So many solver solutions that day, either Z3 or Gauss-Jordan lol. I got a little obsessed about doing it without solvers or (god forbid) manually solving the system and eventually found a relatively simple way to find the intersection with just lines and planes:

1. Translate all hailstones and their velocities to a reference frame in which one stone is stationary at 0,0,0 (origin).
2. Take another arbitrary hailstone (A) and cross its (rereferenced) velocity and position vectors. This gives the normal vector of a plane containing the origin and the trajectory of A, both of which the thrown stone must intersect. So, the trajectory of the thrown stone lies in that plane somewhere.
3. Take two more arbitrary hailstones B and C and find the points and times that they intersect the plane. The thrown stone must strike B and C at those points, so those points are coordinates on the line representing the thrown stone. The velocity of the thrown stone is calculated by dividing the displacement between the two points by the difference of the time points of the intersections.
4. Use the velocity of the thrown stone and the time and position info the intersection of B or C to determine the position of the thrown stone at t = 0
5. Translate that position and velocity back to the original reference frame.

It’s a suboptimal solution in that it uses 4 hailstones instead of the theoretical minimum of 3, but was a lot easier to wrap my head around. Incidentally, it is not too hard to adapt the above algorithm to not need C (i.e., to use only 3 hailstones) by using line intersections. Such a solution is not much more complicated than what I gave and still has a simple geometric interpretation, but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader :)

Oh absolutely, I don’t blame KDE or arch repos lol. I did see that it was a KDE update but somehow didn’t clock the version number. I had it in my head that KDE6 was much farther off.

Didn’t realize this was happening and yay -Syu went brrr and it broke my shit. Probably doesn’t help that I’m running nvidia with linux (endeavouros). Wayland doesn’t work at all (black screen on login with only mouse ptr, wrong resolution), while Xorg is now much less smooth e.g. on the switching desktop animations. Moving windows around and in-window graphics are fine. Some graphical config stuff changed too; I’m still taking inventory.

I’m also currently playing with nvidia vs nvidia-dkms with different kernels to see if that solves anything.

EDIT: Looks like that my configuration was failing to set nvidia_drm modeset=1 correctly due to my unfamiliarity with dracut. Manually adding nvidia_drm.modeset=1 to my kernel cmdline makes Wayland work (and quite well at that), though Xorg is still laggy.

Don’t worry, I was being 100% facetious! After all, γ is generally believed to have been a hard /g/ in Ancient Greek, which is the version of Greek that “graphic” is based on and is CLEARLY the wrong way to say gif :D

Kinda sorta un-jerking (but not really) for a moment, I don’t think that I’d include the rhotic in your hypothetical pronunciation in NASA and thus would say /neæ.sə/ over /neɚ.sə/. I also don’t palatalize the U in SCUBA (/sku:.bə/, not /sk^(j)u:bə/), but I suspect that’s just a dialectical difference.

Edit: I just saw your NZ lemmy instance name and now I understand the vowel choices. Cheers!

Well, you see, the g in gif stands for “graphics” which is ultimately from Greek “γραφικός,” and because this is the 21st century, γ in front of a close front vowel is pronounced as neither /g/ nor /d͡ʒ/ but rather /ʝ/, which is pronounced a bit like English’s y, so in its purest rendition gif is really pronounced “yiff”, which doubles as homage to the online communities that OP frequents.