From 1998, the article is pretty old. But it even shuns "learning packages" along with manuals or anything that doesn't smell like getting things done.
Everybody loves ghost stories before going to bed, so let's spook Icho with Simon's quirks of the C language (http://asdfasdf.ethz.ch/~simon/articles/c-pitfalls.html).
Anyone who sees the world in terms of clean logic has to be mystified and bewildered by many of the rules in popular board games. Especially ancient board games, like Go, that have suffered thousands of years of pollution from meddling humans... :-/ -- Darse Billings
mechanics we introduced to lix to make the miner more resilient to canceling. From the rules perspective, those tweaks are not very clean at all, but it seems the "meddling" is called for based on issues encountered in the actual gameplay experience.
In many ways it's like patching a level to prevent backroutes: it keeps the level more interesting by eliminating otherwise legal but trivial solutions, but often at the cost of complicating the level with unsightly traps and other such elements.
Too bad I don't know the exact rules of Go to really understand this. I was always under the impression that Go has simpler rules given the much lower number of different types of pieces with different move mechanics.
Functions compose from left to right: Instead of y = f(x), write y = xf. Then h(g(f(x))) becomes xfgh. Vectors are row-vectors by default, then vM makes sense for a matrix M. Matrix multiplication can stay like it is. Everything becomes a Unix pipe! Stuff gets processed in reading order!
You can treat a piece of data, x in the above examples, as a function from the one-point set into your data domain. Then everything is a function. Everything is a set, everything is an object, everything is a file, everything is a function.
-- Simon
About your solution:
One important case to consider especially in multiplayer is to rapidly assign the same skill to multiple rodents.
level editor
move them as a single unit via drag-and-drop
how best to argue for the object-first model
rapidly assign the same skill to multiple rodents
"sticky" selection on a lemming, during which clicking on a skill automatically assigns it to the selected lemming--essentially an object-first method special-cased for the hero lemming.
But habit is a mighty powerful thing
1) During the first few seconds, clicking on some skill buttons currently does something
gray out the skill buttons whenever no lemming is selected. Certainly a possible work-around, but always clickable skill buttons look nicer to me.
i5 | 10-year old laptop | |
Lix debug build | 3 sec | 18 sec |
Lix release build | 17 sec | 1 min 40 sec |
Verify 600 replays | 23 sec | over 2 min |
= replays/second | 26 | 5 |
Still a favorite example of bad interface design: Python shell.
Lasse (reallife friend from university) compared speedrunning to playing the piano. The comparison is great, but it wasn't my first idea. I have compared speedrunning to a relationship. The moment you begin, all bugs turn into features.
Lasse (reallife friend from university) compared speedrunning to playing the piano.
It doesn't happen to be the Thorsten Hohage does it :3
Simon without his weight in my opinion is not the Simon.
I was also about to ask whether you'd come to Vienna again this year, since you said in 2 years... 2 years ago.
Person A tells you: "Just do Y."
The bottom is a boring stem that tastes like wood.
Performance is broccoli. Open source is broccoli. D templates are broccoli.
Also, you can't just get rid of Easter; no Christian is going to accept that. ;PAnd what about Jews, Muslims, Hindi, Buddhists, ... who get useless work-free days, but have to work on their own religious fests? A much better suggestion is to remove all religious holidays, but give employees some more vacation days. This of course creates other problems of its own, but at least it respects all religions.
Come to think of it, the 7-day week basically comes out of the Bible. Kind of makes me wonder how other calendar systems with no biblical influences do weeks.And as current dicture says that the bible are not the words of God directly, this should make you wonder how the 7-day week got to make its appearance in the bible in the first place... I believe the answer lies in the lunar cycle of 28 days. This is a very convenient time measure between single days and years, that can be checked almost every night, and where you can even measure ratios by the moon's appearance. So it makes sense to define weeks as quarters of the lunar cycle.
This really makes one appreciate the phrase "thank god it's Friday". Without the week based on Genesis with a church-mandated day of rest, we could well have ended up with a lot less free days. You can indeed thank (Judeo-Christian) god and religion for having the tradition of weekends.I highly doubt your last sentence. If I remember correctly, in Germany we switched from the 6-day work-week to the 5-day one in the 1950s. While Germany was a lot more religious at that time than it is now, barely any change in legislature or every-day life was dictated by religious concerns. Actually I cannot even think of any religious reason for this change, especially as the bible seem to suggest working on 6 days a week. Therefore I conjecture that for any community, there is an inverse relationship between the average working hours and the technical/social development, regardless of any religious concerns.
The solution is to adopt hexadecimal, then number the days from the beginning of the year.You completely failed to demonstrate why this change would solve any problem at all!
Oneweekdoubleweekheek is 0x10 days. The last digit of the date is the day of the heek. You can have 5 or 6 free days in a heek, which is a higher ratio than 2/7. Fix this ratio by removing Easter and other UI sins. Dates go from 0x000 to 0x16E, the first two digits of a date feel month-like. The revolting French didn't get their metric calendar past the church, but this is better anyway. :>
you can't just get rid of Easter; no Christian is going to accept that. ;P
1) You mistakenly wrote "Saturday, April 30", but with your change you would have written "Saturday, 0x78", which is equally wrong. Sure, it is easier to see that the 8th day of the heek is not a Saturday, but what does that help? Did you intend to write "Octaday, 0x78" or perhaps "Saturday, 0x76"? And if you would just have written "0x78" without the day of the week, but meant "0x76", then noone would have realized that something is wrong here.
