/hob/ - Hobbies★

>>68917
Im curious, what ide is that? Ive been using vscode for c until now…
And I cant seem to detect any buffer overflows except for your line 24 so yeah, thats nice. I suppose you havent implemented to win condition check though.

>>68922
>I'm thinking of learning memory-safe C++ instead of Rust because it has more libraries available
That is a very good reason i think. I far, far prefer using rust but almost every time i try to think of a project i want to do it is a bad choice because of the weaker situation with libraries. It really depends what your goal is, though. Languages are best suited for different purposes of course. I am still considering putting more time toward rust myself because my strongest interests are in software that requires the highest possible guarantees of security

>>68923
It's just vim in a WSL terminal. I left it up to the players to determine if the game is over or not just like in real life. It doesn't crash or anything it just doesn't let you make moves anymore until you Ctrl+C.
>>68924
I think I determined that for me Rust is overkill for just writing applications. Even if I tinkered with microcontrollers, drivers or robotics again I might still just use C unless there were actual high stakes involved. You can write microcontroller firmware in Python.

I'm someone who starts projects in whatever interests me and then moves on. I don't really have any depth of expertise or experience to actually get hired, just years of abandoned projects.

>>68925
>years of abandoned projects
20 years at that xD
Ill probably try to make an app soon for drawing on my tablet, would be nice as a personal project because I have zero things to present either. just some minecraft mods or simple games I made when I started learning all this shit like tetris or browser extensions.

Now after I shat on Rust, I am beginning to see a good use case for it: writing a compiler. It is a performant language (more so than Haskell) that supports pattern matching and other features good for writing programs than transform input into output.

>>68547
spoilers the part where he left spain for northen africa is slow paced indeed and wonder when will he travel to egypt

Arthur C. Clarke is my favorite science fiction writer and one of my favorite writers in any genre. I decided somewhat recently that I wanted to read all of his books. Last year, I went through his entire collection of short stories, spanning over 60 years of a long career. I'll eventually go back to it and write my thoughts on it, but for now, I want to talk about The City and the Stars, a novel from 1953.

I decided to start with The City and the Stars because I had read the novella a short time ago, and this novel is an expansion of it. I wanted to approach it while the novella was still fresh in my memory. This is one of his earlier novels, but in it, there are already many of the aspects that make me like this writer so much. His heartfelt enthusiasm for the expansion of the human mind, both through technical and scientific progress as well as the push to make man a truly intelligent entity in this universe, meaning, an ethical being with respect for life, an unending, almost childish curiosity about the cosmos, and the vigor to improve his knowledge of all things. The motto of this novel, "No true intelligence can be hostile," presents a very sunny, optimistic view of life, and it's not a completely ridiculous position if you understand what he means by intelligence. Like always, it depends on the definition, and in his own terms, I agree with him. His faith in humanity is contagious, and I very much enjoy how this novel and his other works make me feel. I mostly come from the other end of the spectrum, being a shy pessimist about things, so reading Clarke is like opening a door to beautiful, reassuring world that I usually don't tap into by myself.

The City and the Stars is basically a coming-of-age tale. You have a boy named Alvin, who is the personification of youthful rebellion against the decadence and stale traditions that hamper humanity from achieving its true potential. Here, as in many of his novels, this potential is expressed mostly as the courage and power to expand the horizon beyond the stars. Space exploration and the necessary knowledge to do so. This is all told almost like a fable. This novel is not at all like the technical, hard science fiction he would write later on. The story is straightforward, and the characters are simple but effective. Each city represents a facet of human behavior or potential, and the characters are very much one-note, being the expression of single aspects of the emotional spectrum, likPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

Prelude to Space is very different and closer to his more mature work. It's about the first landing on the moon, conceived before any actual moon landing ever happened. Written almost 20 years before Apollo 11, this book reads like an extremely educated guess on how the first mission to the moon would likely unfold. He got some things right and others not so much, but it really doesn't matter. Again, the strength of this novel lies in his unabashed faith in humanity and its ability to overcome challenges and travel beyond our cradle, Earth. He delineates a clear plan for human excellence in this novel, shaped by space flight and a love for knowledge and exploration.

