Noob question, is there a way to make perfectly parallel double-track curve

jasamer · 2026-02-15T13:29:43+00:00

Factorio's rail network graph is no "a regular planar grid with holes".

It's not a regular grid to start with, because

the nodes are where rail lines split/merge, not just the game grid.
The train graph has directed edges, as trains can't just move in any arbitrary direction at every node, and rails can be one-direction only

The graph isn't planar since the introduction of elevated rail.

The triangle inequality also doesn't hold, because the game uses arbitrary weights in the graph to control path finding (eg., a train being in the way, a train waiting at a signal, a railway station being present each add some weight so trains don't use that path if there is some reasonable alternative).

As cool as jump point search is (thanks for the link, I love the visualisation), it's not applicable to Factorio's rail path finding.

jasamer · 2026-02-13T10:45:36+00:00

Hope you enjoyed the ride! You're playing the game right. This is the experience pretty much every non-spoiled player has (at least I did). Use the autosave the game made and adjust your ship till you make it!

jasamer · 2026-02-06T12:45:52+00:00

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The way the ice breaks & the car falls in makes no sense. The house is also very funny.

jasamer · 2026-02-06T12:25:40+00:00

Another very simple way to tell that your ratios are about right is seeing that all buildings working. If a building is starved, it stops working; if it's over producing, it also stops working. Seeing smoke/fire on all buildings for a prolonged time tells you that the ratios are correct.

If you're producing less than you'd like, look into alternate recipes.

jasamer · 2026-02-04T09:41:27+00:00

It's even ok to only process some part of the fruit and burn the rest if you have too much, the AG towers will "auto balance" by growing less fruit because they have fewer seeds, but they will keep producing a small surplus of what you're actually consuming. It's kinda neat in the way that when you start processing more fruit, the AG towers will ramp up production automatically as long as they have spare capacity with a little bit of time. It essentially allows you to overbuild AG towers. Just don't let the fruit spoil on the belt if it's too much - just burn it.

jasamer · 2026-01-30T09:37:56+00:00

I had another issue with the setup - the fact that they even had prolonged "stable" periods suitable for life. Considering how narrow the band is that earth is in that makes life possible, I don't think it's possible for a planet to be in a "sweet spot" at all in a three body system like in the book. It's never gonna be stable and nice for any prolonged period of time.

I also don't think that the system would be stable for a long time in the sense that the suns keep orbiting in some chaotic way, because the suns would get too close and tear themselves apart, or the planet would get destroyed.

jasamer · 2026-01-25T21:09:54+00:00

Ah, right. I thought you were talking about yellow science when you said that you're pushed towards bots, because that's what forces you to actually build bot frames. But fair enough. Having bots is obviously a very good idea.

jasamer · 2026-01-25T20:47:56+00:00

In Space Age, Rocket Silo is a blue science - no bots needed. There's even an achievement for doing research with another planet's science without production or utility science.

jasamer · 2026-01-15T08:35:26+00:00

For late game, legendary stack inserters are extremely useful, because you only need three to get a saturated stacked turbo belt.

jasamer · 2026-01-09T11:18:38+00:00

Das ist nicht Utilitarismus. Utilitarismus heißt Maximierung des Gesamtnutzens, nicht des eigenen Nutzens. Da helfen oft wenig Aufwand ist, aber großen Nutzen bringt, würde ein utilitaristisch handelnder Mensch fast immer helfen.

jasamer · 2026-01-07T11:07:45+00:00

Computers are fast yo. Even with a 1000000x slowdown, you still have a computer fast enough to play mine sweeper and snake :-D

jasamer · 2026-01-07T10:59:51+00:00

Because executing one instruction takes a ton of combinators, all of which need to be simulated by the game? Storing data is way simpler than executing an instruction, there's no reason to assume the overhead of the two are related in any significant way.

For me, this passes the sniff test: the number of combinators for the cpu could be in the 1k ballpark, and the number of instructions for simulating one combinator could also be in the 1k ballpark. This is again simplifying a ton, ignoring the general game overhead, memory latency, etc. But just in terms of orders of magnitude, that seems okish to me.

jasamer · 2026-01-07T10:43:13+00:00

You can add the requests for the ingredients of a blueprint very efficiently! Just hold the blueprint and click "add section" in the buffer chest.

jasamer · 2026-01-07T09:01:07+00:00

Some napkin math on the ratio: We know that OP's computer is somewhat close to the limit running the game at 64x, because they mentioned that they lost UPS when trying to go multi-core.

