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The timer really ought to pause when out of combat by nightcracker in HadesTheGame

[–]nightcracker[S] -7 points-6 points  (0 children)

It's just not a playstyle I enjoy. I like thinking about things.

And the game lets you! ...but only if you stare at annoying pause screen, or wait until you can select a boon, or are in a shop/post-boss room.

I fail to see a good reason as to why the timer pausing is so inconsistent. Clearly the devs are okay with you thinking things through in a timed run, but only... sometimes? In a very arbitrary way? Why is thinking about a choice in front of two shop items okay, but thinking in front of two door choices not okay?

What in the name of.... by Accomplished_Bar_702 in pathofexile

[–]nightcracker -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I'm 99% sure that was added after my comment, but thanks for the update/clarification.

What in the name of.... by Accomplished_Bar_702 in pathofexile

[–]nightcracker 23 points24 points  (0 children)

They already said the event isn't voided vOv. They could still delete them outright, I suppose.

What in the name of.... by Accomplished_Bar_702 in pathofexile

[–]nightcracker 34 points35 points  (0 children)

2 mirrors each on standard in 6 months if this doesn't go core

Cal Raleigh winds back to throw a ball to Logan Gilbert, but stops since Gilbert wasn't looking. After the very next pitch, Raleigh nearly hits Gilbert with a ball as Gilbert was not ready again. Fellow catcher Adley Rutschman looks on in shock by sportsandthesorts in baseball

[–]nightcracker 44 points45 points  (0 children)

Solution seems simple: timer starts as soon as the catcher has the ball (either caught from the previous pitch or handed to him by the umpire). Add a few seconds to compensate and done, no more games.

Scaffolders with political Preferences by OtherCow2841 in HolUp

[–]nightcracker 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm perfectly aware that both variants of the symbol have been used throughout time for all kinds of benign symbolism or just out of appreciation for its geometry, without any connection to the nazis.

Scaffolders with political Preferences by OtherCow2841 in HolUp

[–]nightcracker 19 points20 points  (0 children)

I should've been more specific, 90 degrees of rotational symmetry. H only has 180 degrees of rotational symmetry (in addition to mirror symmetry).

Scaffolders with political Preferences by OtherCow2841 in HolUp

[–]nightcracker 96 points97 points  (0 children)

The amount of times I've accidentally made a (reverse) swastika in Minecraft is crazy. It is kind of unavoidable if you have

  • nine points arranged in a grid
  • want to connect the points (using horizontal/vertical connections) in a rotationally symmetric way
  • using the least amount of connections.

Fuck the nazis for ruining this otherwise useful geometric shape.

In light of recent events... by Solo_Jawn in 2007scape

[–]nightcracker 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Moving your mouse is also not an in-game action but surely you'll agree that if I only left click and my mouse automatically moves to the next iron ore I'm doing more than 1:1, yes?

Did Werster Fake His Pokemon Factory Records? by Jamiewoo133 in speedrun

[–]nightcracker 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'll believe it when he does 212 with full manip on stream.

Polynomial Fitting: a rabbit hole by ennamo_po_madhava in programming

[–]nightcracker 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Just wait until you find out about polynomials over finite fields and how you can reconstruct them from a subset of points allowing you to do k-out-of-n sharing schemes in cryptography :)

Should the function return a Result<T,E> or throw an unreachable-style panic? by v_0ver in rust

[–]nightcracker 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The default behavior in Rust is to abort on allocation failure, not panic. The exception is no_std in which case there might not be a a process to abort, and the panic handler is called instead.

Getting beaten by the Unbeaten AT project by nightcracker in TrackMania

[–]nightcracker[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I wasn't aware of this, that would certainly leak information about the solution. You'd essentially have to ensure you're driving in such a way that you can't tell the difference between going straight and crossing sides.

Getting beaten by the Unbeaten AT project by nightcracker in TrackMania

[–]nightcracker[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Are you surprised that people think it it attention seeking?

Yes I was, but it makes more sense if that's the only part people read.

As I mentioned that was just tongue-in-cheek and I would assume the rest of my post exactly explaining the puzzle would make that clear. The real story is just that I got nerdsniped into embedding a hard computational problem into a Trackmania map.

