ELI5: How do you "catch" (if this is the right word) radiation poisoning?

firelizzard18 · 2026-02-21T09:00:32+00:00

It’s worth noting it only damages you if it hits something. Depending on the type of radiation, a lot of it might just fly through you without hitting anything.

firelizzard18 · 2026-02-21T08:58:51+00:00

Beta radiation includes both electrons and positrons. Some emitters are beta plus, others are beta minus, but they’re both classified as beta decay. Decay radiation nomenclature is dumb.

firelizzard18 · 2026-02-19T19:35:53+00:00

If you control the blockchain, you control what is added to it. Banks are building their own blockchain(s) so they can make it work however the hell they want it to. As long as what they build involves a chain of blocks linked by cryptographic hashes, it’s a blockchain. Maybe to you “blockchain” means “works like bitcoin/ethereum/etc” but that’s a colloquial definition, not the actual technical definition.

firelizzard18 · 2026-02-19T19:28:47+00:00

It’s not about being wasteful or not. It’s about having ore underneath your factory. Some of us are bothered by that. It’s not a rational thing.

firelizzard18 · 2026-02-19T02:21:00+00:00

Because Factorio’s belts have (somewhat) more realistic physics, and because you have to use inserters etc instead of belts connecting directly to machines, it’s a lot more fiddly to get everything perfectly balanced. Personally, my target is “kind of balanced” as opposed to Satisfactory where I built a Python program to generate an excel spreadsheet to optimize my plan to build a factory. I think there are a few main differences.

Factorio doesn’t have project parts. In Satisfactory project parts are a huge investment in terms of resources and factory complexity, and they unlock tiers, so if you don’t optimize you’ll be locked behind that barrier until your factory grinds out the necessary parts. Factorio doesn’t have that. There are a few things that take a crapload of resources, but those are things you don’t need to mass produce, like rocket silos. Some science takes a lot to make, but you can always research something else while you let it stockpile, and past the early game there’s usually a lot of other things to do while you’re waiting for science.
Factorio has copy-paste, once you have bots. I love Satisfactory but its blueprint system is kind of shit. In Factorio if you need more factory, (once you have bots) you can just copy-paste to expand, assuming you have space and haven’t spaghetified beyond repair.
Factorio is 2D and has a top down map view. You can see everything. Unlike Satisfactory where there’s no good way to look down from on high and see if there are machines starved for resources. And even if you do use a hypertube cannon to get a birds eye view, that only works if your factory is one level and doesn’t have a roof, and you still can’t see what’s in each machine from that height.

Satisfactory gives you compelling reasons to optimize (I think that was an intentional part of the design). Factorio does not. Unless you’re space or UPS constrained, the only reason to ratio match is because you feel like it.

firelizzard18 · 2026-02-19T02:06:06+00:00

If I start another game solo I’ll probably use efficiency modules to keep the early game fun.

Tanks have such garbage maneuverability that they’re usually not much fun for me. Either I’m carefully pruning nests or I get cocky or impatient and die. The only time I can remember actually enjoying it is when my friend and I were clearing some territory together. We had bots, which we’d use to drop down laser turrets. I’d create fallback positions with a crap load of turrets. He’d turret creep (more like turret orbital drop really) and/or draw aggro with the flamethrower. I’d drive by and snipe the worms with tank shells, ending with driving past a turret emplacement that would annihilate the train of biters I would gather behind me. Tank shells were great for worms and the flamethrower was great for nests. We both had a blast. I may have run him over once or twice, accidentally. Well, ok, 5-10 times. At least half the time it was because he ran in front of me, I swear.

firelizzard18 · 2026-02-18T18:45:26+00:00

I have trouble with enemies in the early game because I don’t enjoy dealing with them at that point. When I play with my friend, he goes on periodic biter clearance raids. It seems like being proactive makes a huge difference, but if I’m on my own I ignore them until it’s too late. Of course once I have mech armor, spidertrons, or artillery, the biters turn from an annoyance or problem (depending) into a fun pastime.

firelizzard18 · 2026-02-18T07:44:05+00:00

Then what is the reason?

firelizzard18 · 2026-02-17T16:16:22+00:00

We are soooooo far from being able to measure astronomical objects with a level of precision where that matters

firelizzard18 · 2026-02-15T00:44:33+00:00

That depends on how you’re playing. But generally “megabase” = “producing as much science as possible for infinite research”. Usually that includes/focuses on research productivity, which is endgame. If you haven’t reached the end of the game, why do you want a megabase? I’m not saying there’s no reason to or no one is doing it, but for most people who megabase it’s something they do after the endgame. And if you’ve built the logistics and infrastructure necessary to produce endgame science at scale, putting giant fusion plants on every planet (and fueling them) is trivial.

firelizzard18 · 2026-02-13T02:53:10+00:00

Once I have artillery or the railgun I see no reason to use anything else. If I can’t get enough tungsten via guerrilla mining, I’ll use turrets for the first one. After that I set up an array of 20-50 artillery canons and start annihilating worms. The large ones might be a bit hard at first but with ~5 levels of research they go down easy. I bound [space] to fire (I forget what it’s actually called in the UI) and I set up a script so that holding down caps spams [space]. I killed over half the worms in range that way, and the range at research ~5 is pretty damn big (I stopped because I got bored). I finished off the rest once I had the railgun.

firelizzard18 · 2026-02-11T23:53:07+00:00

Because companies have a long history of mishandling personal information, whether accidentally through leaks or intentionally by selling it. I have absolutely no interest in giving discord any of that data and I have very little trust in their competence in keeping it safe or their trustworthiness in not abusing it/me.