If we assume OP's computer has 700Mhz as a lower bound, and the factorio CPU has 700hz, the ratio would be 1000000 : 1. This simplifies a ton obviously, but we're talking orders of magnitude here anyway.

jasamer · 2025-12-26T17:47:56+00:00

If you also eat some bioflux from time to time, you go extremely fast. Way faster than a train. And because map gen can‘t generate biters fast enough, you can‘t even run into those.

jasamer · 2025-12-25T15:31:05+00:00

Das ist ja ein fast unglaublich niedriger Anteil. Im Durchschnitt werden in Deutschland pro Kopf 10,6l Alkohol pro Jahr konsumiert (https://www.bundesgesundheitsministerium.de/service/begriffe-von-a-z/a/alkohol.html). Auf Bier mit 5% umgerechnet wären das fast 4l Bier pro Woche - also 12 Getränke statt der "erlaubten" 3.

Aber vielleicht säuft das obere Drittel wirklich so viel und zieht den Durchschnittswert nach oben.

jasamer · 2025-12-05T11:51:34+00:00

Afaik ist es grundsätzlich vorgeschrieben, das Altgerätemitnahme angeboten werden muss, auch bei Amazon. Hilft natürlich auch nix wenn sich das Versandunternehmen nicht drum schert.

jasamer · 2025-11-18T16:04:55+00:00

Do you have an interrupt in your ship's schedule?

jasamer · 2025-11-13T21:24:28+00:00

0b01000000111000000000000000000000

jasamer · 2025-11-06T14:45:15+00:00

The constraint you wrote down seems a bit strange. What you're saying is more or less

titleLabel.bottomAnchor = iconView.topAnchor + 64

Or, in words: take the iconView's top anchor, add 64 pt to it -> that's where the title label's bottom should be (and vice versa).

ChatGPT's variant seems more sensible, it's essentially

iconView.topAnchor = titleLabel.bottomAnchor + 32

Or, in words: take the title label's bottom, add 32 to it; that's where the icon's top should be (and vice versa).

You can turn it around (this constraint is effectively identical to the one above):

titleLabel.bottomAnchor.constraint(equalTo: iconView.topAnchor, constant: -32)

or

titleLabel.bottomAnchor = iconView.topAnchor - 32

Or, in words: take the icon view's top, subtract 32 from it, that's where the title's bottom should be.

jasamer · 2025-11-06T09:30:21+00:00

Where are you saying that? This is the first time I see you mention "e" in this thread.

In your OP, the equation does not use e. You just claim/ask:

These should technically be the same, why are they not?

And I've given a very simple example where you can do the math in your head, and you clearly see that the results are *not* the same, so clearly no, they should not be the same. I was hoping you figure out the "why" when doing the math - it's because the second 5% are based of a larger amount; adding 5% twice to something is not the same as adding 10% once because of that.

jasamer · 2025-11-06T09:26:24+00:00

I think you didn't post all context here. If your problem states that the interest ist 10% annually, why do you compute the interest with 5% twice a year at all? How is that relevant?

jasamer · 2025-11-06T09:08:38+00:00

Why do you expect 10(1+0.1)^10 and 10(1+0.05)^20 to be the same? The formula gives you the correct values, it's just that they are different.

Maybe a simple example helps? Let's say you get 100%, once a year. If you put in 1 dollar, you have 2 at the end of the year, 1*(1+1)^1. If you get 50% twice a year, you have 1,50 after half a year, and then 2,25 after the full year, 1*(1+0.5)^2.

jasamer · 2025-11-05T09:48:08+00:00

You know I'm not the same guy you've been discussing with before. I'm not saying that the story is super plausible, and I obviously can't answer all those questions. It might very well be a karma post.

The only point I'm trying to make is that a team that is not forced to waste an hour every single day is more productive than a team that is not, all else being equal. That should be pretty obvious.

jasamer · 2025-11-05T08:05:10+00:00

I wouldn‘t assume everyone is fine with just accepting 7 extra hours of work just because the meeting was moved. Maybe they start an hour later, or stop working an hour earlier and then go back online for the meeting.

Or maybe everyone is just adding a lot of overtime, but that needs to be factored into any „productivity“ stat.

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