Note that you got the day of the week correctly, but messed up the date. So adding the day of the week (which is more or less independant of the date) adds a way to check the correctness, similar to checksums of bank accounts IDs.
2) Assume you want to compute the date of 20 days in the future, starting with May 21 or 0x8D. Do you really think that computing this is hex is less error-prone than in the current way? Sure, now you have to know how many days the month May has, but I would say this is pretty common knowledge ;). In any case the errors comes from the change of the month resp. heek.
3) Finally your choice of hex is completely arbitrary: Why not use the base 7 which ties nicely to the current week scheme? Then each day of the year has a 3-digit number, and we only have to take the last three weeks of every year as vacation, because we cannot express the date any more ;P
I would have written 0x76. The last digit of the date carries all the emotional meaning that "Saturday" carries today. There is no need to annotate the 6 à la "day 6 of the heek, 0x76".The question is: Is it more important that the person writing the date can check whether the date confirms with the intended day of the week, or is it more important the the audience can check this? As I don't have faith in general people to actually check whether the date they arrive at makes any sense at all, I very much like the ability to make a sensibility-check myself.
In hex calendar, the mistake would happen so rarely that we don't need the checksum anymore. The mistake happens today because the day of the month carries almost no feelings. I don't care whether it's the 29th or 30th, but I certainly care whether it's Saturday or Sunday. In the hex calendar, we imbue this care into the date.
0x8D + 0x14 = 0xA1. This is straightforward.Go out on the streets and ask the first passer-by to compute that...
Hex has lots of powers of 2 in the base. You rarely want to divide by anything else. [...]When was the last time you wanted to divide or multiply the current date?
Hex has an integral square root, 4, of the base 16. This makes it much easier to learn by heart the multiplication tables: [..]
The question is: Is it more important that the person writing the date can check whether the date confirms with the intended day of the week, or is it more important the the audience can check this? As I don't have faith in general people to actually check whether the date they arrive at makes any sense at all, I very much like the ability to make a sensibility-check myself.
Go out on the streets and ask the first passer-by to compute that...
When was the last time you wanted to divide or multiply the current date?
You propose that everybody deliver the checksum with the date -- not only when it's super important, but almost every time a date appears. Why do you like this only for dates? Are dates so much more important than anything else?Average Joe does mathy computations with dates, but rarely does computations with email addresses or lottery winnings. And if my supermarket cashier regularly gets the return money wrong, I doubt you can make the date system so easy, that our Average Joe reliably gets it right.
Would you like it for phone numbers, too? A culturally-encouraged hash whenever you write a reallife address or email address? Do you want the checksums for money, with the bank transferring lottery winnings saying "+1,000,000, one million euros, 11333311 in base-7"?
In the month-week system, you cannot get away from checksumming, and the system is complicated enough that it requires checksumming in the first place. Do you really see no complexity problem in the two misfitting bases running alongside each other, with the month base even changing between months, and the weeks not resetting between years?
The problem with adding more vacation days and removing mandatory holidays is that you could run into a situation where your department is so busy at Eastertime, taking Easter off isn't really an option. My solution is just give everyone their religious holidays off, but they don't have to take days off for religious holidays that they don't celebrate.Only slightly exaggerating: Your system basically amounts to giving all people off the whole year and tell them to report when they want to work. That's basically the inverted version of my own suggestion.
This really makes one appreciate the phrase "thank god it's Friday".<snip>I highly doubt your last sentence.<snip>
Games that I invented 5-10 years go
I have a scrap heap of tabletop game ideas, sometimes entire games with full rule text files. Here are some of these games that weren't entirely terrible.
Problem 1 is a trick question because you said "displayed hamsters"
Quote from: nin10doadictProblem 1 is a trick question because you said "displayed hamsters"
Hehe, this sort of answer classifies you as a good mathematician or computer scientist: Edge cases matter. Also good backroute.
Design of a search feature: Hide your complexity
tl;dr: Use fibers for expensive work.
Lix 0.9 will have a level search. Type a query into a search box, and the game presents you a list of levels that match your query. I'm proud of this feature because I thought of it first: No other Lemmings engine has it, nobody has requested it before, but I'm already using it in my regular level-maintaining workflow. Good stuff. Good broccoli.
I want to be Google! What are the hallmarks of Google search?
- One good search box, no distracting options.
- Searches in everything you might want to. In our case, filenames and level titles.
- While you're typing, you're already seeing first hits on the screen.
- As you type more characters, earlier hits vanish as they become irrelevant.
- Hits appear and vanish in realtime. Very handy: You can stop typing when you've narrowed down to 1 hit.
- All this good stuff happens magically in the background, it doesn't freeze the app.
since they started the "While you're typing, you're already seeing first hits on the screen." feature; it definitely does freeze/slow down. It actually kind of annoys me.
I can wait (what; 0.X seconds?) to type and press enter again and again a couple of times.
Google search offers several tabs: [all] [images] [videos] [shopping] ...
