Besides the visual design, I've been thinking about the tech part of it. There's so many bits shifting, morphing and having state, that it sounds antithetical to what a UI is supposed to be: a consistent and unnoticeable tool to interact with software. I do like some of the things they do to free up screen space, but having components being to programmatically complex is bound to cause issues. Besides having your presentation desync with your data, your UI now has opportunities to desync with itself...
Any details/sources on this? I thought it was strange that the airspace seemed almost entirely uncontested. Scrambling fighters take a while of course (particularly if unmaintained and you're corrupt), but I had at least expected some ground-based air defences to be active. Maybe they were being blown up in the first few videos that surfaced? Unless they were disabled by other means, that's another catastrophic display of the Russian systems.
In addition, USAF/USN have been flying ELINT platforms (e.g. RC-135s) off the coast for months now.
So even without the cooperation of any of the Venezuelan military, it's possible the mission was:
1. Precision long-range strikes on air defense radars around Caracas (and possibly assets)
2. Closer SEAD with F-35s to clear a path
3. SOAR Delta Force infiltration with tactical air suppression
4. CAP from F-35s to intercept any scrambled fighters
5. Exfiltration along same route
If the intelligence was good (location of air defenses and Maduro), it's entirely possible the above just went off cleanly.
See: Desert Storm air campaign. Having capable anti-air assets doesn't matter when your enemy has access to more timely intelligence and the means to do something with it.
I think that might be a step too far, rather I'd guess the US just knows the Russian systems very well. The success of the latest campaign against Iran shows that too, and if anything they learnt even more from that.
Either way, although Trump might every now and then be a bit too friendly with Putin, but a) cooperation at this scale and b) the bad looks and damage to Russian investments I think makes it seem unlikely. Putin doesn't stick his neck out for others unless it serves him. I'm not that well read on the Russian involvement in the area though...
I think the main problem is people using the tool badly and not producing concise material. If what they produced was really lean and correct it'd be great, but you grow a bit tired when you have to expend time reviewing and parsing long, winding and straight wrong PRs and messages from _people_ who have not put in the time.
Indeed, there's almost always a solution to "inergonomics" in Rust, but most are there to provide a guarantee or express an assumption to increase the chance that your code will do what's intended. While that safety can feel a bit exaggerated even for some large systems projects, for a lot of things Rust is just not the right tool if you don't need the guarantees.
On that topic, I've looked some at building games in Rust but I'm thinking it mostly looks like you're creating problems for yourself? Using it for implementing performant backend algorithms and containerised logic could be nice though.
Everything by qntm is phenomenal if a bit rough around the edges. Fine Structure was one of my favorites, along with There is No Antimemetics Division, which is now being published as a proper book!
I like to put it as all the damage we're causing is just taking out a huge loan, and either we repay it on our own terms or mother nature is going to debt collect for us...
Working as an instructor for a project course for first-year university students, I have run in to this a couple of times. The code required for the project is pretty simple, but there are a couple of subtle details that can go wrong. Had one group today with bit shifts and other "advanced" operators everywhere, but the code was not working as expected. I asked them to just `Serial.println()` so they could check what was going on, and they were stumped. LLMs are already great tools, but if you don't know basic troubleshooting/debugging you're in for a bad time when the brick wall arrives.
On the other hand, it shows how much coding is just repetition. You don't need to be a good coder to perform serviceable work, but you won't create anything new and amazing either, if you don't learn to think and reason - but that might for some purposes be fine. (Worrying for the ability of the general population however)
You could ask whether these students would have gotten anything done without generated code? Probably, it's just a momentarily easier alternative to actual understanding. They did however realise the problem and decided by themselves to write their own code in a simpler, more repetitive and "stupid" style, but one that they could reason about. So hopefully a good lesson and all well in the end!
Sounds like you found a good problem for the students. Having the experience of failing to get the right answer out of the tool and then succeeding on your whits creates an opportunity to learn these tools benefit from disciplined usage.
Nice! I might actually try drawing our factory with a shoddy pen plotter I built, could give some cool results. Well-built factories are really pretty, looks like small ecosystems growths when zoomed out. All the draw settings should make it easy to generate some good outlines
Thanks, pen plotting was my motivation for doing this as an SVG and not on a canvas. I never got around plotting an actual factory though, but I might do it this time.
Some of the RP editions have an afterword about publishing in Soviet and evading censorship thorough Sci-fi, pretty interesting. Soviet was a strange place.
Roadside Picnic is a lovely perspective on the genre, in that it isn't at all about the zone or any supposed aliens. The zone makes for a fascinating backdrop for the story, but in the end it is about the people just trying to carve out a life while exposed to an extraordinary, incomprehensible situation grown mundane. The zone could be swapped out for a disaster area or a hostile jungle or whatever, but by being the zone it becomes very alien to the reader as well. It contributes to what I really like about the book, simply being very atmospheric and immersive. It's all show-don't-tell, the reader experiences everything through what the characters see or hear, and the reader's picture of the world is as clouded and uncertain as those living in it. I found a bit of the same feeling in Metro 2033, where anything happening outside of a couple kilometers range is just rumours. Nobody really knows anything for sure and neither does the reader!
Also there was actually a RP TV-series in production with a really cool trailer, but I think the pilot didn't take off so it shut down.
There was an NBC TV series in 2021 called Debris, canceled after 1 season, that must have taken some inspiration from Roadside Picnic (at least from what I see in this failed series trailer). It's about 2 federal agents searching for parts of an exploded alien spacecraft. It was your typical "monster of the week" while building up an overarching story. Each piece of the ship would have some unique and crazy affect on the area and/or people around it.
