TangibleLight's recent activity

  1. Comment on Tildes Minecraft Weekly in ~games

    TangibleLight
    Link Parent
    That's a lot! I only need a few stacks. I won't bother building the generator then. (Maybe later on if there's need, but I'll wait.)

    That's a lot! I only need a few stacks. I won't bother building the generator then. (Maybe later on if there's need, but I'll wait.)

    2 votes

  2. Comment on Tildes Minecraft Weekly in ~games

    TangibleLight
    Link
    Some questions on farm status as I'm a little out-of-the-loop. I assume the answer is 'no' to all, but figured I'd check in case. Is there a good surplus of oxidized copper anywhere? I only need...

    Some questions on farm status as I'm a little out-of-the-loop. I assume the answer is 'no' to all, but figured I'd check in case.

    • Is there a good surplus of oxidized copper anywhere? I only need about a stack for my current plans, so I could just oxidize it manually.
    • Do either of the tree farms in the industrial district work with the nether trees? I'll need a bunch of the blue stuff.
    • Has anyone built an enderman farm? I will build one in the end if not.
    • Is there a good source of sculk blocks anywhere? I will build a generator attached to the enderman farm if not.
    2 votes

  3. Comment on I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit in ~tech

    TangibleLight
    Link Parent
    You can also use asterisks or underscores. *** ___

    You can also use asterisks or underscores.

    ***
___
    4 votes

  4. Comment on Tildes Minecraft Weekly in ~games

    TangibleLight
    Link Parent
    Maybe I should not cancel my stasis network project after all. It seems there might be demand. I do still want to make progress on the end portal room first.

    Maybe I should not cancel my stasis network project after all. It seems there might be demand.

    I do still want to make progress on the end portal room first.

    3 votes

  5. Comment on Tildes Minecraft Weekly in ~games

    TangibleLight
    Link Parent
    Now that we have /sit and /lay, could we get a plugin that lets us /stand?

    Now that we have /sit and /lay, could we get a plugin that lets us /stand?

    2 votes

  6. Comment on Tildes Minecraft Weekly - Tiny Little Babies Edition (26.1 Update) in ~games

    TangibleLight
    (edited )
    Link
    This is where I've been the past few months (CW animal death). https://tildes.net/~life.pets/1ua5/grief_and_guilt I might hop back on the server for a bit to try to distract myself. I want to...

    This is where I've been the past few months (CW animal death). https://tildes.net/~life.pets/1ua5/grief_and_guilt

    I might hop back on the server for a bit to try to distract myself. I want to finish my cathedral.

    I'm going to allow myself the liberty of officially cancelling the stasis network project. Apologies if anyone was counting on it. Perhaps I will revisit in the future but I'm really haven't been and I don't expect to be in the headspace for that kind of engineering any time soon.

    Edit: I don't want to cancel the project, but I will wait a bit before I resume it. I need to set up some infrastructure first anyway (ender pearl farm, mostly).

    6 votes

  7. Grief and guilt

    ~life.pets Ask
    I don't usually write things like this, but I'm having difficulty and think I need to get it out. I had to put down my dog Willow on Monday (two days ago, as of writing), and I am not okay. This...

    I don't usually write things like this, but I'm having difficulty and think I need to get it out. I had to put down my dog Willow on Monday (two days ago, as of writing), and I am not okay.

    This is not the first pet I've lost. Several childhood pets, but those weren't really mine, they were my parents', and so I didn't have the same level of responsibility over the animal as I did with Willow.

    Even of my pets, this is not the first loss. In 2022, I adopted a retired working dog Yukon and an elderly cat Gomez. We lost Yukon in May 2024 (aspiration pneumonia due to megaesophagus) and Gomez in May 2025 (renal failure). The renal failure was a prolonged decline, and so while we tried to manage the disease we had some time to come to terms with things. The pneumonia was very fast decline and more of a shock. I loved them both, but this now feels much worse. I guess because I only really knew them 1 1/2 and 2 1/2 years respectively. I feel guilty about that, like it shouldn't matter and I should have grieved for them the same, but I don't.

    This was the first pet that was mine, in the sense that my wife and I have had full responsibility for her the entire 10 years we've had her. She was the best behaved dog I've ever had. Always by my side at home. Especially when I worked from home during/after Covid lockdowns I took her with me wherever I could. Loyal. I just killed her.

    Well, I didn't do it, we took her to a vet and they did typical euthanasia. It doesn't feel like the difference matters.

