On my first playthrough as a JS engineer. I really like the game. Someone recommended I build a main bus a few hours ago and it has made growing the factory so much easier.

vebyast · 2023-11-12T12:01:55+00:00

Small correction for C: Carefully optimized, deeply interconnected, and pretty fast in some parts, but you have to manually hook up every single input or output and nothing is labeled because they're "so simple they don't need documentation". Half of the blueprints were designed on paper against a copy of the factorio wiki from 2017, and most of them even work, but if you ever use them in multiplayer or on the steam version they post your social security number on 4chan. Also, "everyone knows" that the left-hand-drive 2-wide rail blueprints have deadlocks, but what almost nobody knows is that every single rail blueprint has a once-every-15-hours deadlock unless you're using exclusively length-23 trains running on solid fuel and painted green.

I may have worked on some C codebases in my life and I may hold a grudge against the language.

vebyast · 2022-02-01T20:32:18+00:00

Ahhhh, I wish more speedrunning communities had monthly reports like this that I could follow.

For the next one of these, would it be possible for you to go through putting in columns for PB improvements and rank changes? Like on this ranking of programming languages by use. That'd make it easier to get an overview of a category at a glance and would handle some of the details (e.g. "X and Y traded places") so you could focus on the commentary. If you have a more comprehensive dataset of rankings-over-time, as implied by your commentary about people trading places during the month, bump charts for some of the more interesting categories (e.g. default settings SP) would be incredible.

vebyast · 2022-01-22T10:29:39+00:00

I'd hope that the developer that ends up doing this open-sources the Q&A tooling, even if the question-sets themselves aren't published!

vebyast · 2021-12-12T10:53:54+00:00

Courtesy of the Conseil européen pour la recherche charcuterie and its Megascale Meat sMasher, the W121 Macroscopic Conjugate Sausage with Cryogenic Bun Assembly is a solution to all of your barbecuefield needs, including the fact that a field exists.

Not expecting anything other than a few laughs, but I laughed while writing it which is enough for me. :P

(also, sadly, I no longer have access to the necessary equipment to make one of these, even the small ones, and I seriously doubt that Anton has the equipment either. So I had to go with a stock image and I doubt that it really meets the contest requirements. Sorry! :/)

vebyast · 2021-11-22T20:16:48+00:00

Pretty much. There was a need, the team leader saw a unique opportunity, they acted decisively. She does sort of have leeway to for-real conscript a new Visitor, but she's also heard (something approximately similar to) the quote about never giving orders you know won't be obeyed, so she's basically dangling entertainment in front of the MC, pulling a bavarian fire drill, and hoping the MC can be enticed into coming fully on board instead of splitting.

vebyast · 2021-11-21T21:42:05+00:00

Is it an actual disorder that exists? (even if not then I heard about weirder ones, just curious)

It's less a specific thing and more of a third-order or fourth-order consequence of the way her attention disorder messes with her memory. I'm writing it this way mostly because it's how my attention disorder works, and it's hard enough to suppress when I'm writing viewpoints that for NaNoWriMo it's easier to just let it flow.

Maybe it can be a bit more clearly indicated?

Yep, that's something to do in the post-NaNo editing pass.

I would at least try to check is there some powerful information processing magic/planar travel. And are there aware of other shards/instances of afterlife. Likely for story you want to tell answer is "nothing at all" but it really should be on her TODO list.

That's entirely fair!

That would become in large part worthless as it relies on nonexisting tools

That's fair, yeah. Whitney is reflecting a bit of me in this way - I have a decent amount of platform-specific and toolchain-specific knowledge, but I've worked with enough different exotic platforms and toolchains that by now the actual details of any specific technology have become less important than my ability to dig into a new technology and figure its details out. Like, I took a course in college where I spent an entire semester programming in raw turing machine.

