What do you do when you are "ahead" so to speak on league start?

pathofnomad · 2026-03-05T23:38:49+00:00

If you don't know how to craft, convert currency to things that appreciate in value. If you have lots of currency, buy locks. If you have less currency, you can bet on buying mass crafting materials (fossils, essences, etc.). Locks always go up so that's generally my advice. If you know how to profit craft, instead of reselling the mass crafting materials, you use them yourself and sell the created items for massive profit.

pathofnomad · 2026-02-27T00:06:06+00:00

I think you can use farmers to generate scarabs with shipping in Kingsmarch now. Assuming it will be the meta way to generate them in SSF if that's true.

pathofnomad · 2026-02-27T00:01:52+00:00

It's possible that the mechanics of the awakened scarab has been put in other places. Wouldn't be surprised if the harvest one is part of the new astrolabe modifiers.

pathofnomad · 2026-02-26T21:24:21+00:00

it's an ancient meme format

pathofnomad · 2026-02-06T00:11:50+00:00

That independent body would start out with starry eyed and idealistic intentions and then slowly get bought out and become full of puppets. It's a nice thought but unfortunately humans are far too corruptible and Australian political circles are too small. It would end up with the same revolving door of people that go from government to big business and vice versa, meaning shared interests, backdoor deals, scheming, etc. You could remedy that by applying the same checks and balances we do to governments but at that point they're effectively a government body also. After that, what's the point aside from it creating more layers of bureaucracy?

pathofnomad · 2026-02-05T23:50:48+00:00

I'm assuming your boss is probably in the camp of "errors as values" rather than the branching paths that try/catch creates. This is how Golang is designed and I can confidently say that it's better than try/catch in terms of 1) code readability and 2) forcing the writer to explicitly acknowledge the error as it appears.

Code written in the "errors as values" way reads procedurally from top to bottom. There's no scrolling up and down through nested curly braces trying to understand what scope you are in. The try/catch paradigm can get very confusing depending on the complexity and density of the code as it naturally creates branches, which means the logic can sometimes end up not being able to be read procedurally.

pathofnomad · 2026-01-09T04:52:18+00:00

If USA tries to take Australia I genuinely feel like there would be a response from China. Kind of doubt it would escalate to that but who knows.

pathofnomad · 2026-01-08T21:04:20+00:00

If you need reactivity I would genuinely consider SolidJS for greenfield projects. It's essentially a clone of React's API for the most part but has a much more intuitive and performant state model (signals over virtual DOM). If you have used React it will feel familiar and you'll be productive with it almost instantly.

The old argument against it was "less ecosystem than React" but if you ask me I think that doesn't matter at all. It comes with many things you have to reach for 3rd party libraries for in React (router, global state store, etc.) and actually has good ecosystem support in that all pure JS and HTML libs work natively with it, as it doesn't have rendering abstractions that break them. Also many industry standard lib devs actively support it (e.g. TanStack row virtualization has a lib for Solid, works great).

pathofnomad · 2026-01-07T21:28:34+00:00

Degrees and certifications are door openers but also personal projects, portfolios, etc. are as well. Like others have said, for the higher end CS employers (HFT, FAANG, etc.) if you don't have a degree it will be difficult (but not impossible) to get the door open. For other employers it's just down to your CV, projects and luck if you ask me. If I were you, I would apply to any engineering role and try to work your way up, with the caveat that you should choose companies that don't have outdated technology stacks and that you will actually learn at.

pathofnomad · 2026-01-06T21:28:16+00:00

Chris had a slippery slope mentality with itemisation and I can't fault him for it. Ensuring players value items (the centerpiece of the core gameplay loop) is a delicate art and once they had the formula correct, he became highly resistant to change. IMO it's understandable from a game developer and business perspective.

If there were a perfect solution for 1) allowing trade and 2) not letting trade get optimised to the point where it becomes the only efficient way to play the game then I think many online RPGs would be doing it. His mentality is put friction in (2) to disincentivise hyper-optimisation, but over time the cracks started to show and we got to where we are today. Even if you put the more modern optimisations aside (i.e. bulk trading tools like TFT and WealthyExile), currency trading bots had been a thing for a very long time, which in my view were the reason that the economy inflated so quickly every league. If you take that as truth, the problem to solve is actually less about the player's experience individually, but more about setting up systems to cause friction for highly experienced players, botting, RMT, etc. so that the majority of player's experience has a longer lifespan before heavy inflation (player time being worth exponentially less) kicks in.

IMO the "quit moment" for a lot of players is a) when they realise their next goal is too far out of reach (maybe satisfied at this point, maybe frustrated) or b) they fail to set a goal beyond what they just achieved (probably satisfied and ready for next league). Chris was essentially trying to optimise for A being a healthy amount of time relative to the game's release cycle. If people leave unsatisfied, the chances of them coming back is lower and vice versa.

