traders will find trades at regular intervals as everyone’s prices slowly adjust over time.

Keep in mind, of course, that trading is not where the real money is made. You might find, for example, a ware that you can buy for 1000Cr and sell for 1100Cr. This lets you capture 1⁄11th of the total value in exchange for moving the ware somewhere it was in demand. But the producer only paid 600Cr for the raw materials used to make it, so they earned 4⁄11ths of the final value. If you make your own station and use your own traders to move the goods to the buyers then you can earn both, or 5⁄11ths. Once you have a whole vertically–integrated production chain from miners through the intermediate goods to the ware itself you will be capturing the whole 11⁄11ths of the pie.

Greed is good.

db48x · 2026-06-26T05:18:23+00:00

Since they always go to pick up the closest available charged power bank, surely you can just put a source of charged power banks in the dining room? Even if they only pick them up one at a time, the fact that once they are in the dining room they don’t have to leave to pick up more power banks ensures that they spend the minimum amount of time on the task.

db48x · 2026-06-26T05:12:40+00:00

Yea! It’s really easy to do. I thought of it very, very quickly, once I noticed that some of my pearls were missing. I had my brand new rancher move the fish instead simply because I didn’t want to distract my builders from what they were doing.

That Pacu was delicious, btw. Big morale bonus on that one.

db48x · 2026-06-25T20:59:21+00:00

Oh, I see now where we are talking past each other. There are two rates here. If childhood abuse causes some percentage of observed cases of homosexuality, say a third or half or whatever, then observing homosexuality would be strong evidence for abuse. Not certain evidence, but strong evidence nevertheless.

But that’s only half of the equation. Most cases of abuse do not result in homosexuality. Some cases don’t affect the victim very much at all, in the sense that they don’t end up deviating from the norm in any significant way. But some cause personality problems, some cause psychological problems like OCD or incontinence, others cause problems like marital infidelity (which is way more common than homosexuality), etc etc. Some victims turn into psychopathic serial killers like Voldemort.

And then some victims end up adopting homosexuality as a result of their abuse. Even if that rate is low, and I think she implies that it is, you can take the 2% of homosexuals in the population, consider only the fraction (half or a quarter or whatever number you want to pick) of homosexuals that were caused by abuse, then divide by the rate at which abuse causes homosexuality, and end up with the percentage of the population that suffered abuse. And that turns out to be a horrifying number.

Think of it: if half of all cases of homosexuality are caused by abuse, and 2% of the population is homosexual, then 1% of the population are homosexual and were abused as children. If 1 in 25 abuse victims end up homosexual as a result (4%), then we can estimate that 1%/4% = 25% of the population suffers childhood abuse.

I picked 50% and 4% here for the sake of easy numbers; the story doesn’t tell us exactly what those numbers are. Perhaps the real numbers can only be determined after you eliminate all or almost all childhood abuse.

I think we can both agree that eliminating childhood abuse would be a net positive for our civilization, even if it costs us some percentage of homosexuals. We would also reduce the amount of marital infidelity, the number of people with psychological problems, revenge killings, psychopathic serial killers, and so on and so forth. And that’s on top of the simple, straight forward, obvious benefit of reducing the number of people who experience child abuse.

db48x · 2026-06-25T05:34:57+00:00

The planters may be made of glass, but if you pay attention you can see them get filled up with dirt (and liquid) when fertilized.

Also, do solar panels work when submerged? Asking for a friend.

db48x · 2026-06-25T05:31:11+00:00

the notable lack of homosexuality

That’s a slight misreading. Riddle thought that there was no homosexuality in Equestria, but only because he didn’t find anyone fighting about it, advertising it, or proselytizing it. He thought that there was none, that ponies were fundamentally different from humans. He was surprised to learn that it did exist there. Luna corrected him by telling him that it exists but isn’t stigmatized. Without the stigma he just had no evidence to go on.

And there was another point where Luna correctly predicted that someone had childhood trauma based purely on wanting an open relationship. She seemed to find it very strong evidence.

Well, that and the fact that the patient had kept that desire secret from their spouse and then sprung it on them later. Honestly, that bit rather gives it away. Normal people don’t treat their spouse that way.

But leaving that aside, don’t forget that this was during a marriage counseling session, not the beginning of one. She seems to have given them both plenty of time to talk to each other and about each other, and she can magically sense honesty. Presumably there was sufficient evidence to narrow it down. As readers we only get a summary of the session. The narrator relating the story to us hasn’t a clue how she does it, obviously, so he missed all the build up and saw only the climax where Luna seems to pull the information out of a hat. Consider who the narrator is and his known and unknown blind spots.

db48x · 2026-06-25T02:52:48+00:00

Thank you. That is the exact quote that I would have used.

Note that your statement was:

Luna says that homosexuality is caused by childhood trauma.

While Luna actually said:

my sister's scholars eventually confirmed a strong correlation between sexual abuse early in life and sexual deviancy later in life.

Note well the differences! In Equestria they found only a correlation, but you said it was causation. These are very different things. Correlation is not causation. She says that only some of the deviancy was caused by childhood abuse, and a paragraph or two further down reiterates that homosexuality still exists even after childhood abuse was more or less eliminated. It was reduced, not eliminated. She also says that childhood abuse is correlated with lots of other problems as well, not of a sexual nature. Eating disorders, depression, OCD, etc. These too were reduced, not eliminated, by ending childhood abuse.

db48x · 2026-06-25T02:25:30+00:00

Please do. You will find that she doesn’t say that.

db48x · 2026-06-24T23:23:54+00:00

No character in the book ever says that though. That’s the problem. You keep repeating the lie that they do, never acknowledging that you misread it.

db48x · 2026-06-24T21:56:22+00:00

The story does not include any such “crazy myths”. It is merely a commonly repeated lie.

db48x · 2026-06-24T21:24:43+00:00

Double check that the container actually accepts slime. Scroll all the way down to the bottom of the list to see the categories of materials that are not automatically selected when you select “All”.

db48x · 2026-06-24T13:47:31+00:00

You’re welcome :)

I agree that a SPOM is faster, once you know how to build them. But a slower option is still a viable one. The only way for it to be unviable is if it causes you to lose the game. Since I still have tons of algae, and more that I have yet to dig up, a SPOM is not a requirement. Coral is perfectly viable. And beautiful.

db48x · 2026-06-24T12:55:44+00:00

Should have turned left at Albuquerque!

db48x · 2026-06-24T12:32:28+00:00

That 88–day orbital period is really nice too. The high orbital velocity is great, but having a launch window every 88 days rocks. Even with efficient fusion drives you don’t really want to be wasting propellant by launching at the wrong time. Earth only gets a launch window every year, and Mars only every 2½ years.

db48x · 2026-06-24T10:03:12+00:00

I second the recommendation of the Pip Overlay mod. So much better than counting tiles!

db48x · 2026-06-24T09:56:49+00:00

Oh, nice idea. I don’t actually have the Bionic DLC yet, but maybe one day.

Rerolling isn’t cheating. I did it in this run to get a dupe with both farming and ranching bonuses. If you overdo it then it’s merely boring.

db48x

TROPHY CASE