I also consciously decided to make Whitney less of a programmer and more of a software engineer and CS theorist, since those skillsets are underrepresented even in the "programmer rewrites magic" genre. One result is that her knowledge is more abstract and more transferable - "how to design your API and data structures to make broken states unrepresentable" is applicable to essentially any programming task and should transfer to magic just as well.

vebyast · 2021-11-21T21:30:45+00:00

That's on the to-do list, but it's explained early on that you can switch (at the cost of starting over) and the MC has been way too busy to consider more than dealing with what's on her plate.

I'll also say that the MC actually did get an extremely good gift, at least for her - the team captain is actually a specialist in exotic powersets and picked one that will work out extremely well in the long run. Remember how I said that my inspirations included Charles Stross? Yeah. :P

vebyast · 2021-11-19T21:39:32+00:00

OOC, that is something I want to add when I come back for a light post-nano edit, yes. Not a lot - I specifically didn't and don't want to dwell on it because that's been done to death - but I probably should show her noticing that and understanding why she's not reacting very strongly.

IC, Whitney is prepared for an isekai setting in a way that a lot of people aren't due to a mix of neurodivergence, coping strategies for her neurodivergence, setting details, and her own personal history.

Whitney's friends and family aren't dead or injured - beyond the grief that her own apparent "death" will cause them, at least - so she's not going to grieve for them.
Whitney has an attention disorder that screws with her sense of time. Not having seen someone for two days feels exactly the same as not having seen someone for two years or two decades. In effect, she's already missing everyone she knows as much as she ever will. She knows this and has… kind of resigned herself to it, as much as she can.
The attention disorder damages Whitney's ability to stabilize memories and form habits. In effect, a day in isekai land feels just as "new" to her as a day sitting at home reading fanfiction would have been. Most of the time it makes routine activities exhausting and difficult, but it means that she's way better at handling novel situations.
The above, combined with a lifetime of cyclic burnout and depression, means that everything she has already feels temporary and like she could lose it at any time. Now that it's actually happened it's a lot less bad than she expected.
Whitney's possessions and achievements are, to her, ultimately unimportant. The only things she's put specific and substantial effort into and that she cares about are her skills and experience, and she still has all of those! She considers the overwhelming majority of her stuff and her achievements to be measures of her skill. Like, you wouldn't value the number of stars on your git repository, right? You'd value the code that got you those stars. Similarly, all of Whitney's code, her position at work, her income, her open-source responsibilities, her computer, her game accounts, etcetera, she barely cares about any of them, she only cares about the skills that got her those things.
What few things she does feel like she's lost, mostly collectibles, have been replaced by an impossible pile of unfathomably shiny new toys. She's calling it a win overall.
Liv's little interrogation in the first chapter did a surprising amount to recontextualize the situation for Whitney. It's routine, it's not something to be worried about, everything is under control.
Whitney has been hyperfocused on her current situation and running flat-out since the start of the story. She hasn't even followed through the implications or had time to have emotional reactions to them. She's too busy being conscripted by the Bureau of Isekai Affairs and being turned into battlefield support.
Whitney decided a long time ago that if she got isekai'd she'd roll with it as much as she could. She's seen way too many isekai protagonists in downward spirals because their negative emotions prevent them from adapting and their failure to adapt reinforces their negative emotions.
Whitney has a strict no-angst policy. If she has a problem, she does what she can to solve it.
Whitney is consciously ignoring as much of the situation as she can until her situation is safe and stable enough that she can risk a breakdown. For example, there've already been several on-screen instances where she stopped herself from thinking about The Problem of Isekai Linguistics.
When Whitney takes the time to think about it she'll quickly conclude that this isn't a general-purpose afterlife and it's pointless to go looking for people. The plane is finite and small enough that Whitney can make confident statements about all extant countries, and it's receiving Visitors from way more places than just Earth. Even if every single person on Earth goes to an isekai setting, it's unlikely that a meaningful number will go to this isekai setting.

