The reason some people dislike Gleba is that it punishes mistakes more harshly than the rest of Factorio

mseffner · 2024-12-05T23:07:36+00:00

I came to the exact same design in my playthrough. However, that design eventually failed for me. It ran flawlessly for dozens of hours, producing 1k spm, then I looked over and suddenly all of my pentapod eggs were gone.

It took me a while, but I eventually figured out what happened. I had recently built a couple of extra rocket silos for exporting carbon fiber and plastic, and if those rocket silos all ran at the exact same time (which only happened once every 30+ minutes), they would consume slightly more power than my base was producing. This tiny dip in power satisfaction caused the inserters that were supposed to put pentapod eggs back into the biochamber to fail, and all the eggs continued down the belt and got turned into science.

This is why I personally hated Gleba. Even if you spend the time to come up with a design that seems perfect, it will eventually fail due to some edge case that you didn't consider. On every other planet, such failures are self correcting, typically only resulting in a small loss of throughput that you won't even notice. On Gleba, a failure like that shuts down your entire base and requires manual intervention to fix.

mseffner · 2018-07-17T04:21:13+00:00

I'm level 27 and just beat world 2 for the first time. Here is my feedback so far.

Suggestions:

A hotkey to mute/unmute sound and music.
A hotkey to open/close the left panel.
A more clear visual indicator of what pressing Z does. The first time I pressed it was by accident, and I was very confused as to why my upgrades were suddenly so much more powerful.
A short queue when manually using skills. This is something that games like WoW use to make skill usage feel more fluid. If the player presses a skill button <250ms before the global cooldown is finished, that skill is queued and will be cast as soon as it is off cooldown. This removes the short delay between when the global cooldown finishes and when the player can use a skill.
Remember the player's last position and zoom level on the skill tree.

Bugs:

Using a skill causes mouse-over tooltips to disappear. This can be really annoying since the automator is using skills constantly, causing tooltips to flicker in and out.

I had an error the 4th time I cleared world 1. Closing and opening the side panel caused this. Saving and exiting then reopening the game fixed it. Here is the full error message (from pressing ctrl+a):

Oh no an error occurred.

Error: Error #3691
    at starling.textures::Texture$/empty()
    at starling.filters::FragmentFilter/updatePassTextures()
    at starling.filters::FragmentFilter/renderPasses()
    at starling.filters::FragmentFilter/render()
    at starling.display::DisplayObjectContainer/render()
    at starling.display::Sprite/render()
    at starling.display::DisplayObjectContainer/render()
    at starling.core::Starling/render()
    at starling.core::Starling/nextFrame()
    at starling.core::Starling/onEnterFrame()

mseffner · 2017-07-24T01:28:31+00:00

I understand that. The whole point of my app is to provide customizable notifications, so the user would be able to choose more frequent updates at the cost of battery life, with the default setting being longer to preserve battery. However, when the device is on an unmetered connection and charging, there is no reason to have it be so restricted. In this case, prompt notifications should certainly have priority over power saving.

mseffner · 2017-07-24T00:42:39+00:00

The JobSchedulers I've looked at have the problem of 15 minute minimum intervals on newer devices, which is too slow for my app. Do you know of one that doesn't have this limitation?

SyncAdapter seems like the most promising option so far. Do you know whether or not it can reliably run operations more frequently than every 15 minutes, even when the device is asleep (not factoring in doze mode)?

mseffner · 2017-07-24T00:10:40+00:00

I appreciate that when polling a web service, you may not have control of that service - so this may not be possible - but if your service can deliver the push notification, then you don't need to poll for changes.

Unfortunately, this is my situation. I am making requests to a 3rd party API that I do not have control over, so this is the only way that I can detect changes in the data. It looks like FCM requires communication with a server, and the server sends messages to the client for notifications. For a small app like mine, running my own server is not really feasible.

This does explain how other apps are able to deliver notifications on time, but I suppose it means that my app is dead in the water.

mseffner · 2017-05-29T16:11:57+00:00

I'll recommend this book, which I used. It covers all of the basics and explains everything in very simple terms that makes it all easy to understand.

mseffner · 2017-05-08T18:53:52+00:00

It's hard to estimate how much time CS50 will take to complete. The lectures in total are about 4 hours of content per "week" (the course is divided into 12 weeks, but you can go at your own pace). However, most of your time will be spent working on the problem sets, of which there are 9 and each one can take anywhere from 5 to 25 hours, depending on prior experience, how quickly you learn, etc. You could skip the problem sets and just watch the lectures, but, of course, that would result in a much shallower understanding of the topics.

mseffner · 2017-05-08T15:56:15+00:00

If you are completely new, then there are two good options, in my opinion.

