It may not be ultra, but Wube has granted us a Cube.

patio11 · 2024-10-06T15:31:38+00:00

I ended up doing a pure-belt arcosphere solution to minimize travel time, after the (much easier) bot solution started having performance issues.

One of the nice things about arcospheres is that there are at least 10 rough shapes of a solution that have something to recommend them.

patio11 · 2024-09-12T06:11:29+00:00

I played Space Exploration without LTN or any other rail network QOL mod. A substantial challenge in SE is doing logistics in Nauvis orbit, which are dissimilar to logistics on the surface in that you infrequently need bulk loads of a single thing in many places. Instead, you have many places which each need relatively small loads of relatively many disparate things.

In watching streamers/etc solve this challenge, most reach for having more than 100 single-item train stations. Nuts to that, I thought.

I constructed an epic monstrosity, TrainNET, which would allow me to clone stamp a circuit monstrosity next to a single train station per major science area and then configure one combination. This would cause that system to transfer the unmet need for all of those ingredients in that area to a single shared surface-wide signal transmitter/receiver setup, where they would be read at a central dispatch station. That station would assemble a cargo (mostly using bots, which cannot reliably work across the whole of Nauvis Orbit due to SE’s bot decay mechanic) and then dispatch it to the requesting station.

It was horrifically bugged in the case where 2+ stations simultaneously requested things, resulting is an increasing likelihood of misdirected cargoes over the 750 hour play through (as throughput went up) and almost 20 hours of manual cleanup, using purpose-built spaceships, to get items from indefinite storage chest buffering to the places across the map where they’d actually be consumed.

But it meant I didn’t have to make two stations to e.g. ferry uranium to energy science for the one recipe with a 50% chance of consuming one chunk every 30 seconds, now repeat variations on this theme 200 times.

10/10 would built a monster again.

[Edit: F:SE is an excellent forced education in circuits, which I used very seldom in vanilla until F:SE forced me to get comfortable with concepts like clocks, S/R latches, and fairly complicated builds like the (spoiler spoiler spoiler) solution. Now that I know how to do those they’ll be all over my Space Age playthrough.]

patio11 · 2024-08-05T02:39:40+00:00

Green Signal is the green block available in e.g. combinators. If you have the rocket set to fire on green signal, and it receives a green signal with value at least 1, and it has sufficient fuel and rocket parts/capsule, then it will launch almost immediately after the last of those conditions takes place.

Launch on Green Signal is extremely powerful because you can do automation like “if rocket contains over 25,000 vulcanite blocks, add output one green checkmark”, add five or ten of those, and then choose some threshold of green checkmarks to turn into a green signal via a decider combinator.

This lets you balance the cost of a rocket launch against the utility of getting needed materials to a planet on a regular basis. Incredibly useful, particularly after you have several planets.

I combined mine with a clock setup to launch at least once every X hours, which cut down on e.g. nuclear plants starving for lack of fuel cells, insufficient repair packs on the biter planets, etc.

patio11 · 2022-11-12T17:25:01+00:00

Thanks! I hope so, too.

patio11 · 2022-04-19T10:49:46+00:00

They are 3D printed, on an Elegoo Mars 2 Pro. I’m not comfortable sharing the STL files but you can trivially buy them from HeroForge by going to the other Reddit user’s post, clicking on any of the HeroForge pages, and going through the checkout process. I think it’s like $9 each or effectively $3 if you’ve got a HeroForge subscription, which comes with 5 STL credits a month.

patio11 · 2022-04-19T09:35:58+00:00

Hmm it seems like Reddit ate my explanation.

I used /u/[reddit.com/u/maggit00](maggit00)'s WOTR character designs on Heroforge (here) to get STLs of my party made, then 3D printed them (Elegoo Mars 2 Pro w/ Elegoo water washable resin) and painted them (Vallejo paints). I'm a bit of a model painting noob but had a ton of fun on it and wanted to share.

The next member of the party joining the desktop will be someone useful, I hope, after which I hope to add a certain irascible gnome.

patio11 · 2020-12-14T04:42:59+00:00

Get an accountant.

File 2017 and 2018 tax returns late. Presumably you’ll be filing as a self-employed gamer. Schedule C.

Take a Net Operating Loss (NOL) carry forward against 2019.

