keepcarrot

joined 4 years ago
[–] keepcarrot@hexbear.net 10 points 1 week ago

I feel like there's a big divide with the phrase "so called" as well, since I grew up with seeing it used sarcastically.

[–] keepcarrot@hexbear.net 8 points 1 week ago

She apparently still has a lot of patreon >.> Not entirely sure who her audience is, I feel like a more trad-lib would just be following, like, David Pakman or something.

[–] keepcarrot@hexbear.net 30 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Those numbers seem low. Too low

[–] keepcarrot@hexbear.net 17 points 1 week ago

Same reason

[–] keepcarrot@hexbear.net 15 points 1 week ago

Tbf a lot of old timey punishments sound like inefficient murder

[–] keepcarrot@hexbear.net 1 points 1 week ago

Risperidone made me have deeper sleep and stopped me from rolling around so much in bed.

[–] keepcarrot@hexbear.net 5 points 1 week ago

The shed I'm living in ranges between 5 and 48 degrees C >.>

[–] keepcarrot@hexbear.net 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I'm pretty sure I've seen the extremely inverted position of "Only small business owners managing labour are the real workers, everyone else doesn't have a "real job" or is lazy for not being a small business owner". That vibe is not uncommon. I hate it.

[–] keepcarrot@hexbear.net 11 points 2 weeks ago

There's a gif of someone in a gorilla costume firing a thompson. Imagine I posted that.

[–] keepcarrot@hexbear.net 28 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

by Margaret

[–] keepcarrot@hexbear.net 7 points 2 weeks ago

Ours are quendas

[–] keepcarrot@hexbear.net 8 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Wandered across a part of the internet that thought Andor was bad because it lacks aliens and Jedi.

 

(based on my further thoughts from someone's comment a while ago)

Things get described as over-engineered, which definitely means something but there doesn't seem to be good consensus on what. I think there are multiple definitions and context tends to be used to work it out.

I think this comes up in military engineering a lot because:

  • the end-users of any product (say, the soldiers shooting the guns and driving the humvees) have much less say about the products they are using to the people procuring them, and are quite distant from said people. Often, it is cheaper to train soldiers to attempt to handle the weirdness of a product instead of replacing the product.
  • the production runs are a lot smaller
  • the iterative process for military equipment has a much longer cycle
  • the ability of a segment of the military to go with a different product (e.g. if you command a tank platoon, you can't decide that you're going to go with the Challenger 2 instead of the Abrams, let alone a T-90), which means there is less incentive to compete directly with rivals offering similar products. I realise that we're socialists here, but there is at least some motivation for Ford to offer a similar product to Toyota and that helps iteratively improve both products to some extent. Hence this post going in "guns". All these tanks, AA missiles, guns etc. don't have their designs pared down in the same way the Toyota Hilux has been (though one can see such long term iterative designs have some over-engineerings creep in)

However, I've seen it used to describe bridges, small plastic gadgets, all sorts of things. So what are the different over-engineerings? Note that none of these really describe an overallocation of engineering time, or effort directly. There is such a thing as a bad engineer.

Over-engineering 1: This product has very complex systems in it which are either unnecessarily hard to manufacture, hard to use, or hard to maintain.

So, this definition is the one we think of when we think of German (or Swiss) Engineering. With military equipment, this is definitely true during the Nazi era, but things like the HK G11 or the Swiss PE-57's ejector. The late war Nazi tanks had some of these for specific components but also had other problems. I could imagine something like the F-35 also suffering from this.

This can actually happen for a number of reasons. One can imagine management, without true understanding of the systems, makes a request (or demand) for a mechanical solution to a problem that has appeared in testing, usage, or even imagined. The problem may be simple to define, but quite complex to solve. The engineers may have been given enough time to solve a problem, but not enough time to iteratively pare down to make it easier to manufacture, use, or make it more reliable (this can happen with either new features or initial features).

