FunkyStuff

Disambiguation:

Belts going straight into buildings a la Satisfactory, Create in modded MC, or Mindustry. Buildings usually have slots that allow you to plug a belt into them.

Inserters/mechanical arms that take items off a belt and insert them into buildings like Factorio, or Dyson Sphere Program

My own thoughts:

Inserters and mechanical arms are generally a cleaner system since setting up assembly lines you just have belts running parallel to machines. The case for belts that directly go into/out of buildings is that it makes the math for throughout a lot simpler because there is only 1 rate in the distribution to worry about. Games where inserters have stacking, different speeds, variable throughput depending on destination, etc... have annoyed me a fair amount so I like the straightforwardness of having a belt that carries 120 items/min no matter what.

A pretty important thing to note is that 2d factory games are gonna struggle with a direct belt access mechanic since it means belts have to go through each other a lot, diagram below

[12] [12] [12]   
-/|---/|---/|  
--/----/----/

The belts in the 2nd line have to cut through the first. In 3D that's not a problem since you can just stack the lines vertically instead, but in 2D you have to use whatever mechanic the game has to go above or below existing lines. I think this is the main reason the inserter mechanic is most common, but some games like Mindustry solved this problem neatly and allow you to easily pass items in multiple directions. Dyson Sphere Program also has direct belt inputs for a few buildings where only 1 input is needed, but DSP allows belts to easily cross over each other in 3D space, it just doesn't allow stacking assemblers vertically like in other 3D games.

Another solution for 2D games with direct access belts is to allow for the building itself to act as a kind of junction. Final Factory (an underhyped new release) has this system where you run your belts like this:

[1]--[1]--[1]
[2]--[2]--[2]

And as a building fills up, it starts passing the overflow to the next one. This means as long as you feed the first building in the chain with enough items to stock the whole line, you'll be fine. Then you can take the products out the bottom or sometimes you can fit another line through the crafters to take the output from the assembly line.

Also, another thing, some games use neither system because they rely on other systems for transporting items, like units that automatically carry them. I haven't played any games like that outside of modded Minecraft with Thaumcraft golems and Pneumaticraft drones, so feel free to give your thoughts on those (I think Oddsparks works this way? Haven't tried it yet).

You accuse them of being a socialist because they support Biden. Then you run through all the thought terminating cliches:

• Human nature
• Imagine you have 2 cows
• Totalitarianism/authoritarianism
• Socialists are just utopian idealists who haven't received their first paycheck/don't know how the real world works
• Explain the origin of money using the barter myth
• Climate change related thought terminating cliches that could literally fill the character limit 3 times over
• Call them a tankie
• Say that tankies always claim real communism has never been tried because they keep moving the goalposts
• Show them the reddit front page, /r/theleftcantmeme, etc whatever you can to make the brand of lib you're portraying look as uncool as possible

Then you show them your power level. Make them feel as frustrated as we feel when we speak with their cracker treatbrains. At the very least, from then on if you talk with that person ever again they'll have to think twice before they say some stupid thing you could easily dismiss as sounding like the character you cooked up.

Also, I guess this is just the standard-issue wrecker strategy that some trolls use against us here, ended up recreating that unintentionally

Several mind boggling lines here, my personal favorite is him trying to say he was using Epstein to get to some global health professionals because Epstein was well connected. My brother in Christ, you're Bill Gates, who's gonna say "No, sorry, I can't talk to Mr. Gates at the moment. Oh, Epstein gave his word? Clear my schedule!"

Who are some people that started out as ghouls and made a turn for the better? Bonus points if it came suddenly and from their own realization.

I thought about this for a while and the ones I could come up with aren't really that good.

• Emperor Puyi.
• Jeffrey Sachs went from doing shock therapy to Russia to defending their right to defend against NATO expansionism on a lib news show, but that's been his only good moment to my knowledge.
• Jimmy Carter but he never changed course when he needed to, not much he can do to undo the harm he did as president.
• Patty Hearst but she really wasn't doing anything bad, just came from a wealthy and powerful family much like Puyi.
• Pat Tillman was deployed when he had a change of heart and contacted a bunch of reporters, sadly he was killed by another troop before he got to make much of a difference.
• Peter Daou but he's largely irrelevant
• That natsec ghoul that wrote the article about quitting her job because she doesn't want to be complicit in genocide.
• Whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning? I don't know off the top of my head how involved she ever was with the war on terror, but she was a troop.
• Malala and Greta were never ghouls, but did grow from lib media darlings to over time so honorable mention to both of them.

I guess the most obvious example that does satisfy my criteria is Kissinger, who really popped off when he died.

edit: You do not, in fact, have to hand it to Puyi before he was re-educated.

Love this guy's Rust and tech videos, feel like this one has some insightful and useful ideas about autism.

This game is pretty cool, the demo is free on Steam and it's a good afternoon of content. Lots of interesting ideas that I haven't seen before in factory games.

If you like Factorio, Dyson Sphere Program, or Satisfactory, I'd recommend you check it out! I'm a playtester and have played with some of the features that are coming in the early access launch, they're very cool and it looks like the devs are pretty active.

I'm building a system where I'll have some embedded devices sending audio data to my server via HTTP, along with a small amount of numerical data. It's important that before these are sent to the database, they're bundled together. Another point, the client needs to authenticate to upload data.

The naive solution would be to send everything together as a JSON object and just base 64 encode the audio, with a single backend endpoint for receiving both the audio and the other data. My concern is, base64 adds a pretty significant amount of overhead (4 bytes of base64 for every 3 bytes of audio) and that is a problem for me, it's more power usage and it's a medium amount of data, a 33% tax is non-trivial. Network encoding might reduce that problem, but I can't be entirely sure until I test.

The other solution would be setting up a different endpoint for audio that can receive the binary data directly, maybe through a stream. This probably is the most efficient way to go about it, but it introduces some complexity as to how I'm supposed to match up the audio with the other data. I'm not very familiar with backend engineering so I'm not sure if there's a straightforward solution that is just an unknown unknown for me.

Maybe I can hash the audio data in the client, include it in the header for both requests, then keep a record of incoming requests along with their hashes in a dictionary in the server (push them as they're received) so they can efficiently be matched up with each other? Feels like a cool solution, but IDK, thoughts? Should I just eat the 33% overhead from the simple solution and accept that premature optimization is the root of all evil?