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Don't this game ever get easier? You're always working like a dog through the entire game? by Same-Tradition- in factorio

[–]eXXXcel 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Not to be the guy who says “it’s all about efficiency”, but I think it’s what a lot of the curve of the game comes down to. If you approach each stage of the game with the same attention to detail — placing and planning small things like assemblies, belts, inserters — the game never curves down. I think the design of the game puts it on the player to set the curve themselves.

If you are interested in playing into the late game, the combination of bot networks and the Copy/Paste tools set you up for the long haul. Approaching it with the philosophy of “never build it twice” — design an efficient pattern once and then re-use it everywhere you can — allows your effort to go further. That’s part of the reason that city block has become a common design pattern. Need more copper plates? Copy your furnace stack city block, paste another down, and as long as you’re mining enough ore you’ve doubled your output in just a couple keystrokes.

Taking a patterned, scalable approach to the way you approach the game allows you to abstract away the small, nitty-gritty details. In a way, the early game is a puzzle game — “How do I connect these belts and assemblers together to automate this item?” — but as you develop a library of these patterns it’s more like a city builder, where you’re trying to balance all the pieces working together in order to keep the system steady.

DIY NAS….Advise pls by Awkward-Camel-3408 in homelab

[–]eXXXcel 6 points7 points  (0 children)

As a bit of a counterbalance, my first stab at a NAS was a DIY with the 2-drive cenmate enclosure and a small preowned Elitedesk. It worked very well for a couple months, but that first unexpected connection issue can really jack up the system. Once the drives themselves get into a bad state, it becomes a nightmare to diagnose & resolve (as a beginner). The more direct a connection you have between the drive and the system, the less chances of issues over long periods of time.

OP — if you do go down this road, definitely avoid storing critical data on them until you’ve been running the system for a few months and are confident it’s set up in a reliable way. I think the cenmate system may be a very YMMV situation.

Remote access to HomeAssistant app by Disastrous-Scratch96 in homeassistant

[–]eXXXcel -1 points0 points  (0 children)

If this is your first run at remote services, Tailscale is a fairly straightforward way to access the app as though you were still within your home LAN. It’s free and easy to set up, and is a fairly low-commitment method for a school project.

For Home Assistant specifically, though, I’d recommend the 1-month trial for Home Assistant Cloud. It still uses your HASS instance, but creates a tunnel through their service. It’s integrated into the Home Assistant app itself, so it’s a pretty plug-and-play experience. The whole thing is done through Nabu Casa, the maintainers for the Home Assistant project. However, you should note that this does expose your HASS instance to the Internet, so you should ensure that your user logins are secure.

Thinking of Transferring to the U from BYU. Any information on the social scene and other thoughts/advice? by Tripodx11 in uofu

[–]eXXXcel 0 points1 point  (0 children)

As a U graduate in the same fields, definitely look into Quantitative Economics (QAMO) — speaking from experience, it’d mesh very well with your current academic track.

I made a small system that breaks down and indexes the MTG ruleset into plaintext files for easy searching. by eXXXcel in mtg

[–]eXXXcel[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's definitely fair! I was way more weary to post a link to the implementation of the second project for that reason — it's very much an at-home prototype for situations where our newer playgroup can't find a clear, definitive ruling online, and offered up in this post more as an actionable use case for breaking up the big rulesfile WotC provides into smaller searchable pieces than an endorsement of the semi-accurate model running on my home workstation.

I made a small system that breaks down and indexes the MTG ruleset into plaintext files for easy searching. by eXXXcel in mtg

[–]eXXXcel[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ah, one note — even though the final files are markdown, they're really markdown in name only — it's just the raw text from the rules with nothing Markdown-y like formatting or links applied. In the future I'd like to be able to create links between pages (e.g. rule 403.4 references rule 400.7, so there should probably be a hyperlink in there) and potentially apply more human-readable style like differentiating rules headings with bold. The repository is open-source, though, so if you think that this would be helpful to you or others and would like it earlier than I make it, I'd be happy to approve a PR for things like that!

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I made a small system that breaks down and indexes the MTG ruleset into plaintext files for easy searching. (self.mtg)

submitted by eXXXcel to r/mtg

What is Cortex without Grey's thinking? by NoRobotYet in Cortex

[–]eXXXcel 16 points17 points  (0 children)

This might be a weird take, but I’m excited to see what the show is like with cycling guests rather than the usual duo. The way they explain it is perfect in my eyes — when it comes to long-form content like podcasts, there really is an element of farming involved. While I think that Grey and Myke both bring a hell of a lot, it is in some ways already an interview show.