Engineers can do this to themselves if they get particularly excited about solving a particular problem and not much interest in iteratively testing and updating their solution, but historically a lot of these have come from management (up to and including literally Hitler).

The design is feature complete but has had insufficient time allocated to testing a design (from production to actually hooning around in a park).

Over-engineering 2: Feature Creep and related things

So this one causes the first one a lot, but I think the nature of design in large organisations tends towards this. Features tend to be added but rarely taken away.

Thus, you might wind up with a hatch that requires not much strength to open, easy to operate, thickly armoured, pretty cheap, and traps the crew if it's under 20 degrees and a little bit dusty. The energy to say "maybe we could just have a spring loaded hatch with a lock on the inside instead of this thing" has to maintain itself through multiple layers of bureaucracy, people without the authority to make the change and so on. And each person responsible for that communication has to maintain that energy until it gets to someone who does have that authority. And the connecting links may actually be pretty attached to a particular design.

This results in products having lots of little clever mechanisms on it that may be better replaced with training or simpler devices that take a huge amount money to produce, are unreliable, have low endurance, and so on. I'm sure we could all think of a thousand examples.

Over-engineering 3: Arbitrarily high safety factor.

Again, this is likely the result of not enough engineering time allocated, so crude shorthands wind up being used. You don't know the minimum thickness of steel for a bridge to support a 10 tonne truck going over this particular ravine, but you do know that this ridiculously large amount thickness of steel with supporting trusses will hold up a 10 tonne truck and you kinda want to go home tonight.

This can also result from using standardised parts; the gap between a part that will fail and the next part up might be quite large, so you wind up with an absurd amount of material holding what might otherwise be a light cheap thing together.

In military tech, we often see up-armouring without any corresponding improvements to the chassis, suspension etc. even though it could hypothetically be done for pretty cheap (but not as cheap as not addressing it, up front), or even weight reductions in other parts of the vehicle.

Anyway, those were the ones I have been mulling over.

 

So, a while ago I was in a community theater and we put on plays that would break even largely. Our biggest costs were theater rent, followed by specialist hires (a worker with safety training that did our ropes and high powered electrical stuff). We charged pretty cheap tickets in the context of theater, which given the majority of our actors, costuming and props labour etc. was volunteer.

It got me thinking about games. I realise there is an intense dislike of DLC, particularly AAA companies doing day 1 DLC, but even longer term DLC that could not have been made on the budget of the original game and released like a year later or whatever.

The idea was having a platform for, say, RPG systems that's well coded, slick, bla bla bla, and comes with a few base stories, but after that the majority of development after that is done by something similar to the theater group but indie artists, writers etc. and you buy into a long form RPG (or, idk, subscribe on patreon or whatever). Every month (or whatever), some sub-team releases a new part of their adventure or a new system with a new adventure, and you can keep playing with what characters you had before (if that's what's happening).

Things like the Adventurer's Guild (or whatever the D&D one is, where you register and play each adventure bit once alongside thousands of other players) are a thing, this would wind up be something similar but system agnostic and more tech oriented.

IRL, every time a community theater wants to do a show, they don't rebuild the theater and stuff. It's not "wholly original".

I'd also want the writers/artists to be more connected to their community, hypothetically.

The system would have to have very non-coder friendly tools for writers to pull together systems and make maps and stuff. Dialogue trees may be a bridge too far.

 

Just got this email from one of the event ticketing place some of my friends use

 

I've seen it pop up in quite a few threads, sometimes in jest (or sort of in-jest), but I think it comes up enough to talk about seriously, both from an individual behaviour standpoint and a broader activism/socialism/whatever standpoint.

This is also coming from someone that sees themselves as very extroverted (but also autistic and socially anxious, so pretty poor at getting my social needs met), so maybe this whole idea is way off base.

