softcactus

They are actually pretty simple. Essentially you generate the Dijkstra values for an undirected graph (this can be a grid, navmesh, etc), then you create directed edges pointing from high values to low values. So a grid space of value 8 will point to its neighbors with values less than 8, etc.

All an agent has to do is query their current spot in the graph and it will return a vector that leads them to the next lowest cost. This is useful if you have lots of agents going to the same location.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHcQ4JCj27w

The description of this video has a lot of good resources. I made it when I was a much much worse programmer though so I wouldn't bother actually watching the video lol.

I am not sure why you are being downvoted. I have been doing a project with Homogeneous Transform Matrices recently and also assumed that this was "obvious" since the shear diagonal lives in the rotation part of the matrix. Still, it's a very neat trick and I appreciate the OP for posting it!

I read that it took 16,000 88 flak shells to bring down one bomber. I infer the success of the flak was due simply to quantity.

I am not trying to be pedantic, just wondering out loud. 16,000 shells per bomber sounds like a lot, but I am sure you are familiar with the statistic that 250,000 small-arms rounds were fired for every insurgent killed in Afghanistan, and 25,000 rounds fired per kill in WWII. I can't find an actual hard source on the ratio of bullets per kill though. Bombers obviously cant hide behind cover, but I wonder if that 16,000 number isn't as unreasonable as it seems.

I well know the death rate for B-17 crews - my father flew 32 missions in 1944 in one.

He sounds like an amazing man. I get queasy in light turbulence. I can't imagine the stress and horror of even a single bombing run. That's more than anyone should ever have to go through.

Sorry I worded my previous response poorly.

The 8.8cm german flak gun WAS a radar-guided AA gun.

The Kommandogerat 40 was a rangefinder/computer, not a radar. It had the capability of being radar-guided, but was not necessarily radar-guided by itself.

For the Kommandogerat 40 you needed a direct line-of-sight (they were still used in overcast conditions though) but it would compensate for the velocity vector of the incoming targets, altitude, wind, and would relay fire controls to all the flak pieces in the battery. Not as nice as a radar, but it was able to be fielded in mass quantities, and I think it deserves its place as 2nd most devastating weapon of WWII. Especially since towards the end of the war, the Germans were the ones playing defense. It made the strategic bombing campaigns of the allies very painful. The RAF bomber crews had a 44% death rate. That's deaths, not casualties.

It also excelled in direct fire roles against ground targets.

I beg to differ. It was radar-guided anti-aircraft guns

The 8.8cm german flak gun WAS a radar-guided AA gun.

and proximity fuzes for artillery shells

The axis may not have had proximity fuzes, but the 8.8cm flak was so accurate that during a statistical analysis it was determined that the part of the gun that introduced the most accuracy were the timed fuzes. They switched to shells that detonated on impact and actually ended up scoring more kills than before.

The actual piece of equipment that made this thing so accurate was the fire control computer, the Kommandogerat 40.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1UnrEetRYIuLoUT--ic0i...

Here is a Google Drive link to some scans I made in college of the book written by the designer. It explains all the calculations that the analog computer is doing.

My weight fluctuates pretty normally depending on my exercise level. When I'm actively lifting weights I am in a calorie surplus and usually end up a bit overweight. Losing weight is fairly easy. You just count calories, avoid sugars, and eat high-fiber foods at the start of the meal to feel more full for longer.

I recognize that 'gain weight for the winter famine' is a bit extreme but I'm just willing to gain 5 extra lbs than I normally would.

What does fgemm signify? Why did you set up a redirect to your own HN comments? Memory preservation?

That's a good point, I decided to do some napkin math:

Sanibel Island has 7,821 housing units at an average density of 454.6 per square mile.

Median sales price of the homes in 2021 was $1.64M, average price was similar.

So a rough approximation of the value of the homes on the island alone is $12Bn. I am not sure how you would translate that into damage costs, but in a scenario of total destruction then $12B would be lost.

I have no real evidence other than visiting Ft Myers and Naples a few times, but I can tell you there is (was) a lot of very valuable property right next to the ocean. I don't doubt that if you look at the total distribution of damages that there is a long tail of less severe damage as you go inland, but the conservative estimates from my napkin math shows that it's likely a significant number (over ten billion) occurred just from properties on the small stretch of coastline.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanibel,_Florida https://sanibelrealestateguide.com/average-price-homes/

Build up my savings to the point where I can live comfortably for 2+ years without a paycheck, or 4+ on a tight budget.