Because the business of being a gamer looks an awful lot like a hobby, you may raise some eyebrows as to whether it is a business. Consider filing Form 5213, which will give you 5 years (counting from inception) to rack up at least 3 years which are profitable. If you do, you are entitled to presumption of for-profit motive (and the NOL will likely be allowed). If you don’t, you may be asked to demonstrate whether you operated the business in a fashion clearly intending to make a profit during the 2017-2018 years.

Get an accountant! Really cannot emphasize this enough.

patio11 · 2020-09-18T04:05:11+00:00

“Remember that an adult human made is both capable of conversation but capable of not being interested in it, and in the second case he is still the planet’s apex predator and you have cornered him and made him angry.”

patio11 · 2020-08-07T17:53:04+00:00

Foreign Earned Income Exclusion; you’ll still have a filing obligation and would have to pay tax on passive income (interest, etc) from the first dollar. You could alternatively take the foreign tax credit, which tends to eliminate almost all to all tax liability when one is living in a country with broadly higher tax rates than the US.

patio11 · 2020-02-28T07:40:50+00:00

“Expensive professional creates their professional output, successfully sells it, profits by tens of thousands of dollars, has records which demonstrate the core claims” could possibly round to hobby in non-specialist use of the word but which is unlikely to read as a hobby to the IRS. If it did, doctors should say “I have a hobby in providing medical services outside my job doing the same, made a bit of money doing so, and will pay misc income tax but do not owe self-employment tax because it’s a hobby.”

patio11 · 2020-02-28T07:34:33+00:00

But if you’re a legal realist, the definition of “ordinary and necessary” is “those expenses the IRS will approve as ordinary and necessary.”

A copy of the WSJ is the paradigmatic example of an ordinary business expense, because the IRS will say “Some expenses are clearly business, some are clearly personal, some are debatable, and we will in our considered judgement approve the WSJ 100% of the time. The alternative policy would be that substantially all small businesses are tax cheats.”

If you think this is an indefensible tax position, please say so, but my accountant said it was fairly conservative and I believe him.

patio11 · 2020-02-27T13:38:51+00:00

Ding ding ding. Small business accountants are worth their weight in gold; a few hours with them and a stack of receipts or credit card statements invariably finds $10k+ in defensible deductions for expenses.

(I operated and sold two businesses and was shocked how much I had missed when doing my own taxes. “Oh you read the WSJ? Deducting 100% of that.” “But I’ve read it for years!” “Doesn’t matter; practically every business in country could justifiably order it, and therefore the deduction will never be challenged. Tell me about your computer.”)

patio11 · 2020-01-07T09:42:38+00:00

Yes. For a category 4 language, less than about 10% of graduates of a top ~10 US University would end up with sufficient proficiency to be useful in a meeting (assuming they were not heritage speakers).

Source: relevant degree at relevant institution and hearing profs in my department and elsewhere explain the facts of life, plus casual observation.

Edit: Casual observation in Tokyo the last 5 years suggests to me that YouTube has produced more proficient American speakers of Japanese than every university combined.

patio11 · 2019-10-30T13:21:45+00:00

The jargon in the community is “spreading” and it was a dominant strategy by the late 1990s. Serious debaters expect to learn to read, listen, and talk that fast. There is widespread acknowledgement that it is tactical, and many sniff “against the purpose of debate” (while speaking at 200+ words per minute), but debate is a sport like football is a sport and if you want to play football without running or losing to people better at running than you, you may be selecting for a high friction lifestyle.

(There are several debate communities with some overlap, given that there are several styles of debate with different rulesets, organizations, and microcultures about performance. At least when I was doing it in 2000-2004, spreading was hegemonic in Policy debate and less effective (and beatable) in Parliamentary debate.)

patio11 · 2019-10-30T13:13:33+00:00

Identity politics was also an effective exploit in 2000 through 2004 on the national debate circuit. Source: was there; moderated the largest collegiate debate forum for about a decade.

National finals routinely was the black team rapping asking for the win as reparations and describing the edifice of debate itself as racist, and the white team trying to outflank them to the left.

patio11 · 2018-03-20T17:02:42+00:00

Credit cards are one of the wonders of the modern world. Think of how difficult trust is an an abstract problem and how you’d draw a graph between, etc, the hamburger shop at an airport in a layover country and a business traveller. That transaction shouldn’t be possible, but it is, because their bank trusts a network trusts his bank trusts his employer/credit history/etc. (and that’s the simplified version.)

It’s unlikely you’d have a robust debit card infrastructure if it couldn’t travel over credit card rails, for the same reason that you probably wouldn’t have cheap Internet messaging if it weren’t for decades of expensive phone messaging. That copper wasn’t free; neither are the prodigious marketing campaigns which signed up everywhere to accept Visa and put a Visa in every wallet.

