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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • Because the ones that we hear about are the ones that are good enough to have even made it out of Japan. If a game was bad, it wouldn’t be localized to an English-speaking audience, and we wouldn’t even know it exists.

    It’s the same sort of thinking as asking why (insert media here) was better in the past. The answer is simple - good songs, games, movies, etc. tend to be more memorable, and so we remember the good ones and forget the bad ones. To put it briefly, there’s survivorship bias.



  • I think doing nothing is an overlooked business strategy. Companies always expect change and improvement. There must be a new version, a new redesign, a new functionality, a new hype. It looks good on paper and signals leadership to the investors, even when what the customer really wants is just stability and consistency. We saw it with Windows, where Microsoft’s endless hype-chasing led us to Windows 11. If stagnation is one extreme of business strategies, then whatever these tech companies are doing is the opposite extreme.

    Valve knows what to change and, more importantly, what not to change.







  • Flying is definitely the first challenge that players tend to meet. Just use autopilot. You can cancel the autopilot mid-flight, and you absolutely should cancel the autopilot if you start to see that a planet is getting in your way. Most people just fly with the autopilot, and that’s really my biggest advice.

    If you really insist on flying manual, don’t treat it like driving a car. Spaceships (both real and in-game) drift most of the time. You want to get up to speed (400 m/s is a good top speed most of the time) and then drift the rest of the way to your destination. Do you see the white dotted arrows coming out from the planet that you’re targeting? You want to get those arrows to be as short as possible. If the arrows are visible, that means you’re not lined up with the planet and you’ll miss the planet



  • Yeah, people tend to have that problem, especially if they’re treating it like driving a car. If you want to fly manual, never fly more than 400 m/s, because then you won’t have enough time to slow down.

    My actual advice though is to just use autopilot. People seem to forget that you can cancel autopilot. If you start to see that there’s something getting in your way, cancel the autopilot and push the ship to the left or right (it’s easier to go around the planet than to slow down). Once you’re clear, resume autopilot.


  • Size matters. I built a small form factor pc exactly because I knew I would probably move it a lot. I find that 10-15 L cases can be fit into a large backpack with some care, and 8 L cases can be fit into backpacks relatively easily.

    You probably won’t need it to fit into a backpack, but regardless, you will probably want to remove any unnecessary space to make carrying and transport easier. For what it’s worth, I believe 15 L cases can generally fit into luggages, and I would be more inclined to trust that a PC is undamaged if left in a luggage. Especially if the remaining space is well padded


  • I can kinda see both ways. I think both systems aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive - I think the old system works more intuitively for pipes with low volumes of fluid, and the new system works more intuitively for pipes that are full or near full.

    I hope that the developers can mix the two systems, so that pipes function with the old system when pipes are empty or near empty, and it switches to the new system when pipes are full or near full




  • Yeah, sure! This happens to be my field of research.

    So I was referring to this particular paper, which unfortunately (to my knowledge) didn’t get much follow-up.

    Tangentially, there is much other evidence that circadian rhythms have evolved in part to deal with differences in microbial pathogens at the day vs. at night. However, whether it’s because the composition of bacteria in the atmosphere is different, or because animals are more likely to get themselves exposed to pathogens when they’re foraging, or a mix of both, is unclear. My favorite paper that demonstrates this effect is this one, where the circadian clock affects how strongly the immune system responds to bacteria in the lungs. I’ll also include the seminal paper here that first kickstarted the idea that immunology is fundamentally circadian, although frankly I didn’t like how the paper was written. It looked at how mice responded to Salmonella infection at the day vs. at night and found a difference in immune response that then led to a difference in how severe the infection got.



  • You’re right, I can’t give medical advice. But having abnormally long or short circadian days is a known thing - called circadian diseases. It’s not really my specialty, so I can’t comment too much on it, but my understanding is that many of them are genetic. These genetic variations can cause the circadian clock to run slower or faster than normal (which happens to be adjacent to what I study, so I can talk about it in excruciating detail if desired)

    The Familial Advanced Sleep Phase Syndrome (FASP) is one such genetic circadian disease that gets a lot of attention among the circadian field, but you almost certainly don’t have it, since FASP makes your clock run shorter than 24 hours, whereas you seem to imply that yours runs longer.

    The key thing to remember is that the circadian clock is not psychological. There is an actual, physical, molecular clock running in your brain and in nearly all the cells in your body. If this clock has imperfections, then that will directly lead to consequences in your circadian rhythms and your sleep cycle. The circadian clock is a real thing that people with the right equipment can measure and read. It wouldn’t even be particularly hard - just a blood sample or a swab would be sufficient. To be honest, I myself would like to study your cells to see if there really is anything out of place, but that would probably break so many research and ethics rules.

    Anyways, to answer your question, I would recommend getting a medical opinion - it might be worth specifically bringing up that you suspect you have a circadian disease. I’m not too sure about treatment options, since my impression has generally been that we kind of don’t have any treatments for circadian diseases. But it’s not really my specialty, so maybe there is. My memory is that melatonin is a masking cue, which basically means that it makes you sleep but it doesn’t actually affect your circadian clock (which probably explains your poor experience with melatonin).



  • I’m pretty sure that’s the general hypothesis in the field, but as you might imagine, it’ll be very difficult to prove. There was a study done sometime (I don’t fully remember when) where researchers collected data on when people go to sleep and when they wake up, and they found that there was a remarkably normal distribution in the population for when people wake up and sleep.

    My personal interpretation is that chronotypes (what you call early birds and night owls) are genetic in some way, but I don’t specialize in this area, so don’t take my word for it