By default. Unreal Tournament 2003/4 used to have in-game text chat that would use the "Microsoft Sam" voice synthesizer to read player messages aloud to everyone in the room... MS Sam took so long to pronounce the letter "W /DoubleYou" that you could just go into a server and drop a 512 character "W-bomb" and leave. Everyone in the room would have to listen to several minutes of dubbayou's assuming they never turned off the voice feature.
(I miss those days of genuinely annoying but still apolitical random trolling)
The gentleman who hosted the LAN party, whose mother had her bedroom right above his PC, with speakers blaring, as we got Microsoft Sam to spell out countless insults and incredulous things while he complained "Cmon guys" never did host again.
If you still like video games and are a bit of a masochist you might try playing Noita sometime, a lot of the late game is basically built around this type of logic.
For example there's a wizard-type enemy that temporarily debuffs your max health by 50%, and the effect can stack if you get hit more than once. But what happens if you pick up a permanent health boost item while the debuff spell is on you? You gain the normal health boost, then it multiplies itself when the wizard's spell expires; you can can go from 100 to several thousand HP in seconds and there's basically no limit.
In any other game this would be considered a bug and patched out in the next update. NOT NOITA, motherfucker. You're almost required to do things like this for a lot of the end-game optional content.
So it is this very hard amalgamation of rogue and powder toy that controls like terreria, Very hard, With none of that silly meta progression nonsense you find in most roguelikes, But you push through, get good and beat it. Guess what? That was at most 10% of the game(probably closer to 1%), the other 90% is deliberately obtuse, hidden and optional. What sort of madmen make 90% of their game a easter egg?
I think it could be an unpopular opinion, but I like seeing these completely stupid link-to-a-wiki with no context whatsoever posts. Things that force you to actually RTFA of some obscure bit of tech trivia feel a little bit more like how using the internet used to be all those years ago.
Personally the first HN algorithm anecdote I really noticed was when the "stop destroying videogames' petition hit the front page a couple years ago. In the first hour it got a modest ~100 votes and comments with some organic discussion, so pretty typical for a good HN post. In the next hour it was dead and buried several hundred posts down.
I don't want to be a tinfoil hatter here, but I think certain industries have a lot more influence over this site than most people realize.
I had a post about Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing that I was hoping would go viral because that's the only way I ever saw Amazon ever fix anyone's KDP issues. I posted, then went to bed. When I woke up, it had 250+ points, but was on page 5 with a bunch of posts that were much older and/or had single-digit points.
It must have been on page 1 for a while to rack up that many points, then it sank almost immediately to page 5 where all the other posts with even 50+ points were days old. I've always wondered what happened there. Was it the algorithm, or did a mod step in?
I’m guessing you got a surge of the people passionate and interested in that cause more than they cared about intellectual curiosity. Then the rest of us who don’t really want to see the same things everywhere didn’t engage and it dropped.
It seems very difficult for some people to imagine that their passions aren’t universal, or that people might be tired of endless “awareness raising” campaigns shoehorned into every digital space.
Yes, I'm very aware of that effect. The difference is that this was so aligned with the general attitude of HN users[*] that it stuck out as an anomaly; similar posts almost always hang around for a little while, usually several hours but sometimes over a day,
(*examples include 'right-to-repair, Louis Rossman, all the John Deere and phone hackers, general "I want to own the shit I buy". You get the idea.)
Remember the average person doesn’t comment, they just lurk and maybe vote. Our sense of who the average HN person is comes from an incredibly skewed sample.
Arguably, there's at least two kinds on "average HN people", which I think of as participants and spectators.
For me (and I'm not claiming my opinion is any more than a probable "No true HN person" fallacy), people who never or extremely rarely comment are spectators. And while they quite likely outnumber people who comment regularly by 100 or 1000 to one or more, they are not part of "the HN community" because they do not participate in it.
I think most people's (including spectators) "sense of who the average HN person is" probably aligns reasonably well with the average HN _participant_.
I think there is a difference between what is important and what is intellectually interesting.
As a rule of thumb, promoting an agenda (and that's what a petition is) tends to be toward the less intellectually interesting end of the spectrum...occasionally promoting an agenda might involve interesting arguments.
