knuckleheads

I am not joking when I say that software craftsmen lost the war when tabs vs spaces was obviated as a point of contention by CI enforced formatting and linting around broader community standards.

A craftsman's pride is an industrialist's nightmare! Software has been transitioning from a craft into an industrial process for the last two decades or so, and the software craftsmen of all stripes understandably do not like this!

Matters of taste. I don't mind bigger files where it makes sense, and sometimes for the nature of the domain, it is nice to have more things in one file. As well, they write so many comments that 200 lines doesn't feel right to me.

Very much agreed. Something specific that has helped me a lot (beyond just automatic formatting, linting and testing) was putting a hard fail on any file with more than 1500 lines or so, with an allowlist for specific files with specific reasons for their length. I realized the agents were squirreling away code without wanting to do any sort of refactor. Every time one of these rat's nests has turned up, the codebase has been much improved with a small refactor, to the point it doesn't feel like such a pile of slop anymore.

The idea of AI going anywhere always reminds me of https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-end-of-big-data/ from a decade ago.

I've been working on a newish variant of Sudoku called Binku. It combines the traditional Sudoku rules and adds the rules from a game called Binario/Takuzu (with 1-4 as one color and 5-8 as the other color).

A sample puzzle can be found here: https://sudokupad.app/23x300ggzn

It's been well received by the (very kind!) Sudoku/puzzle communities, so I'm working on throwing a nice interface on it that fits the rules a bit better. I've found about five other examples of others doing a variation of this ruleset before in one way or another, and it's been fun trying to see how hard/deep I can get this puzzle to go.

My party trick is meeting everyone in a room once and then raffling off their names a half hour later. If I was really trying, I can remember them all after a week or a month. Sometimes, I really can try and the name will come back to me after a few minutes. It's magic to some, which is true in that most magic is just lots of intense preparation and practice. So, here's all the tricks I have developed.

First, you need to put yourself in situations where you can practice learning and remembering people's names. At the start of college, I had read How to Win Friends & Influence people and it directly influenced me to try and learn how to remember people's names. This was a very good environment for this, I was constantly meeting people, and wouldn't it be nice if I made a good impression on them! Conversely, hard to practice the skill if you aren't meeting people often. It's also not a permanent skill for me, and if I fall into a routine without meeting many new people, then it's not as easy, but thankfully still comes back soon after.

The next thing was that I wasn't trying to remember somebody's name, I was habitually checking during the initial conversation to see if I had forgotten it. Depending on the culture you are in, you have about 15 minutes after meeting someone to ask them their name again, as almost certainly they have forgotten yours, people are not good at this. It's an easy way to indicate that you are interested in continuing to know them, it's social, polite and even charming at times, as why else would you want to know their name if you didn't want to contact them in the future because they're good people? So a few minutes, then ten minutes, then a half hour, you check if you know it, and ask if you don't. That's easier to remember for me, than to remember somebody's specific name.

I have kept a daily journal for most of my adult life, and it's more or less write only, I don't often go back and read it, and often cannot, my handwriting is so bad. But it's helpful on days when I need to write things out, and it's another useful habit in learning to remember names. At the end of the days when I was really training this skill, I made myself write down the names of everyone I had met that day. This was often difficult, and I remember getting headaches doing it at times, trying to write down the names of 20 or 30 people at a time. However, it helped set the expectation that I would remember everyone's names, and that reinforced the behaviors.

I did find that I developed chunking of names for lack of a better term. I would remember names in order of where I met them and maybe even which part of a room I was in. Not unlike a mind palace, but not something I really tried to do consciously. Just the idea of remembering I met Grace, Alice and Bob in that order at this party.

After that, just try and do your best for a couple months and it will improve without a doubt. People tell me they are bad at remembering names, and I ask them honestly, how hard do you try to remember them? Even a little bit of effort goes a very long way here.