All the characters are either engineers, scholars, or scientists. The story primarily focuses on a small group of scientists overcoming the various difficulties of spaceflight. It is very clear in this novel what his favorite type of character is. If you go to Goodreads or elsewhere and read the reviews of Clarke's work, you'll see that a lot of criticism and complaints center around Clarke's supposed inability to create compelling characters, that his characters are uninteresting, etc. I disagree with this assessment. It's not that he can't write characterization, it's more like that his heroes are expressions of the type of people he admires the most: cerebral, logical, but not without warmth. They're the best of what humanity can offer, not the worst or even the average. This optimism is at the core of most of his characters, beneath their technical, seemingly cold exterior. In fact, his characters are civilized men and succubi, civilized in the best sense, and this gives them a type of maturity that is pretty much final. By that, I mean there is really no character progression. They're never idiots, bellyachers, or foolish. It's usually a team of characters who are professionals and fit for the task at hand. It's akin to the team on the ISS. You don't have morons up there, it's a team of incredibly competent cosmonauts, the elite of technical people, and that's where Clarke's characters usually stand.

As such, and this is very important, there's no human drama stemming from personality flaws. The drama arises from technical problems and the consequences of failing to identify and fix such issues. The characters themselves function like a well-oiled machine, as a team of engineers and scientists should when facing huge problems that require complete cooperation. There's no Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

The Sands of Mars is about the first human colony on the fourth terrestrial planet. There are plenty of interesting assumptions about Mars in this book, which was published in 1951 and written even earlier. For example, it was generally assumed that there was vegetation on Mars and that there were no mountains. Despite the name of the book, we don't get to Mars until halfway through, with the first part dedicated to the complicated business of spaceflight, taking people and supplies into space and to the other planets. The protagonist is a science fiction writer, Martin Gibson, and much of this character is clearly based on the author himself. There is an entire chapter dedicated to the role of science fiction in actual scientific pursuit, something I know was Clarke's concern. I think at times he yearned to have a more active role in the scientific community, doing research as a scientist himself instead of being 'on the sidelines,' as it were, an admirer and writer of fiction about the subject. In his first novel, Prelude to Space, the protagonist is a historian documenting the lunar landing rather than taking an active role in it. It would be some time before he let go of the role of outsider in his novels.

The book depicts a well-organized, fully functional Martian colony. Like in his last book, it's all about a group of highly capable people carrying out research and developing tools to overcome a problem. The problem here is, of course, Mars itself, a planet with virtually no air and no atmosphere. I wish he would elaborate a little more on the production of oxygen and especially water, which is produced in a power plant rather than harvested. However, the main concern of the novel is with the more imaginary Martian flora and how to use it to develop a breathable atmosphere. Terraforming is the main subject in this book and all of the important characters are involved with it in some way or another.

The 'gentleman's world' feel this novel has is amusing. The notion that society is already neatly organized and that the only problems left are of a technical nature, rather than social, is very strong here, and is partially why I enjoyed reading it. We never descend into squabbles, and, as I mentioned in my last post, humanity is held to very high standards, giving a sense of a utopia, or an intelligent man's paradise. Yes, the colony has to go to great lengths for the bare minimum of air and water, but those problems are of a hard natuPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

Childhood's End is one of the best novels I've ever read, pound for pound. It's a fairly short novel, but it packs quite a punch, especially with the two main ideas explored within the book: first contact with an alien race and humanity's ultimate destiny. The middle part slows down, setting things up and fleshing out the world and the impact of the Overlords on society, but it pays off in the end. The conclusion itself is the best part, presenting a very ominous, sinister sort of optimism that I honestly have never encountered in any other science fiction story. I really enjoyed reading the negative reviews for this book on Goodreads because you can tell that people were genuinely scared by this ending. I appreciated its tone and how it undermines the typical happy ending. This is one bizarre "happy ending."