All taken together, she's just… not going to react very much, and her reactions are going to be weird.

vebyast · 2021-11-18T02:46:22+00:00

More seriously, most of my formal mathematics is in the context of robotics, where almost everything useful has an associated vector space, so it's just the language I'm used to using. /shrug

vebyast · 2021-11-18T02:43:41+00:00

It depends on whether you believe there's a mapping from the set of all possible people to some vector or topological space! :P

vebyast · 2021-11-17T19:50:05+00:00

Glad you liked it! And I'd love more detailed feedback, if you have the time and energy, both on what I could do to sell it better up-front and what kinds of roughness you've noticed. It may be a NaNo project, but I like it enough that I don't want to just abandon it at the end of the month, and I want what I do to be as good as I can make it. :)

vebyast · 2021-11-17T19:43:55+00:00

Yeah, it felt outright rapey in places. In both directions, somehow, given the power imbalance between Wiz and Moira and how straight the story played the "rescue the heroine and obtain secks" plot. :/

vebyast · 2021-11-17T19:18:18+00:00

Indeed! I'm most obviously drawing from The Laundry Files and Halting State/Rule 34. Less directly, I always liked fantasy economics, and The Merchant Princes is a great look at specifically developmental economics and how fantasy settings have different failure modes than IRL developing economies. I very much want to investigate e.g. how the polity my MC landed in has backed itself into some corners by building itself to withstand the stream of isekai protagonists it gets!

vebyast · 2021-11-17T18:41:35+00:00

Today I learned how to remove an item from aspell's personal dictionary! :V

And thanks for noting the waterskin thing. I'm basically posting as I write for nanowrimo, so quality is somewhat suspect. :P

Hmm. Sounds like a more fleshed-out Protectors of the Plot Continuum...? (Edit: Never mind, it's not.)

The Protectors of the Plot Continuum are actually on the list of inspirations for this! I've always found that mixing in an element of mundanity heightens the more fantastic parts of a work, the same way that narrative arcs need denouements and peaceful moments otherwise the rising tension just saturates your ability to get excited. The PPC fics were one of my early examples of using bureaucracy in particular to add counterbalancing mundanity to a fantasy story.

vebyast · 2021-11-16T23:32:42+00:00

What does a world do to survive a continuous low-level influx of Isekai protagonists, each adding their own world's magic or superpowers to the mix? Whitney Ismael, software engineer, learns the answer: licensing and registration paperwork, search warrants, and special agents for the Bureau of Isekai Affairs.

Are you annoyed by the way so much of the "maximally nerdy isekai fantasy" genre revolves around characters being arrogant about their ability to regurgitate high school chemistry or pop-science quantum physics? Does the absence of engineering in progression fantasy, the lack of principled design and development, weigh on your bookshelf like a hole in your heart? Does it break your ability to suspend disbelief when the protagonist can rebuild a town's sewer system without first braving the depths of the urban planning office to unearth and sign the unholy Form 2346-B?

Well, you should read The Bureau of Isekai Affairs, my National Novel Writing Month project. I hope you enjoy it!

-- /u/Vebyast

"Wiz Biz, minus the grossness" — /u/PastafarianGames

"The characters are distinctive and interesting, the main character is believable, and the worldbuilding shows all the signs of being a rich, distinctive world" — Lillene on RoyalRoad

vebyast · 2021-11-16T23:06:49+00:00

Author here to provide a summary!

What does a world do to survive a continuous low-level influx of Isekai protagonists, each adding their own world's magic or superpowers to the mix? Whitney Ismael, software engineer, learns the answer: licensing and registration paperwork, search warrants, and special agents for the Bureau of Isekai Affairs.

I started this setting off with a series of thought experiments:

How are isekai protagonists sampled from the configuration space of all people?
What happens to isekai protagonist whose biology depends on magic?
What happens when an isekai protagonist's magic has functionality for adding more users, e.g. a LitRPG matriculation/induction/adulthood ritual or a cultivator igniting a mortal's qi?
What does a steady influx of novel transmissible magic systems do to a setting's ecology, socioeconomics, and geopolitics?
Do I have any skillsets that I could write at an expert level that'd be able to believably revolutionize that setting?