DCA into ETFs with the leftovers.

Buy a little bit more non-perishable food than I need every time I go to the store. Extra bag of beans and rice here and there. Also eating unhealthier than usual since I figure if there's a food shortage or energy shortage during the winter I'd rather be 15lbs overweight.

Continue to learn skills that I think will be valuable in the future/will get me ahead of the average person in my field. I was a child in 2008 so I have never experienced a bad labor market, but I figure I just need to be more employable than average (if I am mistaken then that's what the 2+ years of savings are for). There is always money to be made and people will want to hire those with skills that can make them money. If tech is in a bubble then just being able to make CRUD apps wont land six figure salaries anymore. I'll need a good reason for someone to hire me.

Human brains are funny. Obviously the absurd part of all of this is people (literally) building their houses on the edge of the ocean and expecting this to not happen.

However because it's all we know, it seems that the real absurdity would be the government designating these sites as 'no-build' zones-- or at least FEMA washing their hands of any damage that should happen to these sites.

This should be a wakeup call that many aspects of our current way of life are unsustainable, not that it's just standard operating procedure to rebuild from the ground up every 20 years only for everything to be washed away again.

Why is this redirect set up?

Why does this read like Chuck Palahniuk

I always interpreted this work as a satire of Ayn Randian style objectivism/exceptionalism. It's funny that in school we were taught that it was a criticism of communism/socialism when I think it's really a criticism of the popular perception of communism/socialism.

The underlying premise is a misunderstanding of equity that persists today. The idea behind leftist ideologies is not to handicap the brilliant and able, but to extend the material buffers that allow brilliance to flourish to everyone:

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”

But at the time and today, people (leftists included) thought that leftist ideology must have been based in envy or some inferiority complex. Harrison Bergeron is that 'meta-ideology' taken to its extreme.

Yep. I am a junior engineer. I got a message on Linkedin, someone was offering me like $2k/week to take interviews/technical assessments for clients overseas. I asked if it was legal and he stopped messaging me.

I always wondered how their initial python web scraper was fast enough to index the entire internet on that old hardware, even given the small size of the internet at the time. I guess the answer is that they had a local backup at Stanford. Thanks for sharing!

Politics and war aside, I think it's cool that the profile of the B-2/B-21 airframe closely resembles a falcon in a dive. The control scheme of the falcon is similar too. I wonder how much of it is a coincidence and how much is a sort of convergent evolution.

https://www.reddit.com/r/photoshopbattles/comments/g9jn6r/ps...

That's a fair assessment. I don't think I have enough information to determine either way.

Just finished reading through the whole thing. I am curious which part changed your opinion on him? I'll go through my thoughts:

1. I don't think whistleblower protection would have applied anyways since what the government was doing was technically legal.

2. Snowden seems like an asshole and a nightmare to work with, but I don't think that should factor in to the credibility of any arguments he makes which are backed up with sufficient evidence.

3. The biggest thing that changed his perception for me was how much he leaked. It would have been better if he had only gone after documents that pertained to privacy of US citizens.

For anyone who thinks that Snowden is just a puppet of Russia, or that the CIA needs to walk a gray line to defend the US interests in the name of some global greater good:

Do you think those chickens will never come home to roost? Do you think their training and equipment and tactics wont soon come to border patrol, and then your local police department?

Sure, this agency with a carte blanche now is 'only' targeting people who don't look like you or speak your language or share the same values as you. But how long do you think the US can go before its departments are weaponized by someone who has dreams of being dictator of the US? 20 years? 50? 100?

Rather than just writing Snowden off because he would rather live in the relative freedom of an authoritarian nation than rot in the cell of a 'free' one, maybe take his argument at face value and recognize the real danger of unaccountability.

I read it more as him trying to point out an incongruence between American political discourse and the realities of American realpolitik.

On the one hand you have Biden calling out Trumpism/MAGAism as a threat to democracy, on the other hand you have the media hyperfixation on the optics of his speech: 'omg he looks like a dictator!!'

