kqr

I've never played Diplomacy, but I try to turn every other board game I play into Diplomacy[1] and it's great fun. For me, the reason to play physical board games over other kinds of games is precisely the in-person negotiation and problem-solving that gets people closer together.

[1]: https://entropicthoughts.com/free-banking-monopoly

I have done this for places I visited a lot in my early childhood but since have never returned to. It's a bit eerie to see the memories come back to life. Often I remember just enough of the place to be able to find my way between what were the main attractions to me at that age. Somehow, despite forgetting all the details of the path, something in the back of my head compels me to follow the right road even in confusing intersections. I find it fascinating.

Providing liquidity?

I didn't want to shell out $20 a month for the general thing, so I spent $90 on data collection and built my own for code comments specifically. It runs locally in your browser with a relatively small classification model trained on old-school stylometric features. You can try that before turning to Pangram for uncertain cases, if you wish.[1]

It's easy to get high accuracy numbers if you're testing on long (50+ words) texts. Much harder when the documens are short, as code comments tend to be.[2]

[1]: https://xkqr.org/aicomment

[2]: https://entropicthoughts.com/better-ai-comment-classifier

If I were your editor, I'd strike the adverb. It weakens the sentence.

> Quality brands are economically incentivized to sell-out [...] because customers take some time to catch on, and short-term financials are too often more important

That probably happens a lot, but there's another mechanism by which it could happen, that requires no malice: the brand gets a quality reputation, which increases demand for its products, and they are unable to produce quality products at the rate needed to satisfy that demand. Then it's easy to reason that it'd be a net benefit for everyone to loosen the quality requirements a tiny bit, in order to satisfy the demand of more customers. People used to the quality will barely notice any difference, and then twice as many people can get that experience.

That works once, but when applied again, and again, and again, and again it becomes a problem, even with zero ill intent.

Indeed. I maintain a mental list of underrated conceptual leaps throughout history and rope is in there. Also on the list is writing, statistics, and the world wide web.

The wheel is overrated. It isn't that innovative (having been invented many times throughout history by various cultures) and to be properly useful it needs environmental adaptations. Controlled fire is neither under- nor overrated, I think.

Not mentioned in TFA: cordage is a critical component in slings, an early, powerful ranged weapon.

With some sort of pulley, rope allows a single human to excert large amounts of force trough leverage, often in ways more convenient than other forms of mechanical leverage. (Such as actual levers.)

Rope can also be used for 1:1 power transfer.

Aren't "not rich" and "poor" very different things?

This surprised me too. I suspect the robots only got a "use mutation testing" prompt and independently decided that it must mean manual mutation testing, or possibly that they ran in a sandbox where an automated mutation testing tool was not installed.

But I'm surprised Dan Luu didn't make a remark about this. Surely he must know the difference!

I believe it would. Automated mutation testing is the test coverage metric that is nearly impossible to cheat.

I thought it pretty clear that the code was generated by the same agent that received the testing prompt, so there were no constraints on the code structure, and the testing strategy was known at the time the structure was generated.

This is answered by the large plot early in TFA. All tests were made using the same model, and adding no special instructions at all provided performance above the average.

I don't know what I'm most impressed by: (a) the testing expertise, (b) the time spent looking into the reasoning mistakes generated by LLMs, or (c) the insane amounts of money this must have cost!

Indeed. Trim wheels when rolled upward trim for higher speed, i.e. nose down.

Wait, this agrees with GP's experience but not mine. Did OP invert it?

Like many side scrolling airplane games, the object controlled in this game behaves a lot more like a rocket than an airplane. I suggest learning a little about the physics of airplanes[1] to improve the feeling of flying.

I made a prototype[2] once (not working on mobile, unfortunately) to show what can be done, and it takes getting a lot of details right![3]

[1]: http://av8n.com/how/

[2]: https://xkqr.org/flightle/

[3]: https://entropicthoughts.com/sidescrolling-flight-simulator

What is the wind dynamics? I would have expected to climb when the headwind increased but I didn't. I also didn't manage to stall, only invert when I went out of bounds.

I had no idea people had so strong feelings about theme toggles. I know some applications offer the choice, but I imagined it was because a small set of developers took it as a fun challenge to implement. One of my banking apps has a theme toggle. I look at that app twice a month to see if I need to rebalance the savings portfolio. It doesn't need a theme toggle. Clearly, the toggle is just the result of a scheduled "fun sprint" in between real work. Right?