But sometimes, it switches around: [all] [shopping] [images] [videos] ...
Because the first sequence is so common, lazy Simon is conditioned that Google's image search is on the second button from the left, and always clicks that second button without reading. Occasionally, that lands me on the shopping page. A nasty way to peddle stuff. :lix-glare:
Also, any chance it's just a bug that repros on certain specific conditions?
All that said, I do like the idea that it could be an intentional clickbaiting technique.
(not very spacially efficient) that is fast,
or slower code
I've never taken computer science classes, the typical examples there are probably merge sort versus quicksort? Merge sort is always N log(N), quicksort can be N^2 in worst case. But quicksort is often N log(N) on average and doens't have to allocate heap memory (the recursion goes on the stack, which is fast), therefore it's very good already.Don't forget one more consideration: How does the algorithm perform in some of the most common cases in practical applications? In this example, this means to consider also the case: How does the algorithm perform for (almost) sorted lists?
Python Type Errors over C/C++ Segmentation faults
pic 4. It's the most acceptable solution for now, but still feels a bit hack-ish. ???
(https://www.fieggen.com/Dont_Link/IanKnot6.gif)
Shoelace bowknot into firm knot
I tie my shoelaces with the standard bowknot (https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/standardknot.htm) that most people use, and that the image shows. This holds well for me. To open this bowknot, you pull either loose end, e.g., the yellow loose end. This will pull the yellow loop through the knot and thus the knot falls apart.
Now, the mystery: When pulling on the loose end to remove the loop, there is a 10 % chance that the knot will not easily open, but instead transform into a very tight knot that is painful to open. This happened to me on two days in succession, and that's last straw. I will search the web about this problem.
Surprisingly, it's hard to find. Lots of sites describe how to tie shoelaces, but opening them seems to be no issue for anyone. I assume that in those 10 % of cases, I had already tied the bowknot wrongly in the first place by mistake, which will then lead to the firm knot problem on opening much later.
<geoo> I encounter this issue more frequently than 10%. I believe what happens is that the loose end you pull on went through one of the loops
<geoo> or maybe both of them must have gone through the respective loops of the other color
-- Simon
(works 100% of the time for me): patience. Never rush to tie or undo the knot. I've never had it happen when I'm taking my time and following each step correctly.
While we're on this topic, what are your thoughts on the difference (if any) between
A dog is a mammal.
and
Dogs are mammals.
Is the usage of singular versus plural meaningful?
Consider: The frogs are green. Which of these rewrites to first-order logic are equivalent to "The frogs are green."?
Rewrite A.
1. For all X, if X is a frog, then X is green.
(No claim of existence.)
Rewrite B.
1. For all X, if X is a frog, then X is green.
2. There exists an X such that X is a frog. (At least 1 frog exists.)
Rewrite C.
1. For all X, if X is a frog, then X is green.
2. There exist X and Y such that X is a frog, Y is a frog, and X ≠ Y. (At least 2 frogs exist.)
I have a strong preference (which I will keep secret temporarily, to not bias anybody) but I doubt there is a universally accepted rewrite. Forestidia disagrees with my choice here and has a strong background in philosophical logic. The classical examples on the internet don't help either, Russell's essay is purely about the singular "the".
-- Simon
It seems to me that there probably can't be a universal rewrite for this sentence, because there's insufficient context to determine the exact bounds of the subset "the frogs."
"The frogs are green" can be true or false depending on what "the frogs" refers to. We need context to determine that. Suppose there is a box containing frogs. I point to it and say, "The frogs are green." This extra context removes the ambiguity as to which frogs we are referring to - now it's the frogs that are in the hypothetical box, rather than an unspecified group subset of frogs. But now we must check to see if the statement is actually correct. It is possible for all the frogs in the box to be green[1] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaf_green_tree_frog)[2] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_tree_frog). However, it is also possible that at least one of the frogs in the box is NOT green[3] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_reed_frog)[4] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_tree_frog). For this reason, I can create a set of frogs for which the statement "The frogs are green" is false.
This is where I can no longer really work with the given information without more background knowledge. I am unsure of the exact meaning of "For all X, if X is a frog, then X is green." Is this statement defining the object selection, to state that all the frogs under consideration are green (i.e. if an object is a frog, and it is not green, it is not X)? Or is it a statement that, for any given object X, if X is a frog, it is green (i.e. stating that all frogs are green)?
Without the context I'd argue the sentence is ambiguous and poorly written.
It seems to me that there probably can't be a universal rewrite for this sentence, because there's insufficient context to determine the exact bounds of the subset
Yeah, the statement is dangling without context.
1) "The frogs" refers to at least 2 frogs, all of which are green.
A dog is a mammal.
Dogs are mammals.
My feeling says no concerning logical analysis.
I would formalize both as: For all x: if x is a dog then x is a mammal
if you formalize a sentence of natural language one has the model that fits to our understanding of the world in the back of their minds
I mean, if there aren't any frogs in the box (whether they were there to begin with or not) then that's a null reference, right? It feels to me kind of like trying to divide by 0; it's something that just doesn't work. Yeah, all frogs in the box are green, but if there aren't any frogs, then how do we know that there isn't some non-existent purple frog? I feel that the sentence loses meaning if it references something that doesn't exist.