    Willow also had renal failure, which we learned about at stage 3 (already severe) in January. The past few months have brought back a lot of pain about Gomez since it was the same disease. Realistically, the fact she made it all the way to May still walking on her own is remarkable. Meals have been challenging for the past month or so. Since late last week she refused to eat, and her condition deteriorated quickly over the weekend. We knew this was coming, but childishly it somehow felt like she'd just keep going forever because she'd been doing so well. Of course that's not how it works, but I guess it's easier to imagine that things are normal.

    I think we gave her the best final day we could. We took her to the same pet stores, park, restaurants we used to take her to when she was in her prime. I got her some drive-thru chicken nuggets, her favorite, and she actually ate all of them! She must have been hungry. I want to believe I could have kept feeding her fast food for a few more days or weeks or months, but I know it's simply not true. She moved slow, but still walked on her own at the park and pet store. By the time we arrived at the vet she seemed satisfied, tired, and ready for a nap.

    I don't know.

    As I say, I've done this before and I roughly know the "usual" advice about grief and how it seems to work for me. My wife and I support each other. We still have other pets, and it helps a little to hold them. Enduring a death the same month three years in a row is taking its toll. All our other pets seem healthy and relatively young, and I'm not superstitious, but some deep emotional part of me can't help but fear May 2027. I think I'm just tired.

    Our cat Pinto, still a 9-month old kitten, we've had since she was newborn and abandoned by her mother. We think she was abandoned because she couldn't latch properly to nurse, so we fed her on bottle day and night. Given how much it hurt about Yukon and Gomez after just a couple years, already old when we adopted them, and how much it hurts now about Willow after 11 years, who was a young adult when we adopted her, I am terrified of losing Pinto. I know it'll happen. I don't know what I'll do.

    The quality of the pain doesn't really feel new, but the quantity is so much worse than I expected. Feeling guilty about that is new. The fear is new. Not really sure how to process it. You're not supposed to have favorites but I guess you do anyway.

    I don't really know what I'm trying to get out of posting this. Pity? Not really. I guess I just need to get it out of my head. I'll probably look back at this thread in a few days to see what people have said but I think I just need to get this out and step away from it for a while and process.

    https://i.imgur.com/U1Nq7X8.jpeg

    37 votes

  8. Comment on "The reason I'm not an atheist is that I think the philosophical arguments against it are unanswerable" (gifted link) in ~humanities

    TangibleLight
    Link Parent
    Indeed it does! Thank you for remembering. It'll take me a bit to chew on the new comments here since I looked through this thread this morning. I will say though, in the time since that past...

    Indeed it does! Thank you for remembering. It'll take me a bit to chew on the new comments here since I looked through this thread this morning.

    I will say though, in the time since that past conversation and again reading your great summary here: I really dislike the names "physicalism" and "anti-physicalism". I understand the history and the semantics that they represent, but I don't like the words. To me, it seems that if you believe phenomenological experiences come about due to the physical universe then you must admit phenomenological experience as part of the physical universe. The discrepency is that the "physicalist" positions seem to deny qualia outright or (as I generally did before the referenced conversation) ignore the hard problem of consciousness. The only positions that seem to admit phenomenological experience as part of the physical universe are, ironically, the "anti-physicalist" ones. So I am forced to identify as a dualist of some variety, even though I disagree with the notion of "soul" as often associated with those views.

    I think your conclusion is the most important point though. "Athiests think our brains are just mechanisms!" is a straw man that must be rejected. The conclusions don't follow, either. Suppose we do have eternal nonphysical souls: what bearing does that have on the existence of a god or any other aspect of theology not directly about the nature of the soul?

    5 votes

  9. Comment on Need help making an atlas-styled map without ultramega distortion in ~creative

    TangibleLight
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    It's just the one html file. https://gist.github.com/allemangD/9246a2f56bcdbf3e02db2f967626f5e6#file-map-reprojection-html. Feel free to edit and/or redistribute. Typically I'd agree with the...

    It's just the one html file. https://gist.github.com/allemangD/9246a2f56bcdbf3e02db2f967626f5e6#file-map-reprojection-html. Feel free to edit and/or redistribute.

    Typically I'd agree with the anti-ai sentiment, but every once in a while I think it's important to give things a go to see the state of things. This was a nice well-defined but small enough project that it seemed like a good thing to try it on.

    The basic idea is that at the end of the day, every map projection is some equation that relates x, y pixel coordinates to latitude and longitude. Most of the formulae have a bunch of trigonometry and polynomials. The general structure of the code is to define the x,y->lat,lon and lat,lon->x,y equations for each projection. The pixel coordinates of the equirectangular projection are latitude and longitude, so the shader code just does the x,y->lat,lon formula and looks up the pixel color according to the uploaded image.