There's two narratives here for discussion in this thread:

  • I struggle with pushing myself to be social, and I am afraid this makes me a poor activist. At some point or another advocating for socialism will rely on socialists to talk to non-socialists in spaces and circumstances that are not comfortable.
  • Socialism, on some level, involves a society with more time and space to socialise. What will this look like for a severe introvert? Will there be room for a person to buy a plot of land in the hills and live separate from society forever? Will I have to go to Commissar DanceClass's Dance Class?

And two sentiments that should be discussed with those narratives re: other people:

  • Introvert, socially anxious, autistic etc. There are people they get along with and comfortable social situations, but for a variety of reasons need a break regularly
  • "I just hate people"

This whole post was a thought I had when reading the second people-hater. My initial thought was that this was an internal pathologisation of people based on the society we live in. If the only people you encounter day to day are ladder climbing suburbanites whose main interests are competitively assessing lawn heights and promotions, you're probably going to "hate people". However, this may not be the case for all people who claim this of themselves. Maybe they hate other people on the road, people in queues for groceries etc. I just find it hard to believe that someone who genuinely hates all people would hop on to a forum (an entirely social activity) and spend any amount of time there. Nonetheless, it probably happens.

But, I figured that the topic had enough range and nuance to turn into its own thread instead of responding directly, and saw someone else post the introvert activism thing.

One of the things I thought of was the social battery and how it's often expended on work and commuting. If your main social energy is spent at work/commuting, I feel like it's very possible that one might come away with a dim view of any social activity (incl. organising) and your ability to participate in it, especially if you'd largely done it since school (another cutthroat highly hierarchical social setting).

(how is commuting social? You're in a constant negotiation with other drivers to avoid bumping your 2 ton $20k machines into each other, with a wide variety of levels of aggression, empathy, engagement etc. It's not words, but there is a communication there that can be very draining)

 

(Um, I don't know why your post triggered me into writing this pitch for a wishlist game. Maybe the minecraft with guns bit? idk, I got excited) (repost, as this is enough crap for its on top level post)

I have this pitch for a builder game where you're a military procurement/engineering firm. The LoD would be about what Stormworks has (25cm blocks, or maybe 20 or 10 cm), you spend time fiddling around with air fuel ratios and RADAR etc. You'd be able to fiddle with various war nerd numbers on vehicles you create, but there wouldn't be much for you to do with the vehicles directly. Instead, you teach bots how to use the vehicle (some sort of waypointing system, some vehicle tests like turning, acceleration etc etc). After that, your vehicle and usage data is compiled and a little war goes on in the background. Hypothetically, this war would be happening on another screen or you could refer to it. Because the vehicle is compiled into this RTS mode and not run as a physics simulation (or at least, would be run as a very cut down simulation), that section would be quite light. Possibly multiple layers to examine (strategic, operational, tactical). Your vehicles would have logistical strain (e.g. fuel, maintenance/wear, damage from fire etc). You'd probably want to define a few other variables on how its used (e.g. This is a TANK, GENERAL PURPOSE, SWARM or something). I don't think it would be possible for an AI to account for all ways people would design vehicles and use-cases, but the basic classes are pretty standard nowadays, and people could request things that feel plausible to the dev.

A few reasons for doing it this way:

  • Having it so that the vehicle is tested by itself on multiple predictable scenarios means the physics simulation (e.g. denting, beams bending etc) can be more detailed, and allows for more complicated vehicles.
  • Once its "compiled" so that the bots can use it, it will run quite light (this is sort of explored in From The Depths, but not to its fullest extent). This couldn't take into account everything possible, but hopefully the bots would use things intelligently (e.g. using cover, grouping tanks, screening etc)

You'd watch combat and take notes on what works well and what does, and work on new designs as the war gets under way. Your new designs that you produce and test would percolate through the logistics system and slowly start appearing on the front.

There'd also be a little thing where you could define your squads that the AI uses in the war (e.g. 12 dudes, 1 command, 2 fireteams, each fireteam has a LAW and 5 assault rifles, command has 1 commander and 2 machine guns etc), with some reference to real world stuff. This would obviously be important for transport vehicles and logistics.

