Interesting haha, I've played enough NYT connections that I would never have gotten it on my own because when I thought of the correct word with sauce, I thought "_ crab" ? no, can't be that...
Haha, I know what you mean! Though in fairness, Wyna Liu isn't beyond throwing in a "mostly works" category from time to time...
Wild tangent incoming...
One instance that recently bothered me with an NYT puzzle was the crossword clue (3 letters): "Chromebooks, but not MacBooks". The answer was "PCs" which doesn't make sense to me under any level of categorization for PC.
If we go narrow/historic, then it means x86 IBM PC derivatives which eliminates a lot of chromebooks.
If we use the "home computer" interpretation, then I think it's unreasonable to except Macbooks from the PC umbrella.
If we go literal, well then everything is a PC, including smartphones, tablets, smart devices. The only reasonable test seems to be "Can it play Doom?". :D
Using PC in a "every consumer computing device but Mac" probably made sense in the 80s/90s, now it seems to dilute the term to the point of confusion. I have personally never thought of a Chromebook as a PC, given that it ships with an OS incapable of many things people generally associate with PC activities.
It seems to me that it's exactly why I don't like word games.
They use words like "combine", but it's generally mixing abstractions or taxonomies.
To guess it, I looked at 'crab' because it's a quite uncommon that has some deep relationship with a few words only. Then checked the most obvious one (which was the solution) against the other words, and determined that it didn't bear any significant relationship to the third word. So I checked the other (less obvious) potential solutions, and after a frustrating lack of match, I gave up. And then got annoyed that the first candidate was the right one. To be fair, I guess it's partly because I'm an ESL, as I think that solution/sauce can be used as a nominative locution enough to form a "special relationship".
To be a designer, you have to play with people's (as in general crowd, not individuals) general understanding of the subject.
In particular, that means avoiding the curse of knowledge, and yes for normal people PC meant "not Apple consumer product".
So ultimately, the search algorithm includes:
- categorize all relationships between words, ranked by strength
- compare with what is expected to be known in popular culture (adjust ranks)
- match against the designer's expectations of similar problems (look for clues to pick a best match)
It's a lot of words to say it's the opposite of a aha moment, the result of a pure computational problem, that is often quite frustrating. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
I totally get that, I am ESL too, and I have a similar approach for English-based word games.
And yeah that often results in mild disappointment or frustration instead of an "Aha!" moment. Actual puzzle video games fair better for me at that aspect, as they avoid the inevitable subjectivity of natural language.
(author here) I listen to audiobooks a lot and need something to occupy me visually without distracting from listening to the audio. Jigsaw puzzles are perfect for it :)
I am a small person without access to power tools and didn't have much help for the project, so anything that heavy was out of the question (and the puzzle is huge). Otherwise I would have quite possibly done this!
My local library still does Summer reading programs for both adults and kids. My teacher spouse does the adult one since she has a lot of free time in the Summer. She gets at least one gift basket each Summer that includes a $25 gift card to a local restaurant, as I'm pretty sure its just her and maybe 2 other adults doing it.
Idk read a book and do homework to get a chance to win a small thing during your summer break? That would’ve been a hard sell to me as a kid. I’m glad to hear that my skepticism about such a program is wrong though!
Just know them no. Able to sanity check that an RGB value is the color it's supposed to be yes sometimes. It's not the most useful skill because you almost always get a swatch now, but sometimes being able to have some idea of how it'll look (should it be dark or light, grey or intense color) saves me 10 seconds here and there.
I like playing guess-RGB games every now and then because it improves the skill, but at the same time I find them really stressful haha.
I was a math major in undergrad, we care about typesetting so much because you really do not want to be stuck handwriting everything, but it's not easy to be faster typing than you are with handwriting when you're writing out rows and rows of equations. (Actually physics was generally a lot harder for me to keep up with while typing than math was.)
And when your life is revolving around classes or your thesis, the #1 most important thing to you in the world is how easily you can transfer your ideas to paper/digital format. It makes a lot of sense that people care a lot about the quality of their typesetting engine and exchange macro tips with each other (I got a lot of helpful advice from friends, and my default latex header was about 50% my own stuff and 50% copied from friends in my same major)
On a total tangent, I found out that my grandfather's university digitized their entire library a few years ago including his masters' thesis from 1948. Back then it was written with a typewriter and by hand for everything else.
I bet he could have done something more advanced if he had modern computers, but looking at it 75 years later and seeing his handwriting on the page was moving more than the content itself.
Why does it play an artificial voice saying "Number 9" over and over in between clips in Revolution 9 mode? it's super annoying especially given the clips are shorter
But this is really cool! I've gotten some animal sounds, weather sounds, music, a small kid talking about a soccer match in Spanish, "evil laugh", political speeches in several languages, and a telephone ringing. only pressed skip a couple times for some really unpleasant noises
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