    I don't really know what the robot did to implement the maps. I just told it to restructure everything so there's an abstraction to drop in objects with forward/inverse formulae (the Projections object and #projSelect element), and told it which ones to implement. They all seem to behave right. It produced way more code than I expected for equal earth projection, there is probably some better way to do it but I didn't care to refine it further.

    The click-and-drag code is handled by applying the inverse map to the previous and current mouse coordinate, which gives you a delta latitude and delta longitude. You can compute a rotation matrix from that, and apply it to the whole sphere. Since that just depends on the currently-selected Projection object, you can just drop in new projections without any fuss. That was mostly the purpose to include the icosahedral net projection, since it requires having that abstraction correct.

    Robot review: this was a mix of Gemini Pro and Gemini Fast. I had Fast generate basic scaffolding and architecture, and had Pro implement the rendering and projections. It started out trying to reimplement every little thing, so once it got to a semiworking state with a single projection I had Pro look for common patterns and refactor. I had to specifically ask for this Projections object. From then on I just asked it to give me new projections I could drop in and test. I was most impressed that it was able to single-shot the icosahedral map without any errors, that's by far the hardest projection of the five.

    2 votes

  10. Comment on Need help making an atlas-styled map without ultramega distortion in ~creative

    TangibleLight
    (edited )
    Link
    I vibe coded a little web viewer that lets you import an equirectangular projection (the kind you shared) and interactively rotate/zoom/reproject the map into different projections....

    I vibe coded a little web viewer that lets you import an equirectangular projection (the kind you shared) and interactively rotate/zoom/reproject the map into different projections. https://allemangd.github.io/map-reprojections/

    No warranty as I haven't really looked at the code, but I know enough about map projections to get the robot to produce something that seems to work.

    (Edit: It DOES NOT work on mobile. You can import a map, but you can't pan/zoom and the control panel is in the way. I'm not going to bother fixing this unless someone specifically asks for it.)

    • Azimuthal Equidistant. The "local atlas map". Idea is you could zoom in on a particular continent and export the map with minimal distortion for only that continent. (catbox example)
    • Orthographic. This lets you rotate and export the map as a globe. (catbox example)
    • Icosahedral net. Just for fun. (catbox)
    • Equal Earth. (cat)
    • Equirectangular. Lets you rotate the globe to prevent distortion on particular continents. (box)

    If you're willing to move the north and south pole, rotating the entire map, then the best-looking result I got was this. And, the same orientation re-exported so you can pull it into a different viewer.

    1 vote

  11. Comment on Which Linux distro do you use, and why? in ~tech

    TangibleLight
    Link Parent
    Likewise. I use Debian for everything at home, and I use Ubuntu at work because it is the only "supported" Linux option by our IT. I'm not forced to use Windows, so I tolerate the Ubuntu-isms....

    Likewise. I use Debian for everything at home, and I use Ubuntu at work because it is the only "supported" Linux option by our IT. I'm not forced to use Windows, so I tolerate the Ubuntu-isms.

    Well, I tolerate some of them. I disabled snap and held back all the apt snap packages. I use MATE instead of Gnome, which causes some headache, especially after system updates the keyring services get messed up.

    8 votes

  12. Comment on What would you do with a video game style inventory? in ~talk

    TangibleLight
    Link
    If I do a hand-stand can I put the Earth in my inventory? Or, maybe more practically, can I do a hand-stand on a car and put the car in my inventory? Will the object appear above my head when I...

    If I do a hand-stand can I put the Earth in my inventory?

    Or, maybe more practically, can I do a hand-stand on a car and put the car in my inventory?

    Will the object appear above my head when I remove it from my inventory, or can I choose where to place it before it materializes? This greatly affects my decision to put a house in my inventory.

    1 vote

  13. Comment on US Supreme Court strikes down Donald Trump's tariffs in ~society

    TangibleLight
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    I don't exactly disagree, but I also try not to put to much stock in those feelings, because asserting that 30-40% of people - 100-150 million Americans, or 77 million voting Americans, or that...

    I don't exactly disagree, but I also try not to put to much stock in those feelings, because asserting that 30-40% of people - 100-150 million Americans, or 77 million voting Americans, or that fraction of whichever demographic - are incapable of rational thought is a kind of dehumanization that I'm not really comfortable with.

    But at the same time I can't help but feel there's some truth to it, and I don't like that feeling.

    9 votes

  14. Comment on E-ink tablet recommendations for note taking in ~tech

    TangibleLight
    Link Parent
    I have access now. It does not support PDF export, and it does not render pages locally, instead streaming PNG page data from a server. I am displeased. In any case it's nice to have some means to...

    Also, they're starting to release the webapp to beta users now, and people on Reddit say it is good, but I don't have access yet.

    I have access now. It does not support PDF export, and it does not render pages locally, instead streaming PNG page data from a server. I am displeased.