What I will say is that I have difficulty learning somebody's name in two specific scenarios, beyond it being a bit harder as I get into my thirties now. If I am on zoom, it does not work at all the same. Their names are right there and so I never really feel the need to learn it and I can feel that I don't really know it. The second is that if I have to learn the name at the same as learning that it is a specific persons name, then I struggle with it. That is to say, if it's a name that is foreign to me, it's harder for me to remember, and so I have a habit of asking them to say it again right off the bat. I'm living in a different country now than before, and I can tell that I've gotten more used to the names and language with the time as it is easier for me to remember most of the people's names now. The trickiest ones for me at times are not putting together names that sound very similar together mentally but are in fact spelled and pronounced differently.

With that, that's all my tricks. I am pretty happy with it and it's served me pretty well over the years. I never turned into one of those freaks with the excel spreadsheets full of names and birthdays though ;) That's a step beyond me, and I'm just not socially diligent enough to keep that up long term yet. Good luck!

You really can’t see Trump abusing someone’s trust?

I don't think that is the issue. This article and your comment advocates that in lieu of more money, we throw more thought at it, in the name of balance. Weak! Put some thought into preventing the gaming of the system, yes, but keep the money flowing to getting the work done, not overthinking how to do the work.

Yes! "We tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" is not inspiring! Mamdani threw cash at the problem of snow on the streets and now, huh, suddenly there's not so much snow on the streets of NYC compared to previous blizzards, who would have thought.

>Many of the solutions to these problems require money – running more buses, improving stop amenities, or upgrading signals – or the political will to take away street space for busways and transit lanes. But stop balancing can have a meaningful impact on these issues for a fraction of the price.

To me, this exemplifies a type of thinking that is endemic to policymakers in the US. We can tinker at the edges, we can use computers to optimize what we have, but the idea of using money and political will to change anything at all in a meaningful way is anathema, beyond the pale. Giving up before even getting started. Sure, optimize away, but don't expect me to be inspired by pushing papers around.

Makes sense. I started learning how to play Chess when I was ~30 and my tutors were just chess engines, game reviews on chess.com and whatever books I found interesting enough to get through. I have fun, and that's all I'll ever have, no titles or anything. The centipawn stuff makes sense now, but it took a while.

Yep, exactly. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out better ways for interpreting the evaluations of engines for https://www.schachzeit.com/en/openings/barnes-opening-with-d... and I ended up liking WDL much better than centipawns. A blunder defined in terms of decreasing your chance of winning by such and such percentage is, to me, a much better definition than a blunder losing such and such material. What does that mean? It makes sense to me now, but it took a long while.

Relatedly, there is an interesting thing that lc0 has been doing as well, where it takes the contempt concept even further, and can beat you with queens odd. https://lczero.org/blog/2024/12/the-leela-piece-odds-challen... It assumes it is better than you and that it shouldn't just give up because you might be up a knight, rook or even queen.

Was it intuitive when you were first learning to play? Or have you gotten used to understanding positions via centipawns?

Yeah, it's still unclear to me why Stockfish produces WDL numbers beyond sometimes people ask for them.

I'm not a chess engine guy, but I've talked to some, and, from what I recall, there is a very interesting difference between an engine like Leela Chess Zero (lc0) and Stockfish. Stockfish internally calculates in centipawns while lc0 calculates in WDL's. Stockfish has a model they use that converts their centipawn calculation to WDL's, but it's not _really_ WDL of the position, it's just their estimate of it according to a probabilistic model. Same in reverse applies to lc0. Why I find this interesting is that it shows how they come from different generations, with Stockfish representing the old deterministic style with deep search, and lc0 being directly inspired by Alpha Zero and the new generation of engines based on neural nets. Stockfish has by now adopted the best of both worlds (deep search with a small neural net) and is the better for it, but I still think the developers of both engines banter over who is really producing the True WDL numbers for a given position.

For my part, I find that WDL is more amendable to interpretation. Being up 5 pawns worth of material sort of makes sense, but being told you have a 95% chance of winning makes more sense to me at first blush.

The very first program I ever wrote that I was proud of was a CIA world factbook scraper and report generation script in High School. A hard ass of a teacher had people grab a random assortment of facts about random countries on there and put it all into word, under the guise that it taught you something about the countries. It was entirely formulaic and I remember the lightning realization I could use the Java I was learning in AP class. I made a bet with my roommate that I could write the program to do it faster than it took him to actually do it. I went over by a half hour, but I posted it to facebook and there was much rejoicing in the class.

