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
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Progress continues slowly on the mining project. I feel like most everything is ready, but the 'finishing touches' are frustrating. Distributors change prices and delivery timelines. Investors want to haggle over contract details.
On the bright side, finding a place seems to be going well. I've found half a dozen possibilities, though I won't be going into specifics for OPSEC reasons. Suffice to say that each one has over 100kW of power, and they nearly all are under $1000/month for leasing. One in particular has more than a megawatt available and is still under $1k a month.
Posted a comment in the old thread, replying to @waffles and giving a drawn depiction of how the heat exchanger system is designed.
I understand your design now, after you posted your drawing. And it also makes sense that the cooling/utilities system is going to be a small part of the overall project, so no need to waste time scrutinizing that part.
Have you considered what happens if there's a leak of coolant into the dielectric fluid? Or do you expect the piping to outlast the life of the installation?
Thank you! Good to hear I’m not off my rocker.
I have not considered the possibility of a coolant leak… It’s a good question. The idea was to bend the copper pipe such that the pipe in the coolant tank was one piece, with the connections being the only part that could leak, but you bring up a good question.
With that said, things are (hopefully temporarily) on pause. The Russian government’s new mining law came into effect on the first of November (yay, since that’s what legalizes this project) and they announced some upcoming mining location bans.
Boo, since they were not specific about exactly where mining would be banned. Right now I think we would be in the clear, but it doesn’t make sense to move forward until I’m certain. I don’t love sitting on my hands here.
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For years I've wanted to take part in NaNoWriMo, but was held back by lack of a decent idea going in: I didn't want to just start writing without even a basic premise to guide me. Four weeks ago, I was about to leave the office, when an idea I'd had years ago (but never really properly developed beyond a 500-word sketch) just popped into my head. Between walking from the office to the train station and getting off the train, I'd developed the idea into a full narrative. Over the last four weeks I've been developing the idea further and doing research (including asking you fine people technical questions, for which I'm grateful). With two days to go before the competition starts, I want to spend today and tomorrow coming up with names for my characters and fleshing out the setting and the backstory. It's going to be a busy month, wish me luck.
Only yesterday I discovered that the culture war has come for NaNoWriMo itself. I was under the impression that it was just an informal game with a website, forum and not much beyond that. I didn't realise that it's a bigger deal: they have people in leadership roles and do fundraising drives and corporate tie-ins. Earlier this year they issued a statement saying that they are totally fine with people using ChatGPT as part of their NaNoWriMo entries, and moreover, that opposition to generative AI is rooted in "classism" and "ableism". This ignited a firestorm within the community, with prominent members and published writers urging people not to participate. I can't help but feel a smidge of Schadenfreude of the "living by the sword" variety: I'm sure all of the people opposed to generative AI in the creative arts consider themselves very woke and inclusive, and must resent being accused of "ableism" for what strikes them as a perfectly reasonable position. First time?
The controversy isn't going to stop me from taking part - I think the wailing and gnashing of teeth about generative AI is rather overhyped, and in any case all I'm going to use the website for is log my progress. I have little interest in interacting with anyone else on the website who's taking part, and I certainly won't be donating to the organisation itself.
The community aspect of NaNoWriMo was responsible for some of the best times of my life. I ran my city's NaNoWriMo in 2019, and it was a wonderful experience in every way. We really embraced the core idea of NaNoWriMo as it was originally conceived: ordinary people, getting together to try and exceed our old level of ability, urging each other on to believe that we can do more than we think we can.
So the idea that they would mention "ableism" is very galling, and represents the extent to which the original entity has been skinsuited. Unfortunately, that was in progress for years prior, and 2019 was really the last gasp. In 2020 and 2021, they opted to disallow officially-sanctioned write-ins because of Covid fear - no matter what local regulations said. They also explicitly stated that they wanted more "diverse" people to run the groups in each city, and discourged non-diverse people from applying. And, of course, last year there was the huge grooming scandal. The whole protracted decay of NaNoWriMo, from its apolitical roots in the 2000s, was very blackpilling for me; it directly crystallized for me the idea of, "These are the people who are hostile to you personally, and to what you value most."
Anyway though, just engaging in NaNoWriMo yourself is something I still think is a great idea. For many writers who can't do it as a full-time practice, there's nothing better than simply getting a bunch of words onto the page.
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As an aside - I've written in this forum before about how, up until a certain point in my life, it was quite common for story ideas to pop into my head at any given time; but this process largely halted a couple of years ago as I entered my 30s. There are a lot of practical life factors in play, but subjectively, it feels as though my head were a radio, and the tuner knob has gotten bumped off of the frequency where all the story ideas are broadcast. Before, I could just hear them, and now I can't. Have you ever felt that way? And did you change anything in your life accordingly?
I could've written this paragraph myself. I used to write fiction and compose music quite a lot, but when I undertake NaNoWriMo this year, it will be the first significant chunk of original prose I'll have written since mid-Covid. Before that I wrote four novels or novellas (three as a teenager). The reason I haven't written anything since mid-Covid isn't because I've had writer's block (in the sense that I've been trying to write but the words aren't coming to me) - I just haven't had any ideas since. And it happened in two artistic media - it used to be I could write an entire song in my head without touching a guitar, the ideas would just come to me of their own accord. That almost never happens to me anymore, except sometimes with rhythmic patterns - with rare exceptions, writing a melody is something I have to consciously work at, playing a riff over and over until it congeals into something more substantial. It's hardly surprising to me that the best musicians tend to produce their best work in their twenties and peter out thereafter.