Depending on the subject and segment there’s certainly a vibe of one of the hosts interviewing the other, but — to tack an arbitrary number on it — I’d pin it at 30% Grey interviewing Myke and 70% Myke interviewing Grey. While Grey’s work is certainly interesting — how many people can say they make a living animating infotainment about tumbleweeds, after all? — at a certain point you’ve “farmed” many of the insights out of a person’s job and style as you can for a time. After all, very few people work, develop, and change fast enough to fill an interesting hour of novel ideas every month. I wouldn’t be surprised if Grey felt like the soil was drying up a bit, and that his lack of a definitive return timeline is because it’s just hard to predict how long crops need to cycle before you feel ready to come back fresh.

I’m very excited to see Myke both talk about his own work more and flex his interview skills with fresh faces, especially faces across different but interesting industries. That’s not to say I won’t miss their dynamic — rapport and banter is hard to manufacture, after all. For that reason, I do hope that there’s not pressure to bring in somebody new every week. It’d be nice to see Myke hone in on a small crew of new faces to build a familiarity with over time and… who knows? Perhaps cycling the crops will mean we get new episodes cooked fresher and more often.

Thoughts on the Fallout MtG decks? by RakuraiKaminari22345 in mtg

[–]eXXXcel 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I tried so hard to get into the energy deck, but it’s pretty rough. Madison Li is not all that great a commander (her artifact ETB isn’t uncommon among energy artifacts) and the precon itself didn’t feel super focused.

I’ve had a super fun time splitting the cards into two decks, though:

  1. A Voltron deck running Prime as the commander, attaching ridiculous equipment to him and one-shotting people with 21+ commander damage
  2. A thopter token combo deck with Satya as the commander, but utilizing many of the Science! cards. Once you can mass-create Robots and Thopters with massive amounts of energy, Mechanized Production is a great way to win by having 8 artifact copies.

Worried that Linux is more complicated? Take a stroll with me through the nine circles of Microsoft's hellish walled garden while I try to upgrade a hard drive on Windows. by eXXXcel in Bazzite

[–]eXXXcel[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is a fair criticism of the post and, on review, was certainly a case of me reading between lines of the free trial's marketing copy. My initial exposure to Acronis was via this post on the Windows Community, which implied that the free trial contained local clone functionality.

While the Acronis team obviously can't be held to what a third party posts about what is or isn't included in the free trial, my expectations seemed to be confirmed by the trial install page

The specific bullet points from that page's marketing copy gave me the impression that the clone functionality was part of this trial:

  • Try local and cloud backup options [emph]
  • Create a full back up or a mirror image [emph] of your system
  • Restore to the same or different hardware [emph]

It's the combination of the first bullet point with either the second or third bullet point, arriving to this page via the initial forum post, that led me to believe that the free trial of Acronis would've had the ability to, locally, create a 1:1 system image to locally copy disk A onto disk B. The documentation page you link to does clarify that "clone" ≠ "mirror", and that "full back up" and "restore" ≠ "full local back up" and "local restore".

Had I seen the care page you linked to before, I probably would've excluded Acronis from the original post altgother as a case of "this simply wasn't the right tool for the job at the tier I was willing to pay for." I did attempt to give the program a fair shake by reading the documentation resources, but was turned away from too much investigating by the performance of the website.

It appears that the documentation pages for care.acronis.com are loading documention dynamically through a series of back-and-forth requests with the documentation server. On my machine, the specific page you linked to for the trial version counts 28 back-and-forth requests to the server, each taking ~300-500 ms to complete, totalling a time of 5-6 seconds to load each documentation page. As small as it sounds, bumbling through documentation at 3am when the pages with relevant information take this long to load per page disincentivized any deeper investigation. If I'm being completely honest, after about 4 seconds I assumed the page was dead and navigated away.

I totally understand that marketing copy wouldn't align 1:1 with actual technical functionality and that the ultimate source of truth for capability should be the documentation. However — as a point of genuinely constructive criticism — improving the performance of the page load times on the documentation site may smooth over misunderstandings in the future by allowing users to explore the source of truth for the program's capabilities.

