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ohwellhere

422 karma · joined October 13, 2021

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ohwellhere··on Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
I don't think the dev would leave the top left without a mine until one is moved there, as that would always be a safe square to click first.

So if the probability of finding a mine at any given spot is given by p, then the probability of finding a mine in the top left during gameplay for cases where one does not click it first (in which case it is 0?) is 1 for the case where you clicked on a mine first with probability p, and then p for the remainder.

So the total probability p' is p * 1 + (1 - p) * p, or 2p - p^2.

Wikipedia says

> Beginner is usually on an 8x8 or 9x9 board containing 10 mines, Intermediate is usually on a 16x16 board with 40 mines and expert is usually on a 30x16 board with 99 mines; however, there is usually an option to customise board size and mine count.

  8x8   10 mines  p = 0.16 p' = 0.29 ratio = 1.84
  9x9   10 mines  p = 0.12 p' = 0.23 ratio = 1.88
  16x16 40 mines  p = 0.16 p' = 0.29 ratio = 1.84
  30x16 99 mines  p = 0.21 p' = 0.37 ratio = 1.79
I was curious to see the concrete effects for no reason other than to procrastinate.
ohwellhere··on Ants learned to farm fungi during a mass extinction
The termites built a heat sink for their colony! That's crazy.
ohwellhere··on 'Dancing' raisins − a simple kitchen experiment
My daughters have for years enjoyed dropping their plastic straws into their Jarritos bottle where it sits out of reach until the bubbles magically bring it back up.
ohwellhere··on Sort, sweep, and prune: Collision detection algorithms (2023)
My algorithms class taught to think of it not as "describing performance" in an absolute sense, but as "describing how performance changes as the size of the input data increases".

It is not necessarily true that an O(1) algorithm will outperform an O(n^2) alternative on a particular set of data. But it is true that an O(1) algorithm will outperform an O(n^2) alternative as the size of the input data increases.

ohwellhere··on How much money we can raise for transparently idiotic startups?
I think they're probably talking about something closer to lean startup methodology.
ohwellhere··on 62 Minutes could bring your business down
I work in a hospital system. The OR is only doing emergency cases today; ambulatory clinics are closed; everything is being done on paper; response communication is via email and peer-to-peer text.
ohwellhere··on A leadership crisis in the Nix community
This is a great point, and perhaps we do need a new popular license or set of variants that exclude certain industries. "MIT-Peaceful" perhaps.

I know very many people who would refuse to work for certain companies and in certain industries — and have rejected certain projects — but would happily contribute to something MIT licensed that would end up in those systems anyway!

ohwellhere··on AMA: I'm Dave Greene, an accidental expert on Conway's Game of Life
Have you read Alien Information Theory: Psychedelic Drug Technologies and the Cosmic Game by Andrew R. Gallimore [0], and do you have any thoughts on his cosmology vis a vis cellular automata? And perhaps also the same question related to Stephen Wolfram's physics project?

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Alien-Information-Theory-Psychedelic-...

ohwellhere··on A former slave who became a cowboy, a rancher, and a Texas legend
> used in the British Isles from 1820 to 1850 to describe young boys who tended the family or community cows

This sounds like exactly the kind of definition that would get appropriated to belittle slaves. See also simply, “boy.”

ohwellhere··on C3PO Ft. Childish Gambino – Gold Gang (100% AI) [video]
Made with A.I.

GPT4 (lyrics) Suno (music) Resemble (voice) SyncLabs (performance) Runway (film) Fable (edit) Midjourney (image) Katalist (storyboard) Topaz (up-res)

ohwellhere··on AI-generated sad girl with piano performs the text of the MIT License
That wasn’t even the Family Guy sketch I was thinking of!

“Red-headed lady, gonna eat an apple. She breathes on it first, wipes it on her bloooouuuuse…”

ohwellhere··on Shattered Pixel Dungeon is an open-source traditional roguelike dungeon crawler
This may not be the genre for you, then. And that’s fine!
ohwellhere··on Rive Renderer for real-time vector graphics is now open source
Bevy but not Godot?
ohwellhere··on OpenAI scrapped a promise to disclose key documents to the public
The lesson is that "should have been fired" was believed by the people who had power on paper; "should not have been fired" was believed by the people actually had power.
ohwellhere··on New theory suggests LLMs can understand text
I think this critique would only be fair if we more completely understood how we ourselves work under the hood.

The "fancy math" is a bunch of non-linear functions that encode something derived from series of tokens. I believe we're still exploring what the derived vector spaces "mean" for LLMs, with research inspecting smaller and simplified models to try to make sense of it all.