All of the foregoing is why it was such a surprise to me when the idea for this story popped into my head - I'd legitimately forgotten how pleasant that sensation is of being in a creative flow state and the ideas are just "coming" to you. I'm not going to say it's better than sex, because it isn't, but it's an intensely pleasurable intellectual sensation.
Why do ideas rarely come to me anymore? Half of the answer is just growing up and having a more keenly honed sense of what works and what doesn't. It's not merely that the four novels or novellas I wrote earlier in my life had a strong premise but were let down by the execution - I think even the basic premises of all of these novels were unworkable to start with, and I was too young/inexperienced/immature to recognise that at the time, so close to my creation and so caught up in the act of creating that I failed to appreciate how dumb my creation was. I remember a handful of the ideas for stories and novels I had when I was younger, ideas which I fully intended on bringing to fruition when I could find the time, and absolutely all of them were utterly terrible. (And that's not even getting into the ideas I've forgotten - I very much doubt there were any gems in there.) Like Scott talking about the Chamber of Guf, I think it's very possible that ideas for stories appear in my subconscious at about the same rate as they always did, but my quality control filter prevents them from rising to the level where I'm consciously aware of them. I'm very excited about the idea for this story, in large part because I feel like it has a very strong "elevator pitch" - even if I can't pull it off, I feel like someone could do something interesting with the same basic premise. This is in stark contrast to my third and fourth novels in particular, which were navel-gazing narcissism from start to finish.
But the "quality control filter" explanation doesn't explain why melodies don't come to me as often as they used to.
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I have continued to write the story I'm working on, albeit slowly. I'm currently over 12,300 words, which is nearly the length of Ted Chiang's Story Of Your Life, and I'm probably about a quarter of the way through so far.
Wondering what TheMotte's opinion on lengthy scientific exposition in sci-fi is. I currently have a big block of speculative biochemistry in the latter half of the current draft of the story, and some of my beta-readers... don't like it. I've tried to simplify it so it's understandable while still maintaining the necessary verisimilitude, but in general I get the feeling it might be too much. Personally, I've always liked large infodumps of speculative science in my fiction, the chapter Orphanogenesis in Diaspora with its detailed and lengthy descriptions of how the conceptory creates an orphan is probably one of my favourite openings to a story ever, but in general this kind of thing seems to make people's eyes glaze over.
some general comments:
And on exposition - First decide who you are writing for. Greg Egan writes for quite a different audience compared to Watts. If you are going for a niche audience like Egan then you're going to need to find beta readers who are part of that audience.
If you are writing for a more general audience like Watts then I don't like a lot of this exposition. If you study the way Watts provides info, it is relevant to the narrative, and expressed in a way that allows a non-expert to understand it. This is part of the skill of this type of science fiction writing, taking some obscure speculative science concept and presenting it in a way that is comprehensible and evocative, such that it is a crucial part of the story and the audience is actually interested in how it works for that reason.
A couple of examples - I don't understand why you tell us the orbital parameters of planet nine when introducing it. Even if the semi-major axis is somehow crucial to the story later on, readers are not going to remember that. Also, being more evocative with the detail that you do provide - "semi-major axis of 545 AU" vs, for example, "the Sun hung as one pinprick amongst thousands; Planet Nine was brushing the apex of its orbit, over five hundred times further from its parent than Earth." Sometimes I felt like I was reading an excerpt from a scientific paper, not prose.
Second example, the cortical modems, which are cool, but when you introduce them we get a bunch of jargon about how they work before you actually show us their effects in prose. In my opinion this should always be the other way around. Show us what it does, and then the audience thinks, oh, this is cool, I wonder how it works, then you can bust out the exposition (woven into the narrative in a comprehensible and evocative way, of course, rather than all dumped at once).
All just my two cents of course.
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How's your project going @Southkraut?
At this rate, I'm going to be the one who needs motivating. In my defense, I made several commitments leaving me with little time for Highspace. Some of them would actually make a good Tinker Tuesday entry, but *something something, never cross streams*.
It's a struggle.
Stride documentation is close to useless and the community may be willing to help but is often unable to do so effectively. There are very simple thing that Stride simply can not do out of the box. When I try to do something with Stride, it usually doesn't work, sometimes works after a lot of fiddling, and often stops working spontaneously for no discernible reason. The elevator pitch of Stride is great, but the reality so far is nothing but frustration. If this is as far as it goes, then at least I was able to cannibalize their code base for a bunch of useful utility code. But actually using the Stride Engine is a pain. Right now I've slowly been able to claw some of what I needed out of the engine, but it was a fight every step of the way.
At least I managed to get a deal of refactoring and other useful reworks done on the way.
I'll need to add a few more workarounds before my control scheme works again (Stride's coordinate system is bizarre; +Z is forward...but Cameras and rotations in general look backwards by default). My procedural meshes work again, but I need to wrestle with Stride's material system a little more before they actually look like something again. Performance is crap right now, but I'm putting that off until later; it's too early for profiling.
Aside from the code, I'm doing some concept work on how agents prioritize tasks, but it's still fairly abstract for the time being. I'm definitely overthinking it.
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