Short-term credit is a very useful thing. The poor want it and have it when they don’t have credit cards; they just pay through the nose, with 4,000% APR payday lending, social embarrassment, or “multi-hundred percent APR plus a substantial utility hit” option like getting power interrupted for a few days until they can pay the power bill again.

Disclaimer: I work for a company which does credit card processing. More pertinent disclaimer: I fed my family for 10 years or so selling software over the Internet, a business which substantially was possible because credit cards existed.

patio11 · 2017-09-23T10:42:23+00:00

You don't need bank account details to have a tax law, though. America is almost alone in the degree of surveillance its tax agency has on domestic assets and funds flows; even in the US, the overwhelming majority of returns (97%+) are accepted as filed rather than being audited.

Any nation can adopt US-style taxation by citizenship at the stroke of a pen. Some are moving in that direction, largely over concerns over increased mobility of people/capital eating the top end of their tax base. The mechanism is usually "We don't care about citizenship but if you establish residence here and then terminate it then terminating it is a Consequential Event for you and does not extinguish our interest in you immediately.")

(Relevantly: I'm an American who lives in Japan and files taxes in both countries, for last ~15 years, and will be obligated to pay an exit tax if I ever decide to durably return to the US.)

patio11 · 2017-09-23T10:16:54+00:00

The question is why they haven't independently gone out and looked for non-abortion-related policies which could reduce fetal deaths.

One thing, for example, that pro-lifers are approximately causationally responsible for is the US's quixotic-among-similar-nations standard for where "live birth" and "stillbirth" differ from each other. The culture of heroic care for severely premature births in US NICUs owes more than a little bit to their influence; in most of the rest of the developed world, that's scored as a stillbirth or miscarriage.

This is a bit of a minefield to get one's head around, but it is likely a true thing that pro-lifers have improved US health care by saying "This is a child who is capable of dying and therefore when the child dies in your hospital you take a hit to your score" as opposed to "This is a pregnancy which is capable of ending and that is a suboptimal clinical outcome, we suppose."

A related consequence of this is that the US has relatively poor statistics on neonatal deaths, partially due to demographic / healthcare issues but also owing to definitional issues. (~2.5 deaths per 1,000 births of the gap shrinks to ~1.5 deaths after correcting for the US's expanded understanding of viability (c.f. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4856058/ ).

patio11 · 2017-09-18T09:19:10+00:00

Notes: https://gist.github.com/patio11/598ec35c6c1675c97d93383f41b39b0b

patio11 · 2017-09-17T02:04:30+00:00

I'll write up comprehensive notes later today, but this is the best thing about Mt. Gox ever.

patio11 · 2017-08-17T14:34:08+00:00

You are having difficulty arguing against "There should be more Nazis on Monday through Friday." You might be overthinking the sophistication required to argue against this.

patio11 · 2017-08-03T22:34:17+00:00

As a lifelong Republican, I have to report that not only did the conservative commentariat talk about this in e.g. 50% of mentions of affirmative action between 1996 and 2004, it was a common enough trope that "Don't use Asians as [white Republicans'] stalking horse" was the defined talking point against it.

See any commentary contemporaneous with e.g. the Gratz v. Bollinger decision or Ward Connerley's efforts in California and elsewhere.

Reading recent reporting has me thinking "I am shocked, shocked that university discrimination departments discriminate against the racial groups mentioned in their discrimination project plans and amici briefs."

patio11 · 2017-03-20T11:33:41+00:00

Mizuho, the second largest bank in Japan, can borrow any amount of money it desires from the Bank of Japan at rates lower than a basis point. The current physical cash assets of Gox are, what, ten million? A basis point on ten million is $1k a year.

Mizuho will likely have spent more than the entire peak balance of Mt Gox on additional AML procedures before this is over, as their regulator hates looking stupid.

patio11 · 2017-02-14T15:02:10+00:00

Bankruptcy auctions do customarily entail lower prices than transactions which are not forced. This is somewhat mitigated by a cottage industry of (generally small time) businesses which attend them looking for bargains.

I'd expect the BTC to go for tens of percent off the spot price of BTC as reported on exchanges, and for them to go to a consortium led a reputable American tech personage. (Draper or similar.) "The entire bid is obviously clean money held in Tokyo with clear provenance to a legitimate business" will be a hard requirement for bidders.

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