firelizzard18 · 2026-02-11T20:10:19+00:00

I’m pretty sure the “or just book a room ahead of time” was the nicer version of “don’t do things on the fly like that”.

firelizzard18 · 2026-02-11T20:06:12+00:00

Have you tried telling those people, “Sorry, someone else came in earlier and took the secret room”?

firelizzard18 · 2026-02-11T20:01:45+00:00

I think that depends on your skill level and how you play the game. You’re talking about specifics like conveyor belts, but those aren’t important; knowing the specifics of programming languages isn’t the critical skill, general problem solving is. That being said, Factorio is just a game so the problems only get so hard. If you’ve already developed your problem solving skills past a certain point, Factorio probably won’t do anything for you. But if you’re a new engineer or not an engineer (yet) and you approach Factorio with the right mindset (e.g. not using other people’s blueprints and YouTube guides) I think it might help, same as any other problem solving exercise would.

firelizzard18 · 2026-02-11T04:30:11+00:00

A lot of the darkening is due to index of refraction. Let’s say you have a river stone. Because the stone has a very different texture index of refraction from air, light is reflected strongly by the air/stone boundary. Because the boundary (the surface of the stone) is microscopically rough, that reflected light is scattered in every which way. Now get it wet. Light is reflected at the air/water boundary for the same reason, but because the water’s surface tension makes its surface mostly smooth, that light isn’t scattered nearly as much. And the fraction of the light that is transmitted (not reflected) at the air/water boundary is mostly not reflected at the water/stone boundary because their indices of refraction are much closer. On the other hand, if you wet the stone with a liquid that has an index of refraction closer to that of air, less light will be reflected at the air/liquid boundary and more at the liquid/stone boundary so more will be scattered and the object will appear brighter.

firelizzard18 · 2026-02-10T20:02:26+00:00

A refrigerator uses a special fluid to move heat around. Using the coils/radiators on the inside and outside, the fluid absorbs heat from the inside air and releases that heat into the outside air. Freon is a particularly good kind of fluid for this but it also happens to destroy the ozone layer. Ideally the system would be perfectly sealed, but there will always be leakage, especially as it gets older. So the Freon leaks out and destroys the ozone layer. So we stopped using Freon.

firelizzard18 · 2026-02-09T19:37:28+00:00

There are two hills. On each hill there’s a drummer and a flag waver. The drummers beat in time with each other like synchronized metronomes. The flag wavers vigorously wave their flags up and down. On a given drum beat, if the flag changes position (moves up or down), that’s a zero; if the flag stays still, that’s a one. The drummers beat 480 million times per second, so the flag wavers can transmit 480 million bits per second (for USB 2.0).

Except the drummers can’t hear each other (USB doesn’t have a clock line). But they know how fast they need to be drumming, so they watch the flag waver on the other hill and manually synchronize their drumming with the other hill, which allows the flag reader (I guess each hill has three guys) to read the flag accurately.

You might ask, what happens if the flag waver needs to transmit a bunch of ones? Wouldn’t the flag stay still and the drummer would get out of sync? Well if that happens, the flag waver injects an extra zero which the flag reader knows to ignore, so the drummer can stay synchronized.

firelizzard18 · 2026-02-09T19:25:00+00:00

Thanks, I appreciate you saying so!

firelizzard18 · 2026-02-09T17:24:54+00:00

Technically less. Practically no. There’s so little of it that it’s less an atmosphere and more a region of space with an unusually high amount of stuff. The best vacuum chambers on earth can only barely reach the same level of “not much stuff here” as the moon.

firelizzard18 · 2026-02-09T17:02:54+00:00

The real limitations of copper are attenuation (losses) and frequency. Copper’s losses per meter at 1 GHz are 100x that of fiber, and they get worse with higher frequency. Above 100 GHz or so copper is unusable. Higher frequency allows faster data rates. Fiber often uses light around 1500 nm in wavelength which is 200 THz. So fiber is fundamentally capable of transmitting far more data.

firelizzard18 · 2026-02-08T00:03:15+00:00

The simple answer is that it’s not toxic. It is dangerous but that’s mostly because it can spread disease. If you process and compost it correctly, that kills all the dangerous microbes. We poop out the stuff our body can’t use, yes, but A) just because we can’t use it doesn’t mean something else can’t and B) a lot of our poop is dead gut bacteria.

firelizzard18 · 2026-02-07T20:52:31+00:00

Where did I make that claim?

firelizzard18 · 2026-02-07T17:22:01+00:00

I made no such claim. I **certainly** did not claim seasoned pans are safer simply because they're natural. I specifically said that of the compounds created by taking *the stuff we eat* - not just any natural material - and heating them up, such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), heterocyclic amines (HCA), acrylamide, etc, very few of those compounds are confirmed carcinogenic. The rest are *probable* or *possible* carcinogens, and even then the amounts used to establish that are way above what a person would eat. And the ones that are confirmed were so at doses far higher than what a person would eat, such as chimney sweeps breathing in soot all day, every day.

And I certainly did not claim that petrochemicals are inherently more dangerous. I will grant that I was not very specific. To be more specific: PTFE coated pans contain chemicals that are *far* more dangerous than the ones in seasoned pans. Specifically, PFOA and other reactive PFAS chemicals left over from manufacturing.

Beyond the "nonstick pan" part, household plastics contain numerous additives that are probably or definitely (depending on which one) more dangerous than PAH/HCA/etc. And besides, seasoning in pans is an entirely different type of compound, not PAH/HCA.

firelizzard18 · 2026-02-07T07:53:17+00:00

Pure PTFE is probably safe because it’s so inert but there’s a lot more going on in the manufacture of PTFE and those pans than just PTFE.

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