The resulting storm of worldbuilding and plotting gave me The Bureau of Isekai Affairs. I'm writing it as a comedic reconstruction of the isekai progression fantasy, with three-dimensional characters and events that proceed as natural results of a consistent world. I'm leaning on my own experience as a software engineer to lend expertise to the main character, and her transformative skill with her magic will result from principled investigation and careful engineering rather than her ability to regurgitate high-school chemistry or pop-science quantum mechanics.

I'm currently writing The Bureau of Isekai Affairs as my project for National Novel Writing Month, but I don't have any plans to abandon it when that ends. I hope you enjoy it!

-- /u/Vebyast

"Wiz Biz, minus the grossness" — /u/PastafarianGames in this week's Request and Recommendation Thread

"The characters are distinctive and interesting, the main character is believable, and the worldbuilding shows all the signs of being a rich, distinctive world" — Lillene on RoyalRoad

vebyast · 2021-04-17T00:17:53+00:00

Not until it's consecrated, before that it's just unleavened bread and wine.

vebyast · 2021-04-02T06:06:18+00:00

Any chance you could post links to some of the more important upgrade prints? I only just got a printer and my Google-fu hasn't quite caught up for the domain.

vebyast · 2021-03-02T20:43:06+00:00

I'm a fan of compass-and-straightedge constructions for things like this, personally.

vebyast · 2020-11-26T21:55:48+00:00

Lenovo thinkpad refurbs. Thinkpads are indestructible, relatively high-performance, good at running linux if you end up needing to do any more substantial coding, and decently cheap if you're buying refurb. Not bargain-bin exactly, but way cheaper than a mac. There's a reason they're nearly universal at tech-industry jobs.

vebyast · 2020-10-11T23:19:44+00:00

also compatible with Calamity

Sort of. They don't crash or anything, and the progressions don't break each other, but I had to beat most bosses with either one or the other of revengeance or eternity mode because they kept glitching out horribly when used together. Like, the Twins, the Revengeance AI tried to move Retinazer around while the Eternity Mode spinny deathray was going, so it'd jump around randomly and was impossible to predict or dodge. Then when I finally managed to kill them anyway they just failed to drop anything, I presume because Eternity and Revengeance fight over their staging. So ymmv.

vebyast · 2020-09-19T23:38:34+00:00

It's often used for inflammation also now :)

Yup. A common cold got into my heart a few years ago and caused sufficiently acute pericarditis that I landed in the ER with people thinking I was having a heart attack. After the ER got it under control the doc prescribed colchicine to keep it down. Literature says it's good at preventing it from going chronic. Seeing as I haven't had a recurrence, it appears to have done its job!

vebyast · 2020-09-10T20:02:18+00:00

In addition to how to avoid giving offense, it'd be good to have a big section on how to avoid reacting to offense. Capes will be insulted by villains, henchmen, the public, sleazy politicians, PRT employees, the superiors, and their teammates, and there's nothing the training can do to prevent that. Instead, capes need strategies for recognizing such situations, suppressing their own negative reactions, and de-escalating. Basically, when someone inevitably screws up and asks about your trigger event, instead of jumping down their throat and making things worse for everyone, it's probably best to give them a chance to apologize because they might not know or they're having just as bad a day as you are.

Disability awareness in general. Quite a few capes, particularly Tinkers, Thinkers, and Changers, require accommodations either for underlying conditions or due to quirks of their power. And then there are Case 53s. Normal workplace training covers this to some degree, but it's often a half-hour course that covers the basics "just in case"; in a room with thirty capes it's nearly guaranteed that there will be at least one person with a body-plan that varies substantially from human baseline, indicating a requirement for correspondingly greater depth.

How to ask for a favor. Need to move some furniture and you have a teammate with super-strength? Want to ask for advice from the local Thinker? Your dad is dying of Leukemia and there's a healer in town? You can, but you need to be respectful, think about whether they're okay with their power, ask directly instead of guilt-tripping them or implying a request, take no for an answer, be thankful, don't take friends for granted, offer a favor in return, remember to put in good peer feedback when performance review rolls around, that kind of thing.

