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This post was a huge inspiration for scrapscript!

[0] https://scrapscript.org


Here's a Bluesky starter pack:

[1] https://go.bsky.app/HmV5x47


I maintain a shuffled list of HN blogs here:

[1] https://blogs.hn

Please add your site or make corrections :)

[2] https://github.com/surprisetalk/blogs.hn


Whoops -- I'll fix those up later today. Sloppy work on my end. Thanks!


Great catch! Super helpful. Thank you


Great catch! I'll fix those rows later today

Any suggestions for stuff I can put in the probability rows?


I think the problem is that below 10^-6 there's a pretty broad range of magnitudes that are effectively 'happens to n people every k years (if they try very hard)'. Which makes them rare but not impossible, which is annoying because you can't rule it out but you can't expect to easily reproduce it either.

That does tend to be the best way to think about those probabilities. For any probability you can make it happen If you try enough times or with enough people you can try to force it to happen. Below -6 is a pretty wide range of stuff you can just barely make happen if you have enough people, enough tries and enough time.

It's only once you get to the 'wouldn't happen to 10^10 people in a million years' that you get to the stuff that you can be fairly sure has never happened. Matt Parker has quite a good video on it [1]. He settles on 10^-19 as something that you can be fairly sure has never happened (deliberately).

As for other stuff in the probability rows, maybe include a couple of well known paradoxes like the birthday paradox. And be clear what you're saying, things like getting dealt a royal flush depends a lot on the type of poker game.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ko3TdPy0TU


Thanks! Definitely something funky going on there. I'll double-check my math and clean that up


Can I ask what what was the process of coming up with this list?


Pretty sure it was "Ask ChatGPT". I wouldn't really rely on it. Too many mistakes.


The main implementation can be found here:

https://github.com/tekknolagi/scrapscript


ah, thanks, I couldn't find any link from the main page


Thanks for sharing! I really need to update my wigwams directory haha. Suggestions welcome!


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