But this article implies a theme toggle is table stakes for new development, as implied by the parenthetical:

> (despite the irony that the site that post is published on offers no theming or theme toggle at all)

Like... is that something a website should do? Does this come from a bubble, or have UX people in the industry more broadly moved past "should we provide a theme toggle" into "what is the optimal shape of the theme toggle we obviously must have"?

Maybe I'm old, but I don't expect developers of things to produce multiple themes to suit different preferences. It seems like a complete waste of their time. That time could better be used to improve functionality, fix bugs and stability, or increase behavioural tracking for more specifically targeted advertisements.

Spaced repetition: https://onlymove.net/

I get this use-case, but what makes an MCP server better than a custom CLI tool that exposes those same operations? That's how I've solved similar things in the past.

I noticed this when I tried to get LLMs to play text adventures. Early on in my experiments, I wanted to give them hints when they got stuck at a puzzle. I did this by stopping the loop, injecting thoughts into the LLMs own persistent scratchpad (as if it had thought of that itself), and then starting the loop up again.[1] That way, the LLM would read what it had intended to remember from the previous turn including the hints I injected, and use that for the next turn.

I discovered that LLM-generated tokens in the scratchpad were relatively stable, but injected thoughts were frequently ignored and often deleted from the scratchpad within a few turns – even when the injected thought was the literal answer to the puzzle it was stuck at!

A reader[2] then pointed me toward research similar to what you might recall: LLMs interpret text by maintaining activations for input tokens, so text that is not generated by the same LLM will seem "unlikely" to the LLM in a sense, and when given the alternative between likely and unlikely text, it's probably trained to judge the unlikely text as a weird "slip of the mind" and discredit it in favour of the more likely text. I speculate this is part of how they can be useful in the first place, despite their non-determinism.

[1]: https://entropicthoughts.com/getting-an-llm-to-play-text-adv...

[2]: https://entropicthoughts.com/getting-an-llm-to-play-text-adv...

I jumped on the lifetime offer I received from rsync.net at some point (one of the few providers I would trust with such an offer!), so I no longer pay for backup as long as I stay below some ridiculously high number...

What makes the front wheel brake a bad idea? I almost exclusively use the front brake, because that's the one that'll actually stop me. (Source: when I used rim brakes I had to replace the front brake pad three times for every time I replaced the rear brake pad.)

I know some people use the rear wheel locking up as a way to sense when they have applied enough front brake, but that's not necessary. It's also possible to learn to sense that directly.

> Many of the front brakes installed on less expensive bicycles are worthless and give riders a false sense of security.

You should test the brakes before every ride! The front brake should make it very, very hard to push the bike forward. (The back brake should lock the wheel but the bike will continue to move forward.) That way, you can quickly tell whether they are worthless or provide true security.

> But when we switched to hand brakes, it became impossible, as you need a free hand and speed control at the same

Did y'all have only one hand?

I doubt they're actually that beginner friendly. My children switch between coaster brakes and hand-actuated rim brakes regularly (different sets of bikes in different locations) and they have preferred hand-actuated rim brakes since they started cycling.

They like it when the bike doesn't suddenly stop when they accidentally pedal a little backwards, something that happened particularly frequently when they were beginners.

They also like being able to prepare for the stop by taking their feet off the pedals and hovering them over the ground while they brake.

Usually something more subtle like adding an early return somewhere before the offending line, or inheriting from that class and blanking that method, or something along those lines.

It's a different mindset. Has nothing to do with curiosity.

For me and you, "fixing" something means finding which assumption was violated and redesigning the solution in light of that. Sometimes this means adding code, sometimes it means making the solution smaller.

For a lot of people, "fixing" means adding code to make it work. This always makes the solution larger.

The latter group can still be curious! But they're curious about which addition makes it work, not about their incorrect beliefs.

I can imagining that being scary two different ways. I would not want to wake up because whatever this thing is, I love it. I'm having an amazing time, dream or not.

Completely with you. I've played with limited syntax highlighting in the past (class names were blue, to answer the question in TFA), but for the past few years I've been running with plain black-on-white, with only a green highlight for comments, and a subtle yellow for strings.

https://i.xkqr.org/lighttheme.png

I think the relatively bold highlighting of comments is important – lots of times I'm the only person to react to incorrect comments because people's themes blur them into the background and they stop reading them.

(But then again, I'm crazy. I colour diffs blue and orange: https://i.xkqr.org/blueyellowdiffs.png inspired by similar advice in https://jameshfisher.com/2014/05/11/your-syntax-highlighter-... I think it has worked to help me notice things other reviewers have not, but it's hard to know for sure.)