I keep returning to Zachtronics games endlessly in my free time, despite doing engineering work for 8-10 hours a day for the last months. Sure they're a bit of a facsimile of a programming challenge, but they're pretty tough problems, especially in the ones that are basically using assembly. I even had someone reference that my latest Opus Magnum creation looks like cellular automata.
If you can simplify the problem/solution space into a puzzle, give me a leaderboard to compete against, more specifically let me compete against the people I care about, and give it the barest amount of polish, it's the kind of thing someone like me would obsess over.
> Sure they're a bit of a facsimile of a programming challenge, but they're pretty tough problems, especially in the ones that are basically using assembly.
They are indeed "real," bonafide (though perhaps sophomoric) programming problems. There is an Exapunks puzzle that has you implement a form of binary tree search/traversal in assembly.
Usually I see that term applied to Turing tarpits, intentionally obfuscated languages, joke/meme languages, or ones with highly heterodox syntax. Zachtronic languages are really none of these and closer to an assembly (reduced) instruction set architecture. What makes them toy-like languages is that the "machine" you're writing assembly for is rather oversimplified, and is in fact totally fictitious.
Wow it's impressive to see that this page has remained up for so long!
I used to email the owner a long time ago when I was really getting into Pink Floyd in high school. It was one of the first times I can really recall about having long, ongoing conversations online about something I was becoming increasingly passionate about. I really enjoyed the debate and back and forth that they were willing to entertain with me.
Sadly it looks like those conversations have been lost to time/old email addresses. But the idea that people would be open and willing to chat about their hobbies is really what defined the internet to me of that age.
I had a similar relationship in the 90's with the guy who started the Magnum Mania website for fans of the show Magnum PI. It was fun to communicate directly with somebody who was even more enthusiastic about the show than I was, and fun to send him pictures when I bought my Ferrari 308 after seeing the car on the show and literally saving up for it for 20 years. I haven't talked to him in many years now, and he doesn't seem to update the website as much these days, but the forum there is still pretty active, and there's still tons of info available.
There is an episode of the original run of Magnum wherein a character picks up a phone and dials “9, 1,” as though they are about to call emergency services, and then hangs up the phone instead. I think, but am not sure, that the caller is using a phone on the Masters estate.
Season one, episode eight of Magnum, P.I. was entitled, “The Ugliest Dog in Hawaii.”
There are, of course, episodes of both Knight Rider and The A Team that share that tile, though.
While I am appreciative that you want to demonstrate precisely how useless LLMs are, I wonder if perhaps you could do something more productive than make work for me.
Is there a clear definition of 'typical' when it comes to the speeds/latency - e.g., should I expect this on a p95 level at my residence for the contract?
I ask because I'm paying for a service advertising itself as 500mbps down/10 mbps up/latency 14ms, but I have never in my 3 years of paying for it seen that level of performance.
Running a `networkquality` test right now on ethernet reveals about 159 down/2.0 up/latency 50ms, which is closer to what I've come to expect on any given run
On top of that, if the confines of 'typical' are broken on the side of the provider, would this just be an fcc complaint? More than happy to track this over the course of a month and provide data to back up my findings
The trouble is that there are a lot of situations that could be causing that.
Is the coax line leading to your house in good condition? Is your ISP performing some kind of maintenance on their local infrastructure? How new is your modem and what does it support? What about your router? Ethernet cables or wifi? What about the computer that's interfacing with it, is that the bottleneck? Is all the relevant firmware up to date? What is connected to your network and what is it doing?
I have high end networking equipment that's all kept up-to-date and I generally get a bit higher than what is advertised.
If you have poor quality or old modem and router, they're never going to be able to handle 500 mbps down.
I love this US box art so much it's so dreadful and left such a weird impression on me initially. My friends and I had a hell of a time trying to figure out who the characters were meant to be.
I think by the end of it, our conclusions were:
Left Side: Barbarossa, Ted, Windy
Right Side: McDohl (maybe Luc?), Leknaat, Three headed skeleton demon because ???
Flying on the dragon I always assumed to be Futch, but who knows. If it's Luc in the corner, I guess it could be McDohl in the center, (he is the main character after all.)
Was bummed to see it in the Eiyuden newsletter this morning. Suikoden and its sequel were formative for me and my immediate friend group growing up. His creative vision definitely left an impact on me. (Or at least as much as made it through the localization.)
It was always such a delight to get random notes from him in the updates. It'll definitely be sad to not get those anymore.
I'd imagine outputs along the lines of 'I cannot comply with that request' or stating ethical issues with continuing onwards in the conversation. This seems to want to catch what most would consider to be publically perceived harmful responses
It's not perfect, but it was great for getting into the habit 3 times a week. Now I often make up my own sets as I go, taking note of what's sore on me and what I feel could use some work. Doing that gave me the time to do research and get a bit more familiar with how to engage certain muscles, and what machines will do what for me.
Heardle was one of the games that we really enjoyed quite a bit, but definitely needed some sort of variation to the game itself other than 'first x seconds'
Usually we would get the answer in a single try, because it happened to be a song we knew by heart, or we wouldn't get it at all because we didn't know the artist/it was just not in a genre to which we regularly listen/the song was an obscure hit or one hit wonder before our time
Perhaps it would have been better as 'guess the artist' and give you 5 second clips from decreasingly obscure songs
If you can simplify the problem/solution space into a puzzle, give me a leaderboard to compete against, more specifically let me compete against the people I care about, and give it the barest amount of polish, it's the kind of thing someone like me would obsess over.