I am completely confused about the orbital mechanics in this game. They seem completely broken; at any rate they do not work remotely like any other simulation I've played with (e.g. Gravitation or Kerbal Space Program). The bodies other than the first body appear to actively deflect the spacecraft away!
19:50 Put codex and claude (thinking high) to work in parallel to see who could come up with the better physically accurate mindless tapping orbital mechanics sandbox.
20:10 Both codex and claude finish pretty much at the same time, but my kids say claude's version is more fun.
20:50 Claude runs out of its 5h session limit while finetuning some things, while Codex has 80% left (!).
That sounds like it would be a completely different game and probably not as fun since you'd have to use some very fiddly controls to manually get into orbit. If you eliminate orbit entirely then it's just a slalom race. "Hitting" each star/planet is the immediate feedback that makes it fun.
Yes, give me weird orbits! I want a shot which is just outside the target area to get sucked in by the gravity of the planet, but potentially letting me slingshot around an intermediate planet towards a more distant one. The tap command should still mean “gravity disengaged, momentum still active“ to allow shifts from one orbit to another.
I tried it, but it doesn't make for good gameplay, it just gets too easy. Could maybe subtract points, but that also feels strange. I updated gravity to do things, but orbiting isn't permitted.
i love the gravity. but sometimes the orbital speed is to fast to be able to make the next jump. that's frustrating.
a slow mode, or an option to hit the brakes might be nice. or going slower as the orbit decreases. smaller orbit is harder but slower speed is easier. you just have to find the right moment
the quick bonus should not be more than one point. maybe an extra point for hitting 5 quick jumps in a row.
If the physics were accurate enough, I don't think it'd be easy - you'd get constant elliptical orbits in most cases, right? making the timing much harder going forward
Wonder if I can turn this into browser-playable version with just LLMs.
EDIT: Put Claude Code on the task (reason for choice: Claude Desktop lets me just throw it at a folder with unzipped bundle of sources and assets I found laying around my blog archive).
EDIT2: Holy shit it worked. Will upload it somewhere soon.
Then after verifying it matches what I remembered and clarifying some decisions (section 4 and 5), just told it to make a static client-side no-build-step no-webshit-frameworks game deployable to github.io, and it did it in a single shot (+ a second small request to add a fix to transparency of some assets). Personally, I'm impressed at how well it went, what a nice highlight of the weekend for me.
the main problem is that the projectile can continue flying outside of the visible area and sometimes get stuck there without ending the level. some option to abort the level without restarting would be nice.
or a way to zoom out so that one can try a trajectory that circles around the planets instead of through them. some levels can't be solved because i can't move the mouse outside of the playing area in order to get the trajectory that's needed.
i'd also like an option to replay a specific level. since levels are randomly generated i'd like to be able to replay a level until i can solve it, even if that breaks my streak.
Given how easy the port is, I'm now inclined to fix a few things to make it properly playable, so I'll address it :).
I agree, the moment I launched the ported version I remembered the core annoyance in playtesting was always the ball spending most of its time off-screen, with player waiting for it to maybe come back. I was thinking to solve it more by scaling - zooming out, like in the original game that inspired this - Warheads SE[0].
On the levels, looking at the code I _think_ I originally wanted fixed levels loaded from data files, the randomized order and lack of replay/progression was a way to cut scope for what was a contest entry.
i love the improvements. thank you. the way zoom out works is really nice. retry and abort, all there. being able to retry after failing adds so much satisfaction to figuring out a level.
the only thing missing is a manual zoom or pan so that i an get more freedom to control the starting direction. some level are not solvable because the starting vector needs to go further up than the space allows.
when I first read "orbital slingshot" in the title I thought it was a game about doing gravity assists, which I think would be much more interesting and fun
Yup. I figured it out and went from zero to five immediately when I figured out it wasn't in the least orbital, but rather it was Undertale: you had to click when it was exactly tangent to the target, and then hitting anywhere within the target area was a win.
That's also when I lost all interest, which isn't quite fair in that it's still a slingshot game, just not in the least orbital. It's just a slingshot. No stars required.
At some point they got ultra aggressive about "duplicate" questions.
Technology changes at a fast pace .. so new questions would get asked, and then closed by moderators and pointed to similar questions that might be 5 or 6 years old and no longer relevant.. essentially ending the discussion on many topics and actively preventing progress in certain areas.
Absolutely this. Later in the piece I learned that one of the mods in a place I'd occasionally asking questions on SO was from my local town and would occasionally attend industry social events. It was amusing to let a few people know and watch the "why did you close that question as a duplicate? That vendor module was only released 6 months ths ago but the duplicate was from 5 years back. Make it make sense!".
Some people took SO too competitively. They tried to be the first to answer your question (even if by a single sentence that would be edited to a longer answer later), but when they could not, they at least tried to get your question closed (presumably so that their competitors couldn't get points for answering it).