Meanwhile when you look at the machinery underneath and how our system really maintains the status quo, fascism is the standard operating procedure. How can someone claim they want to restore justice and the sanctity of democracy when the extrajudicial killings of US citizens is just another Tuesday?

I don't think he really needed to criticize the substance of Biden's speech, since, given our leaders hyperfixation on optics, there was no substance to analyze in the first place. The speech was nothing but a layer of feel-good frosting concealing the violent means of control underneath.

I think corporate taxation is the only way out of this mess. Tax the profits, take money out of the system. It makes extra sense given that most of this money was injected into the system in 2020 anyways. It's not like it was 'earned' even in the traditional neoliberal capitalist sense. It was an economy-wide bailout and now that it has served its purpose, it's time for the money to return to where it came.

Trying to tackle inflation by suppressing wages is both immoral and silly. How is that a 'free market' solution? It's the equivalent of price controls. I am glad that the Fed has taken that as their position, only because it seems to have made people across the political spectrum realize that there is a real antagonistic relationship between the architects of the system and those living within it.

I was making the underlying assumption that wealth has some correlation with intelligence (for someone who made money in tech at least)

Tech bros need money to get height gainz -> must pass tech interviews/bring a product to market -> intelligence

But also there is probably a correlation between height and wealth as well. Either way I don't think that it's anyone's place to determine who should reproduce.

How would they know? Are you divulging the fact that your height is the result of a procedure on the first date? Also are we assuming that women prefer tall men because they want tall children, not because tallness is just an attractive trait? Why would women choose to engage in casual sex with a tall man if their whole goal is to have tall children? Also how does this lead towards idiocracy? If the less intelligent women are sleeping with tech workers, and more intelligent women are sleeping with naturally tall men, then wouldn't we see the offspring of the tech bros + less intelligent women have average intelligence, while the smarter women are having taller, smarter children?

There are so many assumptions being made here. I want to know what the conditions in this hypothetical world are. It sounds fascinating.

Wow that cellular automata sandbox is almost identical to something I wrote a while back! You might find this article interesting for running arbitrary code in a browser sandbox:

https://blog.risingstack.com/writing-a-javascript-framework-...

I kind of sought to answer this for myself in a roundabout way. My first experience with web dev was React. I never learned "why" so on a recent personal project I figured I'd start from the ground-up.

First I wrote a little 'RTS' game in Javascript where the player writes code for the units in game and runs the code in the browser. But the player/programmer needs more info about the game's state. Which means I need dynamic html components to display the changing state of the game. Easy enough, I used a lightweight library called slim-js to give me the functionality I needed minus the ugly boilerplate of the Shadow Dom. But now my dynamic components were re-rendering every single frame, since they were tied to a callback that was triggered when the game re-rendered. Ok, I'll just save the state of the game into a map and only update when there's a missing value or a new value. But all of this state management and custom component logic is overhead that makes the page harder to maintain.

I also wanted to use typescript to make sure I was passing the right values back and forth, which means transpiling every time I make a change. I also need to serve the index.html with a webserver, so I can import ES modules. Http-server works well enough for this, but what if I want to add another page to my site for watching tournaments run on the backend?

It was a nice exercise to learn /why/ frameworks like React exist. Moving forward I'm definitely going to move to a React-based page since I'm already starting to outgrow my vanilla-ish stack.

Here's the game if you'd like to check it out: https://ai-arena.com/

I see value in it too. Russia was a safe haven for US leftists and civil rights advocates during the 20th century. But they see no actual value in the speech they are protecting outside of 'trolling the US' for lack of a better term (at least after the fall of the USSR).

Yes, if a left wing agitator is rallying their followers to violence, they should face some sort of consequences, and they often have throughout the 20th century. It's not hard to find examples of American three-letter agencies targeting radical leftists. This isn't a hard concept to grasp.

It's not about partisanry, it's about people facing consequences for doing bad things. Why are you ascribing partisanship? You can hold right-wing values and not harass trans people. Conversely you can be a left-wing terrorist. You ascribed partisan affiliation in your head, it was never an argument I was making.

Retaliation by the government. Freedom of speech has nothing to do with private citizens censoring each other.

Very telling that you find more value in the hate speech than in the value of the victims ability to protect themselves. Especially when both are equally as much free speech.

Let me know when it crosses that line then.