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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  2mo ago (text post)   453 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for October 8, 2024

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service.

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I’ve got my new method of factoring working as a damn elegant Python function. Time to turn it into a science paper. A co-worker made a remark and I realized I’ve also created a division table.

For integers or some other ring?

Yes, for non-trivial composite integers. (The powers of two are trivially composite to this algorithm.)

Mind sharing some details, or mentioning when you have it on Arxiv? It’d be really cool to have something better than Miller-Rabin, followed by trial division over a pre-generated list of primes if composite.

Do you know any papers describing the state of the art in the latter? My access is basically what my city library pays for access to.

Nope - what I know in the area is downstream of coursework and messing around with Project Euler.

I built a state tax burden calculator with react.

I was thinking I want to build more little form and graph things, but the main limitation is data, anyone have any good clean datasets they know about?

How are you building the charts?

First one was just a simple table. Haven't built any charts yet, but thinking about Tableau because one potential gig I know about wants to use them

Have you used Tableau before?

No I have not

A warning: Tableau is a massive pain in the ass.

what are good alternatives?

It depends on how comfortable you are with JavaScript, assuming the charts will be displayed on a website.

You can pretty easily query the price history of stock symbols to get sample time series data.

What type of plots do you want to test?

I was thinking more public policy oriented data sets. Right now I'm looking at using TaxFoundations state tax data, that might get me some interesting stuff. I also know a potential contractor position where I can help someone create table or chart to display homelessness across different states.

Last week it was my time turn to get knocked out by the flu, so I didn't get anything done. This week, I have some major work-related activities, that will likely get in the way of any hobby stuff. Hopefully things will calm down during the weekend.

@Southkraut, how are you doing? Didn't try it out yet, but there does indeed seem to be some buzz around Redot.

Thanks for asking. I ended up picking up the Stride engine after all, went through some tutorials and example projects. Overall it seems more promising than I thought; the pitch of it is pretty much exactly what I want, minus double-precision coordinates. It's very Unity-like, but without the bloat and shoddy performance. That said, it is noticeably slower to launch than Godot. And like Godot, it lacks the ability to inspect a scene a game-runtime; Game and Editor are completely separate. Again, game crashes don't take down the editor, which is good, but the lack of 3D debugging capability is painful.

Didn't get any code work done, but I did sit down for some more concept work with the tangible result that I now think I should focus on my agent framework before anything else. I.e., get actors and their variegated scripting set up rather than to focus on inert things like cosmology, terrain or mechanical physics. Luckily I do have some code for this lying around in both my Unity and my Godot projects, so I can take over most of the structure without needing to reinvent that wheel a third time.

I have been telling myself for some time now that I should do a stricter MVC-esque separation between my backend and whichever interfacing I do with the engine I use, and I suppose yet another engine switch serves to remotivate this commitment. I watered it down last time to get things done faster, but I'm also grateful for all the places in which I stuck to the principle where I can now simply re-use existing code without needing to tear out everything Godot-specific in it.

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