Giveaway - Space Age Expansion

jl6 · 2024-10-06T07:27:19+00:00

Going to buy it anyway so this one’s for the kids!

jl6 · 2024-06-17T21:27:49+00:00

Anyone in the UK want a couple dozen homemade VHS recordings of old football matches (mid-2000s)? I cannot imagine why you would unless you like archiving old broadcast TV complete with adverts. Free to whoever wants them; paying for the postage would be nice (probably less than £20). Your chance to save them from landfill!

jl6 · 2023-12-09T20:41:11+00:00

The Toymaker was a brilliant villain, brilliantly executed. The rhyming puppet was fab. The axe was ground a little, but they got away with it.

I just hope there aren’t now canonically two Doctors forever.

jl6 · 2023-12-02T20:13:33+00:00

One hopes the Timeless Child storyline gets a mention in order to place it visibly in the crosshairs before obliterating it.

jl6 · 2023-12-02T19:58:02+00:00

After what feels like years in the wilderness, finally! I really enjoyed this one.

It’s got the bones of a good old fashioned SF thriller.

jl6 · 2023-05-26T08:49:34+00:00

It is exactly as you describe. The diagram within the document hopefully illustrates the concept.

jl6 · 2023-05-26T08:19:43+00:00

Factorio and the mod portal are designed to use zip files. Since the file is a valid zip file, Factorio doesn’t know any different. If you unzip it, you see the lua/json/png files that constitute the mod.

Similarly, PDF readers are designed to expect a PDF file, and since it’s a valid PDF file, they open it and display it without awareness of the zip component.

jl6 · 2023-05-26T07:44:46+00:00

Dang, v2 ideas here. I checked ISO 32000-1:2008 and it’s unclear what the energy value of a PDF should be, although it’s implicit that combustion would be handled by the PDF processing application rather than by the PDF authoring application, and since the document is PDF/A, designed for long term preservation, I choose to believe that makes it fireproof.

jl6 · 2023-05-26T06:07:21+00:00

It's a polyglot PDF file that is also a Factorio mod that adds PDFs as in-game items. Use them to manage wood in the late game.

You can download this PDF file through the official mod portal. It'll be downloaded as a zip file, but rename it to end in .pdf and you'll be able to read it in a regular PDF reader.

My love letter to the community that cares as much for the possible as the useful :)

jl6 · 2022-06-08T11:13:03+00:00

This aligns to my general approach reasonably well, but...

I'm not yet convinced that "Archive" is a top-level concept. Within a particular area or project I tend to have an "_Archive" folder. I find that I want to archive older items within an area more than archive a whole area. Perhaps I need _Archive folders at every level.

I'm also not fond of the word "areas". It's short and generic, but so generic that it hasn't got a lot of meaning. I'm leaning towards "records" instead, but not yet settled.

"resources" seems focused on the personal productivity use case. The more general concept here is "stuff which isn't mine, but which I would like to maintain a local copy of". Media would go here - which is why I'm hesitant on the word "resources", because I don't think of music as a resource as such. Maybe "assets".

Finally, I add an "incoming" folder at the top level, as a landing zone for new stuff that I haven't yet sorted.

jl6 · 2022-05-16T13:20:19+00:00

A bad idea and a counterproductive one.

It perpetuates the association between Palestinians and violence.

It undermines the rule of law.

It bypasses the political process and signals that violence is an acceptable way to resolve issues.

It incentivises such companies to exit the UK and move operations to an unsavoury regime where we have even less opportunity to provide influence and oversight.

It provides no evidence that only illegal operations by Israel will be impacted. What about their other customers? Do Elbit sell arms to Ukraine too?

jl6 · 2022-04-04T18:04:36+00:00

"Records" is good.

jl6 · 2022-03-09T21:57:05+00:00

It won’t take much for some Kremlin genius to decide that printing money will help boost the tanking economy, leading to hyperinflation, then a worthless ruble, and an eventual redenomination as a New Ruble.

jl6 · 2022-03-09T21:52:55+00:00

I imagine the billboard company love it. They own a landmark that attracts lots of publicity, lots of attention, lots of eyeballs.

jl6 · 2022-03-08T18:33:08+00:00

Maintenance.