Compared to Prelude to Space and The Sands of Mars, it's almost fantasy, at least towards the end. In that sense, this novel is closer to The City and the Stars than to Rendezvous with Rama and his other technically focused novels. It's all about subverting expectations and grappling with big unknowns. It reminds me of a sentence this author was fond of: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." While it never goes as far as sounding like magic, it does become quite abstract and loose regarding the technical aspects of what is happening. The fact that the ending deals with things outside human control and understanding ultimately makes the prose very effective and, at times, ghastly, which I found to be incredibly entertaining.

The Overlords were easily the best characters—in fact, pretty much the only characters in the novel. Since the story covers a very long period of time, human characters simply come and go with the passage of the centuries, while the main Overlords linger, taking care of humanity's problems and waiting for something of utter importance. I'm familiar with this writer, so I guessed almost right away what it was, but I think it's an effective mystery nonetheless. Clarke himself was very fond of this novel, mentioning somewhere that it was one of his best. I agree; in many ways, this is even better than Rendezvous with Rama.

>>67955
Nord Papirus I believe
https://www.deviantart.com/niivu/art/Papirus-Icons-786691314
Or either another "Nord" or "Papirus" by the same author found in his GitHub pack of all released icons+themes

I used to use those meme tiling WMs like i3 and dwm in the past but I switched away since I didn't really use any of their special features. I currently have no wallpaper, but I rarely see my desktop because most of the time I have a maximized window open.

I wish I had a computer, but I am a poor disabled NEET.

>>68890
I feel you wizzie,you're not alone…

>>68890
>>68891
What would be the computer you guys realistically want?

bump
>>68091
>read chapter in x days, page by page until I understand each theorem and its proof
>do at least 30% of the proposed exercises

>>68091
Creating Anki decks of the books I read as I go along have been a huge help in allowing me to grab concepts and make connections. Had I started doing this in undergrad, classwork would have been trivial. So I have been working through new stuff and also re-examining my old textbooks related to what I use in my work.
It takes some practice to make good cards for mathematics, it took me about 3 months of making cards for an hour a day before I really developed a sense of what to do.
I reference the 20 Rules from SuperMemo a lot. https://www.supermemo.com/en/blog/twenty-rules-of-formulating-knowledge

ive been trying to figure out some math for working with game graphics, but im struggling to understand how i would use these pure mathematics in graphics at all. i am a mathlet though, im currently learning basic trigonometry, then i plan on learning some linear algebra and figuring out how 3d graphics actually work. eventually i plan on learning physics too because i want to make fun physics simulations but thats way down the line.

>>68899

I think you'll find those 2 resources very useful considering your level.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLag3Nl349Trp27qK-PXWsn8T5BA_SVITt

https://gamemath.com/book/intro.html

>>68901
interesting stuff thanks wizzie

>>68870
>any interest in anything at all is a result of AUTIZM
Stop

I had a shitty telescope a while back, and I could never see shit. The moon looked cool, but to point to a specific star or planet was almost impossible. And when I got to point to anything all I could see was a white dot. Besides, there was a bit of light pollution where I lived then so I couldn't see much in the sky sometimes.
I liked to look at the constellations, however; I like astronomy and I wish I had the time to learn more about it, and to work out calculations on my HP-48.

>>68882
The most common type of telescope, and possibly the one that brings the most frustration (because they are usually purchased without much thought or a specific goal in mind), is the refractor telescope. I'm guessing you had something like the one in the picture. That's a 70mm aperture refractor telescope. The 70mm refers to the size of its primary lens, which is located at the end of the tube. This type is often chosen for children or as a first telescope because they are inexpensive and most brands offer one for sale. They are also incredibly easy to use. You simply point it at your astronomical object of choice, look through the eyepiece, and that's it, minimal adjustments are required.