A petition is not much of an argument. A petition is a call to action that requires very little action and typically minimal commitment.
By which I mean, I might have flagged it if I saw it on the front page. And maybe I did.
This isn't very satisfying to me, as that ranks pretty low on the list of potentially damaging threads, don't you think? The genesis period of a petition? I see way more alarming stuff on here every day that further disillusions me to the biggest players.
I don't like Paul Graham, but I don't know if he really gives a shit what's happening on here. HN is not a super influential forum.
>as that ranks pretty low on the list of potentially damaging threads, don't you think?
Yes, exactly. That's why it struck me as being so weird; something so innocuous on its face getting hammered that badly suggests some kind of outside coordinated influence.
(oh, and edit; apparently industry lobbyists had been holding private counter-op meetings with the EU Commission before said petition was even finished, so there's that. Not immediately relevant to this discussion but it does speak to what goes on behind the curtain in government topics)
> That's why it struck me as being so weird; something so innocuous on its face getting hammered that badly suggests some kind of outside coordinated influence.
That seems like circular logic? Hasn't dang offered many reasons why a post might be suddenly down rated?
There's just got to be more than "I think I saw a post get down rated, so it must be a bot army"
I don't know all of what dang has said personally, but in most cases where I see new topics getting killed it's pretty obvious what the reasoning is; political ragebait, shady sources, plain junk articles or other low-quality threads.
The SDV/SKG petition thing was none of those, and people were generally positive about it during the discussion. So it seems to me it was either an unexplained random down-voting event or something a little more malicious.
The thing is, it doesn't even have to be PG/HN doing this. Case in point, look at reddit being astroturfed by every company.
And also, look how good Graphene OS posts do, and now compare that to Stop Killing Games. These both have a similar overlap (unless you work at Google, both are interests/hobbies), yet GOS almost always hits front page (and rightly so), yet SKG failed to, despite being a Stallman-ian topic.
It wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that was purely automated based on 4chan organised Gamergater's dogpiling and looking exactly like voting rings and/or manufactured controversy.
The first thing I do with a real ID is widen the reference bars on the sides so the checkout scanner can't read it. If they want my birthday they can type it in manually, I don't need all my info in some store database.
At 7-11, they will not - cannot - do this. Their pos system requires a scannable license, and will block even a 50 year old from buying age restricted items. N=3 stores for me, and only tested in NY.
Interestingly, I've never had anyone scan my DL barcode. About 10% of them look at my ID and manually enter it. The rest look at my gray beard, ask me for my birthdate, and key in whatever random plausible date I give them. :) (There's one store where the gray beard is enough and they remotely approve me at the self checkout, no questions asked. The misery of it is that I only buy NA beer and that still requires an ID.)
The railgun guy might have been having a giggle with you, but you gave him some actual numbers so I'll give you some actual math to go with them.
Your biggest problem here isn't the launcher, it's the projectile. It's going to be damn near impossible to get a 1 gram projectile more than a couple hundred yards unless it's a dense metal. Doesn't matter how fast it's going, drag always wins here.
10 grams is more plausible, but then you're looking at ~1000ft-lbs cranking energy to get 10g supersonic (@ 40% efficiency) It's doable and you'll only be burning an extra ~100 calories per day for 200 shots. You might get bored though. An airgun will have far worse efficiency most of the time, though it can launch dart-shape things which can go much further for the material density.
You mentioned a bow, which is probably the tradeoff point of everything discussed so far. Flight bows are designed for distance shooting, are lightweight and can go 500 yards easily. The downside is you'll need to make the arrows yourself, cause there ain't no supply chain to sell hundreds at a time cheaply.
For the "jUsT uSe a hElIcOpTer lol" comment;
No, that's not practical, but you CAN get an RC plane that will carry a couple pounds for a tiny fraction of the cost. In terms of how much area it can cover vs supplies needed, that plane is going to be the least thirsty thing on the mountain, assuming you even need to climb it then.
Guns are already ~20-50% efficient at turning chemical energy into kinetic energy. If you're not using a direct chemical reaction for energy, then you're using a human which is a lot less energy-dense than a backpack full of ammo.