There'd be a mode where you'd have to do it "in real time" (i.e. no pausing for designing), a more freeform creative mode where you can design and save freely without worrying about wars and launch battles with your vehicle instantly, and a thing where you could compile all of your designs into a faction. Presumably, the game would ship with a few real world referenced factions, people could mod in their own ones. And people could also mod in maps that the AI will fight wars on, and opponent factions (of varying degrees of fairness). Tutorial mode, build a truck that carries a squad. It's an electric truck so you don't have to program a gearbox.

It's probably a bit beyond me as a coder (maybe, idk, the primary time I was trying to learn coding was when I had pretty severe depression), but maybe as a fresh godot project if applicable? I think it would absolutely kill amongst a certain sort of war nerd.

Um, comments, I guess. Obviously extremely ambitious on my end, it will probably be another half-started project in my collection :(

 

One of the first cards is planting corn. corn-man-khrush

 

I didn't make it. We made it.

 

And the ridiculous hull down position:

Just bouncing ideas around based on the rumours and speculation on the T14, but also pulled some influence from post-war French vehicles.

Features: The recoil/loading space behind the gun, the gun, and the "mantle" all move as one. This allows for very extreme gun depression (and elevation), though gun pitch is slowed as a result. This was an odd turret design from France. Because I wanted a secondary commander turret, the rear part of the turret remains with the turret ring so that the commander's view isn't wobbling about.

Commander turret on a little elevator. At its highest, it gives the commander a full 360 degree view a meter higher than normal.

The auto-loader runs vertically through the turret. This means that the turret can be extremely narrow, pretty much the width of two slabs of armour and the gun. The autoloader can also handle extreme gun depression and elevation. The concessions made does reduce loading speed compared to other designs though. The narrow turret reduces the width of the heaviest armour section (the front of the turret), significantly reducing weight.

Roomy in crew compartment. Just because of the positioning of seats and the shape of the cavity between the treads and the turret, there is a bunch of extra space. It's slowly being filled with stuff. The commander can directly see the screens of the driver and gunner and can tap them on the shoulder to yell at them.

Bads: To service the autoloader and load ammunition, someone has to be outside the tank. Could not think of a way to armour the separation between the magazine and crew without massively increasing size. There is a camera inside the magazine and will be manual controls for the gunner to try to unstick ammunition.

Poor hatch open ability. You are very reliant on equipment. The driver and gunner have some ability to open hatches and ride head out, but the commander doesn't due to the turret's bulk preventing them from having a top hatch.

Ammunition cook off is pretty catastrophic, but crew survivable. Ammunition armour and various cook off measures are not perfect, but are there.

Things I'd do differently given Stormwork's minimum working dimensions of 250 mm blocks and other game things: The tank would probably be smaller, especially in height. The top and bottom of the tank probably does not need 250 mm of composites each, and the turret ring doesn't need to be half a meter. I might also make the crew lie down more.

Have not figured out how to make a good looking working ADS. It's pretty cramped in there.

I could do a lot more with the electronics. The 250 mm connectors mean you can't have that many inputs and outputs.

The engine would probably be extremely different. I'm hitting about 50 km/h usually and can probably get more out of the engine atm, but it's two T-17 diesel engines. Not sure about the power to weight advantages of turbines, but unfortunately the turbines in game are enormous. The logistical advantage makes more sense to me.

Turret got a bit too cramped for the coaxial, but it would be there as well.

The engine deck would be openable. Is hard to do in Stormworks.

I'd probably do some sort of fabric seal for when the gun is at extreme depression or elevation? Maybe telescoping sheets? idk, something like that.

 

I have pretty much never haggled in my life and every service worker I've interacted with has no authority to adjust prices.

(Actually when it comes to art commissions I seem to severely undersell to end the interaction as quickly as possible)

Honestly seems nightmarish and I feel like I would get charged $50 for a box of cereal regularly. I already feel like I get charged more for things because I hate shopping around for a quote (usually go with the first person I call because I hate rejecting someone after I've asked them for a quote)

 

I said I would describe a magic system in a daily megathread and forgot (well, lost all confidence in the idea). But maybe a thread would be better for this conversation.

