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Never trust a system that seems to be working
101–110 of 376 posts
Re: Never trust a system that seems to be working
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
This happens because the real insulators are better approximations of ideal insulators, than real conductors are approximations of ideal conductors. In electrical circuits made with normal conductors and insulators, e.g. copper wires and organic polymer insulators, it is possible to ignore the currents that branch from the wires and close through the insulators, because they are extremely small (e.g. in the femtoampe…
I have a bachelors degree in electrical engineering and work experience in hardware design and in the back of my mind I've always known this to be true, but this is the first time in my life I've ever heard anyone say this explicitly. EE pedagogy is badly broken in places.
Indeed, when discussing theory we love pretending that there's no voltage drop from the wires, which can really bite you when you get into design or deep failure analysis. All good technicians and engineers learn this reality fairly soon, and it's one of the things we check especially when dealing with indeterminate failures.
As much as I love academia, I really wish there were more instructors with real experience that could say things like, "for math purposes assume a zero-loss conductor" while still emphasizing that real life is not so simple.
Re: Never trust a system that seems to be working
#103Wow, Factorio is approaching Full Time Job levels of detail and work required to keep everything running. Incredible game that I will never play, I feel I’m back at my job!
This is a mod that seems extremely boring and tedious. The base game is not like this.
> This is a mod that seems extremely boring and tedious.
It doesn't have to be, though. I'm currently playing Space Exploration + Krastorio 2. Krastorio modifies the early/mid game, Space Exploration meddles a little with the early game, but most of it is late game.
There are a few more inputs required for things so they can get more complicated. And with Krastorio the early game is extended (you have "burner" versions of the science lab and assembly machines). So yes, earlier game is a little slower. On the other hand, it gives you stuff to make up for it. You don't require as much science(at least, before space) and there are things like core miners, which provide infinite resources so you don't have to keep moving miners. Also new power generation.
I guess that it depends on what you want to do. Base Factorio you either play until you launch the rocket, or you move on to megabases. If you want to do that, it's perfectly fine. However if you want to keep playing, it's a lot of the same, only bigger. Space Exploration essentially _starts_ once you launch the rocket. I don't want to do megabases so it seems ok with me.
Also, spaceships :)
Re: Never trust a system that seems to be working
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "saying the name of the game uncensored is going to get namesearchers and I have a transflag in my name so guess what kind of response I'd immediately get?" I believe kovarex made some anti-trans statements once, and gamers in general are prone to making abuse pile-ons, so it's a mitigation against that.
> I believe kovarex made some anti-trans statements once Nah, publicly advertised for and defended some right-wing Youtuber. [0] [0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/subcultures/factorio
Might as well cancel most programmers while we're at it. It's insane to lambast him for this when all he did was recommend some of Uncle Bob's videos on project management and programming.
Re: Never trust a system that seems to be working
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I believe kovarex made some anti-trans statements once Nah, publicly advertised for and defended some right-wing Youtuber. [0] [0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/subcultures/factorio
Uncle Bob? Stating he is just "some right-wing youtuber" sounds mildly reductive, the guy co-authored the agile manifesto[0]. I won't go as far as defending his views, but recommending his talks and books seems pretty normal to me. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_C._Martin
He doesn't even have a whole "getting cancelled" section on his Wikipedia page yet, can't be that bad.
Re: Never trust a system that seems to be working
#106We once learned a good lesson about this, as well as recognizing the real threat that ESD poses. We once had a terrible failure that was the result of a main signaling line being damaged by ESD such that it had much higher resistance than it should have. Our signal levels were too close such that it danced over the line a few times and got interpreted as the opposite value, but only sometimes. It also taught a good lesson that when the robots do become self-aware and take over the world, it's gonna hurt like hell.
Re: Never trust a system that seems to be working
#107Wow, Factorio is approaching Full Time Job levels of detail and work required to keep everything running. Incredible game that I will never play, I feel I’m back at my job!
To be fair - this specific issue is with Space Exploration, a mod that's specifically for people who decided that Vanilla didn't hurt quite enough.
Re: Never trust a system that seems to be working
#108Quoted post unavailable.
Was thinking the same. Once you exceed like 5 tweets in a thread, it becomes a small article and you would've been better off just writing an article in the first place. If you check the thread reader below you can see just how unstructured and incoherent it is compared with a simple article.
Re: Never trust a system that seems to be working
#109Tests that output booleans (pass/fail) are an antipattern. Tests and their dashboards must distinguish “the testing system worked and the test failed” from “the testing system failed”.
I dunno, I think regression tests are inherently boolean. Either it passed or it didn't. The code path that the system takes to get to a green light or not is arbitrary. If you start using an enum to return the result of the test, folk tend to add more and more enums over time until it's overly complicated. Processes return an 8 bit integer, but 99% of the time all anyone checks is whether it was 0.
There's certainly practical benefit to being able to quickly triage a test failure. Tests that only output booleans are annoying. When there is a failure, it's helpful to have some out-of-band information about why it failed. That's typically provided via console output, but you can make whatever complex logging system you want.
Re: Never trust a system that seems to be working
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Working with beginning programming students, "Yay, now we have an error message that makes sense" has become my catchphrase.
"Read the error message, no wait don't close that go back" when helping people is a definite feeling. Take a deep breath. Take off your headset. Go outside. Never look at a computer again. Start driving a bulldozer. Life is good.
I’ve lamented here before, but the number of technical people who absolutely freeze up at the sight of an error message is daunting. Being able to interpret errors correctly is a huge step up in this industry; to me it feels like table stakes, but clearly isn’t.