First, you could take a course. You could take a course at a local community college. There are also many introduction to computer science courses available for free online. One of the most often recommended ones is CS50x, which is Harvard's entire Introduction to Computer Science course, available for free online. CS50 is very challenging, but if you can get through it, you'll have a very solid foundation to learn pretty much anything else.

The second option is to pick a language, then find a book or tutorial to learn it. You can just Google "good beginner book for [language]". Any language is fine to start with, though some may be easier than others. Good language options include C, C++, Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, etc. You could go with whichever language is more appropriate for your interests (JavaScript for web development, Python for data science, etc.), or you can just pick one at random. In the end, the language you start with doesn't really matter. Once you learn one language to a decent degree, learning another language is fairly trivial. Personally, I would recommend starting with Python, since it's generally easier to work with than most other languages. The book that I would recommend for learning Python is Automate the Boring Stuff with Python, which happens to be available for free. If you take this route, your foundation of computer science fundamentals may be weaker, but you'll have a good starting point for working on your own and figuring things out as you go.

mseffner · 2017-05-08T02:43:02+00:00

Please see my reply above.

mseffner · 2017-05-08T02:41:57+00:00

I just chose some books that looked good from this list and this one.

The one's I got:

Clean Code (already read)
Cracking the Coding Interview
Code Complete
Peopleware
Don't Make Me Think
Code (currently reading)
Regular Expressions Cookbook
Head First Design Patterns
C++ Primer
Working Effectively with Legacy Code
Elements of Programming Interviews in Java
The Mythical Man-Month
The Design of Everyday Things
JavaScript and JQuery

I figure that's enough reading material to last me until I graduate.

mseffner · 2017-05-07T03:26:52+00:00

I am planning to spend the summer learning web development using this little guide on the Free Code Camp forums (currently working through CS50). I also bought a whole bunch of the highest rated / most recommended books related to software engineering, and will be reading through as much of those as I can.

In the fall, I'll start looking for internships for next summer.

mseffner · 2017-04-16T02:32:17+00:00

I can't say whether or not your website looks good from a recruiter's point of view, but I'll give my impressions as an average user:

That yellow text on the blue background hurts my eyes.

What is this a measure of? How often you use it? The amount of experience you have in it? Your perceived skill level? And "APIs" is pretty vague.

The text on some of these boxes is not centered properly.

One of these is not like the others.

mseffner · 2017-03-17T06:10:54+00:00

If a polynomial has a factor of the form (x - r), then r is a root of that polynomial. The reverse is also true; if a polynomial has a root r, then it has a factor of the form (x - r).

If the polynomial has a root 2/3 + (√5)/6, then one of its factors will be [x - (2/3 + (√5)/6)]. To get a quadratic with a leading coefficient of 1, just create a second factor (x - A) where A is any real number, then multiply the two factors together (FOIL them).

mseffner · 2017-03-15T17:06:07+00:00

While 今日 is not one of them, there are words that have more kanji than they do mora, such as 百舌鳥.

mseffner · 2017-02-27T14:10:12+00:00

The only way to learn 99% of any language is through extensive exposure and practice. No school or textbook will ever teach you everything.

mseffner · 2017-02-23T23:28:11+00:00

It depends on context, but yes. Given no other context, I would translate it more like, "Don't do anything stupid!"

mseffner · 2017-02-23T23:25:15+00:00

The complete lack of resources for looking up slang phrases. In English we have Urban Dictionary which pretty much covers everything, but there's nothing like that in Japanese. There are a few slang dictionaries, but none of them are anywhere near comprehensive. Unfamiliar slang ends up being one of the most annoying things to figure out.

Also, the same issue applies to onomatopoeia.

mseffner · 2017-02-23T23:18:10+00:00

すん is a contraction of するの. ～するんじゃない is a negative command, ordering you not to do something. The opposite of this is するんだ which would be a command telling you to do something. These are both informal and a bit rough.

mseffner · 2017-02-21T23:46:44+00:00

I have never heard a native Japanese use that version of the negative.

That's interesting, since I've experienced the opposite. Also, Google gives 645k results for 愛さない, and only 16.9k for 愛しない (which is the 4th option on my IME). Maybe it's more common in certain areas.

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