domain:arjunpanickssery.substack.com
Redot
With the limited amount time that I have recently, playing around with Redot feels like something more doable than slogging through bigger Highspace features I got stuck on, so it looks like this is what I'll be doing until my brain resets and/or I'll have more time to push through the block there. Contrary to @Southkraut's pessimism, it looks like they're pulling through. Last week I took it for a spin and saw that everything seems to work pretty much like with old Godot, so I dusted off some old projects to see what I can do with them. Ages ago I took a GPU programming course, and made a little simulation of a swarm chasing the player, while respecting some basic rules of physics (like collisions with each other). This was still done in Unity, and while it mostly worked, I started running into some performance issues as complexity grew.
Years later GPU programming is still a niche, but it looks like there's more experience around it, and I can strip-mine other projects for insights. Specifically what I'd like to do is see if I can adapt this into Redot, and push my old simulation to really high numbers (aiming for millions, go big or go home).
@Southkraut, you mentioned you probably wouldn't have time over the past week, but I'll traditionally ask how are you doing anyway. Also, last week you said:
Looking back upon my Unity project and comparing it to my current Godot/Stride iterations, I am struck by one fundamental difference that wasn't even intentional. My old project is primarily a physics simulation, and whatever abstract logic or behavior happens is a consequence of physical entities interacting. In the new version, everything is abstract entities that possibly project into the physical realm. Huh. I'll need to do some more thinking about this.
Can you elaborate on this. I think I know what you mean, but I don't know what consequences, if any, it would have on picking an Engine, for example.
Also, congrats on the new job! I recall you posted about being burned out with the old one a while back. I've been in a similar position not long ago, so I'm glad to hear you took matters into your own hands, and hope the new job is a better fit.
roystgnr
6hr ago
It's not a discrete "rapid shutdown mode", it's just the smooth Gompertz-Makeham curve. Your odds of a natural-causes death double every 8 years, starting at age 30 at the latest (though possibly much earlier; non-natural causes obscure things for 20-somethings and teens).
Come up with a medical revolution that cures 50% of death? You'd think that would double lifespans but no, it just buys everyone 8 more years. Exponentials are wild.
AverageMinimax
7hr ago
Not Just Bikes's proposed solution is to completely ban anything related to cars from city centers
So it seems that they are effectively "Just Bikes" instead of "Not Just Bikes", right?
Astranagant
7hr ago
This is exactly wrong in my experience, my social group are late-20s early-30s, and the least intelligent ended up in labouring and other outdoorsy jobs and as a consequence aged way faster than those who hid from the sun in an office all day.
AvocadoPanic
7hr ago
Is buying blood of teenage boys better than other 'fluids'?
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
7hr ago
That I didn't know.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
7hr ago
Johnson is notable insofar as he spent his 20s and 30s sacrificing his health to make a bunch of money. And now he's burning that money to regain health and youth and is, through absurd amounts of effort, at least partially successful.
Judging by the pictures in Time, he looks like the biggest fitness freak in the world, which he probably is. He looks about 10 years younger and will probably be one of these old guys that have a crystal-clear memory and can put on their socks standing up until they keel over in their nineties.
Which is not a bad thing at all, but it's a very long way from immortality.
arsv
8hr ago
Getting into doomer territory, ... They (the car makers) might also get public transit banned
Not sure why he's making a distinction between self-driving cars and public transit. Self-driving cars are a form of public transit. They are not private vehicles, they owned and operated in a way that's quite similar to busses. In a way, a self-driving car is just a better bus.
There are issues that are specific to self-driving cars due to their personal nature compared to conventional mass transit, which are mostly related to privacy. It's much easier to track you in your "personal bus" than it is in a bus with 20+ other people. But he barely touches on it, and also, conventional mass transit would be quickly losing much of the advantage in that respect anyway due to technological progress in surveillance technology.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
8hr ago
homophobic joke about it not being blood deleted
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
8hr ago
This video popped up in my feed and I hated it. It's not wholly bad, but NJB is arguing in bad faith, using the good old Gish Gallop to overwhelm the viewer. Here's how I would structure a movie about self-driving cars:
- Adding an auto-pilot to your own car will not change the cities much, so it's not really a qualitative change
- To replace private car ownership with a shared pool of autonomous cars, they have to be cheap, safe, fast, clean and ubiquitous. We'll examine the best-case outcome later, but here's why reaching it is a tall order:
- it's hard to make them cheap: blah
- it's hard to make them safe and fast: blah
- it's hard to keep them clean: blah
- it's hard to make the ubiquitous: blah
- But let's imagine autonomous cars are cheap, safe, fast, clean and ubiquitous. How will our cities be reshaped by them?