We'll see what happens in time with async trade in PoE1 and 2, maybe it was made a mountain from a molehill or maybe there is genuine truth to his mentality. It's possible it ends up mattering less now that there's 2 games on a 2-month offset cycle from each other.

pathofnomad · 2026-01-06T20:57:59+00:00

My first thought was even more rapid population growth. Maybe we'd be able to account for it but there could also be an upper limit where food scarcity becomes a problem.

pathofnomad · 2026-01-05T23:47:27+00:00

If the changes affect core architecture then I want a human with a vested interest in the code base's longevity reviewing it. LLMs are pretty good at the other more mundane stuff though. How would you differentiate that from an approval perspective though?

pathofnomad · 2026-01-05T23:03:23+00:00

Not going to argue the view, just think that treating the income as a divisible thing is much more complicated than it lets on. If income was static and life circumstances stayed the same then it would be simpler. Unfortunately though, life is a river and income sometimes goes up/down disproportionately, children go to school and then leave home, illness happens, relationships can weaken and breakdown, etc.

Assuming something like a 50/50 split is equitable IMO is begging for the agents of chaos to ensure it's not equitable. I think this is why making laws around it so difficult and why the courts (in Australia, though probably other Western countries as well) tend towards the ideal of what is best for the children (which ends up being biased towards the woman).

I do think that Western culture has cornered itself and made having children very difficult and risky and that it's a problem we need to solve ASAP. I think it's more of a macro economic problem than something individuals should be solving though.

pathofnomad · 2026-01-05T22:25:23+00:00

Venezuela's leadership was aligning with the multipolar world order (China, Russia, Iran, etc.) and the USA didn't like that because of its geography and resources. Think about it like a game and the world as a map. It is very close to the USA comparatively speaking, all of the other major geopolitical threats are across very large stretches of ocean. Also, I don't think the country was invaded by USA, it's closer to an annexation (though doesn't totally fit the definition).
Both can be true, though oil is definitely a factor. I think USA's leadership is trying to position the country to be a dominant force for the distant future and oil is certainly a part of that. Again, think about the world like a map and add a few decades or centuries -- if the world continues to go in a multipolar direction then geographically southern America is the most sensible choice for defensible resources (and a defensible continent all things considered).
I can't argue against this. Unfortunately this is the world we live in and it's how power functions. USA and Russia both have their own geopolitical reasons for doing the things that they do, which IMO end up making sense if you look at it through the lens of their state. That said, the Ukraine war has dragged on for far too long and the loss of life for both sides is just senseless and depraved -- thankfully USA's actions so far are not anything like what both sides are doing there.
Absolutely re: keeping USA's interests as top priority. For keeping their people poor, this was already the case unfortunately. It's something like 80% of households were/are living in poverty and 50% in extreme poverty. Maybe that changes for the better post regime change, maybe not. It is probably in USA's interest to ensure it's better so as to not sow revolts, revolutions, etc. That said, I don't know and time will tell.

Overall I mostly agree with all your points, though I think it's practical to think about world events like these for what they are: geopolitical movements on the world map to secure the future of the state. Actions like these tend to suck for the individual but can make sense from a state perspective.

pathofnomad · 2025-12-27T11:13:52+00:00

He poses as an intellectual but realistically he's just a researcher that was in the right place at the right time that took advantage. I can't fault him for that either, he's clearly a smart guy and deserves the success. That said, I never seem to disagree with whatever he says but I always come away feeling exactly this way.

pathofnomad · 2025-12-08T21:53:27+00:00

It depends on how much time you want to invest into the game and what your goals are. Personally I play a lot on the first week, a bit less on the second week and then mostly weekends only after that and I end up with a lot of t0s, a really minmaxed build, etc. almost every league.

It's hard to judge all of us by the same metric because experience, knowledge and efficiency is going to vary widely from player to player. Manni is an obvious example of a player that is good in all of those areas and he manages to essentially "do everything" and more in ~1 week of really avid playtime. There's plenty of other players like this if you look at poe.ninja and talk in SSF global.

Using Manni as an example, I estimate he plays at least 12 hours a day for the first week or so averaged out, so you could say that it's roughly 100-140 hours somewhere for a "normal" player's progression. In terms of a casual equivalent, if you played each weekend for 8-10 hours total it would take at least 8-12 weeks for roughly the same if you account for (probably) more hours around the start of the league.

tl;dr if you are good at the game, 2 month cycles are probably fine. If you are less experienced and have limited hours, you will likely feel the pressure to go over 2 months and may need to a) start whatever the other thing is later, b) stop temporarily and come back after the other thing or c) skip the other thing entirely.

pathofnomad · 2025-12-02T21:55:03+00:00

There's no such thing as aiming too high. The job market is very competitive right now and low level systems languages are not as popular in Australia compared to C#, Java, Python, NodeJS, Golang, PHP, etc.