So is it automatically implied that "If the box contains a frog, then all frogs in the box are green?" More importantly, if there are no frogs, does that make the statement "All frogs in the box are green" true or false? It appears to have entered a third state, one of "irrelevance."
3) A is false. B may be true or false. This is neither evidence for nor against the statement. These irrelevant cases have no bearing on someone's confidence on the truthfulness of the statement.
If you take the empty set that contains no elements: The fact that it contains no elements can be used with the logical principle discussed here:
E.g. You get to the conclusion that the empty set is a subset (or identical) of every other set.
<snip>
I think you may find it a little tricky to come up with such a statement that sounds natural. Like, I don't know, "nothing is always part of any group of things"?
I always loved the fictional 'D'ni' number system from the Myst series;
Looking forward soon to reading "Dr. Simon blogs". :P :thumbsup: :tal-silver:
I sent email with missed attachment. Again because I didn't follow my own advice to always add attachment first (https://www.lemmingsforums.net/index.php?topic=2288.msg69540#msg69540), then write body, then write subject, then add recipients.
Game with EffectManager | ----depends-on----> | Physics |
Physics | ----depends-on----> | Game's EffectManager |
Game | ----depends-on----> | EffectManager, Physics |
EffectManager | ----implements----> | EffectSink |
Physics | ----depends-on----> | EffectSink |
It tempts to cheat the system. Surely, to round() a floating-point number should be pure (https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11320#c3)? What if, in general, yes, it is pure, but only on one particular architecture, the library writes custom float-handling flags to the CPU, then rounds, then restores the old flags? Such assembler calls are the most impure building blocks of any function.<snip>
Purity would imply deterministic, but you can assert something to be deterministic without being pure.
Nothing is free, the cashback customers are paying with their time and lost privacy.
firstly, whether the sale will really be private in this day and age
whether it's really that big a deal that some giant marketing firm who's never heard of you beyond as "customer #410757864530" knows which brand of toothpaste you buy.
items will always be marked as 'on sale' even when the price is high
(most customers are likely more interested in the additional, on-the-spot discounts - which can actually be quite significant, sometimes as much as $15 - $20 off a $100 order).
on something you were planning on buying anyway; it does save money, though a small amount. Over time it adds up if you're diligent with this method.
it's a little disingenuous to pick the worst case example where the coupon isn't working;
You can't exactly use that example to say the barcode scanning system is bad, unless it happens frequently.
Some of our customers do, but some of them present me coupons before they show their loyalty card. If I try put coupons through the system before the loyalty card I get in trouble and need to ask a manager.
Why does Red Bull require IDs in the UK?
Mostly yes, I pay cash for 90 % of my purchases.
Sweden: Customary to take bank cards for any bill, and people happily pay everything with that. Germany: Most places don't accept it unless the bill is 5 Euros. Thus cash is still popular.
I thought cashback programs had you register with name? At least banks do. They'll keep this data in their super-high-secure datacenter, which falls prey to social engineering 3 years down the road. Or to an overworked maintenance programmer.
12/12 games drawn? I wonder how many of the 'draw game' rules they obey in the chess tournament. I would assume all of them, even the obscure ones like 'game is drawn if 50 turns pass with no captures or pawn movement' or 'game is drawn if the layout of the pieces is the exact same three separate times.' Keeping track of those without some sort of computer would be rather difficult, I think.
Shogi (Japanese chess with flowery-named pieces such as odor cart)
Pieces should be colored by type. Piece ownership is indicated by pointing direction, but for this, the pieces should look much more triangular. Their existing obstuse arrow shape is almost rectangular. Some people have invented pieces that you can more easily recognize.
"odor cart": sounds like a bad translation perhaps? I believe with languages like Japanese if you attempt to only translate individual Kanji characters in isolation and ignoring contexts, you can sometimes end up with results that have almost nothing to do with the actual words or phrase in question. Also, doesn't some Kanji characters have multiple very different meanings (almost like homophones but actually written exactly the same way as well?). Do we know if "odor cart" isn't just creative cherry-picking on a particular reading of the Kanji in question, even though it isn't actually the intended/correct reading being used wrt the name of that particular Shogi piece?
Pieces should be colored by type.
You gave up your nap? Clearly you don't have enough pets.
frustrations I had was that the packages in the repositories were frequently out of date.
constant frustrations with NeoLemmix and Lix is updates.
"odor cart": sounds like a bad translation perhaps?It's just Simon poking fun at the weird way the Japanese language works. 香車 means "incense chariot", but 香 by itself can mean "smell".
attempt to only translate individual Kanji characters in isolation
results that have almost nothing to do with the actual words
QuotePieces should be colored by type.Wouldn't having actually different shapes like Western chess pieces do, be even clearer for telling apart piece types?
Is the color by type idea mainly to compensate for having to recognize Kanjis? The pictorial approach seems mostly sufficient to me without also having different colors, though maybe the pictures used could be slightly better in some cases.
Even with the correct translation "incense chariot", it's still a flowery name for my taste -- incense has little to do with war, the theme of chess-likes.