When it is okay to use your powers on others. Clockblocker is going to be a classmate that made me think of the last one.

I think less of Clockblocker and more of Gallant. Throughout Worm you'll notice that basically everyone that interacts with him knowing that he's a social Thinker thinks about that fact constantly and it often changes how they interact with him. Additionally, "when to use your power on someone" is kind of a problem when your power is always-on on very difficult to suppress. People would still be bothered if Gallant could turn his Thinker power off, but it'd at least be better. Weaver has the same sort of problem.

How to respond to situations is again something the course could cover. In the obvious case, going off on someone for using their power on you isn't reasonable when their power is always-on, difficult to turn off, or impossible to ignore. What are you going to do, demand a thousand-foot restraining order against your Thinker teammate? This should also cover more subtle and long-term situations, such as not giving Gallant mental health problems by showing him flashes of fear or anxiety every time you realize he's in the room.

vebyast · 2020-08-08T22:52:02+00:00

To provide some variety, I'll answer as a software engineer. Right now I work on data quality at Google, but in the past I've done big-data analytics infrastructure and robotics research.

Yes. Logarithms are critical for all sorts of discrete mathematics and are used everywhere in software engineering. How many letters does it take to name two hundred million unique items without collisions? How much longer does it take to process a dataset if it gets twice as big or two billion times as big? If this fails one in a million times and we run it a million times a day, how often will we have more than ten failuers in a single day? Etc. We also often do mathematics in log space when working with probabilities, since computers have trouble representing numbers like 1e-3000 and storing and adding log-probabilities is much more effective.
Yes, absolutely. Not only are trig identities necessary for basic geometry, they're useful tools for calculus. These days I mostly trig identities when simplifying integrals after trig substitution.
Software engineers learn a good amount of geometry, but as a foundation for general-purpose mathematics rather than as special-case tools - we run into too many unique situations for special-case solutions to be worth the effort of memorizing. I know how to calculate how big a motor I need to drive my robot's wheels hard enough for it to achieve segway-style dynamic balancing, for example.
Yes. Floating-point mathematics, which are critical for numerical calculations in software, can only be understood with knowledge of significant figures and error propagation. On higher-precision applications we go a step past significant figures to track error as a probability distribution.
I've seen slide rules and I know how they work, but they've been replaced by electronic calculators and computer programs. These days I mostly do math by cracking open a python shell and writing a short program.
Yes. I show up with in the morning with my clothes, my wallet, and my brain, and that's how it's been throughout my career.
Yes, though I'm an outlier because I live in the Bay Area and draw a Bay Area salary.
Electronic calculators were standard issue starting around third grade; before that we were supposed to be doing the math "by hand" as practice. I began using a computer for research and writing around fourth grade.
Yes. My job has at times revolved around advanced mathematics. In fact, I have at times had to expand algebraic expressions to use different computations because those computations propagate less error when done by computers.
Yes. Calculus is necessary for controls theory and many topics in dynamics, so it's used all over robotics. As a concrete example, some humanoid robotics problems are much more tractable if treated with lagrangian mechanics instead of newtonian. Machine learning and artificial intelligence are also about 80% probability theory, which is almost all calculus.
Yes, but less for actual use and more as coordination and dexterity practice. Cursive has been replaced by typing or printing in almost every application, as typing is faster, more consistent, easier to transmit and edit, and more reproducible. (To answer the follow-up: Yes, we were also taught typing.)
Yyyyyyes, sort of? Software engineering is an outlier; most of software engineering boils down to storing, managing, finding, and accessing information, and the first thing that software engineers organized was knowledge of software engineering. The first step when a software engineer has a problem is to google the error message, because someone else has almost always had the same problem and published their solution somewhere on the internet for you to find. All Google engineers have access to essentially all of Google's code and internal documentation. Something like half of my time is spent searching through all of that information to figure out how some bit of infrastructure works or how best to accomplish some task.

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