kuberoot

@kuberoot@discuss.tchncs.de

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨proportional reaction⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The issue with Lua’s and/or in this context is that they don’t work if false or nil are valid values. In a and b or c, if b = false, the result is always c.

  I also love null-related operators like ?? and ?. for this, since they explicitly check for null, letting you handle any non-null values for optional/default values. The syntax can get a bit cursed, like maybeNull?.maybeMethod?.(args) in JS, but I still prefer that to writing out multiple field accesses in an if condition… And arguably the code is only less readable if you aren’t acclimated to it.

  All that said I do really appreciate Lua’s simplicity, as a language that provides tooling to create the features you want instead of building them into the language, though I wish it had some conventional regex instead of its own patterns.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Invest⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  What the fuck did I just witness? No, really, can somebody explain?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  That actually sounds like a fun SCP - a word that doesn’t seem to contain a letter, but when testing for the presence of that letter using an algorithm that exclusively checks for that presence, it reports the letter is indeed present. Any attempt to check where in the word the letter is, or to get a list of all letters in that word, spuriously fail. Containment could be fun, probably involving amnestics and widespread societal influence, I also wonder if they could create an algorithm for checking letter presence that can be performed by hand without leaking any other information to the person performing it, reproducing the anomaly without computers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hollow Knight: Silksong Sparks Debate About Difficulty and Boss Runbacks⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I disagree, runbacks are as much difficulty as having to recover your currency after death, or even having to recover your items after dying in Minecraft. It’s a punishment for dying, and a way to make you treat it seriously.

  It can incentivise the wrong things, punish experimentation and make players stick with what they know, even if better options exist. You’re free to dislike it, and it has downsides, but dismissing it as “not difficulty” is just dishonest.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Plex got hacked.⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not a security expert, but to my knowledge that’s the point - even a unique salt global to your site/service can help. Worth mentioning are rainbow tables, which are databases of hashes for known strings, so you can take a hash and look up the string, and very easily defeated by salts.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Plex got hacked.⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  If the password is securely hashed, and the attack only includes data exfiltration, then there’s theoretically no risk of breaking into users’ accounts anyways. However, the issue is that if somebody can log into your Plex account, that means they got your password somehow - and if they did get that password, they can use it elsewhere. So if there’s any reason to change your password on Plex, then there’s just as much reason to change that same password elsewhere.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Plex got hacked.⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I do think they missed a bit about password reuse, since they tell you to reset the password on their site, you should be changing the password on any other sites where you reused it. But yeah, not arguing about it being good otherwise.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Well, shit.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m curious - was it also a checkbox that immediately applied when toggled, instead of not actually applying until you press save?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New Valve trademark for 'Steam Frame', looks like we're getting new hardware⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I really hope not, that feels like crypto all over again, with inconsistent payouts and varying electricity prices… And on top of that probably awful service since people tend to have the weirdest internet connections.

  Though if you remove the part where it’s used to stream games to other players, that sounds too niche to be viable, but could be cool. If going in that direction, I’d imagine it more likely to be gaming servers for businesses, like VR gaming spots, where they have multiple gaming computers hooked up to headsets.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hollow Knight: Silksong is out now on Steam - and it broke Steam servers for 15 minutes and counting now⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not a soulslike fan myself, but I don’t think hollow knight is very soulslike - the combat is very snappy, avoiding locking you into animations or making you consider your momentum, and I have the impression soulslikes also tend to be way more environmentally lethal, so to speak.

  It might have some of that visual/lore/exploration vibe though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Little Pea Shooters⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  So, the issue is, as far as I know the calculations are dead simple - you “enter” and “exit” the planet’s influence at the same distance from the planet, which means your potential gravitational energy didn’t change, so from the orbital mechanics point of view, from the planet’s frame of reference, your velocity should stay the same.

  As you “fall” in the orbit around the planet, you’re converting potential gravitational energy to kinetic energy, but as you “climb” you convert it back into potential gravitational energy, ending with the same amount of each kind of energy. The only change is that the velocity is redirected.

  With that in mind, it’s why, from my knowledge, the equations are really simple, with the only complications being trigonometry (to resolve the angles) and pythagoras (squaring, adding and getting the square root make the result unintuitive).

  Going back to your graph, if I were to do the math, according to my theory:

  • In A, let’s say you go in with 200 speed, and 0° angle (for simplicity). That means relative to the planet you have 100 speed.
  • In B, you gain some speed by converting potential energy to kinetic. We can’t say how much you gained, because we’re missing any real measure of distance and mass, but the neat thing is - it doesn’t matter, because:
  • In C, you turn that kinetic energy back into potential energy, and end up with the same speed you entered at, at the same distance. This means you now again have 100 speed relative to the planet, but aimed at a 60° angle. We can now add the velocity vectors of the planet and the velocity relative to the planet to get the velocity relative to the sun, using the planet’s velocity as one axis, getting a vector of [100+100*cos(60°); 100*sin(60°)], or [150; 86.6025], with magnitude of 173.2051, which is less than the 200 we went in with.