It's clear that LLMs can "remix" in interesting ways. "ChatGPT, write me a Shakespearean-style sonnet about how LLMs work." (https://pastebin.com/FwzqWJ5W) It's not clear to me that our creativity and intelligence is not the same or a similar process.

Beyond that, I'm not convinced there are definitions of meaning, knowledge, creativity, intelligence, etc, that are both useful and don't refer solely to the output. If I need a solution and none exists yet and something creates it, I will call that creative irrespective of process.

But I don't know anything about anything. :)

ohwellhere··on 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev
I can't read. :)
ohwellhere··on 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev
It's been a hot minute since I've done work in this ecosystem, but I am not sure it is accurate to say that Storyboards do not support Auto Layout. I used to build iOS apps with Storyboards and Auto Layout a few years ago.

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Us...

ohwellhere··on Stupid by choice
For all the men reading this, you should know that women discuss this as a tactic men take regarding housework, cooking, childcare, emotional labor, or any other traditional "women's work". Even when tolerated, they generally find it obnoxious and lose respect for men who do this.

That's oversimplified and overgeneralized, yes. But perhaps there's a little nugget in there that's useful for someone.

ohwellhere··on James Webb Space Telescope captures high-resolution image of Uranus
My 9 year old daughter told me last week that Uranus had rings, and I told her I really didn't think so, are you thinking of Saturn? And she said nope, they both do. What a weird bit of knowledge to get wrong, even at 9, so I looked it up. She was delighted to have taught me something.
ohwellhere··on HTML Web Components
I think there's a lot of value for classic server-side web applications rather than SPAs. That handles routing, state, etc. I'm personally a fan and hope that the server-based application renaissance happens as some predict.
ohwellhere··on Git rebase, what can go wrong
Yes! The source code is itself the first level of documentation. The commit history is the second.

A free form textual interface to document everything about why you made the changes you just made? Why not maximize the value of this resource!

ohwellhere··on Git rebase, what can go wrong
The way I phrase and teach what I consider to be the important rule of git is:

> Don't rewrite history on shared branches with proper communication.

I don't teach "never", I don't teach that `main` is special, I don't teach that force pushing is forbidden, because I don't believe in those things.

I highly prefer a rebase-heavy workflow. In addition to not "cluttering" the history, it's an invaluable tool to keep commits focused on "the right level" of atomic changes.

ohwellhere··on Software disenchantment
You're 100% right. Ever since watching the Jonathan Blow talk on the end of the world I have started paying attention to it and it's amazing how many absolutely shitty software experiences we just accept on the daily.

I understand all the points about financial costs and opportunity costs and pragmatism and the rest, and I partially agree with it, but it's hard not to sometimes feel like we've accepted living in a half built world.

ohwellhere··on How to build a universe that doesn’t fall apart two days later (1978)
Aleister Crowley wrote that everyone shares in magical thinking, it's just that they want to make magick itself the exception.
ohwellhere··on All objects and some questions
There's some interesting discussion of this in Wolfram's "The Concept of the Ruliad" article in his physics project.

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/11/the-concept-of-t...

ohwellhere··on Ahead of Time: On Poetry and Mourning
My journey was similar. After walking through enough art museums and realizing that I only really engaged with and was moved by a few pieces and it was still worth it, I was able to read books of poetry much more calmly.
ohwellhere··on Researchers Find ‘Backdoor’ in Encrypted Police and Military Radios
I wonder if there are measurable personality differences that predict how well someone responds to hyperbolic rhetoric.

For instance, the US has been doing down on the Economist Democracy Index in recent years. "Flawed democracy" is not totalitarian, but it's trending away from "full democracy" and cries of totalitarianism may well be responding to real concerns.

In the abstract, I wonder if it's better to raise such issues with incremental language and small arguments, or to raise them with hyperbolic claims, or to tailor to your audience, or some other combination.

ohwellhere··on Diablo
> Really these posts that call one kind of game time wasting or drug-like but not another just miss the brutal irony.

I think you're spot on.

> > To me there is just "no there there" - and that's probably the point?

In some ways I've always felt Diablo is just more honest about what a video game is.

ohwellhere··on From second thoughts on the germ theory to a full-blown host theory
Yes to all!

Although I think your final point is the most profound.

ohwellhere··on Electric bike, stupid love of my life
I had a coworker have his bike stolen on 5th Ave in New York City while thoroughly chained and U-locked to scaffolding at 9am with hundreds of pedestrian passersby in the time it took him to go up the passenger elevator and down the freight elevator.
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