- since cars drive at inhuman speeds, they need a grade-separated road network that excludes pedestrians and drivers
- since they are ubiquitous, this road network has to reach all destinations to be safe
- since they are cheap, this road network can't be built underground and will need to be based on the existing road network
- etc.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
8hr ago
If you follow the logical conclusion of the above, this is even better - you can have the luxury of your own personal vehicular conveyance without the need to actually park it nearby your destination! Simply roll up, get out, and tell your car to either keep driving or find the nearest parking location. Tap a button on your phone, summon your car to wherever you ended up. All of a sudden, the need for immeadiate parking is killed, and the state mandated and required need for parking that drives current urban development has no leg to stand on, and we can all go back to the wonderful idyllic standard of walkable town centers of the early 20th century. Yay.
NJB's video is terrible, but he makes at least a couple good points:
- you'll still want your car to arrive quickly, so this means that at rush hour cars will have to drive downtown en-masse and either find some parking or keep driving around the block
- while you won't need a parking space next to your house, the demand for roads will only increase: instead of having to use a school bus or their parent's car the kids now will be able to drive to school, to the mall, to their friend's house etc.
Bryan Johnson has actually done it, both him towards his father and his son towards him. I'm actually really interested in this, because people are already getting my relatively pretty healthy blood for free (which is good), and I'd love to be able to use it to improve my dad's health.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
9hr ago
Sure, I agree with all of that. It would be silly for skeptics of LLMs to “declare victory” now. I say give it another 5 years at least. The main reason I brought it up is because Ilya’s the one who’s saying it, which lends quite a bit more authority to the claim.
erwgv3g34
9hr ago
Sulla's tutorial got me started with Civ IV; I recommend it in the strongest possible terms.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9hr ago
There are beginners playthroughs on youtube: https://youtube.com/watch?v=CgBnpbaQFo4 or https://youtube.com/watch?v=_f-pwq6cKwk?list=PLs3acGYgI1-vw-A3LHOb_BDQxKNtv1tze
There's a text guide here (this would be the best IMO for getting started, in terms of efficient reading): https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/beginner-help-the-basics.648469/
There's a slightly more advanced tactic/strategy guide here: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/sisiutils-strategy-guide-for-beginners.165632/
The game manual is here: https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/civ-4-manual.12753/
The map is pretty straightforward. It's all about getting three resources - food, commerce and production. There's a little button you can press on to show the per-tile yields, another one that highlights special resources.
You get the most value in making cities near food resources so they can quickly grow and get pops working other tiles: hills, mineral resources and forests for production or luxury resources/coast/rivers for commerce. Commerce is wealth, culture, espionage and most of all research, you control where exactly it goes with sliders.
No_one
9hr ago
People who live long don't take hundreds of supplements, but are generally those who love life, themselves, socially active and even a bit insufferable. Like Trump. Oldest person in my family was a bit like him, also pretty sharp to old age, very high self-regard.
Lifting weights to restore muscle lost after sarcopenia starts in sixties really helps. You won't live much longer, but you can move around and do stuff. E.g. Dr. Eugster who decided to lift weights to regain muscle at 87, lived to 97 pretty actively. Or here's Ernestine Shepherd, training old people in a gym at age.. probably late 80s.. She had a body better than most twenty-somethings by 80, nice muscle definition, erect posture. (see attachment for age 85)
If they're physically active and careful enough, easily live to mid 90s.
My grandma who I'm talking about had a massive heart attack at 79 after smoking for half a century, the kind that usually kills people, then lived fairly sedentarily on heart medication until 93 and her irreversible overnight fall in the bathroom while living alone. After that she spent a year in a hospice, mostly sleeping or drowsing but lucid for the daily hr one of her sons came, brought her beer and visited. Her mind was going so she lost her filter, and we heard incredible things. I wonder if she'd have preferred DNR.
No_one
9hr ago
Joe Rogan claims a stem cell therapy basically fixed one of his problematic joints.
No_one
9hr ago
Some book recommendations for you and anyone else:
Classics: I rate Clarke much higher than either Asimov or.. Bradbury. As a writer. Although honestly even if Clarke paid for child sex in Ceylon, that still makes him a vastly more likeable individual than Asimov, the eternal consequences of evolution denying high-modernist tool..
