u/rodyamirov

It is a currency that is famously very often stolen? It's incredibly easy to steal in practice (nobody cares about the theory, the reality is people get social engineered, or use exchanges which get hacked, or etc.).

See https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/ for an ongoing list of the most prominent hacks, thefts, etc. but of course it happens at smaller scales all the time.

I will grant that it's useful for money laundering, but there are other ways, if you're into that (I'm not into that). It's also good for "investing" and "gambling."

I'm definitely concerned, at least with the sprint events, that this adds .2s or whatever to everybody's time, and the old sprint events records become eternal (which I guess is already happening with clock lol but for skewb, pyra, 2x2)

Everybody has their own personality and therefore their own process. What works for you will not work for other and v. versa. However, I'd make it a safe bet that neither extreme plotter nor extreme pantser is going to work well for almost anyone. You need to have some kind of goal, and you also need to actually write things.

What I have started doing is a very skeletal outline, then write a chapter and get a sense of how it flows, what stands out as good or bad, etc., then go back to the outline, then go back and write another segment, and so on. Usually ideas I have on one side improve the other; sometimes I'll come up with something on one side that requires changes in the other. As the work gets longer, the outline becomes more important; I need the chapters to have a beginning and end to make sure I'm getting where I need to go. But ultimately the writing needs to be more important -- a boring chapter that sets up your ending is forgiveable, once, maybe; but ultimately your book is made of chapters which are made of paragraphs and those paragraphs need to be individually good or your book is bad, no matter how good your outline was.

But yeah, go back and forth. Don't stick to one extreme.

One downside to this is that your Value enum is now too big -- you need two bits for the tag, and then 64 bits for the largest variant, which means it can't fit in a single 64 bit register anymore, and you're hung (perf-wise, is the point).

You could pass down to 32 bits for all your values but then you're passing down to 32 bits for all your values.

ftr -- I don't think you deserve these downvotes. I would interpret them as "people think you are wrong," not "people think you are stupid." This is a totally reasonable concern! When you get a really good idea it's normal to think it's precious. But to make a book (or even a reasonable length short story) you'll need to have dozens of really good ideas, and then a lot of work to glue them all together. Somebody taking your idea and running with it isn't going to hurt you the way you think it is, so don't worry.

If the chapter just sucks, you can also just try telling instead of showing.

The whole show-don't-tell meme that gets passed around here is mostly bad advice. Important things you want the reader to deeply feel and experience -- show that. Yes, absolutely. Things you just need to establish and get across? Tell them! We don't need a detailed blow-by-blow of how the cop gets coffee; you can just mention that he got it.

And telling can be great! It lets your narrator opine a little bit, get voicey, and establish character by things they _don't_ say -- in extreme cases, and this may not fit with the book you're writing, the narrator can straight up say it was boring, throw a sentence of shade on somebody, and take a five page excursion you didn't want to write and turn it into a paragraph of something that's fun to read, without the reader missing anything important. Or whatever.

Now, if that doesn't work -- if this chapter is really, really important and you can't get away with cutting it or summarizing over it -- I think you need to take a step back and figure out why you don't want to write it. Is it possible that the chapter idea is ... bad? Just because it's on your outline doesn't mean you have to write it. Your outline can be wrong! You can change it! I've changed significant plot points (or: what seemed to be significant plot points, in the end the flow of the book was mostly unchanged) simply because it sucked to write.

I had a whole thieves' guild plot line, super cliche, I wrote something like 50-70 pages of it, but it was like pulling teeth. I hated writing it, I hated reading it, but it was Important to the Characters.

Fine! Ripped it out (keep it in a folder somewhere in case you change your mind, don't be crazy), took the three ideas I actually liked, and made a whole new plotline which hit the important parts of those ideas, and wasn't as cliche. Much, much better. Did it hurt to throw all that stuff away? Sure. Well, less than I thought it would, honestly, but yeah, it set me back. Did it make the book better? Absolutely.

Do you also skip eating vegetables with your meals?

I don't recommend skipping them; I do recommend thinking deeply about them and trying to find a way to make them more interesting. I have found that things that were very hard (unfun) to write are often not great and not fun to read; so it may be useful to try and find another take on the bridge chapter that is more interesting to you, in the hopes that it will also be more interesting to others.

I find it very difficult to write chapters out of order and then think they're going to fit together well at the end (and do you really want to go back and write 14 "bridge" chapters at the end, after you've done all the fun stuff?). I don't think it's a good way. But you can try it, there's no law.

For myself, when I get to a chapter that's structurally necessary but is just not coming together, or I can't get momentum on, I try things like -- change the perspective, change the writing style, whatever. Which may not be appropriate for your book. But you can also take the plan you have, extract the points you want to get across, and then see if there's a completely different chapter you can write that can cover those other points.

Planning to have a dinner party to get characters X, Y, and Z introduced, but don't want to write a dinner party? Great, don't have a dinner party. Maybe they meet in the pub, having a drinking game. Maybe they have a minor car accident, or one of them takes the last tomato at the store, or one of them talks shit about the other one's spaceship, whatever fits your genre. But you could hit all those beats while still having some driving action that entertains you and, hopefully, the readers as well.

This is a very common concern among new writers but I'm not sure where it comes from. What would someone gain by stealing your work?

The context may give some clue, I don't know. I can't imagine, in the trad-pub world, that anyone would bother trying to steal (and then, assumedly, edit and polish?) someone else's book. It just seems crazy, it would be so easy to get caught, and you could get in real trouble.

Maybe in the fanfic world somebody might steal your fic and beat you to internet points ...? I have no idea. I don't know how that world works. But nowhere in my life have I personally witnessed, in any context, people stealing somebody else's writing -- particularly something incomplete! -- and claiming it. Why would they? What is the long-term plan there?