At some moment it just stopped making sense for me to ask questions on SO, because if you can google the answer then what's the point, but if you can't google the answer, then some angry competitive user is likely to close your question for some reason.
I can absolutely say that "I couldn't answer the question first" is not a motive people had for closing questions. That would have been abusive and definitely something that moderators would follow up on and deal with to whatever tiny extent it happened.
I can say extremely confidently from years of experience that the people who were always "trying to be the first to answer your question" were, overwhelmingly, the ones trying hardest not to let anyone ever close anything, even harder than the most aggrieved newbies asking questions and not caring about the underlying community. Nobody sits around answering multiple questions a day for years on end, purely on intrinsic motivation. I joined in late 2010 and posted answers all the way until mid-2023, but fully half of those were before the end of 2012. There are reasons for that. Meanwhile, there are people with reputation scores in the seven digits, even though the site awards no further privileges past 25,000. The obvious conclusion is that we're primarily talking about people primarily motivated by Number Go Up, and closing questions is an impediment to Number Go Up, so it must be prevented at all costs.
Questions get closed for the reasons that are listed in the interface for closing questions, which are also described in the Help Center and also explained in detail on meta (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476). When questions don't meet the expected standards, it's important to close them as quickly as possible; because when people answer questions that should be closed, they are actively making the site worse (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/429808). And since there will always be people around who are motivated by Number Go Up, there was value in preempting them.
Really the system was poorly designed. The Staging Ground was the one shining beacon of hope, because it inherently prevented answers by default, providing only a comment thread with the explicit purpose of fixing issues with the question so that it could meet site standards.
I have various ill-informed hypotheses, mostly connected to the cult of shareholder value and the decades of short-termism that have resulted. As the author notes: MBAs are not inclined to take big creative risks—but, equally, are would-be Roys not inevitaby likely to be put off the whole enterprise, when whatever they might build must thread an ever-narrower path between failure followed by bankruptcy on the one hand and succeeding sufficiently to become a meal for some huge soulless multnational conglomerate (or evolving in to one) on the other?
Unless one is able to build something without needing to take outside capital, it seems inevitable that anyone willing to take true creative riskes will eventually be pushed out–and by corollary any true successes are unlikely to survive the succession of their original founders unscathed.
This reminds me of an interesting security incident that occurred on the undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca unix cluster while I was an undergrad, circa 1996.
When I'd started, the cluster had three SunOS servers, named cayley, descartes, and napier; undergrad math students had their home directory allocated on a local disk on one of these three machines, which each cross-mounted the others' via NFS. At this time, however, the Math Faculty Computing Facility had just received a fancy new dedicated NFS file server from (IIRC) NetApp, and all our home directories had been moved there instead, presumably freeing up desperately-needed CPU cycles on the three compute servers so we could run the Modula-3 and μC++ compilers.
One evening I was in one of the XTerm labs in the Math and Computer centre working on a CS assignment (the only alternative being to do from my dorm room via 2400 buad dialup). As was tradition, I had left the assignment until the night before it was due to start work on. Indeed, it seems that we all must have, because after getting part way through I needed to access some input data files that were shared from the home directory of the course account—something like ~csXYZ/assignments/N/input—only to find I could not read them.
These files were of course owned by the csXYZ course account and should have been either world-readable or readable by the corresponding csXYZ group to which all students registered that term belonged. Unfortunately something had gone wrong, and although the files were rw-r-----, they belonged to the wrong group, so that I and the other students in the class were not able to access them.
It now being after 6pm there was no hope of tracking down one of the course professors or the tutor to rectify this before morning (and it's quite likley the assignment submission deadline was 9am).
Fortunately, I was a naive and ignorant undergrad student, and not knowing what should and should not have been possible I began to think about how I might obtain access to the needed files.
I knew about suid and sgid binaries, and knew that on these modern SunOS 4 machines you could also have suid and sgid script, so I created a script to cat the needed files, then changed its group to match that to which the files belonged, then tried to chmod g+s the script—but of course this (correctly) failed with a message informing that I could not make my file sgid if I didn't belong to the group in question. I then took a different tack: I chgrped the script back to a gropu I did belong to, ran chmod g+s, then chgrped the script back to the group that owned the files I wanted to read.
I now know that this should have resulted in the script losing its setgid bit, but at the time I was unaware of the expected behaviour—and it seemed that the computer was as ignorant as I was because it duly changed the group as requested without resetting the setgid bit, and I was able to run the script, obtain the files I needed, and finish the assignment.
I then headed over to the CS Club office to discuss what had happened, because I was somewhat surprised this had worked and I wanted to understand why, and I knew that despite the lateness of the hour the office would certainly be open and very likely contain someone more expert than I who would be able to explain.
