Can someone explain Lemmy's algorithm to me? This has 83 downvotes and 7 upvotes at the time of writing, but it's like the 11th post on my home feed when sorted by hot. Clearly nobody thinks this is a good post for the comminity; how is this still being shown in default feeds (not 'newest' or 'controversial' or so) at all?
lucg
joined 1 year ago
That I'm still paying the rent amount from when we moved in nearly ten years ago. Comparable places cost twice as much when we last looked in 2024. We'd actually like to move to a more modern place but at these rates it's extremely hard to justify a nicer and/or nearer place
The landlord is super lazy, they do the bare bare minimum for maintenance and repairs so we just do the small things instead of trying to motivate him to do it or send someone, but also, bless this landlord lol!
Alright I see — and happy to hear it!
"space" to save anyone a click
Why not one of the northerly neighbors? Seems more attractive to me as someone from the Netherlands
There ought to be nonfictional countries that fit that bill lol
Okay yeah I see, that sounds like the types of habits I'd run into as well!
For a German example, they look each other in the eye while toasting with full cups or glasses and make such a point of it that you almost think it's in irony but no! They're dead serious that it's otherwise worse than skipping someone xD
What habits make you stand out in France? As a Dutchie in Germany I'm not aware of any, but I may just be too inept to notice :P
I tested it and there'll be months where I do 400 queries and months where there's maybe 200. Since it doesn't carry over, I'll simply have to use alternatives on a regular basis. Especially across all devices (all my work is on a computer, most of the time with unfamiliar technologies as the customer has a new project for us to pentest), I'll be out of queries most months. My employer is too scrooge to pay for our primary internal communication tool (we pay for various crap where it's mandatory, even if we barely need it, but not for a donation-run hosted service that we heavily use). They're never going to subsidise the searches I do during work time so long as competitors are "free". So I'll be stuck with other engines regardless, or have to pay as much as for a streaming service. It just seems like a lot, especially when part of it goes to Russia and burn-the-world AI bros
Before even being allowed to queue, security cared a lot that I present some email of the company I'm flying with. I had just sent the QR code to my phone, but the person doesn't have a scanner (so what is this going to prove?) and so she requires seeing the email for the privilege of confiscating toiletries. Of course the airline later scanned it just fine but I'd not have gotten on the airplane that day if I had given my laptop away as checked luggage (didn't have email on phone back then)
Of course she didn't more than glance at it, no identity card check to compare the name or anything. An invoice from my mom's dentist would probably have done the trick. Balancing a laptop on a knee, trying to two-handed type a password that you only know as muscle memory, is the sort of reason they require you to plan two hours "just in case we come up with more bullshit than expected for you or a passenger ahead of you"
And yes, my backpack with electronics needed to be flagged, bomb tested, and the last sip of water needed to be finished because the bottle was theoretically capable of holding an amount over the limit. Makes sense.
The Factoriopedia lists one "/m" rate for each asteroid type at a given position on a space route, but you clearly have to kill more asteroids as you go faster so it cannot be "per minute" (Factorio uses /m to mean per minute elsewhere in the game). However, it cannot mean metre either because you travel at many kilometres per second: you'd get thousands of asteroids per second per type! Searching through the forums, Lemmy, and reddit, I didn't find an answer to this conundrum of space versus time
I've now gotten around to figuring out how the spawn rate varies :)
Method
- Let the ship fly at the indicated speed (V) for 10 minutes (plus margin, because the asteroids need a bit of time to move from spawn to the ship) between Solar System Edge and Shattered Planet
- Open the production stats window, set to 10 minutes, select the kills tab, and take a screenshot so that we can work with nonmoving values
- Calculate the ship's average position, namely: position at time of screenshot minus (5 minutes × V km/s)
- Look up the expected spawn rate at that position by linearly interpolating between the nearest values in the Factoriopedia (they are precise to 40 km, so we know the value at 0km, ..., 960km, 1000km, 1040km, etc.)
