I would like to note that suit pants are ridiculously comfortable, and generally a fitted suit is far more comfortable than nearly anything else I wear daily. I don’t understand what crimes society has committed to achieve the outcomes of modern fashion.
Modern fashion dictates simply wearing whatever you are most comfortable in. Most people don't find suits to be comfortable (because they don't put in the effort to get them properly fitted, granted), and thus default to other styles of clothing. But if suits are what you are most comfortable in, then that is what the fashion suggests you must wear. Comfort is the fashion.
It, most certainly, isn't, people wear all sorts of uncomfortable clothes and shoes in the name of fashion. Fashion is all about signalling your status and belonging to this or that social group. Suits are simply associated with people most folks don't want to be associated with.
> people wear all sorts of uncomfortable clothes and shoes in the name of fashion.
Some people do wear all sorts of uncomfortable clothes and shoes, but they do so when they want to reject the fashion. Fashionable people blend into the wall, so naturally some people gravitate towards anti-fashion in order to differentiate themselves from the rest of the heard.
I do agree that it has become fashionable to practice anti-fashion on special occasions, although that isn't the type of fashion we've been talking about.
I very much doubt the fun was found in the physical act of placing units. Instead I’d wager it was in the immediacy of the chaos, and correction of it, as you dealt with the smaller problems — and the micro-optimizations you could apply being involved with every minor detail of the system.
When you switch to blueprints, you move up the abstraction chain; there’s still some optimization in constructing blueprints but largely you’re now just plumbing… chaining together higher level components, simply ensuring inputs == output, and all the microoptimizations are hard to justify because they disrupt your blueprints. The patterns and structures have reduced to only what you’ve specified in your library (where previously you were discovering them out of the many operators the game provides).
But the literal act of placing objects wasn’t the point, yet that’s all the game has become.
I've found that for me, I lose interest in a factory game the moment I have to scale up. It's when progressing through the game means copying an existing solution to a problem and pasting it (a bunch of times) somewhere else rather than coming up with new solutions.
In general, I get bored when I've figured out the solution to a problem but it takes a long time to get it implemented. Which is also why building conveyor belts is typically my least favourite part of any factory game and why I very rarely refactor my base.
> In general, I get bored when I've figured out the solution to a problem but it takes a long time to get it implemented.
Not a factory game, but the designers of Portal 2 talked about this. They noticed that in the first game there were puzzles where people would figure out what to do, but then get stuck on actually being able to do it, which was frustrating. So for the second game they endeavored to make it so that the challenge was always in the solution to the puzzle, never in executing the solution.
This is why I got bored of Dyson Sphere Program. Once you travel to other solar systems, all you get are resources that let you skip certain production chains. The proliferator spray then made direct insertion inefficient.
The planets in Factorio have new buildings, new mechanics, and certain resources are cheap while others are more scarce.
I've played factorio since version 0.3 and modded Minecraft since 1.0. I've always lamented the points in any playthrough where a new feature makes the old way of doing things obsolete - but in Factorio in particular, it has never actually turned out very bad. There is always enough gameplay in the next abstraction tier that it hasn't made the game boring, although it does change what it is. The ladder starts when you get burner miners (extremely early) and you never have to mine by hand again. When you get electric miners you never have to refuel them by hand again. Those are already drastic gameplay shifts you experience within the first 20 minutes. It only keeps going from there - construction bots, solar power, logistics bots. The switch from handcrafting machines to having your factory craft them for you. Oil processing. Advanced oil processing. Trains. Power armour. Modules. Quality.
In Angel's Mods, much more than in the base game, there are so many of these points where your old factory process line is obsolete and your best option is to completely dismantle it and build the newer process you just unlocked, although the old one can keep running until you get around to that. It's a nonstop circus of redesigning and rebuilding. They haven't introduced any fundamentally new mechanics mind you - that all just comes from expansions in the set of recipes and machines available (and there's a reason every Angel's modpack includes Helmod). I've never tried Pyanodon's. Bob's Inserters also makes you want to redesign your layouts every time you unlock new inserter directions.