  If you want an intuitive example of what I’m referring to, consider a planet approaching you as you are stationary relative to the sun. If we assume ideal, presumably impossible, entry and exit angles of 0° and 180°, leaving the planet’s gravity field moving in the exact opposite direction than what you entered, you’ll note you’ll be gaining speed on exit either way, despite not moving towards the planet on the approach and “catching up”.

  The graph doesn’t really show anything other than illustrate your thoughts - but there’s absolutely nothing backing that as being true :/

  Either way, it does feel like we’re going around in circles, and I don’t want to be taking up your time unnecessarily. If you have something to disprove my math (maybe my understanding of orbital dynamics is wrong, and it’s not that simple), that’d be a starting point to try to figure out what’s wrong; if you’re interested, I could try to make diagrams, though I feel like they might kind of look the same, just with different numbers based on calculations.

  I guess one last thing I can offer is a video somebody replied to me with elsewhere in the thread, explaining this idea: youtube.com/shorts/kD8PFhj_a8s

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Little Pea Shooters⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, relative motions are more intuitive to me - they make sense, and I can use calculations for them.

  In the first example, you presented 101 speed - this means only 1 speed relative to the planet, and that’s all that’s getting redirected (in the planet’s frame of reference your enter and exit velocity should be the same, since that’s how orbits work). The number is just too small, but your velocity would be planet velocity + 1 on a different vector, which will be less than 101 total.

  If we estimate the angle on the picture is about 50 degrees from the velocity vector, and the speed to be 100+v1, the speed from the planet’s frame of reference is v1 - so, the exit velocity will have components of (100+v1cos(60°)) and (v1sin(60°)), so the final speed relative to the sun should be

  sqrt((100+xcos(60°))^2+(xsin(60°))^2)

  Wolfram alpha suggests this simplifies to sqrt(x(x+100)+10000), and comparing the equation by appending <x+100 gives the solution of x>0

  This means, if my math is correct, with an entry angle of 0° and exit angle of 60°, you always lose speed.

  I could try replacing the angle with a variable and setting a constraint of x>0 and see if the free version of wolfram alpha would spit out something, but just replacing the 60 with y is spitting out some convincing solutions, since in those x is never greater than 0.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Little Pea Shooters⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m sorry, but this comment thread genuinely makes me feel like I’m going insane. You seem to have explained exactly the same thing as me, with the same example, and none of it includes the “fall for longer before you catch up” bit.

  As for the orbit not curving, yeah, I think you’re right - the obvious case is if you’re sitting stationary on the planet’s orbit, but the curious case is if you’re approaching from the sun, with the planet’s velocity plus velocity away from the sun. If I’m not mistaken, in that case you’d end up with the same velocity (minus what you might have lost to the sun’s gravity), but on the other side of the planet’s gravity well, which means you still gained energy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Little Pea Shooters⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ayy, I’m not crazy, that sounds like exactly what I described… The only question is, is the explanation of “you spend longer falling” is bs, or if it makes sense if you conceptualize it differently?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Little Pea Shooters⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Right, but as I explained, it’s the how that doesn’t make sense to me - the explanation that you “fall for longer” doesn’t make sense, since 1. with how orbits work, it takes the same energy and time to “fall” as it does to ascend, and 2. at these scales you can use the planet as an inertial frame of reference, so the angle of approach doesn’t matter for how “long” you “fall”, it’ll be the same regardless of whether you’re moving towards or away from the planet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Little Pea Shooters⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m confused, but this doesn’t make sense to me.

  It shouldn’t matter whether you’re moving in the same direction or not for this, because ultimately it’s all relative - if you set the planet as the frame of reference, the direction you come in from doesn’t matter - just the velocity and angle.

  What I can see working is calculating the in and out angles - if the exit velocity is at a sharper angle relative to the planets velocity than the entrance angle, then your exit velocity “gains” more of the planet’s velocity than the entrance velocity “loses”.

  If you were completely stationary, from the planet’s point of reference, you’re moving with the velocity of the planet. If you then did half an orbit, exiting in the other direction (theoretically), from the planet’s point of reference you have the same speed, just in the other direction - but from the sun’s point of reference, you’re now moving at the planet’s speed on top of the planet’s own speed, thus gaining double the velocity of the planet.