According to Kōji Shimizu, chief researcher at the Archaeological Institute of Kashihara, Nara Prefecture, the names of the Heian shogi pieces keep those of chaturanga (general, elephant, horse, chariot and soldier), and add to them the five treasures of Buddhism (jade, gold, silver, katsura tree, and incense).
(given IIRC from somewhere I read or heard, Japanese adults are expected to know something like some hundreds or thousands [!] of Kanji characters for proficiency in general reading comprehension)
Three piles. The game consists only of playing cards. Each player has their cards distributed among 3 personal face-down piles. Each turn, you may pick up exactly one of your piles, and do something with the cards: Maybe they're action cards, maybe they're worth points only in certain combinations, maybe you can redistribute them among the piles, ...
The catch is that you cannot pick the same pile twice in a row. If you put all your good cards in one pile, you can only use them in even-numbered turns, and your opponents will know exactly that you can't do anything at all in odd-numbered turns. If you distribute your good cards only among two of three piles, you can play good stuff every turn, but your opponents will know exactly when the stuff is coming. To keep your options open, you'd have to use all three piles.
Neighbors in a circle. This needs at least 5 people, and ideally, exactly 5. They're sitting in a circle. You're in a weak alliance with your immediate neighbors: Maybe for each pair (one pair is you + left neighbor, another is you + right neighbor), each member of the pair scores based on something that the pair constructed during the game. Thus, you'll be happy if your neighbor does well, but you won't help them unconditionally.This mechanic of working with your direct neighbours appears in two board games I know of. The most well known is 7 Wonders (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_Wonders_(board_game)), which is a card drafting game, everyone gets 7 cards, picks one, passes the hand clockwise, and keeps going until no cards remain, and you try to build the best results out of this. You can buy resources from your direct neighbours if you didn't get the ones you need, and there are some other things too that care only about your direct neighbours. Its well known because it scales from 3 - 7 players effortlessly without extending the length of the game.
The catch is that you can attack opponents who sit exactly 2 seats away from you. If you're player C during player order ...-A-B-C-D-E-F..., then players A and E aren't your neighbors, therefore you have an honest interest in harming them.
Assume you (C) want to attack A. B will discourage you from attacking A because B is A's neighbor and has a moderate interest in A doing well. B will suggest that you attack E instead. Then D will be unhappy and encourage you in your original plan to attack A. Then B and D will get into an argument. When D's turn comes, he will be happy to attack B, which makes E and F very happy, etc.
It is desirable to have an odd number of people in the circle: Otherwise, there are two disjoint sets of people who get into arguments only with other members of the same set.
Mombasa is not Mancala (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mancala). :P
Pit. Which is a turnless game that sort of resembles stock market transactions. THere are different types of cards; "wheat, gold, oil, sugar, etc." The goal is to trade cards until you're entire hand is composed of just one type.
Have you tried Rummikub yourself Simon? It's a great game I feel.
We played it yesterday, following our edition's rules (from 1996, Ravensburger). We did a 2v1, and yeah, it would have probably been more fun with 5 detectives, although it might have been very hard for me in the beginning.
I would drop the 2x cards, as if I'd use them the detectives would have no chance to win. Without those, it eventually boiled down to a turn with a 50% chance of being caught, and of winning (because the detectives were running out of tickets).
What I don't like is that as the game progresses, the chance of Mr. X being caught decreases instead of increasing, which would seem more fun.
std::ostream& operator << (std::ostream& o, const Date& d)
{
if (d.year == 0) o << "000";
o << d.year << '-';
if (d.month < 10) o << '0'; o << d.month << '-';
if (d.day < 10) o << '0'; o << d.day << ' ';
if (d.hour < 10) o << '0'; o << d.hour << ':';
if (d.minute < 10) o << '0'; o << d.minute << ':';
if (d.second < 10) o << '0'; o << d.second;
return o;
}
std::ostream& operator << (std::ostream& o, const Date& d)
{
char buf[20];
snprintf(buf, sizeof(buf), "%04d-%02d-%02d %02d:%02d:%02d",
d.year, d.month, d.day, d.hour, d.minute, d.second);
o << buf;
return o;
}
I need a precise video viewer: <snip>
All you ever find is extravagant video editing suites that crash, consume RAM, or aren't free-and-open-source. I don't want to edit the video; if I ever want to cut video, then ffmpeg on the command line suffices and won't crash.
Amazing how such a seemingly-simple tool (the only hard requirement: it gives me precise numbers) is so hard to find.
wonder if VLC has this kind of feature.
VLC shows only seconds, and can only framestep forward.
With regard to Lix specifically, which color tends to be the most visible? Perhaps every player should see their own lixes in that color?
I really don't think that's a good idea. Players tend to get attached to their favourite colours and want to keep playing as them :)
To be clear, this is mostly a solved problem for Lix, correct?
Hard to imagine how you'd do better for 8 with rainbow + black & white. Basically the 8 corners of the RGB-space cube.
given how small the sprites are, I suspect it'd be tricky to create other visual differentiators as clear as color would be.
Right. Glaring colors with different lightness are good and easy to implement. The main point of the post was to explain my reluctance to implement Raymanni's desire for more than 8 colors, because 12 colors are harder to christmas-tree-distribute than 8 colors are.
The programming example you gave doesn't feel to me like much of an analogy to the "is something that" in English.