    In any case it's nice to have some means to view page contents on Linux, but it still feels overly cumbersome. I am making noise in the feedback system requesting that they render locally, but somehow I doubt it will happen.

    1 vote

  15. Comment on Voyager Technologies CEO says space data center cooling problem still needs to be solved in ~space

    TangibleLight
    Link Parent
    The temperature of the matter in space is high, but since there's not much matter the thermal energy is low. You might be thinking about the heat of the radiation in space - there is ambient light...

    The temperature of the matter in space is high, but since there's not much matter the thermal energy is low.

    You might be thinking about the heat of the radiation in space - there is ambient light coming from the cosmic microwave background, but it's only a few °K. As such radiators always trend toward that temperature (except in the presence of other sources of hotter radiation like planets and starlight).

    3 votes

  16. Comment on Tildes Minecraft Weekly in ~games

    TangibleLight
    Link
    @j0hn1215 I updated and filled out some of the maps in the inn, except I didn't complete the big one because my elytra was nearly broken. Also, it looks like there are some unwanted guests upstairs.

    @j0hn1215 I updated and filled out some of the maps in the inn, except I didn't complete the big one because my elytra was nearly broken. Also, it looks like there are some unwanted guests upstairs.

    1 vote

  17. Comment on E-ink tablet recommendations for note taking in ~tech

    TangibleLight
    Link Parent
    I've edited my post about pricing but I'll also say here more explicitly: I was wrong about the pricing model, it's different than I remembered, and the basic marker is included with the list...

    I've edited my post about pricing but I'll also say here more explicitly: I was wrong about the pricing model, it's different than I remembered, and the basic marker is included with the list price of the three devices.

    Also, they're starting to release the webapp to beta users now, and people on Reddit say it is good, but I don't have access yet. Apparently it does not support PDF export (yet??? 🙏) which does not bode well for my dream of a canonical implementation of the file format for the community.

    Also, the "create a public link" feature is out of beta and available in the latest software update.

    1 vote

  18. Comment on Tildes Minecraft Weekly in ~games

    TangibleLight
    Link Parent
    I'm glad the mood landed on the lighting; that's exactly the inspiration. The vacation was to Las Vegas, and walking past the shops in the Bellagio I saw this lighting fixture in one of the...

    I'm glad the mood landed on the lighting; that's exactly the inspiration. The vacation was to Las Vegas, and walking past the shops in the Bellagio I saw this lighting fixture in one of the hallways. "Some expensive place" is certainly a good descriptor. The texture of the glass reminded me a bit of froglights, and all the angles reminded me of fractal things like Koch curves or trees or, as I settled on after more thought over the week, the Dragon curve.

    Aside: if you ever find yourself in Las Vegas, "O" by Cirque du Soleil was truly excellent and an unforgettable experience. I highly recommend.

    4 votes

  19. Comment on Tildes Minecraft Weekly in ~games

    TangibleLight
    Link
    I've been out of town on holiday the past week, so not much progress from me since then. I just logged on this evening for the first time since I've been back and took a peek around the server....

    I've been out of town on holiday the past week, so not much progress from me since then. I just logged on this evening for the first time since I've been back and took a peek around the server. It's always so cool to see what progress people have made after a short break!

    I was particularly impressed by the Ender Dragon statue at town square, but I'm not sure who exactly made it or when. It's a fitting monument for such an event!

    I finished digging out the space around my nether portal, what I've dubbed "the atrium" pending a proper name. Shoutout to @ColdheartsTalon for filling in the gaps in the walls with their spare netherrack to stop hoglins from raiding me while I experiment with lighting.

    While I was on holiday I was struck by inspiration for the chandeliers that I intend to hang in the space. I will continue to play with placement and color to work out the best way to keep the space feeling open and allowing more detail to be visible, but I'm happy with this rough draft.

    In keeping with the theme of space filling curves: the floor is a Hilbert curve while these lighting fixtures are Dragon curves. There's some double meaning there with the end portal that I quite enjoy.

    To relax a bit and try to take my mind off the bigger projects, I built a flag near the town square and spotted Talon atop it. It's meant to mimic the 'swoosh' of the Tildes logo but still look like it's flowing in the wind. From above or on a map, the segments of the flag are 2x2 tiles that form the logo, although the "top" blue and "bottom" red segments are shifted by one pixel to avoid holes in the flag. I couldn't figure out a way to keep the flowing look without that shift.

    I welcome anyone to revise the shape to make it flow more true to the source material, or to improve the lighting situation. I just threw some glow lichen on the thing, but surely something brighter and more elegant could be done.

    5 votes

  20. Comment on E-ink tablet recommendations for note taking in ~tech