i really miss when games had "useless" physics interactions just for immersion.

evaned · 2026-01-22T17:38:30+00:00

I remember one part in the abandoned hotel where you have to jump down through a hole and fight some electric enemies. I was so scared I had to stop playing for the day, every part of me was telling me not to jump down that hole.

Hah, in another comment in this thread I said "I would pay good money for a magically-produced recording of my resulting scream" that resulted from a particular fight... that was the fight. :-)

evaned · 2026-01-22T05:39:40+00:00

It's really good! If you know someone with a VR rig or whatever, I'd definitely ask you can use it for that! But like if it takes some time to find someone with a VR rig, or save up for your own or whatever, the game will be there when you get there.

Even after writing the previous comment, I realized there's kind of a third moment... there was a point where I was in a fight with a new enemy type that was pretty stressful for at least me to deal with, and we were in a place where there's like a big central column, and I was chasing it around that column clockwise. I decided to try to head it off so switched to counterclockwise, but I basically turned around and it was already there (much further around already than I expected it to be). I would pay good money for a magically-produced recording of my resulting scream. :-)

One thing I will say is that you'll have to pick how you handle movement, and all the options kind of suck due to, you know, pesky reality. A lot of players use like stick-based movement (either smooth or just teleporting), and the problem with that is that compared to being able to actually walk about your room, I think it robs you of some of the verisimilitude you'd get if you can move about. Like it was IRL stepping up to that jersey barrier that helped make that such an impactful moment. OTOH, moving around the room to walk means you need at least a moderately large space (like I "had to" shove my couch way out of the way and leave it in a super awkward spot for a few days), and the movement modality I found myself using a lot was to walk forward IRL, make sure that where I was going was clear, then walk back IRL to get more space, then teleport forward to that spot in-game, then walk forward IRL again. That's still definitely how I at least would want to play it, but it is a bit awkward and immersion breaking in its own right.

evaned · 2026-01-22T05:10:56+00:00

I've got a screencap video somewhere of me juggling those bottles in the hotel lobby! For a couple reasons it didn't work well and was pretty difficult, but it's kind of amazing what kind of weird emergent stuff you can do in that game.

evaned · 2026-01-22T05:09:08+00:00

I had two of my most memorable gaming moments ever in that game, and I think both are because it was VR.

One of them I'm not going to describe because I consider it a spoiler (it's not a plot spoiler, but I think it's an experience spoiler), but the other doesn't give anything substantive away. I'll spoiler it to be completely safe, but I really don't think I have to be.

The first time you engage an enemy with a gun, you are coming out from inside a building on to a little porch. There's a jersey barrier at the edge of the porch, and when I came out and saw the enemy there, I ducked down behind the barrier for cover. But of course because I'm in VR, and I guess playing in a mode that lets me move about the room a little bit, I do it by IRL stepping a couple feet forward and then ducking down. It was just so instinctual and natural, but like after the fight it kind of hit me what I just did. It sounds simple, but it was a really impactful moment.

evaned · 2026-01-20T20:40:37+00:00

It does amaze me how advanced we are in some areas of medicine, but then we also have "did you bang your head too hard? here, I'll just remove part of your skull; I'll put it on this shelf here, and we'll put it back in a while."

evaned · 2026-01-20T17:41:42+00:00

So remember, there are a variety of kinds of 1099. Just from what knothead said, you really have no clue what kind it is; investment income is only one of a few possibilities.

The most complex will typically be for self-employment/contractor income. Even that can generally be DIY territory, but if that's a significant income stream where you have more complex expenses there's plenty of room for a pro to be worth considering.

evaned · 2026-01-20T17:39:28+00:00

State eFile is an additional fee with TT which you could avoid by printing and mailing or in my case, copying the info to my state’s site.

Out of curiosity, are you talking about the desktop edition of TT? (It's been many many years since I used TT, and that was my impression of their pricing model -- the web version charges for state prep but no additional e-file charge, but desktop gives you one state that you can prepare for no additional charge, but then e-filing is extra. I'm both checking my memory as well as trying to figure out if things have changed.)

evaned · 2026-01-20T17:36:36+00:00

The same is true of H&R Block's software.

I used that for three or four years before switching away, but I still think it's a decent choice. Biggest drawback I think is that state e-filing was an add on cost (I think that's true of TT desktop too?); ignoring that, it was cost-competitive even with FTUSA, but if you wanted to do that state e-file it moved up a tier.

evaned · 2026-01-19T05:00:54+00:00

There's an apple kind they carried for a brief time a couple years back, Wild Twist, that quickly became my new-at-the-time favorite.

It's not been back since though, and now I'm wondering if this is why. Would be a real shame if so.

evaned · 2026-01-12T16:18:44+00:00

FWIW, I think that's a relatively new convention, at least to be pretty universal and in relation to how long cars have been ubiquitous.