Feel free to apply the Simon culls below to some example writings of mine in this forum, I welcome the closer look and debate.
I hesitate making intricate programming design topics here though: It's really software development at heart, not of general Lemmings interest, and probably more sensible on Software Engineering stack overflow. It would be a genuine call for help, on a nontrivial and highly specific problem in my personal areas of expertise and interest (Lemmings, OOP) -- thus obvious solutions won't fit.
On the other hand, it's easier to explain the problem on Lemmings Forums, because we have a bunch of developers here that will readily understand the problem. And if we find the least-worst solution, maybe it'll be helpful too for somebody in the future.
There's no harm in posting the problem here; as the saying goes, two (or more) heads can be better than one. But I also think you are actually already the person on the forum who's most well-versed in the theory and practice of software design and architecture. So ideally you'd want to get advice from someone who's even better at this, and hence a more programming-oriented forum or channel is probably the way to go.
Christmas tree problem
You have a fir tree and want to decorate it with christmas lights.
The fir tree's green bushy "surface" is cone-shaped, with a circular boundary at the bottom.
You also have n candles. These are about to be placed on the fir tree.
---
Task. Distribute the n candles on the fir tree such that the candles are nicely spaced apart from all other candles. You may place candles on the boundary.
(http://www.lixgame.com/etc/eight-player-lix-colors.png)
Application. If your christmas tree is instead the space of all colors, and you have 8 Lix player colors, find a distribution of 8 colors such that no two colors look more similar than necessary. This is hard, especially if you, in addition, want to avoid black because black lixes looks too much like theboundarylevel background.
To be fair, the picture you've posted distinguishes the Lixes very well. If you wanted to avoid black, this could be changed for hot pink or pastel pink, both of which are different enough from red not to be confused. Interesting that you chose teal rather than royal blue for Lix #5 in the image.
But I also think you are actually already the person on the forum who's most well-versed in the theory and practice of software design and architecture.
there's certainly not any harm in posting it here. I'd certainly be interested in seeing whatever you come up with; I find your posts on these topics quite interesting and informative.
Subconciousness will continue to attack the problem. This has two benefits the next morning: [...]For me this usually comes with the following downside in the evening though:
Maybe it works if you make sure to do something mellow and not exciting in the last hour before you go to bed.
Maybe it works if you make sure to do something mellow and not exciting in the last hour before you go to bed.
I often have the problem of lying in bed for an hour...
Working/doing physical tasks while thinking about the problem may help.
Clam's level "Evacuating a retirement home"
I knew I solved it too without evening having to test it out.
Locale
I use the en_US.UTF-8 Linux locale for everything. I don't want my computer to know that I'm German; all software should be in English so that I can websearch the error messages. The decimal sign is the dot . and the thousands separator is the comma , and that should be adopted worldwide.
Nonetheless, some features of the US locale are horrendous, such as starting the week on Sunday. This affects GUI calendar tools in the desktop panel. Here is how to make Monday the first day of the week:
Are dates in Europe written the same way as they are here in the US? I visited Europe back in 2007, but I don't remember what format the date uses. Here in the USA, we use month/date/year. In my parents home country of Vietnam, it's switched, so that the format is day/month/year. When they came to the USA about 40 years ago, they had to get used to the new format. In the same way, when I visited Vietnam for the very first time earlier this year, I had to get used to using Celsius instead of the familiar Fahrenheit. I remember on my Europe trip, my friends and I were on a bus where the temperature was displayed up in the very front and it read 25 degrees C One of them goes, "why is it not cold?" I said, "You know why? Because the temperature is not in Fahrenheit that we're all familiar with, it's in Celsius." When converted to Fahrenheit, it makes sense that 25 C is actually a warm day (77 degrees F).
What is this Zendo, Simon? :)
Britain
miles for distance and speed (for driving as in MPH) but km, m, cm and mm for other measurements.
speed limits and speedomoters are in MPH
dates in Europe written the same way
pretty much everywhere used day/month/year
In Britain we are super annoying cos sometimes we use celsius for cold temperatures and farenheit for hot. Also most people of a younger generation than me will use kg and km for weight and distance whereas I grew up using stones, lbs and oz for weight and miles for distance and speed (for driving as in MPH) but km, m, cm and mm for other measurements. Our speed limits and speedomoters are in MPH despite the fact KPH would be the more modern way to do it. It would be chaos to change those things though
I sure would like another French revolution for ditching decimal in favor of hexadecimal. And this time, we also fix datetime. :lix-grin:
ditching decimal in favor of hexadecimalReally? I for one definitely prefer the metric system over the customary USA system that we use. Conversions between metric units are so much easier, being based on powers of 10.
I don't advocate for what the US does.
My point is that 10 is a bad base for a positional system: 10 contains only one power of 2, and an awkward divisor of 5 in the base. I want to scrap base-10 everywhere for base-16, not only in measurement, but wherever numbers are expressed in a positional numeral system.
Zendo is a tabletop game... The player who correctly states the secret rule wins
maybe other websites will let you download the game
Even this European notation is still middle-endian, i.e., the most-often changing figure is neither at the front nor the back. The most-often changing figure is the ones digit of the day. It's in second position. The One True Date Format (ISO-8601) is year-month-day, and it should be used wherever possible.
