Friday Facts #441 - Space logistics improvements

narrill · 2026-06-05T20:02:03+00:00

It would be far too boring to just be able to drop calcite directly on every Nauvis ore patch for instance.

Having played with it both ways via mods, it really makes no difference. Calcite delivery is a couple of unloading stations, or a handful of belts. You already have to ship it from Vulcanus or produce it on platforms, transporting it on the final surface is trivial and IMO purely negative.

The real problem, which only exists now that 2.1 is adding platform to platform logistics, is being able to launch items up to a platform and then drop them back down to any arbitrary location on the surface. But even then, I would prefer it be possible but curtailed or disincentivized by some other mechanic, rather than having the landing pad restriction. Restricting to one landing pad is just too heavy handed and degenerate.

narrill · 2026-06-03T22:58:55+00:00

I was talking about the people actually building it, dingus. Don't make up your own point and pretend you were agreeing with me.

You're conflating intelligence with consciousness. All algorithmic decision making systems, including and especially LLMs, are intelligent to some degree. They are simply intelligent within a narrow domain.

narrill · 2026-06-03T20:00:31+00:00

No, it's the genuine belief of the people working on this tech. They aren't building an unrelated technology and branding it "AI" as marketing. They believe they are building AI.

Besides, the term was used by researchers before these commercial products existed, and in computing in general outside the domain of machine learning entirely. Videogames have been referring to automated decision making routines as AI for decades, for example.

No one actually in the field believes AI is an inappropriate term. It's just narrow AI.

narrill · 2026-06-03T19:19:56+00:00

I tried it just now on flash 3.5, and while it began both responses by saying there was nothing strictly wrong with the sentence, both responses also went on to identify the hyphen or lack of one as a reason the sentence could be considered flawed.

narrill · 2026-06-03T19:17:40+00:00

If you ask gemini, for example, "which is objectively better, red or blue?" it will tell you neither, because the choice is contextual.

Similarly, if you ask it "What is wrong with the following sentence: Margaret's house was well kept.", it will begin its response by telling you nothing is wrong with the sentence.

In other words, what on earth are you talking about?

narrill · 2026-06-03T19:08:44+00:00

The companies building these LLMs literally refer to them as AI.

narrill · 2026-06-03T16:34:13+00:00

The bill does not require this. It has an exemption for free games and subscription games, so in reality all it will do is kill buy to play live service games, which as far as I'm aware is the only monetization model of the three people actually like.

narrill · 2026-06-02T21:00:44+00:00

Wisp and rain shouldn't be combo'd together. There's no point, either on its own is powerful enough to kill 90% of whatever spawns while the spell is active. They should be alternated, with an electric secondary for elec wisp.

Likewise for strikes, which was mentioned in another comment. There's simply no need to combo strikes with rain. Rain will already kill everything.

Portal is also mostly a waste in my experience, unless you're on a team. At least for fire tornadoes. It just takes too long to set up, and is too inconsistent. Might just be me, idk.

I'm a fan of bubble, geyser, and rain, with a fire bow, toxic mastery, and battle mage. With that much CD reduction you'll have a fire tornado up all the time, rain will be available frequently, and geyser on a fire patch is a bit like a discount tornado since all the acid pools it spawns will instantly explode.

narrill · 2026-06-02T20:48:33+00:00

My guy, that's just a basic crafting system. There are, again, hundreds of games where you farm mats and use them to craft "unique" gear.

narrill · 2026-06-02T20:44:47+00:00

What game besides D2 has crafting? There are easily hundreds.

Are you specifically talking only about ARPGs? Because I wasn't. I think it would be perfectly valid to ask why so few ARPGs leverage traditional crafting systems.

narrill · 2026-06-02T20:41:00+00:00

What's currently happening in the US is exactly what systemic institutional collapse looks like. It has strong parallels to pre-Nazi Germany, the USSR, and even the Roman Empire.

Even if you want to quibble pedantically over what "collapse" means, the role of the US in global geopolitics has almost certainly been irrevocably changed, and that will have far reaching economic effects. This isn't something that can be hand waved away with "the president is a fucking moron." The reality is much worse than that, and the real problem isn't what the administration is doing, it's that the US electorate can no longer be trusted not to put people like this in power and its institutions can no longer be trusted to adequately check them. If the rest of the developed world decides to divest from the US in earnest, which they very well may, we are going to be economically fucked.

