gakles
11d ago
Just got back into Project Zomboid. The game is so fun when it works, but the pace of development is killing me. I dropped it a year ago in anticipation of NPCs in build 42, but they still aren't here, and I'm playing on build 41 because half the mods I want to use are unsupported in B42. Currently playing a mechanic with the scrap warrior mod on 4x pop no respawn, hopefully it'll be a long playthrough but I'm struggling to clear out a safe zone to even begin dealing with the bigger hordes. The FPS optimization mods are impressive, I went from a stuttering nightmare to a decent experience even when around a 100+ horde.
gakles
11d ago
I think the game has huge potential, particularly with the already thriving, somewhat supported modding scene. I'm honestly a little concerned the devs are spending too much time making new planes and not new systems/qol/optimization, because they'll announce a plane in the roadmap (eg. heavy cargo lifter) and modders will spin one out in half a month.
gakles
16d ago
Neat! I've been burning my excess tokens from claude's $20 tier trying to vibecode my own videogame. I want to make a naval warfare sim sorta like Rule the Waves but in the modern era. I have minimal coding experience (I don't know how to use github) and have basically just been feeding claude prompts and letting it sort things out.
So far the going has been good, if a bit slow. I tend to burn through the 5-hour limit within an hourish using opus on medium thinking, with about 3-4 hours every week dedicated to this for the last 2-ish months. The sim needs to run on a mac, so I've spent a lot of tokens telling claude to plan the architecture and look for optimizations, which, to my amateur analysis, has been reasonably successful. The latest version is 47k lines of typescript (is this good? bad? I don't know :) ). Theres ships with different modules, planes, doctrines, missiles of various types, and intercept programming, as well as reasonably(I believe) accurate modelling of radar and flight performance.
I've tried using Sonnet to code, and it works surprising well for things which don't require too much forethought, like "make a model and loadout for an arleigh burke destroyer". It's not so great at things like "The tomahawk missiles keep falling into the sea after launch, find out why and fix it", where it tends to get fixated on one aspect or metric and ignoring others. In the latter case, the launch booster didn't have enough thrust, but it kept trying smudge the lift surface size to get the missiles to fly without it. As a whole, I've found that using Opus (and fable, for the brief moments it was available) lead to net faster progress and implementation of systems I wanted, with at least an order of magnitude less mistakes. A few weeks ago I migrated from a browser interface to electron I believe and Opus made the switch painlessly while I'm sure Sonnet would have fumbled.
I'm decently happy with the current program: ships follow orders, missiles fly, some are intercepted, theres cool sprays of CIWS and 5 inch guns when cruise missiles get to close, and airplanes are mostly capable of launching standoff munitions and doing air combat. That beiing said, it's pretty rough on the edges, theres no main menu or situation setup: I have to add ships/planes via lines of code if I want them in the simulation.
If anyone with experience wants to check it out I'll happily post the code to github. I'd love feedback, I'm sure the llms have missed some big things, somewhere, but I'm to dumb to ask the right questions.
gakles
25d ago
World War Z was a book which really stuck with me. I read it in my early teens and went into it looking for the archetypical zombie thriller and I was completely blindsided by the breadth of storytelling. Brooks' choice to tell the story from ordinary people, discussing their lived experiences made each vignette much more real to me. I can honestly say that by the time I was halfway through I was thinking about how hard it would be to block the staircase with sofa. Brooks has dropped in a ton of personal moralizing to the story, pretty obvious in certain parts during my most recent re-read, but as a teen I was too enraptured by the story and too young to pick up on most of. For those interested in more WWZ content there is a super long althist rewrite from a very leftist perspective in this thread. It's even more heavyhanded than the original book and laughable at times but a fun (and occasionally enraging) read. I haven't found another book like WWZ with that approach to storytelling and grounded approach to zombies. Please let me know if you know of any others like it!
gakles
1mo ago
I think people are acting more selfless than they really would be, and ofc voting was influenced by surrounding discourse, and of course the scenario is that red won, so some <50% of the population picked blue and died. The plurality of less-selfish people who voted blue, who then get thanos-snapped, were probably load bearing to some degree. I think there are a lot of negative externalities to red winning that red-pressers aren't considering.
gakles
1mo ago
Something something time preference.
I wouldn't want to live in a world where red won. Sociologically it would be an interesting question of how a society which thanos snapped itself would cope. Rugged individualism? "They were stupid and weak for picking blue, we're the smart ones."?
gakles
2mo ago
Sorry, deleted my comment because I realised you were only responding to the belligerent claim, which is fair, my bad.
Aggressively and incessantly waging war
I think theres a distinction between the relations Israel and Iran had before and after both sessions of surprise aerial bombing. I guess my motte would be that both surprise attacks severely increased direct kinetic conflict, civilian suffering, and heightened tensions in and between both states, in a way that wasn't there on the days before both attacks.
wrt your two questions:
- Nope, and to slightly modify the common saying, I have jewish friends.