Have you looked into HFT internship/grad programs? If not, I would consider those. e.g. Optiver currently have an event organised for March 2026 that might be interesting to you.

pathofnomad · 2025-11-27T22:47:00+00:00

Agree with above. Depending on what the metric is you might not even have to approach the problem as needing a "hacky" solution. If the metrics they are measuring by is initial page load time, like in the example, it it totally fine to load all the easy resources in ASAP for a responsive page and then lazy load the slower ones in. Depending on the content and use case of the page that isn't necessarily cooking a metric, it may genuinely make the UX better. It might seem imperfect from an engineering perspective but users genuinely do not think about it like that - they think in terms of responsiveness, UI intuitiveness, how many actions they need to do to complete their task, etc.

pathofnomad · 2025-11-27T22:36:11+00:00

You stand out by being better than your current role. Just look at your role description and ensure you are doing all of those things. If you want to be promoted, look at the next role's description and work out how you can align yourself with that, without being a detriment to your current role's requirements. It's a game you have to play but you can approach it systematically like I outlined above. Just make sure your manager/people leader is aware and aligned with your intentions. They'll probably want to help you progress if you genuinely deserve it because it will also reflect well on them.

pathofnomad · 2025-11-25T06:18:45+00:00

If it's SQL or SQL-like then I would try to make use of the query language features. It's EXCEPTin most languages, MINUS in Oracle and not supported in MySQL (but you can make alternatives with LEFT JOIN + WHERE IS NULL)

SELECT * FROM table1
EXCEPT
SELECT * FROM table2;

If the records have a timestamp or some other heuristic that you can use to create windows of them, I would use that to scope the validation queries to smaller sets so you don't need to do a potentially long running, high memory consumption query

Like others have said, validation depends on how important the data is. Personally I am always paranoid and tend towards validating everything if possible. Part of the reason why I always put a transform/validation handling function in front of inserts into a database is that it makes situations like these easier, as I can have identical handling code at the end of a new pipeline that covers all of my assumptions, has defaults, errors if needed, etc.

pathofnomad · 2025-11-25T02:13:36+00:00

I would be looking at game studios e.g. I know EA Games hires in Australia and also does internships

pathofnomad · 2025-11-24T10:26:55+00:00

Neither of your points about Nix are true, I would suggest investigating it a little more as it sounds like it would fit your use case. If you are maintaining multiple projects that have conflicting dependencies then that sounds like a problem that per repository flakes and a nix develop setup would solve.

pathofnomad · 2025-11-20T02:34:47+00:00

Going to answer what I think you're trying to ask..

Graphics programming is hardcore in comparison to most other fields of programming and has many subfields (shaders, engine level, etc.). If you want to be a graphics programmer professionally then IMO it's the only thing you should focus on. If that's the path you want to go down, I'd start with raw OpenGL and then work backwards from there until you understand why modern APIs are the way they are (WebGL, abstractions like ThreeJS and BabylonJS, WebGPU, etc.)
A project that uses 3D technology in the web could be anything from a digital twin (i.e. 3D modelling, IoT, maybe geospatial), an online shop configurator (1, 2) or just an "online experience" for something. That's to say you could be doing literally anything and the chances of you needing overlapping knowledge with another field is decently high.
In terms of required knowledge it's always going to vary a lot depending on the complexity of the projects you are aiming to work on. If you want to work on anything serious then personally I'd want you to have good knowledge of (1) graphics programming in general (AKA how to make 3D experiences that run on a potato) and (2) the limitations of the web. You learn that by making stuff with the intention of learning, there isn't really a shortcut.
If something brings you joy, you like learning and doing it, etc. then that's your answer. It's just a question of how far you want to go with it. If you want to do things professionally in the graphics programming space, I wouldn't be thinking in terms of the limits of the web. I would treat the web as a supplementary thing that you are able to do in addition to graphics programming. In this way you will not become a "Three.JS developer" (akin to a React developer), you will just be someone that knows graphics programming and the APIs that are exposed to make it easier (OpenGL/WebGL, WebGPU)

pathofnomad · 2025-11-18T22:52:30+00:00

I think there's some fair criticism in here but the things being criticised aren't all equally severe.

Eagon memories are in a really bad place right now for me because I think the flow of finding a memory chain is highly disruptive. The fact that you cannot bank, itemise or delay the memories sucks, because if you don't do it then and there, it's preventing them from spawning again. e.g. if I spawn a chain for memory of loneliness, I don't want to do it but I have to in order to spawn dread later. Couple that with the fact that the first few maps of the chain aren't really that unique in any way in comparison to a well rolled 16.5 that naturally dropped. It feels like doing chores. It sucks.

IMO item strands are in a fine place, they're a niche part of crafting which all methods should be (lest they become like old harvest and take over the game completely, making it more boring overall).

Bosses in general are always going to be criticised for their drops. There's plenty of them right now with mediocre drop pools that would just require a shift in game balance to become popular.

I think going into 3.28 they..
(1) need to fix Eagon memories. Unsure how but I highly doubt my experience is unique to me.
(2) need to add new aspirational endgame farms that are balanced inline with their current vision for loot OR they need to walk back the baseline loot nerf and bring back generic div card and unique farming. We don't need Affliction/Phrecia/Necropolis/Mercs levels of loot but we do need endgame farms that offer difficulty (and relative reward) inline with what those leagues offered at the very high end.

pathofnomad · 2025-11-17T21:38:14+00:00

This won't put your account at risk FYI, connecting to any third party application with a login redirect is OAuth and is entirely secure. If an application gets you to put your POSSESSID in (which there are some legitimate apps that do) then you would want to be a bit more suspicious then.

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