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Posted by memalign 11 hours ago

The Xkcd thing, now interactive(editor.p5js.org)
1052 points | 144 comments
tempestn 3 minutes ago|
Accidentally discovered you can quantum tunnel blocks through the weak link to shore it up!
BoppreH 10 hours ago||
I would suggest adding the /r/ProgrammerHumor version too: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1p204nx/ac...

The AI crank always cracks me up.

tw04 4 hours ago||
AWS definitely lives above unpaid developers. In fact they should probably be the bird flying straight at the unpaid developers as they force yet another company to move to a closed license to survive.
publicdebates 4 hours ago||
You don't think AWS is internally built on massive amounts of open source?
sethaurus 4 hours ago||
That's what it would mean to place them above unpaid developers in the illustration, yes.
mh8h 3 hours ago|||
There's a recent update: https://x.com/Hesamation/status/2028289544676630739?s=20
sumo89 9 hours ago|||
The shark biting the cable is what gets me
i-zu 6 hours ago|||
One of DNS pillars should be replaced by BGP.
mhink 6 hours ago||
And NTP, if I recall correctly.
JeanSebTr 5 hours ago||
When was that?
rezonant 5 hours ago||
When was BGP? Or when was NTP?
Sohcahtoa82 4 hours ago|||
I think it was a joke based on NTP being a time protocol.
jibal 1 hour ago|||
whoosh
Sohcahtoa82 4 hours ago|||
The "Whatever Microsoft is doing" bit was always my favorite.
Projectiboga 9 hours ago|||
I like that the hand crank is going counter-clockwise
Nevermark 6 hours ago||
Crap, I saw it as clockwise. (Furious reversal of effort…)
skyberrys 7 hours ago|||
Can someone help me understand the single brick at the very bottom under Linux? What is it representing?
rtkwe 7 hours ago|||
The undersea cables actually connecting the entire internet. Sometimes sharks just take a bite of them, they're reasonable well protected but it's enough damage to cause outages and disruptions.

It's the single pin under everything because there are a limited number of those cables especially in some regions so a single shark can take out the entire internet for some countries.

http://www.mirceakademy.com/uploads/MSA2024-6-6.pdf

zahlman 5 hours ago|||
Do satellite networks not move the needle in terms of capacity/reliability now?
fc417fc802 1 hour ago|||
Conceptually, it's the difference between your wifi versus running a single fiber to each room in your house. The difference in bandwidth is multiple orders of magnitude.

This is never going to change because from a physical perspective free radio is a shared medium while each individual fiber (or wire) has its own private bandwidth.

toast0 4 hours ago||||
Only a little bit. Just clicking around, a new Hawaii cable is supposed to have 24 Fiber Pairs and 18Tbit per Fiber Pair at the end of this year. If you lose several tbits of bandwidth, you're going to have a hard time making it up with satellite.

For small island countries and such, satellite capacity may be sufficient; and it is likely helpful for keeping international calling alive even if it's not sufficient for international data. But when you drop capacity by a factor of 1000, it's going to be super messy.

rtkwe 4 hours ago||||
No. They're not setup to be a principal route between two nations and most satellite networks until very recently didn't even route messages through other satellites but instead retransmitted them to a ground station with access to hardline internet. Even Starlink mostly does this still because it's way cheaper and easier.
rtkwe 1 hour ago||
You can see an unofficial tracker [0] of the Starlink downlink network and see how outside of some rural areas your data is only moving a few tens of miles away most of the time before it's sent down to a ground system. Their sats have 3 200 Gbps laser communicators for intra constellation routing which is pretty small for the task of replacing fiber optic links.

[0] https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1805q6rlePY4WZd8QMO...

roughly 4 hours ago|||
I never understand why questions like this get downvoted around here.
Hamuko 6 hours ago|||
I feel like having them as a single brick is a bit hyperbolic, since undersea cables are pretty redundant in most of the world. Get rid of one and traffic just routes around it. Ships have been routinely destroying cables in the Gulf of Finland and the Baltic Sea in the past couple of years without causing significant disruptions.
rtkwe 4 hours ago|||
Only mildly. There's not huge amounts of dark capacity just sitting around waiting to take over so if a major fiber connection goes down the remainder will get congested with the extra capacity. It won't cascade like a power outage but the remaining lines will slow down.
drob518 5 hours ago||||
The whole Internet was designed for precisely this use case. If there is an outage, the distributed system will try to find another path. No actual central point of failure. As you say, the single brick is hyperbolic. But yea, those sharks can certainly be disruptive at times.
rezonant 5 hours ago||||
Well that depends on how much traffic that cable was supporting, how much free capacity is available on other cables heading to the same area, how much additional latency the rerouting will add and how sensitive to latency the rerouted traffic is doesn't it?
huflungdung 6 hours ago|||
[dead]
CarVac 7 hours ago||||
Undersea cables. With a shark biting one.
apsurd 7 hours ago||||
The cables at the bottom of the ocean.
forrestpitz 7 hours ago|||
Looks like an undersea cable to me
b3lvedere 8 hours ago|||
Oh wow! :)

Thank you for the laughs. I needed that!

SideburnsOfDoom 8 hours ago||
given the events of the last few days, one could add a Shahed drone too.
jfkimmes 9 hours ago||
Here's a little more context about the author's motivation: https://mathstodon.xyz/@csk/116162797629337132
zahlman 5 hours ago||
> In my online undergraduate P5.js course, students are about to begin the module on motion and physics, including a bit of physics simulation using Matter.js.