  The issue is, of course, I have no idea if I’m making sense, or missing the point.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨7 years later, Valve's Proton has been an incredible game-changer for Linux⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It does seem to go a step further, Fedora seems to not only require you to install them, but also not provide them in the official repositories, requiring you to use unofficial repositories. Most software in a distro’s repositories doesn’t come preinstalled, but it’s generally as simple as running the package manager.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨7 years later, Valve's Proton has been an incredible game-changer for Linux⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think I was using an NVidia GPU up until about 3 years ago, when I switched to AMD when upgrading, so my knowledge on that front is a bit outdated.

  The arch wiki has more information if you’re curious, but I’m aware of official proprietary drivers, official partially opensourced drivers, separately packaged legacy drivers, and the unofficial opensource Nouveau drivers which weren’t really usable back then.

  What you’re describing sounds odd to me, but looking it up, sounds like Fedora doesn’t package official drivers? I’m having trouble finding proper information on this, but it could be for ideological reasons, since those drivers are proprietary - so the default drivers might be Nouveau, which might be rather broken, both because of lack of workforce and NVidia blocking unofficial drivers from using their devices properly.

  If that’s the case, it’s basically a conflict between ideology and usability within that distribution - it might seem like a great distro for users, and it might be competently made, but when somebody doesn’t care about the ideology and just wants their device to work, they’ll end up with confusion and work to do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨7 years later, Valve's Proton has been an incredible game-changer for Linux⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I will remark that that sounds like a distro issue - I use Arch and the drivers are just in the official distros, no need to add external ones. Just look up what you need on the wiki and install it.

  That said, AMD will still probably be a better experience.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Codeberg: army of AI crawlers are extremely slowing us; AI crawlers learned how to solve the Anubis challenges.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think the issue is that text uses comparatively very little information, so you can’t just inject invisible changes by changing the least insignificant bits - you’d need to change the actual phrasing/spelling of your text/code, and that’d be noticable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK There's a campaign to replace the distorted Mercator world map with the fairer Equal-Earth projection⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If it’s already distorted, switching to a different distortion that’s area-preserving can still be an improvement.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨NO! I don't want to download your app and set up an account. Leave me alone⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think it’s a joke, though it’s not universal, but many services probably either don’t process the image, or use libraries that support webp, and naively limit formats before feeding them in - in those cases, renaming the file can bypass those crappy filters, and other software will probably figure out the filetype based on the actual data.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ukrainian hackers destroyed the IT infrastructure of a Russian drone manufacturer: what is known⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  All information on the manufacturer’s servers has been destroyed, including 10 terabytes of backup materials.

  The numbers might not add up, but it’s possible the hackers had access to the (insufficient, and badly secured) backups to delete them too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨7,818 titles on Steam disclose generative AI usage, or 7% of Steam's total library of 114,126 games, up from ~1,000 titles in April 2024⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  What? It shows up as a footer under the description, and inside is the game developer’s description of how they used AI. Look at Stellaris for example, I remember they claim to use it minimally (in very vague words), but they certainly get to say their piece.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dik Piks⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Obligatory Tom Cardy

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Scifi question about time travel:⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I would assume they sent them after the number was drawn, to before the number was drawn, which means the future self doesn’t need their own message to learn the numbers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Statement on Stop Killing Games - VIDEOGAMES EUROPE⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Sure, but the point is to be realistic and not put undue weight on the developers, right? Binaries can generally be much more permissive than source code when proprietary dependencies are involved, and easier to release “clean” than source code.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The "standard" car charger is usually overkill—but your electrician might not know that [32:26]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Not the same person and cba to get a timestamp right now, but it’s the 80% rule - the electrical stuff isn’t designed to deliver the rated amperage continuously for hours on end, so for car charging, you’re apparently supposed to limit it to 80%. Now, 80% of 50 isn’t 42 but 40, so not sure if it’s a case of 80% not being a precise number or a mistake here, but it roughly checks out.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tunic is awesome and I wish more people talked about it⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not sure which puzzles you’re referring to - do you mean stuff to reach an ending, or the obscure, very much optional, deep secrets?

  It’s been a while since I played it, but I don’t remember grindy puzzles in the main content, bar the big one, but that one felt exhilarating to figure out and solve.

  As for combat, it is difficult, but I remember beating the whole game without turning down the difficulty (which I remember being a thing), so it seemed fine to me… But yeah, people misrepresenting a game is always a risk.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tunic is awesome and I wish more people talked about it⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I will point out that (IIRC) Tunic does have significantly more mechanical progression than some other examples, like Outer Wilds or Toki Tori 2, but they’re all lovely games