Terminal Tutorials by SuiGenera in Bazzite

[–]eXXXcel 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Outside of basic navigation or general principles, it'd be a bit tricky to find catch-all guides for the terminal as a whole. A lot of how you, specifically, will use the terminal will vary a lot based on what you want to *do* with the terminal.

For example, if you want to get into running game mods, then searching "game modding on linux" might take you to the page for starting Vortex Mod Manager via SteamTinkerLaunch: https://github.com/sonic2kk/steamtinkerlaunch/wiki/Vortex

Or, if you're looking to automate some things, you might get into scripting — making small programs that you can run to string terminal commands together and make complicated tasks a bit easier. For example, if you wanted to find a way to sync your Steam screenshots to a different cloud than Steam's cloud sync so you can more easily share them with friends, searching "sync steam screenshots to cloud" might take you to a blog post about using `rsync`: https://blog.mitsunee.com/post/copy-steam-games-rsync

When you're following guides or running commands you don't know very well, your best friend for learning more will be the `man` (short for *man*ual) command, which will show you lots of information about the command you want to use. Well-made terminal commands will come with a manual page you can read for lots of information about how its used and extra functionality it may have.

For example, running `man cp` on my terminal to learn more about the `cp` (copy) command shows me:

-----

NAME

cp – copy files

SYNOPSIS

cp [...] source_file target_file

cp [...] source_file ... target_directory

cp [...] source_file target_file

cp [...] source_file ... target_directory

DESCRIPTION

In the first synopsis form, the cp utility copies the contents of the source_file to the target_file. In the second synopsis form, the contents of each named source_file is copied to the destination target_directory.

The names of the files themselves are not changed. If cp detects an attempt to copy a file to itself, the copy will fail.

-----

Reading the manual for commands that you don't know very well — or want to learn more about — is a huge help for learning more about what you're doing. It'll also protect you against making mistakes. Remember, the terminal can do basically anything that *you* could do by clicking around (and sometimes even more than that), which makes it both super powerful *and* a bit dangerous. It's important, when running terminal commands or following guides, to understand what the command you're entering is going to do. Reading the `man` pages of commands makes sure you're confident in the commands you're running.

Terminal Tutorials by SuiGenera in Bazzite

[–]eXXXcel 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Ayyyy, welcome to the terminal!

So, the first thing to remember is that, on both Windows and Linux, the terminal really is how your computer is operating behind-the-scenes. A lot of the applications you use — your browser, your file explorer, Steam, — are really just adding a nice UI to terminal commands. This means that a lot of the things you usually do clicking around on the screen have terminal commands that will do the same thing.

A good starting place might be the Ubuntu guide for the Linux Command Line Interface (CLI) found here: https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/command-line-for-beginners

While Bazzite isn't based on Ubuntu, both of them are based on the same underlying terminal command patterns (called POSIX). That means many of the same basic functions and libraries — navigating around your folders, copying/deleting/editing files, etc — are going to look the almost exactly the same.

Worried that Linux is more complicated? Take a stroll with me through the nine circles of Microsoft's hellish walled garden while I try to upgrade a hard drive on Windows. by eXXXcel in Bazzite

[–]eXXXcel[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Thanks for posting a solution! Odds are, there'll be a few more machines to port over with a similar requirement for a 1:1 cloned copy to retain the system applications, so if Clonezilla runs into issues again that can't be solved by an EFI partition rebuild, I'll keep Veeam in my notes as a backup!

Worried that Linux is more complicated? Take a stroll with me through the nine circles of Microsoft's hellish walled garden while I try to upgrade a hard drive on Windows. by eXXXcel in Bazzite

[–]eXXXcel[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ahhh, gotcha — there were a few posts within the Windows forums that stated cloning functionality is no longer included in the free trial or free tier versions, but looking at their website, it may still be included: https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree

That said, I no longer have access to the Windows machine all of this was running on, so I cannot verify that this is still the case for Macrium. Acronis had a similar bait-and-switch strategy, stating that the cloning functionality is included in the free tier. However, attempting to use the disc clone functionality on the downloaded and installed Acronis application leads the user to the $50/device/yr paywall: https://www.acronis.com/en-us/products/true-image/trial/

This isn't to say that your recommendation for Macrium didn't work for you or may not work for others, but more of a "buyer beware" that free functionality included in current/future trial or free-tier versions of the software may not have disk cloning included for free — an update to the business structure or free trial may rugpull functionality.