Still, you can fall in love with a 70mm refractor IF you are aware of its capabilities and limitations. As I mentioned in the original post, if you try to punch above your weight when equipment is concerned, frustration will usually ensue. Even with excellent lenses, 70mm refractors are not all that suited for observing stars and deep-sky objects. They will improve your visibility significantly, but stars, nebulae, and deep-sky objects are quite far from Earth, so they will still appear as bright points in the sky.

70mm refractors are primarily for objects within the solar system. If you know how to use them and have some patience while waiting for a clear night, you can, for example, see the rings of Saturn, the moons of Jupiter, comets, and so on. Of course, you can have a lot of fun observing the Moon; many features of its surface will be visible. Again, you can use it for objects farther away, but keep in mind that they won't look like the pictures from NASA. Still, there's a lot of enjoyment to be had with a 70mm telescope.

In fact, I'm currently shopping around for one. They are perfect for what I want to do. The key is to purchase one from a reputable brand like Celestron. Having a very good 70mm telescope is far better than having a poor-quality 130mm one. The quality of the lens is crucial. There are many issues that can arise with inferior lenses, such as chromatic aberration and fuzziness caused by poorly adjusted components inside the telescope. So, opt for a small aperture with good quality.

Now, you are correct that astronomy is mostly about geometry. Actually SEEING objects is a relatively small part of the overall experienPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>68884
Thanks for the book rec! I had actually found it, and it was one of my favorites on the list (along with Smart's spherical astronomy, and Jean Meeus' Mathematical Astronomy Morsels.)
If I get my hands on that telescope again, I will definitely look at the moon more attentively. We take so much for granted in life.

So this night was more or less clear, 34% humidity, some clouds but good, clear windows between them for longs periods of time. Not in the right places to see the moon but I decided to just focus on whatever I could see. A large area from the Southern Cross was quite visible, particularly the "backyard" of Mimosa, the second brightest star in that constellation. I was not focusing on Mimosa specifically, instead, just around that area, it's possible to spot a star cluster called Jewel Box (NGC 4755). It's visible to the naked eye as a fuzzy bright spot but using binoculars or a telescope you can actually see it's a collection of stars. If you're patient and keep looking at it, your eyes will adjust, as well as your focus will increase, and you'll be able to detect several different stars within the cluster. As you get used to stellar scintillation, you'll be able to distinguish more and more features. You'll be amazed how much you're be able to see if you keep at it for an hour or so, instead of just taking a peek.

Here's an useful picture. 1 is their location on the star chart. I circled its location in pink. 2 is the Stellarium graphic. I circled all the stars that was distinct enough for me to identify. 3 is a picture of this cluster taken by an observatory. 4 is closer to how I was actually seeing it through a 8x42 binoculars, which is a birding binoculars but it's the equipment I have for now.

>>68893
Happy gazing anon.

>>67566
TNG was what got me into sci-fi in the first place as a kid.
It's a good show and glad you enjoyed it.

>>67566
Dianna Troi was a mistake. Empaths were a mistake. I fucking hated every second that bitch was on the screen. Riker was also a shit character. Other than that it was quite good and enjoyable. I wish they would have done Star Trek Captain Worf. I always liked Worf. The stuff they did later in the series really fleshed out his character and I would have liked to see him as the lead. What we got after that was just disappointing. Janeway wasn't terrible, but just not very interesting as was the show itself. It was like TNG just watered down. Then Enterprise was just shit. I didn't get very far with that one. Couldn't force myself through it.

>>67574
Oh, and deep space 9 is good. Not as good as TNG but nearly.

>>67576
I never liked Deep space 9 but I did enjoy TNG and Voyager.

Part of the appeal of Star Trek to me is the exploration and adventure.
Sitting on a space station most of the time just didn't do it for me.

