Hello everyone, I have a theoretical question about an animation in the documentary I've linked in this post.

At timestamp 05:01, you can see an animation of Venus, suffering the effects of a change in gravitational forces. After being close enough to the expanding sun, Venus begins to lose material on its surface due to the stronger gravitational pull of the sun.

For me, this whole animation doesn't seem right because the mass and the center of mass of the sun doesn't change. I can imagine how the mater of the sun's surface could change the gravitational pull that the material on Venus' surface is experiencing, but would it be that strong at that point? I would've assumed that more and more of the sun's mass will be concentrated in the core as the red giant is expanding and not leaving enough mater to overcome Venus' gravity at its surface.

Once, Venus enters the denser parts of the suns' atmosphere, I wouldn't doubt that the atmospheric drag or the fall towards the denser core would scatter the material on the surface and eventually destroy Venus completely. Shortly before that, however, while Venus is still roughly maintaining an orbit similar to its current one, this doesn't seem right to me.

Did they mess up this animation or will the sun, at its surface, have more gravitational pull than Venus?

I haven't had any luck in finding sci-fi books recently. I'm looking for a longer story that takes its time to establish the world/universe and the characters living in it. I like the idea of exploring space or futuristic cities/landscapes and being on a journey together with the protagonist. The story doesn't have to have a happy end or flawless characters, but I also don't like it when everything is hopeless/dystopic and all the characters stumble from one flawed decision to the next one. Some examples of what I enjoyed so far are:

• Dune
• Project Hail Mary
• The Expanse Series
• Hyperion Cantos Series
• Bobiverse Series
• The Murderbot Diaries Series
• Tuf Voyaging
• Night's Dawn Series (Might not be for everyone... contains excessive violence and some smut, but also some very interesting ideas)
• Vatta's War Series (I usually don't like military sci-fi, but this one wasn't bad)
• The Interdependency Series
• Falling Free

If you enjoyed some of these stories and have any similar suggestions, feel free to share them here. If not, maybe consider checking out the list above... I highly recommend each of these entries.

I'm looking for song suggestions to add to my playlist. It's meant to be a collection of EDM songs that use oriental or Asian Instruments as the main feature, or at least to a noticeable degree.

With this description alone, it's easy to get lost in more specific genres like tropical house+Balkan instruments or lofi beats+flute/string-instruments or Indian/Bollywood EDM. When I look at song suggestions from YouTube or Spotify, it's usually focussing on one of these aspects and only suggesting that type of music.

What I want instead are songs that are closer to mainstream (western) EDM that use these instruments to change things up a bit and add a spin to the standard formula. I'm trying to get a variety of songs that try to achieve this in different ways. I'd be happy if you post songs here which could fit in your opinion, and hope this description wasn't too convoluted.

Since I haven't seen anyone post this, I thought I'd share the new Star Engine demo video from Cloud Imperium Games.

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/7671504

For a while now, I had this idea in my head of making a small 2D side scroller game that helps people learn programming, and I'm looking for honest opinions and feedback from others. I know that such a game is niche and I wouldn't expect to earn a lot with it. Spending time on development would only make sense for me, however, if there is at least some interest in playing it. Whether the game will have some success, is not a question that can be answered here, but my hope is, that I'll be a bit more confident in my decision after hearing more feedback from others.

I have been teaching C/C++ and Python for years now and have developed a small application that gives students, without a specific goal, something to work towards to. It is just a console application that offers various programming tasks to be solved, submitted and compared against previous results. The student just has to run the application, import my interface library and start coding. I usually go over the theory and try to help them while they are figuring it out. Just to give you an example of such a task:

"There is a sequence of N unsorted and unknown numbers. You can compare, whether any number is greater than any other one by specifying their positions in the sequence. You can swap two numbers, save copies of them on a stash, and replace any number in the sequence with stashed ones. Try to sort the sequence of unknown numbers with as little operations as possible."

