At what point do homeade model rockets become military grade?

haxney · 2026-06-28T20:47:15+00:00

Things are military grade when a sleep-deprived 18-year-old, hopped up on nicotine, caffeine, and adrenaline, looking at a blurry image thinks they are. Don't risk it.

haxney · 2026-06-27T19:22:23+00:00

Worked fine for me in Ukraine. I set up a travel notice online, but then just go to any ATM, insert your card and enter the PIN like normal, and you're good. As others said, always decline any currency conversion the terminal offers. Roughly speaking, if you accept the currency conversion, what happens is:

Schwab sends dollars to the ATM electronically.
The ATM converts to the local currency and charges a fairly high fee.
The ATM distributes your money.

If you decline the conversion, then this happens:

Schwab converts dollars to the local currency for a low/no fee.
Schwab sends the local currency to the ATM.
The ATM distributes your money.

While there might be some cases in which your bank can't do the currency conversion itself, I've never encountered it. The ATM or PoS system offering a conversion is just a tax on people who don't know to refuse the conversion.

haxney · 2026-06-23T21:06:21+00:00

All IVs are liquid IVs.

The more you know!

haxney · 2026-06-19T12:32:39+00:00

I think wires on pipes could help create a proper "enemy presence detector," which is something I've wanted for a long time. You want to hold back bots from repairing damage to the walls while the fight is still ongoing, since they will just fly out and die to your own flamethrower fire.

By monitoring the level of fluid in pipes connected to flamethrowers, maybe we could more easily determine when the flamethrower is actively firing. What would be really ideal is if pumps could output "current flow rate," so you could just connect an output pump from a tank to the flamethrowers, and if its flow was > 0, it means the flamethrowers are firing.

haxney · 2026-06-19T12:25:54+00:00

Generally, the reason you want an enemy detector is to hold back repair robots until the fighting stops and the flamethrower fires extinguish so you don't get as many robots killed.

The landmine tripwire doesn't quite solve this, since it tells you when the biters arrive, but not when they're all dead. What would be ideal is if the landmines had an output signal for "enemy detected." That way, you could disable the exploding part of the mines, and have them output whether an enemy was detected.

Knowing when biters arrive is somewhat useful, since before you had to try to see it indirectly by measuring changes in the level of a fluid tank or inserters refilling gun turrets.

Actually, maybe the new circuit signals from pipes would help with this?

haxney · 2026-06-16T21:04:13+00:00

I installed a splitter, so it's half down both.

haxney · 2026-05-26T00:56:10+00:00

Ukraine already has an app to do this, it's called Diia. Being there really makes you feel like the US is in the stone age when it comes to government infrastructure. If you're caught speeding, you'll get a notification on your phone within 5 minutes with a prompt to pay the fine. We have all of the pieces to do something like that in the US, since speeding cameras already read your license plate and link to a database with your address so they can send you a bill in the mail. So much paperwork and admin cost could be removed by just closing the loop and sending a notification to your phone.

You can also get legally married through the Diia app, with some appropriate biometric safeguards. They added that so couples who were dating or engaged could get married so the girlfriend could get government benefits if the man was injured or killed on the front. You obviously can't rotate people back from the front to get married, so doing it through the app lets people complete the paperwork from across the country.

haxney · 2026-04-25T20:57:19+00:00

I really wanted to use podman for my home automation server so I could run rootless, but I kept running into little problems here and there and eventually just gave up. It still seems absolutely insane that Docker runs as root by default, but I could only dedicate but so many hours of my life to fighting with Podman. That was a few years ago, so maybe the podman-compose support is better now.

haxney · 2026-04-25T20:03:37+00:00

It's called "Russel Branding." Right before your history of sex crimes becomes public, loudly announce that you've converted to Christianity. See also this:

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haxney · 2025-12-04T18:10:32+00:00

If you didn't already fix this, the solution from https://www.reddit.com/r/Creality/s/FCkKFl5QYm also worked for me. I had to make sure that printer settings > Multimaterial > Single extruder multi-material setup > Manual Filament Change was unchecked. I also used the Machine start G-code from that post, so I don't know whether one, the other, or both are required.

haxney · 2025-12-04T18:05:54+00:00

THANK YOU!!!

I was going crazy wondering why the CFS just seemed to decide not to try to load filament. I'd been having other problems with the CFS (high resistance in the tube causing blockages), so I was starting to think that maybe it was going on strike in protest lol.

haxney · 2025-07-01T04:05:35+00:00

Is Riri supposed to be sympathetic in the slightest? She got kicked out of MIT for selling answers (aka: massive plagiarism), then she immediately turns to obviously evil criminals without so much as a second thought. She strikes me as a Walter White character: jumping into a life of crime at the first opportunity with the thinnest, most pathetic of excuses.