Oh wow!! Thanks for letting me know, perfect

Red Alert II for me would be great.

A plea to the various lab engineering teams: please create a json format or whatever that lets me configure this with voices locally. I am a happy user as of late of the Codex app by Open AI. It would be great if I could just give it some JSON somehow and it just works. I suppose skills can do this and I will try that later on. But I think this stuff matters, and it would be nice to have it built in and encouraged.

It was declining before the introduction of modern birth control! As well, there were other versions of birth control prior to hormonal birth control, less effective of course, but still practiced with that intent.

Every since the start of the industrial revolution, children became an economic burden instead of a benefit. Once man power was replaced by machines, it stopped making sense to have so many kids and the total fertility rate started to decline. The data is sparse prior to 1950, which is coincidentally when there was a huge global post war baby boom, but visit https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate and scroll down to births per woman and look at someplace like Sweden. It was already going down! Prior to modernity and its ills. TFR was higher when people felt like they had to have kids to survive a harsh world.

I've been working on the demo for Globs, a daily puzzle game about finding the hidden theme behind a jumble of tiles:

https://threeemojis.com/en-US/play/globs

It was inspired by 2025 by thomaswc, a 45x45 connections-like puzzle. Globs jumped off from there and it's been very fun to make. I have AI generating the puzzle groups and it keeps surprising me everyday with what it comes up with. I've got demos up for over 20 different languages, and many different sizes of puzzle. Just recently, I got the puzzle to be generated daily for American English, British English, High German and European Spanish. It can also do custom theme puzzles like the following:

Big YC https://threeemojis.com/en-US/play/globs/en-US/demo?size=big...

Jumbo HN https://threeemojis.com/en-US/play/globs/en-US/demo?size=jum...

There is still some bugs I am tracking down (open the page in a private browser if you hit stale data) but the game has really come together lately and been a lot of fun, I hope you all like it!

Are the digital twins open source anywhere, or available as a service somehow? They sound useful to use!

December a few years ago, pre-ChatGPT I did Advent of Code in Rust. It was very difficult, had never done the full month before, barely knew Rust and kept getting my ass kicked by it. I spent a full Saturday afternoon solving one of the last problems of the month, and it was wonderful. My head hurt and I was reading weird Wikipedia articles and it was a blast. Nothing is stopping me from doing that sort of thing again, and I feel like I might need to, to counteract the stagnation I feel at times mentally when it comes to coding. That spark is still in there I feel, buried under all the slop, and it would reappear if I gave it the chance, I hope. I have been grieving for the last years I think and only recently have I come to terms with the changes to my identity that llm's have wrought.

What a fall from grace, trying to fashion buying calls on FXY as a revolution! Put this on your own personal website and redirect that page, let the domain maintain some dignity.

Thank you for another example of why Occupy was doomed to fail, I had not considered that you had control over the donation flow. Instead of working together as a group and finding somebody more responsible than yourself to manage the incoming capital, you diverted it away from the movement and dispersed it to the winds. Was that decision made collectively by the group? Or did you take it upon yourself to do so? Control over the domains and twitter account, along with the incoming flow of donations are the resources that you had and Occupy let you squander.

You in particular are my main criticism of Occupy as a movement. They lacked any sort of structure, shunned it in fact, that would have ripped control of these resources away from you once it became clear that you disagreed politically with the vast majority of the people involved. That you were allowed to keep control of those resources is emblematic of how Occupy could let all that energy dissipate into nothing.

It is a shame that jart got control of @OccupyWallSt and occupywallst.com and never gave it up. It seems like her politics and views are very out of line with many of the people who were originally involved in that movement. Repurposing occupywallst.com for something like this compared to it's origin is a big disappointing contrast. https://web.archive.org/web/20111021162924/http://www.occupy...

Yes, it uses reasoning. I tried without it, and at the time with OpenAI's api, it was not giving such good answers. Reasoning improved it a fair amount.

Yes, that's correct! Took her about a year off and on, he had made a little app for her to go through and categorize everything.

As an aside, for about $200, you can ask a true/false question of every word in the English language with a frontier LLM, and get mostly good answers. I make word games in my free time and was sort of shocked when I realized how cheap intelligence has been getting.