The idea of the side scroller would be, to give that application a compelling frontend and to "gamify" these tasks even more. Aside from the usual game mechanics like "find and fetch items", "talk to this or that person" or "solve simple terrain puzzles", I want the programming tasks to be the main quest which unlocks new parts of the world and ultimately completes the story line. There will be some kind of quest book that goes into more detail and tries to help the player understand the task and to find solutions. Aside from that, the player is expected to use their own development environment (which can be as simple as: Notepad and GCC/Python Interpreter). The quest book is just meant as a starting point, and players would have to do additional research to learn more about algorithms and how to implement them.

I think, at this point, I have described the rough idea enough, and I apologize for the wall of text so far. For that reason, everything below this is optional TLDR as far as I'm concerned.

The last thing I wanted to mention here is the rough sketch of the lore I had in mind. A medieval world containing steam punk elements that is slowly but surely overtaken by these alien looking artifacts. You, the protagonist, have figured out that some of these artifacts can be controlled by using the language that can be derived from the carvings on them. Around the artifacts, a contamination that destroys everything is slowly spreading. No one has figured out how to stop this, but it becomes clear over the course of the game, that interacting with these artifacts and solving the programming tasks, slowly reverses the spread. The ultimate conclusion is, that an alien species put these artifacts in this world to slowly terraform it. Because they didn't want to wipe out any intelligent species in the process, they created an off-switch. If a species is intelligent enough to figure out these tasks, the whole terraforming process is terminated.

For a while now, I had this idea in my head of making a small 2D side scroller game that helps people learn programming, and I'm looking for honest opinions and feedback from others. I know that such a game is niche and I wouldn't expect to earn a lot with it. Spending time on development would only make sense for me, however, if there is at least some interest in playing it. Whether the game will have some success, is not a question that can be answered here, but my hope is, that I'll be a bit more confident in my decision after hearing more feedback from others.

I have been teaching C/C++ and Python for years now and have developed a small application that gives students, without a specific goal, something to work towards to. It is just a console application that offers various programming tasks to be solved, submitted and compared against previous results. The student just has to run the application, import my interface library and start coding. I usually go over the theory and try to help them while they are figuring it out. Just to give you an example of such a task:

"There is a sequence of N unsorted and unknown numbers. You can compare, whether any number is greater than any other one by specifying their positions in the sequence. You can swap two numbers, save copies of them on a stash, and replace any number in the sequence with stashed ones. Try to sort the sequence of unknown numbers with as little operations as possible."

The idea of the side scroller would be, to give that application a compelling frontend and to "gamify" these tasks even more. Aside from the usual game mechanics like "find and fetch items", "talk to this or that person" or "solve simple terrain puzzles", I want the programming tasks to be the main quest which unlocks new parts of the world and ultimately completes the story line. There will be some kind of quest book that goes into more detail and tries to help the player understand the task and to find solutions. Aside from that, the player is expected to use their own development environment (which can be as simple as: Notepad and GCC/Python Interpreter). The quest book is just meant as a starting point, and players would have to do additional research to learn more about algorithms and how to implement them.

I think, at this point, I have described the rough idea enough, and I apologize for the wall of text so far. For that reason, everything below this is optional TLDR as far as I'm concerned.

The last thing I wanted to mention here is the rough sketch of the lore I had in mind. A medieval world containing steam punk elements that is slowly but surely overtaken by these alien looking artifacts. You, the protagonist, have figured out that some of these artifacts can be controlled by using the language that can be derived from the carvings on them. Around the artifacts, a contamination that destroys everything is slowly spreading. No one has figured out how to stop this, but it becomes clear over the course of the game, that interacting with these artifacts and solving the programming tasks, slowly reverses the spread. The ultimate conclusion is, that an alien species put these artifacts in this world to slowly terraform it. Because they didn't want to wipe out any intelligent species in the process, they created an off-switch. If a species is intelligent enough to figure out these tasks, the whole terraforming process is terminated.

I just wanted to show off a cool project I've found recently. Dashy is a very customizable dashboard that works perfectly for self-hosting projects. You can monitor any service that is reachable via http/https and use widgets like the universal web search interface, I've enabled in my installation.

I only use it as a glorified startup page for my browsers with the search function, but to give you an idea of what's possible, you can take a look at some more creative examples as well.

Netflix making an adaptation of The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, which is one of the best sci-fi books I've read so far. It'll be released in 2024 and I'm kinda hyped after that teaser.