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Craig Ferguson and Adam Savage shoot the shit

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Redditor reverse engineers the Slay the Spire mapmaking algorithm

For a side project I'm toying with I went looking for this exact thing and am glad to find it. Very fun and interesting stuff.

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"How God plays chess"

An interesting article which delves into the history of endgame tables (where computers have calculated every possible position for a defined number of pieces.) The article shares some interesting anecdotes from the origins of ending tables, as well as a parable (I've copied the start of it below.)

Featuring prominently, and the storyteller of the below parable is Ken Thompson. He isn't a name many will be familiar with, but he was working in Bell labs on things like the C programming language and UNIX.

He created the first endgame table for King-Queen vs King-Rook, which was a monumental thing, something which had never been done before. And the insights gained, and the understanding of what it would take to solve chess, are a fascinating read.

One day World Champion Garry Kasparov, who towers above all his rivals, reached an Elo of 3000. When the rating list was released the heavens over Baku opened and an Angel of the Lord descended. He approached Garry and said: “For what you have achieved you are invited to play a game of chess against God.”

Garry was overwhelmed. He dressed into his finest and got onto the golden escalator that transported him to heaven. There the Angel led him into a small room where God was sitting, drinking coffee and looking at a computer screen. Garry was somewhat surprised that He was wearing jeans and a t-shirt, and had a fairly unkempt white beard. He bowed deeply and said:

“Oh Almighty Lord, Creator of the Universe…”

“Just call me God,” God interrupted. “Or G, which is what most of my friends call me.”

“Okay, God, it is a great privilege for me to stand in your presence and to actually play a game of chess against you. Of course I have absolutely no expectation of winning. I assume you play a perfect game!?”

“Yes,” replied God, “I have done the 32-piece endgame.”

“Ahh,” said Garry, “Of course that is trivially easy for you.”

“No, no,” said God, “it was really tough. More than 10^35 legal positions — it took the matter from a good-sized planet to store. But let us play. You can have white.”

[...]

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A "no phone" roadtrip

This is a real heartwarming video about a roadtrip between a father and a daughter, who vow not to use their phones during the trip. It's cute seeing the re-adjustment to the old days way of roadtripping, but the dynamic between them is something truly special.

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Fly Me To The Moon (2024) - 3 of 5 Atlas Rockets

Fly Me to the Moon2024PG-13

I heard the hook of this movie and put off watching it, but I'm glad I did. It was cute and well done. Reminded me of a mixture of The Right Stuff and Wag The Dog.

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Cry Uncle and Loose the Dogs of War

Had to cry uncle and give up on solving part 2 of Day 5 for Advent Of Code. I tried to solve it with a more elegant way and then when I couldn't figure that out, I tried to brute force it and couldn't get there. Unfortunately I need to cook dinner and do other things before tonight's new puzzle.

I'll go looking at other peoples' solutions to see how they did it after dinner. Bummed to already hit one I couldn't solve, but it's a reminder there's always more to learn.

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Advent of Code - Day 4 & 5

I forgot to make a post after Day 4, but I solved it after a few headaches. Day 5 is, as of this posting, half way complete. I got a late start and forced myself to stop at 12:30am to go to sleep since I have work today. I am confident I can complete it after work before starting Day 6. I may try to make tonight a "as fast as I can" finish just to see how I do. Which means starting at 9pm on the dot and going at it. I have no illusions I will remain out of the top 100, but I am hoping to get in the first 2,500 to finish it.

We'll see. If not tonight, I am determined for one of these days to try and do it "competitively.

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ESPN will join the Disney Streaming Bundle in 2025

This is exciting, the realization that things on ESPN are sometimes not available for us as cord cutters has been very frustrating.

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Martial law declared in South Korea for first time in 44 years

Yoon accused the political opposition of "anti-state" activities and said he sought to "eradicate pro-North Korean forces," but he did not cite any specific threats from the North. Instead, he charged that his liberal political opponents were paralyzing the government with an "unprecedented" number of impeachment motions.

The declaration marked the first time in 44 years that martial law has been declared in South Korea.

A decree issued at 11 p.m. Tuesday by army Gen. Park An-soo, the martial law commander, prohibited all political activities, rallies and demonstrations. It also banned acts that attempt to "overthrow the liberal democratic system" and subjected all media and publications to martial law control.

Update:

Update 2:

And it's over. The President backed down and lifted Martial Law.

• South Korea’s President Yoon declares emergency martial law
• South Korea's president declares martial law

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Dec. 2, 1869 - Seattle incorporates

It came across my Facebook feed. (I'm an old person, I have an interest in Seattle history and so Facebook shows me a fair bit of it.) The post came from the Washington State Archives:

Our Document of the Day: Seattle was incorporated 155 years ago today on December 2, 1869, by the territorial legislature. At the time, Seattle had a population of a little over 1,000 residents. Seattle was originally incorporated in 1865, governed by a board of trustees. Citizens petitioned for dissolution in 1867 due to questionable activities by the elected leaders, which the Washington Territorial Legislature in Olympia granted. Late in 1869, citizens asked for a mayor and town council in lieu of governance by a board, and the legislature granted their request with reincorporation and a new town charter.

📷 Municipal articles of incorporation for Seattle, W.T., 1869. Territorial Laws, Washington State Archives.

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Advent of Code - Day 3: Mull It Over

• Part 1 - 1 submission
• Part 2 - 4 submissions

Part 1 was very straight forward with regex as the key to solving it. Part 2 took me a bit longer. I had watched a video of another coder solving a previous day's challenge and they dutifully coded and tested the examples in each day's problem. Something I usually skipped over. Today I was determined to hold to them. It served me well on the first part, but the 2nd part contains an element of it which the test data doesn't catch for you and it took me a while to fix it.

I ended up using part of the solution from another poster's code. I had a non-regex concept for how to do it, but they showed me how to integrate it as part of the regex. However, the pitfall caught me still.

The core issue is that the "state" of whether to process the inputs carries over across lines of text from the input. This isn't something the test data covers (though the problem makes plain how it should work.) So even though my testing implementation worked, it fell down on the larger dataset.

I figured it out though.

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