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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 4th, 2023

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  • Well, if you want an atmosphere to start with, might try running numbers for sulfur hexafluoride. I don’t know if it’d be your best option, but I’d guess that it’d be up there if you can keep the object warm enough for it to be a gas.

    https://www.epa.gov/eps-partnership/sulfur-hexafluoride-sf6-basics

    Sulfur hexafluoride (SF₆) is a synthetic fluorinated compound with an extremely stable molecular structure. Because of its unique dielectric properties, electric utilities rely heavily on SF₆ in electric power systems for voltage electrical insulation, current interruption, and arc quenching in the transmission and distribution of electricity. Yet it is also the most potent greenhouse gas known to date. Over a 100-year period, SF₆ is 23,500 times more effective at trapping infrared radiation than an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide (CO₂).

    I don’t know how to calculate albedo, but I’m sure that there are Web pages out there talking about it.

    EDIT: If all you care about is keeping the body warm via solar radiation and you don’t care about it specifically using purely the greenhouse effect, you could use space mirrors in orbit.


  • I’m not familiar enough with Cloudflare’s error messages — or deployment with Cloudflare — to know what exact behavior that corresponds to, but I’d guess that most likely it can open a TCP connection to port 443 on what it thinks is your server, but it’s not getting HTTPS on that port or your server isn’t configured to serve up the right certificate for that hostname or the web server software running on it is otherwise broken. Might be some sort of intervening firewall.

    I don’t know where your actual server is, may not even be accessible to me. But if you have a Linux machine that can talk to it directly – including, perhaps, the server itself – you should be able to see what certificate it’s handing back via:

    $ openssl s_client -showcerts -servername akaris.space IP-address-of-actual-server:443
    

    That’ll try to establish a TLS connection, will send the specified server name so that if you’re using vhosting on the server, it knows which site to return, and then will tell you what certificate the web server used. Would probably be my first diagnostic step if I thought that there was a problem with the TLS handshake on a machine I was running.

    That might provide enough information to you to let you resolve the issue yourself.

    Beyond that, trying to provide much more information probably isn’t possible without more information about how your server is set up and what actually is working. You can censor IP addresses if you want to keep that private.









  • I wouldn’t. I’d leave things at now.

    I think that the Internet has pretty much monotonically improved over time. Oh, sure, there are some things that I miss, but overall? Today wins solidly. Today:

    • Bandwidth is much higher.

    • Availability is much more widespread.

    • Security is a lot better in most respects. Used to be most traffic on the Internet wasn’t encrypted.

    • Flash and ActiveX are gone on the Web.

    • IPv6 is widely available, alleviating address constraints.

    • Email spam is more or less solved, though it does make running your own mail server today a pain.

    • Open source is a lot more widespread and mainstream.

    • I’d say that the reliability of a lot of online services is better.

    • The widespread use of containerization and VMs has dramatically reduced the cost of having a small server in a datacenter.

    • GOG and Steam are pretty amazing ways to buy video games. The selection is inexpensive, readily available, and ludicrously vast.

    • Ditto for Amazon compared to brick-and-mortar plus mail order.





  • While I like Bethesda games quite a bit, I do agree on the in-game lorebook stuff. I can’t see the appeal of the stuff. It’s a collection of extremely short, in my opinion not-very-impressive stories. I just can’t see someone sitting there and reading them and enjoying the things — if I’m going to read fantasy, I’d far rather spend the time on an actual novel. Yet I’ve seen people obsess online about how much they like the in-game lorebooks.

    I’ve wondered before whether maybe people who are talking about how much they like them haven’t gone out and read full-length fantasy books, and so they’re getting a tiny taste of reading fantasy fiction and they like that, but it’s the only fantasy that they’ve read.



  • I can think of lots of series that I don’t like, just because I’m not into the genre. I think that everyone has genres that they don’t like.

    I think a more-interesting question is about popular series that I don’t like within a genre that I do like.

    I didn’t like Frostpunk, despite liking city-builders. Felt like the decisions were largely mechanical, didn’t involve a lot of analysis and tweaking levers.

    I didn’t like Sudden Strike 4, despite liking lots of real time tactics games, like Close Combat. It felt really simplified.

    I didn’t like Pacific Drive, despite liking survival games. It has time limits, and I often dislike time limits in games.

    I didn’t like Outer Wilds, despite liking a lot of space games. Didn’t like the cartoony style, the low-tech vibe, felt like it wasn’t respectful of player time.

    I didn’t like Elden Ring, though I like a number of swords and sorcery games. Just felt simple, repetitive and uninteresting.

    EDIT: A couple of honorable mentions that I don’t hate, but which were disappointing:

    Borderlands. The gunplay can be all right, and the flow of new guns and having to adapt to them is interesting. But every Borderlands game I play, the always-respawning enemies are a turnoff. Feels like the world is immutable. Also don’t like the mindless farming of every container with glowing green dots. And for a combat-oriented game, it doesn’t make me mix up my tactics much based on whatever I’m facing. While I finish the game, I always wind up feeling like I’m not having nearly as much fun as I should be having.

    Choice of Games. I like text-based games, but a lot of games published by this company, even otherwise well-written ones, have adopted a convention of making one win by playing consistently to certain characteristics of a character, so one tries to just figure out at every choice what option will maximize that characteristic. That’s extremely uninteresting gameplay, even if the story is nice and the text well-written. I feel like the same authors would have done better just writing choose-your-own-adventure type games if they weren’t focused on the stats. I also really dislike the lack of an undo, to the point that I’ve put some work into a Choicescript-to-Sugarcube converter.