And yes, people who do avalanche control typically fire explosives out of a cannon or drop them from a helicopter. Getting a machine supply all the energy is the whole idea instead of climbing mountains yourself.
Do you not understand your argument is exploring a made-up scenario where we're no longer an industrialized civilization where these things are manufactured cheaply by the billions?
And if you INSIST on making everything completely low-tech and renewable, build a potato gun and use high-proof alcohol as fuel. It'll weigh less and last longer than whatever rube-Goldberg trebuchet design you have.
A good one will weigh about 5 pounds and not have moving parts to break. Ferment your own alcohol from plants you grow yourself. You can at least do that much, right?
A good one will have as few parts as possible, and be optimized for both portability and distances.
>Ferment your own alcohol from plants you grow yourself
I suppose I could just harvest gunpowder from the bullet trees that grow all over candy-land, too.
Or, I could just have an ultra-optimized trebuchet in my backpack for throwing things with very little effort besides the energy (me) required to reload it, wind it up, and let ‘er rip ..
Nobody in this thread has demonstrated anything but a distinct lack of imagination and a willingness to be as boring as fuck about a really cool idea, though, so I’m not bothered by convincing anyone.
It’s like saying “why would you use a bow and arrow when you’ve got a 50 caliber machine gun industry right there, ready to help you blow things up”.
I’d use a bow and arrow in the same context - so that I don’t have to have an entire industry dependency just to survive and/or do stuff in the wild.
And before you change the context and say “yeah, why don’t use just use a bow and arrow to do your seed-bombing, huh hippy?”, that thought of course crossed my mind. Soon as I find a supersonic capable bow, that is.
I, for one, would absolutely love to see you carrying up a mountain the contraption in the video with its full 50kgs weight, then raising said weight by three meters with the power of your muscles to launch each single 4 grams pellet, and doing that for several hours every day. I am curious though if you have considered how much you would have to eat to power your muscles, how do you plan to procure the abundant food supply you'd certainly need (and which of course it should have been produced without chemicals and industrial processes of any kind), and how would you carry that up the mountain as well.
What part of "I can't wait to see this optimized into a portable version" did you not understand?
Yes, this prototype is big and unwieldy. So?
The development process is obviously on its way towards the construction of a smaller, lighter version.
BTW, there are rocks up the mountain. They can serve as the weight once you get there.
It's the math of the thing that is going to end up becoming optimal. Not just the material design - which is important once the loading and tolerances are understood. The gearing/screw mechanism is especially interesting from this perspective - it provides a clear path for optimization.
Once he has the equation dialed in, it will be interesting to see it scale down. The winding gear provides a path to optimization on the horizontal plane, and that is going to be very interesting to see go through a few more iterations. Pun, intended.
> What part of "I can't wait to see this optimized into a portable version" did you not understand?
The part where you don't need to load into the system at least as much energy (actually a multiple) as you get out of it.
But there are already a lot of simple, portable and lightweight mechanical systems to launch objects at high speeds, and optimised to be loaded by muscle energy: they're called sling, slingshot, bow, crossbow, etc. They have excellent performance. Since air drag is dominant on small projectiles, speed decays exponentially and the range only increases little with more energy. Claude calculates that a bow can double the video's trebuchet at throwing distance because of the arrow's shape and weight, despite shooting at much lower speed and needing about a quarter of the energy input.
>lift the weight for every shot, which requires energy.
All harvesting requires some secondary-energy source.
Gravity is a resource, it takes effort to convert it to a form that can be applied - just like wheat, photons, air guns, etc.
> It's not obvious whether a trebuchet is better than compressed air, like a BB gun.
True, it’s not obvious yet, but it sure is fun following along and imagining the final, highly optimal version making its way through the process. I’d use it for some seed bombing hijinks, anyway. Green up the place, I would.
Look at it this way:
The boiling point of ammonia is -33 C.
Would you drink a jug of household cleaning ammonia just because it's been heated to +20C?
But anyway, I don't think there's hazardous levels left after normal distillation+cutting, the reason for not buying booze from some guy behind a barn usually has more to do with lead contamination risks.
https://archive.is/55YK9
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