Midrange: SM Stirling is essentially an SF writer even if he writes fantasy, which he seems to like. He's not the best but he's pretty good and the Draka series is unparalleled as a political Turing test. He is a rare type of guy - a die-hard 1776 liberal, but biologically aware, evolution-pilled in regards to organisms of all scales, whether individual or societal. Most of his stuff is weird alt-history like the Dies the Fire series where electricity stops working. Probably a good read, but I like his SF. He has notably contributed imo the best novellas to both the War World anthology (about the codominium prison moon of Haven) and Niven's Kzinti one.
Alastair Reynolds (active from cca 1990) worked as an astronomer, so he's got the hard-sf part down. It is often space opera, but it's a fresh look at how that'd be in a STL universe where you can, at best, hug the lightspeed because a bunch of actually elite human capital- cybernetic researchers taking advantage of freedom on Mars networked their brains with nanomachines, became something way beyond human and moved the tech frontier in a big way to infinite thrust engines that, rumor has it, just tap the ongoing big bangs in parallel universes thus allowing constantly functioning reaction drive.
Setting (for the obvious reason) doesn't have superhuman AIs with a few exceptions.
New:
I have sympathies to anarchists, one can't really feel glad about the necessity of the entire sausage machine required in our finite world on a flat surface. So Iain M.Banks's Culture series isn't really about the utopia or even that political, it's more of a very high effort space opera.
You seemed to have missed Greg Egan. If he's too weird/spergy for you with his math stuff, it's not omnipresent. The short story collections Axiomatic and Luminous are very good, Distress & Zendegi I'd also recommend.
Like I said in a previous FF thread, I very much appreciate Walter Blaire, a new true SF writer. As in, it's not just lasers pasted in for rifles, it's about internally coherent worlds that are different to ours for material reasons. That's why I came to dislike Star Wars - it's just the stale old WW2 myth but in space.
Although he takes more of the 'human/history' angle, as his books are less about shiny tech but more about the ways organisations and biology trap people. Especially raising the salience of the latter is very praiseworthy and I hope to one day make him profoundly cringe about the implications of that. Guy writes as fun book, steps on the sorest thumb there is inadvertently.
Ditto6687
10hr ago
Off topic but whats the best intro to Civ4 for someone who can't even parse the map? Aside from playing the game solo obviously that's the best.
No_one
10hr ago
But Space Engineers has a grid.
The problem with Space Engineers is that a building game with a default multiplayer build limit that you can max out in 6 hours is kinda pointless. Played some of it but honestly..
No_one
10hr ago
I deleted that mess (it worked but required babysitting) and remade it with bigger, better thought out modular parts.
Now it's almost attention free and keeps working.
Gleba is really good imo because stack inserters are godly. You can basically 4x the capacity of any belt. Incredible!
No_one
10hr ago
I didn't play it in this game but it's lovely looking at it.
Infinite power. Infinite minerals. 50% productivity smelters. You can pipe liquid metal everywhere. You can easily fill out a belt with basic metal components.
What else do you need ?
No_one
10hr ago
Biters in vanilla are nothing, nothing. Just build walls and minefields. You've got robots for that. It's a set of pretty simple blueprints you copy & paste. Terrain is flat, rocks dynamited.
Finally knuckled down and put together an actually good item quantity balancer (no mods, loads a train car with ~30 different items in specified quantities. Pretty simple. Subtracts what's in the buffer box from what's in the train, turns every negative smaller than -10value into 1, and puts that to the filter inserter. Inverse filter inserter on the other side, with smaller stack, and it does the job.) If you spam this and segment the logistic network (using the same algo) to push non-train stuff out networks and push normal items in, you can expand endlessly.
Hell with that you could expand endlessly even with Rampant as with nuclear shells cleaning up what's actually 'Deathworld squared' becomes a possibility, your wall just has to be high firepower enough to deal with inevitable massive attack Rampant loves to spring at you. Once you have nukes, blasting the entire area around your base with nuclear fire feels so, so satisfying. (have to do this manually, It's way too much of a waste, algo isn't made for nuclear shells).
The only downside is the UPS drops to 10 for 3 minutes every 45 minutes when Rampant is busily moving the kill counter into the half a million range. But the fireworks are epic.
I did add alot of prefaces and assumptions to my argument, yes. I personally doubt we'll be seeing functioning, self-driving cars any time soon.
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