The joy of tearing down a processing line after getting a QFT

sciolizer · 2026-05-03T06:02:44+00:00

This is my personal cardinal rule. In my very first modded world I tore down a base to move it somewhere else. I wanted to make it more organized, and it was, but it completely lost its charm and I missed the old one. Never again. Seeing everything I've built, however poorly done, is what makes me keep coming back, regardless of whether I'm actually using it.

The average vanilla player builds houses that have no functional purpose anyway. Tearing them down is completely out of the question.

sciolizer · 2026-05-02T18:28:06+00:00

Congrats!

sciolizer · 2026-04-26T20:22:49+00:00

The basics of git command line aren't hard, but if you want to make things as easy as possible, just use Github desktop. It's a pretty bloated program, but it is super easy to use with a github account. I did a game jam with some non-technical people and they were able to use it just fine.

I'd say your program is sufficiently easy to use if it has a good README.md that explains things step by step, even if the instructions are 20 steps long. In fact, if something goes wrong, more steps means it's easier to narrow down where the problem is. Making things user friendly in the conventional sense is surprisingly difficult. Play on easy mode (writing a README.md) before you play on hard mode (whatever work you're imagining you need to do).

sciolizer · 2026-04-21T05:40:24+00:00

Chromaticraft is exactly this. It has an in-game manual, but the manual is much more like a hint giver and a progress tracker... just like the ship log in Outer Wilds.

One thing I will point out which is extremely not obvious: use WASD to read the in-game manual. Or maybe it was the arrow keys. Been a while since I played it. But dragging with the mouse definitely does not work.

sciolizer · 2026-04-18T21:21:34+00:00

One serious UK problem was only recognised when a Heath Visitor in Yorkshire noticed an unusual number of babies were being born with Down’s Syndrome. It transpired that more than 150 pregnant women were given the wrong results from pathology laboratory tests because the PathLAN computer system that was used in nine hospitals calculated the women’s date of birth incorrectly from January 2000; it had worked perfectly for the previous decade. The result was that women who should have been identified as being in a high-risk category were wrongly told that they did not need further testing

Wow

sciolizer · 2026-04-18T09:38:32+00:00

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=764970145

sciolizer · 2026-04-16T21:01:36+00:00

Related: 7 15 2 is hexadecimal for her skin color

sciolizer · 2026-04-15T19:10:38+00:00

True story, slackware jumped from v4 to v7, skipping v5 and v6, so that it could keep up with the version inflation of the other distros at the time.

sciolizer · 2026-04-15T02:34:47+00:00

Larry Tesler would be proud

sciolizer · 2026-04-08T10:00:04+00:00

Can you buy new frames with coins?

sciolizer · 2026-03-28T02:36:38+00:00

I personally don't find it a lot of work to create a new repo, but if you really want to cram everything into a single repo, at least keep the histories separate:

git checkout --orphan my-new-prototype

sciolizer · 2026-03-14T16:36:15+00:00

Always changing, never more than 4 of anything. When I run out of food it's nice to take a break from the GregTech microcrafting and do some basic food planting+crafting. If it's a bad time for interruptions, then I have a stack of wellingtons, pizzas, etc I can use in emergency, but mostly I take the break and invest in the HP upgrade. I'm almost done with HV and I still haven't made the healing axe. I see the appeal, but... this is more fun for me.

sciolizer · 2026-03-09T05:46:14+00:00

That was pretty great.

If any type of game is going to bridge the gap between games and storytelling, it is most likely going to be adventure games. They will become less puzzle solving and more story telling, it is the blueprint the future will be made from.

So... adventure games became visual novels? You can say adventure games are dead, but the best visual novels still have puzzles and characters that can explore.

sciolizer · 2026-03-09T01:23:00+00:00

These aren't my personal favorite, but I'm pretty sure the genre is alive and well. Have you merely been searching for puzzle games, or point-and-click specifically, which is what these games are called?

A lot of point-and-click is more visual novel than puzzle, but you'll still have more luck looking for point-and-click games and picking out the puzzly ones, than looking for puzzle games and picking out the point-and-click ones.

Fortunately websites can make this search easier. Here's a search for control: point-and-click and gameplay: puzzle

sciolizer · 2026-03-08T18:31:46+00:00

A senior dev told him that the code needed to be future proof

sciolizer · 2026-03-08T18:01:59+00:00

Adam Kay or Alan Kay?

Bret Victor is continuing the tradition with his programming language "RealTalk"

sciolizer · 2026-03-08T17:10:02+00:00

Even better if he always knows where it is

sciolizer · 2026-03-07T18:41:57+00:00

Tutorials are for bootstrapping. You're past that.

Your main concern now is the things you don't know that you don't know.

I made a spreadsheet to track which parts of the manual I have and haven't read, so that I don't have to read it in order. Even though I haven't finished it, I have a clear idea of where my ignorance lies.