Part of the game is designing copy-pastable layouts that you can just repeat in a row, or tile in a grid - once you get to the stage where that's practical to do. You don't build each copy individually, you let your bots do it. If your bots can't do it then make it so they can, before you can say you're at this milestone. Also trains make grid patterns or "city blocks" very practical.
I consider PRs to be primarily a defense of the architecture, and to a lesser degree a general sanity check. It’s also a useful opportunity to enforce automations are being run
I consider 99% of my "defense of the architecture" strategy to be teaching my team why the architecture is important, how to think about it, and invite they commentary on it as we own and evolve it together. And of course if they are doing something and want input or are uncertain, then my door is open.
If PRs are a notable part of my architecture defense, I'm going to work on investing in the team instead of reviewing PRs.
> I consider 99% of my "defense of the architecture" strategy to be teaching my team why the architecture is important, how to think about it, and invite they commentary on it as we own and evolve it together.
Nice way to avoid the responsibility for any team fuckup: it's not me, I only teach them, they decide themselves.
Welcome to the tech industry. Its all about shifting responsibility in case something goes wrong. Thats the only reason companies use third party software in the first place, to have a scapegoat...
"Teaching" doesn't work well for plenty of people. I couldn't count the number of presentations, design review meetings, tech talks, etc. I've attended that I remember nothing from. On the other hand, putting something into code, getting feedback and understanding how something affects the system I care about - that's something that sticks.
I mean, do that too, but end of the day PRs are your final chance to catch the mistakes before they start cementing, and is your best opportunity to identify misunderstandings (you can smell the confusion in their changes and address it directly).
But also, I must defend against the hordes of unwashed masses and maintain the sanctity of my domain. End of the day, a codebase I own is a codebase I own, and others cannot be allowed to poison the well, intentionally or not. That’s how you get cholera
Very well put. A PR is the final (and ultimate) chance to say "no" to a change - after that it's part of the software, it needs to be maintained, it can have impact on stability/quality etc.
I don't quite understand how someone in charge of a software (techlead or similar title) can't take this serious; I know a few such people and I generally prefer to avoid working with them...
I’m pretty sure NTILE is just a generally cursed function. SQL NTILE also requires everything to be loaded in memory because of the odd rule that larger buckets precede smaller buckets, so it’s unusable on anything decently sized.
Not being able to specify how ties are handled (and choosing, as far as I can tell, a fairly useless definition) fits the bill.
If it is "cursed" for a function to do what it is clearly documented to do, instead of what someone mistakenly imagines it to do, then what function isn't cursed?
> Not being able to specify how ties are handled (and choosing, as far as I can tell, a fairly useless definition) fits the bill.
Actually, you can completely specify how ties are handled—and should, in any study designed to be repeatable. The docs for dplyr::ntile tell us that:
> To rank by multiple columns at once, supply a data frame.
So, repeatable, completely specified tiebreaking is as easy as adding a tiebreaker column to the dataset, using whatever strategy makes sense for your study. For example, if we wanted random tiebreaking using R's built-in `runif`, all it takes is one extra line of code:
"Provenance" tracks where data came from, but "taint" tracks where unsafe data can flow. It's a uhh not so sexy term, but it is the industry standard term.
It’s been a fair few years since I got to write some new Perl but I’m fairly sure you could use Perl -T which meant any variables passed into the program (typically from cgi) would be tainted until you safely extracted the contents (via a regex for example)
The word itself is getting on for a thousand years old, originally solely in the sense of colour dyes, similar to “stain”, but over time this was adopted to be “to corrupt” in a more figurative sense, I suspect the same root for taint and stain, with taint more indisputable and harder to remove perhaps.
The main meaning of taint is contamination. Not really a revolting term to me. Maybe you associate it with some of its other meanings and that’s why you find it revolting.
If they were actually useful though, demand shouldn’t stay the same — more niches should be getting filled. If they’re just clones of each other, then yes
Sometimes in business you ultimately and unavoidably have to eat shit, so it is what it is. But you should strive to be someone who doesn’t have to eat shit, and until then, if you still gotta eat shit, then try not to make a habit of it.
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