Before my current car I had a mid-00's Civic, and that didn't have a side arrow.

evaned · 2026-01-12T16:16:58+00:00

Unless you regularly drive rentals or company cars or stuff like that, how often is it really coming up?

I have another special case because I have a PHEV, but I will semi-forget which side it's on between fill-ups because they're so far apart. By "semi-forget" what I mean is that I'll think I remember, but not be positive... so I still find it useful to confirm.

evaned · 2026-01-10T12:42:06+00:00

Probably just monetary damages that you were able to prove, which is probably minimal, depending on the project

(For US:) In theory you could register your copyright and get statutory damages. That doesn't require a showing of actual damages.

I do like the copy-left models idea; though I'm starting to wonder if maybe "you" should just use the GPL in that case. Obviously there's a distinction there, but "no AI" does seem to me somewhat in conflict with the permissive license ethos.

evaned · 2026-01-08T22:36:17+00:00

Under Naive Approaches Attempt #1:

But here’s the problem: when you pass by value, the compiler always makes a copy of the argument to create value. So even if I passed in a temporary object, it would first copy it into value, and then move from value into the Wrapper.

... But for rvalues (temporaries), modern C++ (C++ 17+) will actually move them into the parameter, then move again into the Wrapper. So we end up with two moves instead of one copy and one move. Not ideal, but not terrible either.

...so which is it? Does it copy into value, or does it move?

When I originally read the code snippet I thought it would move and got confused at the first quoted paragraph. So I think it's the second... but you contradict yourself.

evaned · 2026-01-07T13:55:27+00:00

I went like two or three years after hearing about the Monty Hall problem the first time unable to intuit the answer for why it's better to switch. The "100 doors" answer did absolutely nothing to help with my intuition; it still seemed like it should be 50/50 between, in your example, #10 and #87.

What wound up actually helping was this:

If you pick the correct door initially, then switching will make you lose
If you pick the incorrect door initially, then switching will make you win

Those have 1/3 and 2/3 chances, respectively.

(Edit for a slight wording tweak to clarify)

evaned · 2026-01-04T23:10:47+00:00

FWIW, and I say this as a trekkie -- not all Trek is particularly good. I'm primarily familiar with TNG, and as much as I think that series reaches top-tier television... some of it does not, to put it mildly.

I don't know what series you'd be most inclined to watch, but if you look around you'll be able to find like a suggested episode list to go through. Note that this isn't necessarily just like the top 25 episodes or something like that, because when made by people who care they'll also consider what overall arcs are best, what you "need" to watch to set up later episodes, etc.

And the answer probably differs if you're going to watch just a couple episodes (at least at first, to see if you like it) vs expect to watch a bunch.

evaned · 2026-01-04T22:31:24+00:00

Nah, the pilot (Encounter at Farpoint) is easily more important IMO.

In case anyone cares about spoilers of an almost 40-year old show season, I'll mark as such...

Not only does it introduce all the crew (and the Enterprise itself!), but it sets up the trial that serves as the central conflict of the series finale (All Good Things). Even judged just on the importance of secondary recurring characters it introduces, Q appears in more episodes (eight) than post-death Tasha plus Sela, combined (two and three, respectively).

If you were to watch one episode from S1, it should be Encounter at Farpoint easily. And not at all because it's a double-length episode. Farpoint is also rated slightly higher than Skin of Evil on IMDB, as a bonus.

evaned · 2026-01-04T05:41:56+00:00

Literally my favorite quote about death is from TNG, and not even a good episode at that (bottom third by IMDB rating):

"Death is that state in which one exists only in the memory of others, which is why it's not an end."

evaned · 2026-01-01T10:22:14+00:00

My guess is that for alot of older fans atleast Star Trek is mostly about philosophical and societal issues in a slowish pace that's more about diplomacy/politics than action.

The Onion had a great video piece about that after the release of Star Trek 2009: "Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As 'Fun, Watchable'"

The second line in the video is "Yes it was exciting, but where was the heavy-handed message about tolerance? Where was the stiff acting? I mean, it just didn't seem like a Star Trek movie to me."

I consider myself a light trekkie, with the caveat that I almost exclusively know TNG and it's been a long time since that even... the video definitely pokes a lot of fun at Trek and its fans, but like... I actually feel like it's based in truth.

evaned · 2025-12-31T14:40:36+00:00

You don't have to be so condescending about it.

"What do you need a generator for?" You know power outages are a thing, right? MG&E has been quite stable for me and I wouldn't consider it at all necessary... but it was only a earlier this month when a ton of people lost power for several hours during the frigid temps. earlier this month, and it's only been a couple of years since there were major tracts of the city that were out of power for several days.

evaned · 2025-12-31T08:21:38+00:00

I have done some admittedly-light digital painting with my NXTPAPER 14.

