Civ doesn’t compare at all, it is nothing. Completing the main scenario (building a silo and launching a rocket) can take days to weeks if you jump in with zero knowledge.

Factorio is the definition of a dopamine drip. You start with a pickaxe and work your way up through the technology tree. Coal, coal-burning mining rigs, smelting furnaces, conveyor belts, coal-burning inserters, steam generators, electricity, assemblers, vehicles, oil processing, chemical processing, better generators, better automation, more complex materials… and that’s just the individual items. You’ll have to build assembly lines for increasingly complex items, transport networks with conveyor belts, pipes, or trains, find raw material quarries and wells because everything is finite, then either manage air pollution or expect to be overrun by alien bugs. Small individual steps, but they add up very quickly and there’s always something to do.

I’m forcing myself not to buy the recently released expansion because I know I’ll lose days to it. If you have ADHD or a thing for automation, it is stupidly addictive. The factory must grow.

It’s the closest we’ll ever come to time travel. You start playing and suddenly it’s the next morning.

Having your spacecraft ripped apart by floating point rounding errors was part of the charm, and I’m sure that some speedrunner has used a massive disintegration bomb to cause the physics calculation frame to hang and phase through an obstacle.

Ah yes, the holy trinity:

• DPS
• DPS (but blue)
• DPS (but green)

https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

I was ready to have a rant about PHP. Well played.

I’m cool with the weed, but single-use vapes is where I draw the line.

What did he do this time?

Managers will still expect you to do 60% of your work on 60% of your keyboard.

You’ll encounter math eventually. It could be as simple as implementing linear interpolation for a custom type, or understanding why a type is not suited for a particular application (e.g. never use floating points to represent money). If you delve into low-level networking, you’ll need a good understanding of binary/decimal/hexadecimal conversions and operations. If you go into game development or graphics, you won’t survive without a deep understanding of vectors, matrices, and quaternions. Any kind of data science is just math translated to a machine-readable language.

In my opinion, knowledge of the basic concepts is more important than being good at actually performing mathematics with pen and paper. For example, if you need to apply a transformation to a vector, nobody expects you to whip up a program that does the thing. Instead, you should immediately know:

• what a transformation is (translation, rotation, scaling, projection, etc),
• that each transformation has a corresponding transformation matrix,
• that you’ll have to deal with inhomogeneous and homogeneous coordinates, and
• that you’ll have to combine the transformation matrices and the original vector.

That abstract knowledge will give you a starting point. Then you can look up the particulars – the corresponding transformation matrices, the method to convert between inhomogeneous and homogeneous coordinates, and the process of matrix multiplication. I know because I failed calculus.

I’d be very concerned about the state and safety of those rails.

Self-hosters:

Unacceptable: “You look submissive and enslaveable.”

Acceptable: “You look just like an elf.”

Exhibit #1 of why every vote counts and every voter is needed.

“Oh, it’s not from electrocution. If you fuck with the tram, the driver will get out and break your spine in half.”

I’ve met some tram drivers who would absolutely chase down and beat the piss out of some pedestrians who don’t understand that the rail infrastructure is the rail vehicle’s domain, if given the chance.

Also political memes.

And memes.

Better than spending a day writing the script, only to discover that you’d already written a better one as soon as you’re done.

First day at Antimemetics and I’m already wasting my own time.

Time ceased to be real in late 2019.

IIRC, Twitch uses similar ad injection. Ad blockers get around it by opening new video streams until they find one that isn’t running an ad. Could be wrong though, I’m parroting an uncited comment.

Do people actually believe Apple’s hogwash about privacy?