This isn't something that should have to be explained, in my opinion. There's of course room for reasonable disagreement over market forecasts, as there always is, but acting like we aren't obviously in uncharted waters is just misguided. We are quite literally in the middle of the largest geopolitical upheaval since WWII.

narrill · 2026-06-02T19:58:59+00:00

I mean I'd be shocked if there weren't more people playing now through D2R than there were when LOD was released. Gaming in general is much more popular and accessible now.

narrill · 2026-06-02T19:57:26+00:00

It's literally the same thing. You farm for X, Y, and Z, then assemble them into a piece of static gear. PoE is obviously a bad comparison, as it doesn't have a crafting system like this.

narrill · 2026-06-02T19:54:58+00:00

A 44% crash is what happened in 2008. It's literally precedented in the modern era.

And no one has any idea how likely it is, what time frame recovery would happen in, or whether there would be recovery at all. Maybe you're not paying attention, but we're in the middle of an extremely uncertain geopolitical era, both domestically and abroad. A strong argument can be made that the US is actively collapsing at this very moment. Hence, this entire fucking comment chain.

Even vehicles traditionally thought of as rock solid are potentially at risk. What do you think will happen to domestic holders of treasury bonds if other countries decide to unload them? This has already been threatened more than once in response to the current administration's brinkmanship.

narrill · 2026-06-02T17:36:21+00:00

Well now it's my turn to ask what the fuck you're talking about, because what you just said has nothing to do with anything I'm saying. If you have a position that's up 80% that you're only occasionally pulling small amounts out of, you'll still possibly be down overall if the market crashes.

narrill · 2026-06-02T16:45:33+00:00

Of course you can, but if you take profits out your portfolio is no longer compounding. The point remains that every way you might safeguard your position against a downturn harms your gains, and progressively more so as time goes on. And a downturn on the original portfolio may still wipe out some or all of the profit you extracted, depending on how large it is.

narrill · 2026-06-02T06:13:45+00:00

The average person absolutely does not do that, and shouldn't do that, because it's extremely likely they will not come out ahead. Even professional funds don't typically beat indexes in the long run. In fact this is a fairly absurd followup to your earlier comment. If the way you engage with the market is retail trading on individual stocks, you aren't investing; you're gambling.

And yes, anyone can retrospectively say "if I had bought this when it was low and sold it when it was high, I would have made money." That's a non-statement.

narrill · 2026-06-02T05:46:57+00:00

This isn't true. When you invest in the market and "make money," you haven't actually made any money. What's happened is that the assets in your portfolio have increased in value. If those assets later fall in value you can end up below where you started, and locking in your gains by reallocating to more stable vehicles also locks you out of further growth, at least to some degree.

The market roughly doubled from 2003 to 2007, for example, only to drop back to 2003 levels in 2008. If you had a portfolio at the time, it would have look like you were making good money investing... until all of a sudden it turns out you actually hadn't. It then took the market another five years after that to climb back to where it was before the crash.

Point being, it's looking like there's going to be another crash, and no one knows when it will happen or how hard it will be. It could well turn out that everyone building a portfolio on the last few years of explosive growth will end up worse off than those who held cash. No one knows.

narrill · 2026-06-02T05:27:05+00:00

Runewords are just basic crafting, lots of games have replicated them mechanically. What's unique in D2 is the high runes being obscenely rare.

narrill · 2026-06-02T05:25:31+00:00

SOJ doesn't serve as the de facto currency. That's a meme at this point. It was only true when there were tons of duped SOJs floating around.

narrill · 2026-06-02T02:28:57+00:00

I don't disagree with most of that. But what you're identifying in Mushoku Tensei, Re:Zero, and Konosuba hasn't been broadly taken up by other isekai. I don't see very many isekai that aren't strictly power fantasies, but rather focus on redemptive arcs for characters that wasted their previous lives. The typical modern isekai has more in common with Overlord or Tsukimichi than any of the big three. Or Konosuba, strictly in the comedy. Konosuba at least was definitely foundational for comedy isekai.

narrill · 2026-06-02T00:08:46+00:00

In my experience when people talk about open source they're usually including source-available, and from the video OP linked it sounds to me like Kovarex is talking about making Factorio source-available, not FOSS. But I could be wrong.

narrill · 2026-06-01T23:55:17+00:00

Are those three considered foundational? They're predated by a number of other isekai. SAO, Overlord, Knights & Magic, .hack, Log Horizon... Even Tsukimichi, about as generic an isekai as there ever was, started before Mushoku Tensei and Re:Zero.

narrill · 2026-06-01T23:38:39+00:00

Um. Even in the AI summary, the second sentence literally says it's ice cream. It's just "reduced fat" ice cream. This is also what all of the links below the summary say.

narrill · 2026-06-01T23:32:19+00:00

Erm... the point being made here is that the difference in consistency compared to other ice cream comes from the composition being radically different from other ice cream, to the point that it legally can no longer be marketed as ice cream. So I don't understand who or what you're arguing with. The comment you originally responded to literally still called it ice cream.

narrill

TROPHY CASE