I also don't wish to step on anyone's actual beliefs, though practitioners can comment if they have any ideas.

A couple of easy examples:

  • Harry Potter: In this, magic is largely inherited by individuals, though it can be randomly brought in and removed from bloodlines. It does seem to give some level of fatigue when used, but honestly not that much. It does create a caste of "superior" humans by birth, humans who could never be poor and can arbitrarily exact violence on lesser beings. Even their emotions are more powerful than ordinary humans. The books don't really touch on this and our PoV character is almost a "rightful king", inheritor of vast wealth and magical artifacts.
  • Star Wars: This magic is loosely based on buddhism, though the magic itself seems to be more related to living beings (e.g. a river doesn't necessarily have karmic value unless that's what the episode of The Clone Wars is about). Nonetheless, if you squint, you can still see some of the language of "the fundamental interconnectedness of all things". It does, however, seem to have a severe hereditary component. Sometimes, you are just a poo person. In my head canon, the Dark Side is the extreme expression of self, at some point even considering one's own emotions as separate to one's self, and the light side is an acceptance of being a part of the universe. However, I feel like "grey jedi" is more popular amongst the fandom. idk. For some reason, being either very connected or very disconnected from the universe gives you phenomenal magic powers to enact your will, as long as you were born with the power.

Suggest your own short description and maybe an analysis.

I have posted about my magic system before, designed for a little dieselpunk British occupation of the Ottoman Empire, where various explorers are doing biblical archaeology. The players (this was for an RPG) are working for a British industrialist/oil guy who wants to find the tree of life and live forever. Over the course of their adventure, they find various echoes of magic that used to exist in the world but is slowly withering away. The history of magic, they find, reflects their current situation where capital is slowly strangling the world and every bit of will and life from it.

Notes on my magic:

  • Magic comes from people and relationships between people.
  • What it specifically does for most people is nebulous. Probably something like making your hearth a little warmer or a sense of which soil is more fertile? Or maybe something relational? Haven't thought about it much.
  • Magic by the ruling class is stolen. They are born with their own, just like everyone else. However, through exploitation, violence, and trickery, they steal other people's magic (or souls). This gives them a lot more power to do mythological acts, live forever, and pass their stolen magic to their children.
  • To pass magic on to one's children, you have to have some yourself, so it can be nurtured and grow. However, once it has been stolen, this no longer happens. The world's population now is entirely populated by such descendants. The ancient gods that the players encounter refer to the players (and all modern people) as "hollow ones". In the gods eyes, modern people are useless for their goals of achieving immortality.
  • This is also an analogy of how many ancient cities are barely habitable now, as the over-farming has increased the salt in the land to the point where the cities collapsed. As once fertile land was over-exploited, so have people.
  • The gods, having exhausted their populations of magical energy, eventually turn on each other in a scramble to stay alive and in power. This allows the common people to drive them out, causing some of the large migrations of antiquity as the gods and their lackeys flee in one direction or another.
  • This history is eventually forgotten over thousands of years, but is still present in the surviving gods themselves sleeping to conserve energy, transforming themselves into stone or bronze statues or whatever, and some artifacts they've imbued with power and given to their lackeys.
  • The last most active god is Yahweh, who ate his wife Asherah as they fled south into modern Arabia.

I'm not sure if I want magic to return to the world at the end of the story, or the British benefactor to find the tree of life withered and broken. If it does return, it should be able to spread (somewhat thinly) throughout the world through non-exploitative relationships.

It is also very soul-like, but seems unnecessary for life as we know it.

 
 

Thought Cuban (or maybe vietnamese) gun ownership was a lot higher than it was by "guns per capita". Vaguely remember somewhere here that it's quite high but locked up in community armouries in case of invasion rather than individually held on to.

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