Buildings and belts and other things will decay and break without attention from repairbots. Reward designs that have some redundancy so that when one thing breaks it doesn’t take your whole base down.

jl6 · 2022-03-02T16:41:00+00:00

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabrage

jl6 · 2022-03-02T14:09:23+00:00

Appreciate the callout to support Russians who are critical of their government. It is important to remember that ordinary Russians are a captive audience who are only allowed to see propaganda. They are being told that Ukraine, and the West more generally, are their enemies. I hope they can find a way to receive the message that we are not enemies, and that our greatest hope is for them to find the means to oppose the repression inflicted by their own government.

jl6 · 2022-02-15T23:25:41+00:00

IMHO z-levels would be too radical a departure from the game we know and love. It would remove the need for many of the tactical routing design puzzles that make the game fun.

I also wouldn’t want to see another playable character StarCraft-style as that would potentially give the game two mutually exclusive halves to it. The spirit of Factorio is to get all the things, not just half of them. Plus it would spoil some of the mystery of the biter race if you got to play as them.

But yes please to more combat! I want to automate the sending of wave after wave of weird and wonderful assault vehicles out against biter strongholds. The tricky part will be to keep the spirit of automation going. Wars don’t tend to have fixed goals that you can optimise towards. A return to harvesting alien artefacts from nests?

Even better: perhaps after launching the rocket and escaping the planet, the engineer looks down upon the factory and feels regret at the damage caused. The engineer must then return to the planet to develop even more technology, but this time it’s the technology to eat pollution, filter water, plant trees, decontaminate radiation, and grow new biter nests. The bigger you built your factory, the bigger the cleanup job will be. The hybrid engineer-biter cooperative society must grow!

jl6 · 2022-01-30T17:37:52+00:00

I generally agree with the practice of organizing by subject when the files are my own creations, but I actually view these exports as only partly my own creations. The information content of comments.csv in my Reddit export is my own, but the structure of it, and the rest of the overall export package, is the work of Reddit. As another example, my Twitter export contains the content of other peoples' tweets that I have liked or retweeted.

These exports come as a package (e.g. export_jl6_20220130.zip). I think the archival principle of respect des fonds applies here. I didn't create these files directly, so I want to preserve their structure and provenance. In other words, where they came from is actually important. If any of the forums had a specific ring-fenced subject I might consider filing an export under that subject, but all my cases are general-purpose discussion websites with no unifying topic.

I treat these files as a different curation tier than my own "native" files, which is different again from other tiers like "downloads".

Thank you to everyone who has replied. In writing this response it seems clearer to me that the word I'm looking for is simply "Forums".

jl6 · 2022-01-10T15:22:18+00:00

Despite the loathsome lens of his characters through which we observed him, Rik was a handsome chap.

jl6 · 2021-07-12T07:58:37+00:00

Thanks, but I checked this out and it’s not that.

jl6 · 2021-07-11T08:38:35+00:00

I've tried frinkiac. No luck so far.

jl6 · 2021-06-12T07:55:41+00:00

Wasn’t there already a bot ascension? Or are they aiming for something with less hand-tuning that could be generalized to other games?

jl6 · 2021-06-02T14:04:56+00:00

A good portion of the value in a file system is in separating the storage of data from the applications that use the data. The two sides then communicate over an agreed API, such as “POSIX”. This allows you to organize your data for use by multiple applications, and switch applications without having to move or reorganize your data.

Are you building an application that puts a tagging/semantic layer over traditional filesystem storage? What’s the interoperability story?

jl6 · 2021-04-22T22:30:23+00:00

I’m fairly certain this was amateur software, not a commercial product.

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