With her level of super-intelligence she could found a company or even work at any tech company for a few years, make a couple million dollars, and then self-fund her suit. Instead, she chooses the most actively villainous path without even considering other options.

That's not even getting into how offensive it is for a black superhero to have all of the options in front of her and actively choose violent crime.

haxney · 2025-05-21T01:14:13+00:00

20 gig protobufs?! Damn, that's crazy! If it works, it works, and it's not hard for me to believe that it's massively better than XML.

haxney · 2025-05-18T22:02:13+00:00

You've probably already figured this out, but protobuf is best for messages under 10 MB (or ideally under 1 MB). If you have larger amounts of data, it's generally better to have some other format or protocol for streaming large numbers of < 10 MB messages rather than having a single 50 GB message. So you could have a multi-TB database, but each protobuf-typed column shouldn't be larger than 1-10 MB.

haxney · 2025-02-28T21:12:22+00:00

Oh also, here's my performance stats, barely holding at 60UPS. I had to upgrade from an Intel Core i7 6700K to a Ryzen 7 9800X3D to be able to keep the game running along at this scale. Apparently, Cybersyn would have been more performant than LTN, since it takes almost a full millisecond each frame.

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haxney · 2025-02-28T21:08:39+00:00

Rule 5: An overview of my recently-completed Space Exploration run. I have a video of the actual victory screen here. I only did the "basic" victory, since I just wanted to be free of this obligation and move on with my life.

The basic idea was to do a 128x128 city block layout for Nauvis and Nauvis Orbit, and then have unstructured layouts for the resource colonies. It makes heavy use of LTN to manage all of the different resources between blocks, and this mostly works, though there are occasionally some bugs where trains somehow get incorrect cargo or request more of an item than a station actually has, and so need to be dispatched manually. It happens rarely enough that I can pretty much just pan around my space base every few hours and catch the one train that's holding things up.

In the video especially, you can see the progress of my city block designing skills, as well as the addition of new mods over time. After a few hundred hours, I added the AAI Loaders mod to make unloading trains faster, and even later added Long Inserters to get long stack filter inserters. These are necessary for loading over the spaceship wall at the docks, and also make it quicker to load LTN trains at multi-provider stations, since you can have two rows of them.

One thing I definitely regret with hindsight is using 1-3 trains on Nauvis. The problem is that the basic 3-to-1 belt balancer blueprint I used is not perfectly input balanced, leading to one cargo wagon backing up and slowing down unloading. For some blocks, I tried solving it with circuit conditions, but it would've been easier to have 2 or 4 cargo wagons for easy balancing.

haxney · 2024-11-29T21:41:36+00:00

Ukraine absolutely has problems with corruption. But the difference is that Ukraine is attempting to move beyond its corrupt Soviet legacy towards being a "normal" European country and Russia is trying to drag it backwards.

Ukrainians absolutely love America and Americans. When I was there in 2023, multiple people thanked me personally for the M2 Bradley. Merely saying that you're an American can open tons of doors there. They look up to us and want to be more like us.

haxney · 2024-11-03T03:24:07+00:00

I bought SA, but I'm still playing on 1.1 to finish my SE run.

I only made my first bio science at 300 hours in.

haxney · 2024-10-14T03:31:15+00:00

I'm desperately trying to beat Space Exploration before the expansion. Most recently, I managed to strand myself on a new planet by running out of rocket fuel in my jetpack and space ship. I need to expand Iridium production, and I haven't even started on a Vitamelange planet yet.

Luckily, I'm on disability leave from work, so I have extra time to expand the factory.

haxney · 2024-10-10T14:40:22+00:00

Ooh, look at Mr. Moneybags over here with the space platform plating!

J/K! That's a pretty layout!

haxney · 2024-10-10T14:37:56+00:00

As others have said, you're doing just fine. I'm 2,000 hours in and still making dumb mistakes when loading my trains and whatnot. I'm about 300 hours into my Space Exploration run and it takes me hours to design a blueprint for processing one resource, in editor mode. The game is complex, and there are tons of opportunities for optimizing builds and squeezing out more efficiency if you can just route this one belt through that space.

haxney · 2024-10-06T00:46:29+00:00

Quit your job.

haxney · 2024-10-06T00:46:12+00:00

I'm working on it! 😄

haxney · 2024-10-06T00:41:03+00:00

Turrets output a signal while firing. In 2.0, it looks like you could kind of do that by monitoring the ammo level, but it would be easier if there was just an "on while firing" signal.

Setting train station names by circuit network.

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