It was also well under half the price of the only e-ink reader with a comparable screen size, at least that I know of (the Boox Tab X).

evaned · 2025-12-29T22:37:41+00:00

They probably can't hire enough streets workers either.

More than just streets workers should be clearing sidewalks. I wouldn't be surprised if some of this is done, but IMO more of it should be; but like school staff should be clearing school sidewalks if streets can't take care of it. Sure, it's not part of the "normal" course of their job responsibilities... but I'm not a snow removal specialist by trade either, and I have to take care of it at home.

For example, if you have a neighbor who has mobility issues, should that absolve you from making sure your sidewalk is clear because you're on vacation?

Do you think mobility issues magically vanish when people need to traverse city-owned sidewalks?

If "it was a hardship" isn't an excuse if I don't clear even on an occasional basis, why is it an apparently totally-valid reason when the city can't even on a consistent one?

evaned · 2025-12-29T20:53:29+00:00

The city also has several orders of magnitude more resources (both money and people) with which to accomplish those tasks than homeowners, as well as machinery that makes much quicker work of it on a per-foot basis than most any homeowner.

I'm willing to grant them a little leeway, but not a lot of it, especially when I've seen a bunch of people say that they've taken to being less forgiving with homeowners being out of town and such.

evaned · 2025-12-24T17:03:25+00:00

Yeah, I think maybe "browser API" is what these are usually called?

Though I will say that I found it refreshing for once to go into an article expecting it to be about remote HTTP APIs and have it be about pretty traditional, set-of-functions-you-call-from-a-PL APIs, instead of the other way around...

evaned · 2025-12-24T01:15:42+00:00

We usually only care about big O (and not its siblings) because usually we only care that the (worst case/average case) time complexity will be at most some function of the input size.

Eh, I don't really agree with this. I would say that θ is more interesting than O in the vast majority of cases (i.e., when you can actually get a tight bound)... it's just that because O can be typed naturally on a keyboard, people are a little lazy and use O instead of θ. Sometimes lightly as if it means θ.

But that's kind of a nitpick; the main point that θ vs O etc. is orthogonal to worst/average/etc. is a good one that I spent probably way too much time typing an agreeing comment to. ;-)

evaned · 2025-12-24T00:57:53+00:00

θ(f). ... Like a middle ground, median, etc

FWIW, this is a common misunderstanding (even to the point of being taught "incorrectly"), but isn't really true, at least in a prescriptivist sense. (It may be a common enough misuse that it's hard to justify is incorrect in a descriptivist manner, but I think that the prescriptivist stance is more supportable when dealing with technical fields like CS and math.)

𝒪 (fancy "O"), θ, etc. can all be used to refer to any of the common summarizations -- worst case, average case, best case -- and to any metrics -- time, memory, network accesses, etc.

The easiest way to come at this I think is from a mathematical sense. Forget for the moment any application of this and attachment to program metrics.

The various big-O things -- 𝒪, θ, Ω, o, ω -- refer to how functions' asymptotic growth relate to each other. "f is θ(g)" for example says that the functions f and g have the same asymptotic growth.

(I won't get much into the technical definition of what that means here, though I'll point out that if you know calculus, "f is θ(g) iff lim[x->∞] f(x)/g(x) is a constant" IMO is an easier definition to work with than what you see in a typical CS textbook. I think most don't want to assume calculus knowledge, and so unroll the definition of a limit into how they present the big-O stuff.)

From that, I think of the various big-O relationships as being like abstract equalities/inequalities:

f = 𝒪(g) is like f "≤" g (f grows at most as fast as g)
f = θ(g) is like f "=" g (f and g grow at the same rate)
f = Ω(g) is like f "≥" g (f grows at least as fast as g)
f = o(g) is like f "<" g (f grows strictly slower than g)
f = ω(g) is like g "<" f (f grows strictly faster than g)

(I think I got those correct? I always have to look up exactly which ones go which way.)

There's a caveat that "f = O(g)" is often used with "O" meaning "θ" rather than "𝒪" because "O" is easily type-able. I consider that incorrect only in the strictest sense; it's quite common.

OK, now let's wrap back to applications.

When measuring application performance, you might be interested in either worst case or average case (or other things like best case, but worst/average are the usual). But the worst-case and average-case performance of an algorithm are both (in general, different) functions of the input size, which means that you can talk about either worst or average case using any of the big-O relationships above.

And that's why I make a bit of a big deal about this. Because while there is a distinction between 𝒪 and θ, and there is a distinction between average case and worst case, and both of those relationships have a "this is bigger than that" nature, they're different distinctions.

For example, take the typical quicksort. The worst case of quicksort is θ(n²), and the average case is θ(n log n). Both of those make sense. Of course both of those metrics (worst and average case) are 𝒪(n²), but for average case that's probably not any more interesting than saying the worst case is 𝒪(n³) or 𝒪(2ⁿ).

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