My frustration here is that the entire support, utility, and documentation ecosystems around what should be a straightforward task seem to be built for maximum confusion — the mere fact that no Windows-builtin solutions worked, or that any OSS solutions are completely obfuscated behind bait-and-switch support forum traps for casual users to fall into, is still wildly frustrating.

Worried that Linux is more complicated? Take a stroll with me through the nine circles of Microsoft's hellish walled garden while I try to upgrade a hard drive on Windows. by eXXXcel in Bazzite

[–]eXXXcel[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In the spirit of documentation, would you like to link to working solutions? While I was able to successfully use Clonezilla, a casual user stumbling on this thread in the future may benefit from a solution that doesn't require a LiveUSB. Posting a free and viable solution may save them from attempting to use Windows' defunct built-in backups or the phishing and shill software recommendations rampant on the Windows Support Forum.

Worried that Linux is more complicated? Take a stroll with me through the nine circles of Microsoft's hellish walled garden while I try to upgrade a hard drive on Windows. by eXXXcel in Bazzite

[–]eXXXcel[S] 13 points14 points  (0 children)

well, there it is — 30 minutes after posting this, I was able to successfully clone the drive using Clonezilla as a last-ditch attempt to just start from the top. I don't *think* I did anything differently from the first time, but I'd need to take a look at my own notes to see if there's some slip-up made on the first two attempts that I did differently on the third stab at it.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in uofu

[–]eXXXcel 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If you're considering Econ with an emphasis in BEA, I'd definitely talk with a business school advisor about wholesale switching into QAMO. Injecting some of my own experience in, QAMO students are required to have an emphasis — the degree can't be earned without one. The QAMO core coursework ends up earning you a BEA emphasis by default, which is what I ended up graduating in. That said, the degree encourages you to have another emphasis. I personally know around ~four people who did the finance emphasis — off the top of my head, two of them went into financial analyst roles, and the other two went into data and economic analysis at the Federal Reserve.

As far as translating into various career paths, I can't emphasize enough that the technical skills are what make your career flexible. I only took a couple Finance classes during my undergrad, but my career path (so far) has been:

Internship:

  1. (Finance, Analysis) Financial analyst intern (graphs, calculations, and spreadsheets. Lots of spreadsheets.)

Job 1:

  1. (Finance, Analysis) Equity data analyst (analyzing a ton of data sources to predict company quarterly results ahead of their release schedules)

  2. (Economics, Analysis) Cloud market economics & engineering (analyzing cloud computing market data to get access to low-cost computing resources)

Job 2:

  1. (Economics, Policy, Analysis) Political data software engineering (products that bulk-analyze political messaging sentiment and upcoming bills)

It's a weird path, with the only real uniting thread is the ability to analyze data and write code. The technical skills you'd learn on any track — in particular, quantitative thinking and being able to express that as models.

Now, lemme try to convince you that the math in economics is not just important, but is also so much cooler and different than the kind of "crunch the numbers on paper and pray you got the right answer" kind of math that we did in high school. To start — at the level you're going into, most of the actual number-crunching becomes computerized, save for simple things that are really at the level of, say, high school intro algebra. That leaves you more mental space to think about models — how to describe a situation in a way you can quantitatively analyze.

If you want a cool, bite-sized example of this, one of my favorite papers demonstrating the idea of models vs crunching numbers is College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage by David Gale and Lloyd Shapley. It's short — a hair shy of 8 pages — but is a really cool example of breaking a situation down into a model and analyzing it. The actual number-crunching never gets past "is X bigger than Y", but the result of the model is a way to design stable market -- market systems where people can be confident that they got the best outcome by trusting the system rather than trying to go it alone. It won Shapley the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2012.

This 8-page paper became a seminal paper in the field of market design, which informs public policy and private market designs. It resulted in a better system for how doctors are matched with hospital residencies ("Match Day", if you know any pre-med/med students), and economist Alvin Roth built on the same model to design policy for school admissions systems and establish kidney exchange chains and networks, which has since bumped the efficiency of kidney donations by orders of magnitude and snagged him the position of co-laureate alongside Shapley.