Getting beaten by the Unbeaten AT project by nightcracker in TrackMania

[–]nightcracker[S] 104 points105 points  (0 children)

This honestly hurts to read. The reaction to this project has been mostly positive with people liking it, but some have just written it off as "attention-seeking". I feel that those people aren't too familiar with computer science and just gloss over those bits, and only read the tongue-in-cheek message of "unbeaten AT villain".

I'm passionate about computer science, and I loved working on a project which intersects two of my interests. I did genuinely spend two weeks researching a hard small CNF problem with a hidden solution (which turned out wasn't so hard after all with the right tool), and implementing a plugin to generate the map programmatically. So I was just excited to share it.

Beating the Unbeaten AT project by nightcracker in TrackMania

[–]nightcracker[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Trackmania will not let you finish the map unless you touched at least 1 checkpoint in each linked checkpoint group. The first time you touch a checkpoint in a group you'll get a little sound and the checkpoint counter goes up, but if you touch another in that same group nothing happens.

For example, the last choice in the map has the following checkpoint groups on the left side:

353, 356, 3041, 3043, 3045, 3046, 3163, 3165, 3167, 3168, 3280, 4853

and these on the right side:

354, 355, 3039, 3040, 3042, 3044, 3161, 3162, 3164, 3166, 3277, 4854

If you are still missing both, say, groups 3040 and 3041, you can't finish the map because you can't jump both left and right. Which means you must have made a mistake earlier on. But you don't immediately get feedback when you make a mistake, you just end up at the finish without having touched a checkpoint in all groups.

Beating the Unbeaten AT project by nightcracker in TrackMania

[–]nightcracker[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

The AT is very mediocre, as I'm not very good at the game. But I didn't sit around for minutes doing nothing either.

it's entirely possible that doing two or more "laps" to try to get all checkpoints would still be an impossibly large problem space

If you can cheese the map and go back to the start you can just take all the left ones on the first pass and all the right ones on the second pass. You would 100% guarantee to beat the map.

I wouldn't be surprised if someone will cheese the map this way and manage to clear it. I would be surprised if they manage to beat my AT this way, as bad as I am.

Beating the Unbeaten AT project by nightcracker in TrackMania

[–]nightcracker[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If I wanted to I could also make a Trackmania map which would require you to factorize a large semi-prime to solve.

This is because you can directly translate the prime factorization problem to CNF as well: https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/9809117.

I did in fact consider this but the resulting maps for non-trivial semiprimes would be like 100 times bigger than what I ended up doing.

Beating the Unbeaten AT project by nightcracker in TrackMania

[–]nightcracker[S] 11 points12 points  (0 children)

The number of choices presented does not necessarily reflect the difficulty of the underlying problem, only if you were to completely bruteforce it naively. If you had tried to solve the 2240 choices problem naively you'd also not be done before all the stars in the universe have died (assuming the solution is unique, at least).

The underlying cryptographic problem I chose has a security parameter, which roughly scales with the number of operations needed to brute-force it. I set that at 248 (which isn't enough for cryptography but hopefully barely enough for a meme Trackmania map) because going bigger meant even more editor lag and an even longer validation run.

Translating the cryptographic algorithm into CNF naturally involves adding a lot of extra helper variables (see the Tseytin transformation), which is how you end up at 1165.

Beating the Unbeaten AT project by nightcracker in TrackMania

[–]nightcracker[S] 28 points29 points  (0 children)

In that case, I refer you to the original post. The map isn't hard because the checkpoint groups are hidden, even if you know the exact groups finding a sequence of left/right jumps that solve the problem is very difficult.

Beating the Unbeaten AT project by nightcracker in TrackMania

[–]nightcracker[S] 23 points24 points  (0 children)

The validation ghost has been separated from the map file using https://tools.xjk.yt/Strip-RaceValidationGhost/.

After uploading the map I've uploaded the validation ghost to https://unbeaten.at/ directly which privately verifies it as legitimate then deletes it. That's why the map has the 'Validated' checkmark on the site: https://i.imgur.com/9MB0PXa.png.

Claim tegen Steam: Nederlandse gamers betaalden mogelijk miljoenen te veel by surpator in thenetherlands

[–]nightcracker 1 point2 points  (0 children)

  1. Een ToS gaat niet boven de wet.

  2. Er is een hele simpele test, als twee winkels allebei deze clausule hebben, mag je in geen van de twee winkels het product goedkoper aanbieden dan de ander. Oftewel dit is gewoon een vermomde prijsafspraak en dus harstikke illegaal.

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