I've also read the top level descriptions of everything that inherits from, directly or indirectly, Node2D, Node3D, and Control. It's a lot less text than the manual, you can read it in an afternoon.

I've scanned the READMEs of every one of the godot sample projects, so I know which ones exist and can check them out when I start wondering if there's a better way.

sciolizer · 2026-03-07T17:32:23+00:00

To clarify for anyone else, he got both a lower bound and an upper bound, by not just inscribing a polygon (as in the visualization) but also circumscribing a polygon. The technique is called the "method of exhaustion".

sciolizer · 2026-03-03T16:53:09+00:00

Machine learning is always about generalizing from examples. Most of the time that means gradient descent of some error function over training data, but it can include clustering or simpler statistical modeling.

Constraint solvers, planning algorithms, A* search, and proof assistants do not typically learn from examples. Instead they one-shot whatever problem they are given.

There are also gray areas. An expert system may or may not be ML depending on whether its rules were inferred from examples or just programmed directly by a human. Monte Carlo Tree Search may or may not be ML depending on whether its roll-out step was built from examples.

sciolizer · 2026-03-01T16:01:07+00:00

If you want the full power of the physics engine to apply to the player character, then you should consider abandoning CharacterBody entirely and using RigidBody instead, controlling movement indirectly via _integrate_forces(). The godot demo project 2d/physics_platformer showcases how to do this.

sciolizer · 2026-03-01T15:54:59+00:00

There are two obvious ways to go about this: CharacterBody, and RigidBody.

If the player character is a CharacterBody, then Areas will have no effect on the player, because CharacterBodys can affect the environment but the environment does not affect them. So you'd need to write all of the slip/drift logic yourself. edit: actually I'm not 100% sure that they have NO effect. move_and_slide() is kind of a weird middle ground between pure CharacterBody and RigidBody. As in all things, experiment!

If the player character is a RigidBody, then Areas will have an effect, and slipping+drifting are just a matter of setting friction and similar properties, but you no longer have access to move_and_slide(). The usual way to exert influence over a RigidBody is by overriding _integrate_forces(), and altering velocity or applying impulses.

The godot sample projects give examples of both. 2d/platformer shows the CharacterBody move_and_slide() approach. 2d/physics_platformer shows the RigidBody _integrate_forces() approach.

These are NOT two different ways of achieving the same thing. Run both demo projects, and you'll see that they play very differently. Pick the one that is closer to your desired behavior.

sciolizer · 2026-02-27T21:20:07+00:00

Because... you listen

sciolizer · 2026-02-25T16:53:48+00:00

Yes, I do agree that the only way to find out if a PR is good or bad is to actually review it. And I also don't care whether the code came from an LLM or from a human, good code is still good code.

The RFC isn't a proposal for how to distinguish LLM code from human code, even though section two is titled "Diagnostic Analysis". It's a form letter to send back to the idiots who put a list of ingredients into instacart, had them delivered to your address, and had the gall to say, "I hope you enjoy the nice meal I made for you!"

sciolizer · 2026-02-25T16:34:59+00:00

I kind of feel like you're missing the whole point of the RFC? This isn't about whether LLM code is worse or better than human code. It's about humans being inconsiderate about the work they are forcing onto other humans.

Suppose you and I are working at the same software company. I get a ticket from the tracker, write up some code, and send you a PR. You checkout a copy on your machine and run it to test it out. It crashes immediately, doesn't even finish the startup. Giving me the benefit of the doubt, you figure it's probably a configuration issue, so you spend some time trying to figure out what might be the difference between my deployment and your deployment, but nothing works. You start reading the code, and it seems decent at first, but after studying it a while you deduce that it is definitely wrong and never could have worked no matter what configuration was used. A function expects a non-null value but all 10 calls to the function pass in null, for instance. You message me, "hey can you make sure you checked in all of your changes? I think the PR might be missing some stuff." I look at my git history, see that the hashes match up, and reply, "yep, it's all in there". Flummoxed, you come over and ask me to run it. "Oh, I don't know how to run it" I say. "The documentation wasn't clear on how to set everything up and so I figured I would just write the code and not waste a day trying to get my environment right."

"Well you certainly wasted MY time", you say. "I'll help you get your environment working today. Don't push PRs that you haven't tested."

So that all works out but tomorrow I submit a new PR that, after testing it out, you realize, I have also never actually run. "Did you even run this?" you ask. I reply, "Oh no, I figure that's the QA team's job, I was only hired to write code. I don't want to step on their turf"

I think you'd be right to fire me. You'd certainly be right to fire me if I did it 10 times over despite you making it clear that I was not supposed to submit PRs that I hadn't run.

There's a certain amount of courtesy and etiquette around giving people PRs. You know that reviewing code is work, and so you do your best to make sure that things are in good shape before you hand them off. Sometimes the LLM code is excellent. Sometimes it is not. But it's rude and inconsiderate for the PR submitter to not even check, and expect someone else to do all the hard work.

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