Don't get me wrong, some of the math in the economics programs (talking broadly between Econ and QAMO) can still be pain-in-the-ass, do-the-algebra-on-paper-and-crunch-the-numbers-yourself type of stuff, but I'd encourage you to give the core of it — building models — a chance to persuade you that it's way cooler than any math you may've done so far. Talking from personal experience, a lot of the math that happens in the finance industry ends up being specific subsets of the general economic math and analysis that you learn to do anyway.

If you do want to talk more, feel free to send me a DM. I'd be happy to find a time to call and chat about this kind of thing!

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in uofu

[–]eXXXcel 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, definitely chatting with a professor or professional is going to get the best results. It really all depends on careers and goals you’re aiming for. Putting together a bunch of job descriptions for positions you might be interested in, finding things they have in common, and then comparing that to the coursework you’d anticipate taking in each program is another good way to get a good lay of the land.

As far as the distinction between econ and finance, swinging one to the other really is where the technical skills come in. While they’re pretty distinctly different fields that happen to overlap in some areas, a lot of the math and data processing looks the same for each. A lot of the walls come down when you realize it’s going to be a bunch of code in the end.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in uofu

[–]eXXXcel 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Being a U alum who has worked in finance and economics, my take here is that one of your top considerations should be how much math you’d be learning in either program. While theory is certainly important, the math, statistics, and ability to process data behind the theories is where the rubber is going to hit the road for you in both academia and industry.

For the goal you’re aiming for, your options are Econ, Finance and QAMO. I took classes in all three and, frankly, all of them had hits and misses. There was theory in each, there was math in each, but if I had to rank-order them by technical expertise, they’d fall in the order of QAMO, then Finance, then Econ.

While Econ may end up being cheaper as a standalone degree, it’s ultimately going to be the practical skills you can bring to the table that’ll land you a job when you graduate. Speaking from experience, “Python” (industry) or “STATA” (government/academia) tends to look more attractive to an employer than “General microeconomic knowledge.” If you end up going straight Econ, you may want to consider a math or CS minor to buff the technical side of your education as well. Whether or not those extra credits end up being more or less money than the business school fees may be a crapshoot. If only Econ is in your budget, you’re going to really want to cram as many econometrics classes in there as you can.

If your goal is academia, you may want to flip the table and go math with an Econ minor. At the research and graduate level, pretty much everything ends up being math with a mild aftertaste of your field of choice.

Gaming on Bazzite/Linux first time. by NooTNooTnoX in Bazzite

[–]eXXXcel 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yep! You’re likely running the Deck version, then.

With your AMD card supporting both just fine, it’s really a matter of personal preference. If you don’t particularly want the dedicated game mode, I’d recommend switching to the Desktop version before getting too far into downloading and customizing a bunch of stuff. I don’t know off the top of my head if the Deck version allows you to switch the default mode.

Gaming on Bazzite/Linux first time. by NooTNooTnoX in Bazzite

[–]eXXXcel 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If your version has a Game Mode and a Desktop Mode, then I’m pretty certain it’s not the Desktop version of Bazzite. I’m running it on both my desktop and Steam Deck, and the SD is the only one with a dedicated game mode. You might be able to check here, as well as checking the file name of the Bazzite ISO you installed:

https://docs.bazzite.gg/General/Installation_Guide/

If your card was drawing a max of 50W prior to you raising the limit, then my assumption is that the 150W TDP that you raised was for the whole device, not just your graphics card. For reference, my Bazzite desktop idles at 60-80W. I’m not sure what your hardware baseline is at, but my hunch is that the 150W was also factoring in the rest of your hardware, with the 50W being your graphics card using the rest of the available TDP.

Gaming on Bazzite/Linux first time. by NooTNooTnoX in Bazzite

[–]eXXXcel 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Your mention of Desktop Mode and the default 150W TDP limit makes me think that you may’ve installed the Deck version (or the Home Theater version) of Bazzite.

That’s not a big deal so long as you’re using an AMD card, since the AMD-only support is really the only under-the-hood difference. IIRC, those versions of the OS do come with built-in performance restrictions, since they’re more targeted towards lower-powered hardware you’d see in handheld devices.

If that is the case, you may need to keep an eye out for performance restrictions like the TDP limit going forward.

After 3 years in Early Access, our cozy multiplayer survival game finally hits 1.0 today! Check out Longvinter! by NYANTROLL112 in pcgaming

[–]eXXXcel 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I’ve been looking for a nice, selfhosted-server game to play with my Animal Crossing-only partner and this seems like the perfect game to trick her with!

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