Doom was inspired by arcade games. Armor helped, but your speed was your real defense.

I liked getting to the other side of that map by telepunting - drop the translocator disk at your feet, smack it with the impact hammer just right, and you could send it flying ridiculous distances. You could easily send it the opposite tower in Facing Worlds if your aim was good.

I didn’t even know that’s a thing you could do! Might have to reinstall the game and give this a try.

You can also set:

    layout = neato;

in a dot file, call dot, and it will use the neato layout engine.

(See https://graphviz.org/docs/attrs/layout/)

And if I look in my /usr/bin, I see that neato is just symlinked to dot. It's pulling the usual trick of one executable that behaves slightly differently depending on the invocation name.

The subreddit also had a policy of not unlocking the megathread until the leaderboard was filled up. So any hints there will also be too late for the making the global leaderboard.

And the old About noted what you just said about there being nothing preventing someone from using AI:

> If you want to use AI to help you solve puzzles, I can't really stop you, but I feel like it's harder to get better at programming if you ask an AI to do the programming for you.

I like the NATO one.

It occurred to me that it would be more useful to me in Emacs, and that might make a fun little exercise.

And that's how I discovered `M-x nato-region` was already a thing.

For my fellow visual thinkers who might be looking for a linear algebra book that focuses more on developing the geometric intuition for stuff like this, rather than just pure numeric linear system solving, let me recommend:

"Practical Linear Algebra: A Geometry Toolbox" by Farin and Hansford.

This is one of those things that's perennially annoying in computer graphics. Depending on the API you can have different conventions for:

- data layout (row-major vs. column major)

- pre-multiplication vs. post-multiplication of matrices

Switching either of these conventions results in a transposition of the data in memory, but knowing which one you're switching is important to getting the implementation of the math right.

And then on top of that for even more fun you have:

- Left- vs. right-handed coordinate systems

- Y-up or Z-up

- Winding order for inside/outside

There are lots of small parity things like this where you can get it right by accident but then have weird issues down the line if you aren't scrupulous. (I once had a very tedious time tracking down some inconsistencies in inside/outside determination in a production rendering system.)

I remember that being the Newegg philosophy w.r.t. patent trolls.

I really don't get this move.

It's one thing to try to steer basic, non-technical users toward an MS account by default. Fine; I may not like that, but I get it. But at this point, anyone left who's still using these methods to create a local account is likely to be a technical user who's deliberately and intentionally wanting a stay on local account for whatever their own reasons.

I suspect that's a rather small group, which leaves me puzzled: (1) is the juice really worth the squeeze, and (2) is it really worth being so hostile to your power users?

Sounds like a perfect recipe for the Abilene paradox.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abilene_paradox