- Not really, I generally fall into "the trust the experts" crowd and Jewish people rarely directly advocate against the (these days dismantled) technocracy. If American military(and financial, etc.) support for Israel is considered public policy then I do blame a subsection of jews for that.
gakles
2mo ago
We can't destroy Iran's capacity to build cheap drones without blockading land routes from China and every garage where they can be assembled in Iran. Russia can't do it to Ukraine, Ukraine can't do it to Russia, and we couldn't do it to the Houthis. Shahed type drones (not to mention mines) will always pose a threat to shipping in the Strait of Hormuz unless the Iranians on the coast no longer want to launch drones or are no longer there (read: invasion).
gakles
5mo ago
Source: 10 minute talk with expat uber driver
Anecdotally, my uber driver, an expat phd student in Australia was in favor of regime change but was skeptical the current protests would be effective, he argued the protesters didn’t have enough conviction and firepower. With current reports of the state killing several thousand protestors, I might have to agree with him. We’ll have to see if the people are willing to march in the streets when they can be mowed down by heavy machine guns.
gakles
5mo ago
Its just awful optically, only one shot actually went through the windshield, the rest were through the driver side window, meaning the car was past the officer by the time he really punched her ticket. By the time he unholstered, the wheels were pointing away from him, too. Not that this really matters, in that if she actually wanted to smoosh him or another officer she could have obviously turned the car around/started reversing and she had technically already acted to smoosh him (while turning so as to not smoosh him, but still). Doesn't change the legality, but it just looks awful. If the left had any credibility, this would be an excellent time to use it to argue against ICE overreach. Alas, they've cried wolf a few thousand times too many.
gakles
10mo ago
The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt was published in 2007 and blew up the polisci academic space, it was the first book to openly address the odd relationship Israel has with the US (and the groups which make it possible). I think it gives a pretty good cross section of US-Israel relations as they were in 2007 and previously and is a great help explaining many of the current institutions/habits that have been placed under a great deal of stress since Oct. 7. While groups the like ADL have smeared it as antisemetic, it very much is not, it's not some conspiratorial "expose" but an academic investigation (one of the authors is a jew, too). Not very much emphasis wrt Gaza but they authors spend some time on Palestine.
gakles
10mo ago
Decisive Battles of the Twentieth Century. It's written like an encyclopedia, with 23 different chapters/entries which are each about 30 pages deep. The book is pretty light on exposition, the chapter on Kursk for example has about 2 pages detailing the previous 6 months fighting, but to it's credit the book also goes fairly in depth with force composition and the planning/implementation of Zitadelle. Despite this the authors can't resist describing the armor and gun of the "fearsome Panzerkampfwagen VI Tiger Ausf. H", which pleased me, but older and more serious historians might take issue with that bit of indulgence.
My other issue with the book is it's title, which seems to hint at setpiece battles resulting in the annihilation of the enemy, yet they include chapters on Verdun and The Marne, neither of which were conclusive. Also the book shoehorns in the Battle of Britain which I'm pretty ambivalent about. The greatest tragedy is that this book was published in 1976, so it doesn't have Desert Storm. Maybe it's because I recently read Robert M. Citino's Blitzkreig to Desert Storm: The Evolution of Operational Warfare but I would really like a re-release which focuses on maneuver warfare.
8/10
gakles
11mo ago
Summer fitness has been interesting. I was pretty excited to return home to my local gym after my second semester in college but was sorely disappointed. They changed the machines, it's way smaller than my college's gym, and the extra 15 minutes it takes to drive there really became an inconvenience. I went a few times with friends but haven't touched a barbell in a month and half now. Luckily, the scuffed pullup bar in our barn is still functional, so I've been doing 50-75 reps a day. I'll do 15 with strict form, then two sets of ten more relaxed ones, one with a wide grip and one without locking out my arms at the bottom. Doing this 2-3x a day only takes a total of around 30 minutes and its been great for my mental health. I'm probably resting too long between sets and certainly not pushing myself to failure but I've seen an increase in strength and my form is getting much better.
My calisthenics goal this summer is to do a front lever, which I'm finding incredibly difficult. Like I can do 15 pullups without breaking a sweat, but I can barely get my legs parallel to the ground. Once I got serious about the pullup routine I've been adding torso/leg raises to the start and while I'm seeing some improvement it's really tough. I watched a youtube video where a calisthenics guy recommended tucking your legs and focusing on your torso before working your legs out, and thats the routine I've roughly been following. I think the main think holding me back right now is core and back strength, each day it's 50/50 which gives out first.
Aesthetically, it took about a month to burn off the fat that finals seasons had added. My abs are pretty good and the wide grip pullups have finally built my deltoids in a way I never had before. These changes are probably also a result of my facial structure/body shifting away from teen and towards adult more generally. I'm pretty lean right now with no sign of stopping, the first month of the summer was pretty bad with lots of boba/fatty mexican food but the start of a summer fling made me lock in and I've pretty much cut out sweets. By the end of next month (when school restarts) if I stay on track I'll be in the best aesthetic shape of my life. The aforementioned summer fling also increased my self confidence by a lot, which will probably make me somewhat more outgoing back at school. It's nice to know people actually find you attractive.
One of my friends back at college is one of those people who is genetically inclined to run. I'm not, but I'm hoping when I get back to school I'll pick it up again. I ran every other day last fall semester, and I don't think I'll be able to do that with my workload but something like 2x a week would be nice. The consequences of bad cardio scare me. Going back to the college gym will be interesting. I know my "gym buddy" has been pretty consistent so far this summer, so we'll see how much his bench/squat outstrip mine, and how fast it'll take for me to catch back up.
WARNO! I kinda hate the base game for being too arcady and competitive at times so I've been playing with either the CRMxWIF modpack or rebsfrago. Rebsfrago is soooo slow but pretty fun, and building artillery dominance can be fun. CRMxWIF is great but the roster is too limited and theres not too many neat things units can do, like SEAD or really nice artillery strikes. My micro is pretty shit but im having fun using long range weapons to snipe the backline, and my ai teammates do most of the real pushing. I'm starting to get a feel for what a good unit roster is (in both mods) but I just can't seem to get a combined arms push going, I'll be able to take the next copse of trees if I have all sorts of indirect support but I find it miles easier to just erode the enemy with long range fires, I'll get twice the kills, lose fewer units, and don't have to micro my frontline as much.
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