- Calculate the ratio between how many huge asteroids were killed per minute (per the kills graph) and how many huge asteroids should have spawned
- Plot that value on the graph as a percentage
Results
There seem to be two or three formulas in use: one for 10km/s and below (it appears as though this is in effect when your ship touches 10.xx km/s every few seconds, but that seems strange), one for a rapid but smooth transition (or maybe they blend the two other formulas together?), and then one for speeds above 15 km/s. The middle formula may also just be a blend of the other two, perhaps they average the result between 10 and 15 km/s (or apply a sigmoid or whatnot)
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The formula for slow speeds seems to spawn 1.1x (or 10%) more asteroids as the speed doubles from 5 to 10 km/s (not many data points in this range; value is very approximate)
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The formula for high speeds spawns about 1.5–1.7x more asteroids when you go 2x faster
The Factoriopedia value isn't distance-based (one could think "/m" is a shorthand for "/10km" or so), because then it would have been 1:1 linear: when you cover twice as much distance per unit of time, the number of kills would double. It also isn't time-based, because then the graph should have shown a flat line at 100%. It appears to be a derivative of your ship's speed (and perhaps other factors, such as its width)
Sorry for the sparse data above 50 km/s btw. I had spent a bunch of time and already pretty much gotten the answer when I realised that I could go back to an earlier save and do the same thing for an easier section of the route where the ship can safely fly faster. I collected just these two data points and, when that also looked close enough to linear, called it "good enough" =)
Discussion/limitations
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I wonder if the Factorio developers made Promethium much more common if you fly slow, to make it easier to collect for players that didn't build a great ship
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Not all asteroids that spawn get killed, so the graph must be wrong in absolute terms, i.e., the actual spawn rate is higher than what I calculate using the "killed" statistic. My railguns' range about covers as far as the huge asteroids spawn out and I see that only a few on the edges (faded out, only visible when hovering over them) make it down the length of the ship, so the absolute number is probably not super far off. In any case, my personal goal was to figure out the relative number, not the absolute one
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Yes, I know these speeds are rookie numbers compared to some of the things I see online. But it's all my own work :). I purposefully don't look at other designs in detail because the satisfaction of figuring it out is the point of the game for me. The "not invented here" syndrome is a problem for my workplace, not my gaming experience :D
Future work
A. I'm also curious how platform width affects the rates, but did not have time to design another ship for trying that out
B. Check that the results are identical on other routes
C. Check how it behaves at and below zero speed
Supplementary material
The Factoriopedia does not show the total spawn rate and so it's hard to see what the difficulty is of each segment towards Shattered Planet. I've added a few data points to what I needed for the above calculation anyway and now we have the answer to that as well:
Spreadsheet with raw data for your enjoyment: https://lucgommans.nl/p/factorio/space-age-asteroid-spawn-rate-factoriov2.0.48.ods
Feel free to share the graphs or infos around, consider it CC-BY-SA or a similar flavor if you like ^^
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I met my best friend in an online open-source game that was pretty popular at the time (so far as foss games go). We were both into making games of our own and got talking because of that
He taught me the bits of programming I found particularly challenging, and we generally just chatted a lot and shared and played what we were making or came across online. He's now a full-time game developer at a tiny company (so he does everything from coding to sysadmin to customer support) and I'm doing IT security consultancy where customer contact and an understanding of how networks and systems run is also core to the job. Kind of surprising how close they are, but also different enough that I'm sometimes surprised what he doesn't know about security (not things he should have known necessarily, but still) and conversely I find the insights about game development still very interesting. Multiplayer lag hiding, as a random example. We're a super good match. He lives about a day driving away so we see each other every few winter/summer holiday seasons since I was ~17, at which time we met up for the first time at the only LAN party ever organised for this game (where I had the honor of making the website and meeting all these friends I hitherto only chatted with, still probably the best weekend of my life). He lives in like the most beautiful mountainous region that never gets old to this flatlander. I'm so lucky to have a friend like this, never judging, always available, understands me exactly