I'm currently watching Star Trek the original series after almost a year without touching any Trek at all. I needed the abstinence to enjoy this stuff again. Just finished watching Shore Leave from the first season. It's a decent episode, a rather quaint idea but way too padded out. I won't be commenting every single episode here, but will try to make a post summarizing my thoughts on each season.

Hear about the new tranny cult that serial killed their way across the US that was just partially caught?

6 known victims so far, but that number might grow as more details are uncovered.

>>68755
King Von is dead. He was such a real nigga that his opps in prison felt sad when he passed away. Like he killed our people but what a legend. Rare specimen. They couldn't believe it and left a deep sigh.

Once he was questioned by the cops and they said "You and T.Roy are the talk of the streets. Be wary". The info about their shootings and their enemies plans reached even the police. He was a valuable shooter for his set. Without him the score would be way less. He felt in jail and prison like fish in the water so much that goofies on YouTube whine about him romanticizing it in his interviews where he simply told his experience. Never snitched too. The story about him putting $100,000 on FBG Duck is prolly fake. The chains were bought long before the killing. Muwop and others killed FBG Duck because one person from THF said he was trapped and about to be attacked. Hence why they rushed so fast and got caught. FBG Duck was fucking that person's baby mother (ex). When in court it was revealed he was in no danger, 5 members of O'Block 6 (one killed himself before arrest) gave him a side eye. That's for real.

Unfortunately for all involved from all sides.

>>68830
Not that Von would be against that, but the dates from the paperwork don't coincide.

>>60202 (OP)
How about the people that protect us from scum like him?

>>68867
TV show actors? What?

I like to collect old phones and PDAs. I have spent hundreds of dollars on these obsolete devices. They're pretty cool though

>>49409 (OP)
is that image supposed to be pareidolia? becuase it kinda looks like a face from the distance.

I make parasols & umbrellas

>>68859
cool

>>67749
how do you know you're high testosterone? Are you a fast gainer?

>>67750
His desire to crush his enemies, see them driven to suicide, and to hear their loli call him "nii-san" is indicative of extremely high testosterone.

>>67749
A decent wizard does not even befriend the kin of their enemies, lest it be to cause further havoc to them

New year, new martial art.

Started formally practicing kali.
It's expensive and the talent I have to train with is limited, but as long as they don't drip feed instructions I am pretty confident I can learn all I want from it in 6 months to a year.
What I am mostly worried about is the instructor wants to mix in Krav, which I am not interested in, and very likely wants to avoid allowing sparing often, which is troublesome since I am used to sparing almost every class when I did karate.

I know Taichi

>>65977
unlike games of chance, you actually have 100% control over it

I've been playing weiqi and shogi for five years and chess for longer, but recently decided to stop. I don’t really want to stare at a screen all day anymore and it’s impossible to find a game with a long enough time control where I can make moves on a physical board, and I'm tired of playing correspondence. But beyond that, I think that AI has fundamentally changed the nature of these games and the culture surrounding them to the point where they no longer appeal to me. I think I’ll keep studying old pro games on a physical board, at least.

I was going to link a subbed NHK Cup game, but I just learned that they've all been copyright claimed apparently. This sucks.

>>65898
There seems to be a misconception that because the rules are simple and about surrounding things, the game must be straightforward and peaceful, but in reality, most weiqi games devolve into complicated, high-stakes fighting. I think it's a very intriguing game once you understand how the stones interact with each other.

How good is GO AI opponents these days?

I like the game but I can't play it.
What I mean is that I suck, and I don't get any better however much I play or try to read go books. I do enjoy it but I also feel tense as I have to keep myself from making impulse moves and think my moves, but reading different variations gets very taxing and I end up making a mess..
I like the fights, though. I like breaking into a seemingly safe territory and living.

>>65873 (OP)
GO is a gentleman's game.