This game looks amazing, I'll definitely have to try this out sometime. [...] There's a set on eBay, I might get it to play at Christmas.
In theory, you could apply the principle to any game pieces, but the little colourful shapes make it particularly appealing.
you could probably do a thing maybe with lemmings levels or other things. We use to play it on this forum as well in the past.
Does caffeine do more damage than good, it probably does when we thing about it. Good on you Simon for giving that up for July time.
Are you still going cold turkey with it at the moment Simon?
cd -
Switches back to the directory where came from before the most recent cd.
Powershell 6.2 added cd - (https://superuser.com/a/1486052). Alternatively, there is bash for Windows, and Windows git comes with git bash.
youtube-dl (https://youtube-dl.org/) got DMCA'd and is not on github.
youtube-dl is a free-and-open-source video-downloading command-line tool. Extremely useful to avoid Google's bloated web player. When I want to watch something, I download the entire video and watch it offline. Only once in a blue moon, when I want to comment on a video, I access a video's actual page.
Bleeping Computer (https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/youtube-dl-removed-from-github-after-riaa-dmca-notice/) nicely summarizes: The successful use of a DMCA infringement notice to shutdown software that is in itself not a copyright violation is a scary precedent and one that lays the groundwork for misuse in the future.
Attacking a project via DMCA does not require any legal backing. It's enough to be a holder of some intellectual monopolies that somehow feel related. github is not the defendant, but is merely by DMCA forced to comply with the attack. It's the defendant's (the project's) task to fight an unduly issued DMCA takedown. IANAL.
That's part of the reason why I want no third-party copyrights in Lix, to avoid such DMCA harassment that is hard to fight.
Anyway!
youtube-dl 2020-09-20 Python source (https://pypi.org/project/youtube_dl/#files)
youtube-dl 2020-09-20 Linux binary (http://www.lixgame.com/dow/youtube-dl)
youtube-dl 2020-09-20 Windows binary (https://youtube-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl.exe)
The problem is that Youtube often changes its protocols or file naming etc., and youtube-dl plays catch-up. Above version 2020-09-20 will probably only remain useful for a few weeks.
Who wants to help me buy a battleship and blockade the Americans with me? Free Pepsi Max Lemon will be served on my ship.
-- Simon
lawsuit the US government is taking against Google? (for monopolistic practices).
A Vickrey auction requires sealed bids, i.e., bidders can't see the bids or names of other bidders. Ebay auctions are like Vickrey auctions only if everybody snipes. Early bids violate the requirement that bids be sealed; Ebay prominently displays the number of bids and the current price (~second-highest bid).
Sometimes I bid on an item early I know I won't get just to drive the price up then laugh maniacally to myself.
I had to call Icho in the middle of the traffic jam to look online for nearby streets, in hope to enter one of them into the navigation system.
I have no idea which set of curly braces goes together, it's so easy to lose track. I'd prefer a language that is more like this:
[declare many smaller functions and nest less]
Image: Kvick Sört (https://idea-instructions.com/quick-sort.png)
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You can argue that it's too high-level, and you want lower-level algorithm that move the pivot element into place and shift the elements around (the partitioning step). This doesn't seem trivial to me if you insist on minimal complexity, i.e., I believe there is a chance that a naive implementation of the partitioning has higher-than-necessary complexity.
Youtube: Core Design Principles for Software Developers (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llGgO74uXMI)
by Venkat Subramaniam a.k.a. Hilarious Indian Scala Guy
For every 100 g above 78 kg, I will donate 1 euro to the hosting of Lemmings Forums. E.g., merely touching the goal weight of 80 kg is 20 euros. Being lazy and not losing weight at all is 110 euros.
("It is the strongest of any weapon!" while I insist that this must be written "It is the strongest of all weapons!")
I bought a kilogram of honeycomb. Quality Brötchen topping.
Thinking
Mathematicians, scientists, puzzle fans, chess players, ... are supposed to be good thinkers. What does it mean: To think?
you didn't include "philosophers" on this list ;)
add artists (musicians included in that term)
Pondering some more. I believe that the ranges for N = 10 and N = 100 are quite similar, that the range remains reasonably loose even for N → ∞, and that tightening the range to (only pair of aces) is wrong for any N. Reason: We can reword the stakes. To avoid wagering 1 unit that our hand is better, you can pay 1/N units (the price of folding). If your hand beats two random cards on average, you should call regardless of the price of folding.
Loap and L2Player, these projects must grow. Custom L2 packs are nice alrelady in DOS L2, but Kieran and Ste had to hold back on puzzle difficulty lest they introduced accidental execution difficulty. I deem level design more an art than a science. Let's not curb the designers' creativity, let's offer them the best tooling we can.
Q7o is the hand considered to be closest to a 50/50 chance of winning in such a situation.
Agreed. ToS would benefit so much more from L2Player, especially on the last level of each tribe - those are a crazy concept that probably does need a bit more in the player-aid department. (though savestate DOSBox is adequate to some degree, like it was with L3)
Solved Lemmings' Ark in vanilla Lemmix.
Everybody can read C source code.
Everybody knows the rules of popular classical board/card games.
Everybody is fit with high-school mathematics, in particular, high-school level calculus.