Sorry, I read "okay" as "a good idea" and thought, I mean, sure, if it helps you visualize something. I definitely google stuff when I need to (what trees are native to Arkansas? Idfk but the scene needs some proper nouns)

But if the question is -- "is it allowed..." -- who would even have the authority to say no? Come on.

Well if you were falsely accused, I apologize. The post itself shows 99.7% chance of being generated by AI, and clearly people's informal "human" sensors agreed.

And apologies if you were hoping to have a conversation other than the one you're having, but to me, "bots are stomping over the last human spaces on the internet, and there is nothing we can do about it except to cede the space and give up" is a more interesting and real problem than your mental model of rust (and, sadly, they're both on topic; since the loss of community space is _right here_, it's _this community space_).

Yeah, get a clock while it's still here! Compete for the eternal WR in the year it's got left to it ;_;

(it's a fun puzzle anyhow, even if it's demoted to non-WCA)

I'm very happy with the Shengshou, but it's the only one I've tried. You need to adjust your expectations a little bit, it's not a speed cube, but I haven't had lockups or popping or anything.

Why would anyone want to give a thoughtful, well-reasoned response to a post which was neither? If we wanted to talk to a bot, there are better ways.

This isn't really a fix, in my opinion; the numbers communicate something (to humans as well as machines), and communication is extremely valuable. The difference between "oh, it's a small breaking change but I can probably just update my code" and "it's a total redesign of the library, I'll look at it in a couple months when things calm down" is very useful to be able to quickly communicate.

As others have noted, other languages have two layers of breaking change digits (the "marketing number" and the "major patch number"). This is genuinely useful!

Strongly agree. From a technical perspective, in theory, a breaking change is a breaking change; but it would be nice, at a human level, to be able to distinguish between "we changed the signature of a handle of public functions, sorry, go update your code" and "this is a huge redesign of the library." Most people are unwilling to bump the leading number unless it's the second case, which makes the first case hard to deal with -- they either stick with a bad API forever, send out small breaking changes with minor versions and hope nobody cries (looking at you, polars), or use it as an excuse to redesign their public API in big ways to fix papercuts (nom).

Get a 6x6x6 and a 7x7x7 to complete the WCA collection.

Bigger pyraminxes are nice, too; I enjoy the 5x5. And a 334 cuboid!

And for a really big one, look for the Petal Icosahedron Ultimate. It's like a much bigger curvy copter, with even more jumbling (depending on the version, you either get bandaging or even more weird parities to discover. I really, really like it.

Right? This seems like it should be a great hook. But it turned me off.

FTR I still want to read Cloud Atlas. But the beginning was just so dry.

I put it down and said "someday, but not today."

A "hook" on the first page is probably an oversimplification of some actually good, real advice, which originally had more subtlety.

But there is a reality to it. When I'm in a bookstore trying to find something new, if the first page or two doesn't grab me in some way or other (more on this in a moment) I'm going to put it down. For example, Cloud Atlas as a concept really appeals to me, but I picked it up and the first couple of pages were letters written in an old style (I can't remember the exact dates, it doesn't matter). I didn't like them, found it tedious to get through; because it was highly recommended, I flipped through a little bit to see if it dramatically changed, but it didn't. So I put it down and got something else. The first page(s) failed to hook me, and I moved on.

So, about the hook. It doesn't have to be a plot hook, and (in my opinion) probably shouldn't be. Don't drop your drawers on the first page; we haven't even met, yet. But it should have something to engage with. That could be:

• Humor, or some kind of amusing dialogue or situation
• Intriguing in medias res action or events
• A brilliant writing style
• Whatever, it's your book

But it's like meeting a new person. They don't have to tell you their life story in five minutes, but they should have a winning smile, or a joke, or more generally, a certain way of being that makes you want to stick with them.

That all being said; if your book is worth a damn you probably have something of that flavor in your book, hopefully pretty commonly. So you could actually take the reverse of the common advice; it's not that you need a hook, it's that the first page(s) need to not suck. And often, particularly, in first drafts, they do! It's setup nobody needs, introductions to people you don't care about, dates and times and whatever else, just garbage noise that should either be moved to later in the book (once you actually need the information), restructured and scattered, or removed entirely (a lot of explanations are necessary for you, as a writer, but not for the reader).

I like the yuxin one! Even if it does take 45 minutes to scramble.

It's not the default because it requires a (tiny) amount of extra memory and bookkeeping and so on that you usually don't need. As you discovered, it's trivial to opt in if you do need it, so this way you only pay for what you use.

I have a characther a girl whos married but shes rebeling against a mad god so she was sent to hell and spent 250 ish years there before being saved she sees hell from the outside again

But then

it feels a little fake and exagrated and im going for something more real and raw

This is sort of a hazard of the genre. This is a profoundly unreal situation which is fake and exaggerated. That doesn't have to be the end of the world, but if you take the 1-10 slider and set it 250,000,000 it's just gonna feel over the top. It is. You're not going to be able to get around that.

If you want to make this scene work, find somebody who did something similar that you liked, and see what they did well, and try to imitate it. You don't have to copy (or, better: copy it but then throw that away and write a new one from scratch) but you should learn from others. Real life experience (how things actually are) and craft experience (how these things can be expressed) are both worth studying.

How's the turning on there? I got some older skewb variants and I was interested in them but the turns were so bad I simply couldn't get through any algorithms on them. I'm interested to see any more modern ones.

Oh hey I got that Moyu for my father's day as well. I figured it would be just a little better than my old one (Tornado v2) but damn, that thing is amazing

Practiced with it so much I'm in a wrist brace now, so uh, watch out for that

Yeah the diansheng was a huge deal on release, but then dayan came out a month or too later with a far superior cube and that was that