When did things get specialized this much?

hendersonreed 2 hours ago||
Looking through the website of the course, it's not really a general computer science course - it "explores the use of graphics in art, design and visualization contexts" and is part of the digital art program. Quite a reasonable tech stack, for that purpose I think.
ink_13 5 hours ago||
Oh cool, a product of Waterloo's Craig Kaplan, most famous for his work on the discovery of the einstein monotile
panzi 10 hours ago||
Register the mousemove event handler on window, then you will still get the events when the mouse moves out of the window/frame while dragging and it won't be that buggy.
DaanDL 10 hours ago|
Was about to comment the same. It's a common mistake/gotcha.
benrutter 9 hours ago||
Possibly dumb question, but does that still hold inside p5js?
virgil_disgr4ce 9 hours ago||
p5 is just a wrapper that adds the setup() and draw() functions, so yes
knowtheory 9 hours ago||
I love that the initial state itself isn't stable.

The world keeps moving around us. Can't choose staying still.

tyleo 9 hours ago|||
Interesting! It's stable on my machine. I wonder if this is due to floating-point differences.
andai 8 hours ago|||
On my machine, the initial state isn't simulated. It only begins simulation when I touch it. At which point, the weight causes the bottom blocks to intersect each other significantly.
FireInsight 8 hours ago|||
For me, bottom blocks stay still while those on the very top fall down.
Hamuko 6 hours ago||
If I open it, click on the background to activate the physics and just keep the tab open, pretty much all of the blocks that can collapse do eventually collapse.
smikhanov 5 hours ago||
The Nebraska guy’s block remains surprisingly stable, even when the whole thing above it collapses. Very symbolic.
tyleo 8 hours ago||||
Maybe that's what I'm seeing.
rob74 8 hours ago|||
One more pedantic nitpick: when a block gets wedged between two blocks at an angle, it gets slowly pushed out, although there is a lot of weight resting on the top block. That would be realistic only (maybe) if the blocks were made of ice, but not for other materials...
clickety_clack 4 hours ago|||
Coefficient of friction is way too low.
withinboredom 8 hours ago|||
Another reason not to let ice on the internet.
danhau 6 hours ago|||
I‘m guessing it‘s somewhat framerate-dependent.
LanceH 8 hours ago|||
That's the javascript effect.
rtkwe 5 hours ago||
Nah that's just the effect of turning on the simulation. The initial version isn't the same as the first steps because there's no weight. If you look closely after you click the blocks overlap slightly.

Something similar happens all the time in games when you go from a static version of something to the higher level of detail version with physics enabled, if the transition isn't handled gracefully or early enough you can get snapping.

arcadianalpaca 7 hours ago||
Just like real life. Sit still, touch nothing, and watch everything fall apart all on its own ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
PenguinRevolver 8 hours ago||
I love that clicking the empty space and just doing nothing at all still causes the blocks to fall apart after some time.
ASalazarMX 5 hours ago||
Since it's going to collapse anyway, it's fun to table flip everything using the botton block.
tosti 7 hours ago||
[flagged]
Sohcahtoa82 4 hours ago|||
The whole "Disabling JavaScript and then pretending to not know why websites don't work and then acting holier-than-thou about it" shtick gets old.

You know sites will break. Could you just cut the bullshit with pretending to not understand broken websites?

rtkwe 2 hours ago|||
Truly baffling, you're voluntarily disabling a critical piece of how websites expect to function and then act shocked when web sites don't cater to the >>0.0001% of users who decline to allow their site to work.
tosti 2 hours ago|||
Why are you assuming I disabled javascript? The bullshit here is you thinking you know better than anyone else. You should get flagged for such ludicrous claims, not me.
rtkwe 7 hours ago|||
Turn on JS or check what's causing it to fail to load. It's a little JS physics toy of this XKCD comic. https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2347:_Dependency
tosti 6 hours ago||
[flagged]
zygentoma 48 minutes ago||
I love that the thing of itself is completely unstable once you click somewhere to start the simulation … :)
fallingmeat 10 hours ago||
oh look at that. removing IBM enterprise apps really doesn’t break anything and the whole stack got lighter. science.
rob74 8 hours ago|
Did you actually manage to remove a block without everything collapsing (eventually)? Then you must have an incredibly steady hand, it's nearly impossible to do as far as I can see. Which can also be interpreted as a metaphor for the state of the tech stack, I guess...
andyjohnson0 2 hours ago||
This is wonderful.

The gravitational constant is maybe a little low for my taste, but I like that I can fling a block vertically up off the top of the frame and it reappears even 5+ seconds later. Things don't get ignored out of existence. Neat.

Nevermark 6 hours ago|
As entropy increases, the stack rises.

But then, when trapped in a local maxima prohibiting growth, pressure builds as too many new layers attempt to shim themselves under existing layers, until inevitably the stack collapses somewhere.

Then new layers can restart generating new apex baby layers on a now higher foundation of fertile fragmented but compressed and stable new-legacy rubble. Another point-oh age begins.

And sometimes, the stack just falls apart because.

In between those extinction events, layers that spawn the most layers, and form opportunistic bridges over lateral layers, dominate and thrive.

Occasionally, some layers try to reorder themselves to optimize future growth. Or tunnel down to achieve stronger footing. But like the tower of Hanoi, the more layers involved, the more intractable the replanting and reordering. Meanwhile, other growth routes around them. Yet, many instances of these failed structures can be found in the depths.

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