Everybody knows some mathematics beyond the high-school level, whether from formal education or by self-teaching. Hard to define how far I assume this; let's say, complex numbers, some graph theory, linear algebra, elementary set theory, elementary topology.
In English, I haven't seen anybody put a space ("100%"). Is it correct to omit the space? That would treat % different than physical units; you'd write "220 V", "60 Hz" even in English.As an only English speaker, I don't think I've ever seen someone put a space before a percent sign. Or at least, not that I can recall. It definitely looks weird to me.
As an only English speaker, I don't think I've ever seen someone put a space before a percent sign. Or at least, not that I can recall. It definitely looks weird to me.
I've ranted about percentages in Lemmings for years. Indeed, 97 % is less useful than the positive save requirement 39/40 or the negative count, lose 1. But 100 % is still so common colloquially and needs no denominator (40) to compute; I feel like 100 % is special. I'll have to sleep over it. Probably just say "all".
And I wouldn't say that physical units always have a space in English, writing 220V or 60Hz is definitely normal, though adding the space there is probably more common than doing it for %. This might also depend on the unit though? I'm trying to think if there's any I would expect a space.
In fact, it looks like Google insists you don't put the space :P
Re dates: ISO 8601 covers your back with 2022-12-31 a.k.a. the one true date format.
Around December 20th to 24th, I'll weigh myself. For every 100 g above 78 kg, I will donate 1 euro to the hosting of Lemmings Forums. E.g., merely touching the goal weight of 80 kg is 20 euros. Being lazy and not losing weight at all is 110 euros.
84.7 kg before breakfast. For 5 weeks, I got lots of sleep and didn't overeat.
I'll call it here. Donation for LF hosting will be 67 Euros at the promised rate of 1 Euro per 100 g over 78 kg.
Every now and then I try to play Clones again and it's just... awful. Nothing about it feels intuitive. A Game of this nature that doesn't always allow you to pause or pausing that doesn't work correctly should be illegal. Sorry to the creator, I know they at one time were present on this forum but this game sucks.
Every now and then I try to play Clones again and it's just... awful. Nothing about it feels intuitive. A Game of this nature that doesn't always allow you to pause or pausing that doesn't work correctly should be illegal. Sorry to the creator, I know they at one time were present on this forum but this game sucks.
Greetings! Nice to see Clones still being mentioned :) The reason we limited pausing was to prevent super-human actions, because pausing makes playing levels easier and can bypass the intended challenge. However to account for this we added a 2nd type of pausing called "Freeze Time" (default keyboard key is U) which you can use as often as you want to do super-human moves, but each Freeze Time use will incur a timeclock penalty so that players who don't Freeze Time will obtain a higher score for the leaderboard rankings, which we felt was fair. You can even assign actions to clones when the game is paused via Freeze Time.
Here is Freeze Time in action - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-777IGQDBmT1AWB_i_iRc4YQwNm4yTFe/view
In terms of not being intuitive, my only regret is that the "beautification" of my levels went a bit overboard I think. We hired someone and they added too many background graphics which I think make the levels a bit cluttered sometimes and hard to tell if something is land or background. I would have preferred a simpler clean look. You can however disable these graphics in the options menu: Disable Background and Sky. Oh and also the "Clones Belt" for gestures to give actions isn't practical I felt, I would have liked to make the keyboard bindings the default method - but this can also be changed in the options menu.
Otherwise I'm all ears for adjustments to include in future patches to improve the game! Multiplayer was always the focus, and I haven't played in a while so I'd be up for a match should anyone want to play. That one "capture the star clone" map was really fun.
ah yes now I remember vaguely, this freeze time function.... One has to wonder; why not just make pause behave this way? Why have essentially two different types of pause buttons?? Can't it do everything freeze time can, including incurring the penalty, without *failing to pause*?
The other major roadblock was how you assign skills. NeoLemmix has a similar "follow lemming" feature, but as a side option. Selecting a skill then selecting the target lemming just seems to work better most of the time. Especially if you're new to the game and clones may often be spilling out in different directions suddenly you didn't intend, you want to click quickly to get them under control. From being a lemmings player this just felt totally backwards.
The other issue I can't recall very well but had something to do with physics and how clones moved around. Maybe it was just another issue of differences from being a Lemming player.
auto-transitioned from one to the other silently behind the scenes
But giving morphs while paused was only allowed in one not the other so not sure.. hmm..
Four indices. American cards put indices in two corners only. Does no American ever fan cards in hand in the wrong direction?To me this just seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy: why would anyone here learn to fan their cards the other way if you couldn't actually see what the cards were?
figure out what fanning them the other way meant
it meant having the left card on top rather than the right.
you were all psychos that held the cards from the top or something.
this is maddening. i can't get any help elsewhere so hopefully someone here can get me out of this hell.Source (http://gimpchat.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=18815)
try as I might I cannot manage to redock itSource (https://www.gimp-forum.net/Thread-SOLVED-How-to-redock-an-undockable-dialogue)
It just refuses to be fixed like the dialogue in "Layers/Brushes" on the right.
P.S. My awkward workaroung so far is to close gimp, delete the ".gimp-2.8" folder and restart gimp again; and loose the previous settings Sad
Now I wrote this and will scare WillLem off git forever?