The office was indeed open but no explanation was forthcoming; instead, I was admonished not to discuss this security hole with anyone until I had reported it, in person, to the system administrators.
Thus it was that bright and early the next morning I found myself in Bill Ince's office with a printout of the terminal history containing a demonstration of the exploit in hand. I informed him I had a security issue to report, and handed him the printout.
He scanned the paper for a moment or two, and then replied simply "ahh, you found it".
It seems I was not the first to report the issue, and he explained that it was due to a bug in the new NetApp file server. He then turned monitor of the terminal on his desk around to show me a long list of filenames scrolling by, and (in hindsight rather unwisely) informed me that it was displaying a list of files that were vulnerable to being WRITTEN to due to the same hole.
He duly swore me to secrecy until the issue could be resolved by NetApp (which it was a few days later), thanked me, and sent me on my way.
Seems interesting but for some reason on Chrome on my iPhone 13 mini the page is too big for the screen: I have to pinch zoom out to see the X that dismisses the instructions, and can't scroll the about page.
Did you make some assumptions about the minimum window / screen size based on oversized modern smartphones, forgetting that lots of us still cling to more reasonably sized older devices?
Hm, yeah, tested it down to about 500 px width, and the low-resolution devices in Chromium but that was too optimistic then. The modals should of course be closeable, and both game boards simultaneously visible. Played around with the modals a bit, so maybe it works better now?
You know what else is infuriating? Pages that won't load (at all—just show a blank page, or in this case a too many redirects error—if you do not have cookies and local storage enabled.
Agh, sorry about this! I'm one of the people building leaflet.pub, which this blog is running on. Just pushed a fix for this (ironically on nextjs/vercel). The redirect loop is to handle sharing auth between our "main" domain, and people's various custom subdomains. Auth, via the ATProtocol, is used for things like subscribing and commenting!
Well, their "About" page explains that it's a journal "dedicated to two big ideas…: equality under the law and global federalism." But more relevantly, also that they publish "short stories and memoirs, because stories — shared at the fire pit of hunting camps and at feasts on Thanksgiving Day or Eid al-Fitr — are also essential to who we are."
As with any kind of literary fiction, what moral (if any) you take from this story is largely up to you.
Not to disparage Stijn's efforts, but he's about a quarter century late to the AR ad-blocking game: when Steve Mann came give a talk at the University of Waterloo whilst I was an undergrad there (circa 1997–2000), one of the applications of his wearable computer that he demonstrated was the ability to recognise and block ads on posters and billboards.
Of course at the time the computing power needed just to do the image tracking was far in excess of what could be carried on his person, so it involved a (possibly pre-WiFi) radio link to a lab network of graphics workstations, and as far as I know the software wasn't doing any kind of AI ad identification, but only matching pre-tagged ad images (or maybe just tracking the physical locations of the user vs the known location of the ads, via GPS + INS + video tracking).
It was nevertheless an exceedingly impressive demo that it has taken quite some time to make a significant improvement on.
I read your comment as praise for Stijn for having made a somewhat practical and working prototype for a concept that could only be demoed in the most resource intensive and clunkiest ways 25 years ago.
Steve Mann's demo was I'm sure impressive, still the idea in itself is absolutely trivial (looking for ways to hide ads started the very day ads were born) and it all comes down to the execution.
"What type of irresponsible uses do you see for this technology, professor?"
"Uh, I think, like, advertising. Like that, that type of thing. One of the things that I'm trying to do is, is design filters to filter out advertising, so that when you're walking around, you could filter out real world spam. You know, already we have spam in the real world such as billboards, and things like that. So, what I envision is that the mediated reality could be used to filter out the spam."
He was my prof in undergrad. He was pretty much half insane; sometimes he would stop talking mid sentence and just stare at the class for a bit. He would do this even on days where he wasn’t wearing the glasses. Such a strange course. Did learn some cool things though.
> One of the things that I'm trying to do is, is design filters to filter out advertising, so that when you're walking around, you could filter out real world spam.
Instead, I totally expect Meta and the Quest X to not block ads, but replace any IRL ads with targeted ads. You will not be able to turn this off. Instead, they could Black Mirror it and highlight each ad found and force you to stare at it for at least 5 seconds so the impression will count. If you don't, it'll just blank out everything else except the ad.
Whenever the tell-all memoir of the next Meta AR ad executive comes out in a few years, I hope they credit your comment for giving them the inspiration of how to implement the Torment Nexus
[Ed.⁰ This is a colloquialism¹; 1 Samuel 13:14,Acts 13:22:
Colloquialisms were the original shibboleths, tbh, but no sexism or other -*isms intended or defended by the aforementioned, admittedly sexist, canonical quotation]
What's the incentive to keep using the headset in your dystopia? if Meta sold the product you're describing, why would anyone buy it? Are you imagining a world with government mandated AR goggles? Why wouldn't I just take them off?
