The Factory Floor

2:58 AM

pokes @James with an austempered...mower blade?

6 hours later…

8:36 AM

@Hosch250 Coolio!

JDługosz

9:01 AM

@Green The first was myself, so really you are the first.

4 hours later…

Gryphon

1:14 PM

@James I mean, it's not technically the most toxic thing out there. Mercury is pretty nasty, though.

3 hours later…

3:46 PM

you about @James?

3 hours later…

Q: Proposal: a Sandbox landing site for all Sandboxes

6:47 PM

Now comes the time to pack 100 kg of FG flight muscle into a creature, and I don't even know if pterosaur flight muscles were different from birds' and how.

F... Duck!

Worldbuilding Meta

7:45 PM

I spent some time cleaning up the Sandbox today. It's getting to be a slow honker to load. This is especially true when I'm linking in through a comment notification. I spent time removing the body contents of deleted posts and flagged a bunch of the longer comment chains for deletion (must be...

Green

@Gryphon Very Fast Death Factor is pretty amazing.

Anatoxin-a

Anatoxin-a, also known as Very Fast Death Factor (VFDF), is a secondary, bicyclic amine alkaloid and cyanotoxin with acute neurotoxicity. It was first discovered in the early 1960s in Canada, and was isolated in 1972. The toxin is produced by seven different genera of cyanobacteria and has been reported in North America, South America, Central America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. Symptoms of anatoxin exposure include loss of coordination, muscular fasciculations, convulsions and death by respiratory paralysis. Its mode of action is through the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (nAchR) where...

8:14 PM

@Mephistopheles No problem, it was fun.

Been many long years since I've used those formulas.

I last used them back in my first semester of college some 5.5-6 years ago.

And before that, a few years earlier in HS.

Q: How could my hard telekinesis work?

8:39 PM

@Hosch250 Ok, I already mentioned it in the question

So, in my setting, telekinesis is divided into two sub-fields: Soft telekinesis allows for precise manipulation of objects but doesn't pack a punch. Newton's third law is negligible for this type. Hard telekinesis is a quick burst of force that can accelerate an object in a certain direction, b...

science-based super-powers psionics

@Mephistopheles Thanks :)

@Hosch250 you're welcome.

On that note, I'm only about 68kg.

Your guy is either large or fat.

(I'm just under 6', naturally muscular, but quite lean, so...)

@Hosch250 Well, it's a knight.

Oh, makes sense, with armor and all.

8:47 PM

Onto a different topic, do you think it'd be possible to pack 100 kg of flight muscle into a creature? I'm still struggling with the attachment sites.

220 pounds? Not really.

I don't think a 100kg creature could even fly.

@Hosch250 The Quetzalcoatlus was at around 200-250 kg, with 20% of the total mass being flight muscle.

It could maybe glide--if it was in the habit of climbing mountains and hurling itself off, but I doubt even that.

@Hosch250 That one only needs tensile strength and wing loading to figure out, I guess.

That's just a guess.

And, TBH, it's not necessarily a very good one.

Could be they mixed some bones from other species up by accident (happens far, far more than most people think).

Could be it was one massive living balloon inside those bones, and was mostly just air.

Could be it used its wings for something else.

8:52 PM

@Hosch250 Guess I have to use my za warudo again

markwitton-com.blogspot.com/2018/05/…

2 hours later…

11:11 PM

@Mephistopheles have you had a tinker with that Flight program the blog post you linked mentions?

and hey there @Mithrandir24601 and @Kepotx

happy timezone to everyone

@Kepotx Happy late afternoon.

well, it's past midnight for me, so yes, quite late afternoon

LOL.

I think I'll just start saying "Good hunting", like in Jungle Book.

Considering starting job hunting.

Since I don't really have any growth options in my current company. Coworkers are great, and I like the concepts they use, but between bad code, and not being likely to have a promotion opportunity for 10+ years...

Green

@Hosch250 Do it!

11:26 PM

@Green Any particular reason?

@Hosch250 no opportunity for 10+ years is a red flag, but sometimes, I wonder if there is really company who does good code

If you hire me to build you a new system, you'll get good code.

I'm not saying you are doing bad code, just that lot of companies won't give you enough time to write good enough code

So, it won't necessarily be awesome, but it'll be able to change as it grows without gotchas, and it'll have separation of responsibilities, etc.

I lack of experience so I may be wrong/pessimistic

11:29 PM

IMO, you don't need time to do good code. You just need to know how.

Everyone thinks "I can program, let's go!". Almost nobody actually keeps looking to 10 years down the road.

Could they keep maintaining it, could they add as many new features as there currently are without it collapsing under the new weight, etc.

Will it scale if the userbase grows from, say, 10k to 10m?

I mean, it won't right off--you will find slow points or whatever and need to fix it. The thing is, could you fix it without redoing everything?

Will it result in changes crawling throughout the codebase, or will it be limited to that section?

That kind of thing.

There's no such thing as the perfect program.

What there is, though, is the good enough program that can be changed as needed.

And I know that because I've worked on an open source project and seen it.

It started as a bit of extension code in VBA.

Then it was ported to C# and became a VBE addin.

Once it was in C#, it started having more and more features added. It got a parser (with many bugs!) and started to understand VBA code instead of just adding new static things.

Then, after a little bit, it started falling apart under it's own weight. We started adding a bunch of features for the next release, then realized what was happening, rewrote it, and released the next version 1.5 years later.

Literally everything was redone. It also had twice the features once we finished.

Since some things were just added because someone wanted to work on it. Eventually we feature-freezed, smashed bugs, and kicked it out.

Jump to a couple years later, it's needed bits and pieces redone, sometimes several times.

But it's still growing and is still easily maintainable.

Easy to add new things, easy to fix things (mostly, which is where some larger work is still going on at times to make it better), etc.

And that's where I found you don't need more time to write good code.

You just need to know how. Because writing bad code literally takes longer than writing good code.

Even in the first iteration.