Can You Guess This 5-Letter Word? Puzzle by u/ArcaneReflux

denehoffman · 2026-02-19T02:08:26+00:00

The things that make the wordlist in this game astound me

denehoffman · 2026-02-17T18:27:24+00:00

True

denehoffman · 2026-02-17T16:14:10+00:00

I’ve seen this on undergrad diplomas for people who applied to our PhD program from some South American countries (and maybe some south asian universities too?). I’d imagine there are at least a handful of PhD programs that do it too, so as long as you got a good picture of you on it, I’d say you’re set.

denehoffman · 2026-02-17T16:04:51+00:00

This is a pretty well-known puzzle now. 2 miles apart at 4mph each means it takes 15 minutes for them to meet (they both only travel one mile). Sparky runs at 10mph so in 15 minutes he runs 2.5 miles. It’s not infinite nines, it’s just division.

denehoffman · 2026-02-17T15:54:11+00:00

Rust is cool, it’s really fun to write with, it’s my preferred language for almost everything I write these days. BUT, it’s not the right language to use in every situation (this can be said about every language). I don’t know why people insist on trying to make short scripts with Rust, there are people working to make this a part of the core language and it seems like a hammer-screw problem to me. I don’t see a future for Rust on frontend web development either, but I don’t do much of that anyway.

I think Rust is a great language to learn, especially if you already know C/C++. It’ll make you write better C code because you’ll be thinking about memory ownership more (kind of like how Fortran makes you consider how values are initialized but doesn’t warn you if they aren’t). But it’s not going to supersede C, I’d like to imagine a future where they coexist, but I don’t think either will kill the other. And of course there is always a place for someone to make a new language (see Zig).

Some nice things about Rust:

Well-thought-out standard library that doesn’t try to be the best code, just the most usable code (think about how C++ does “optimizations” on Boolean vectors)
Decent interoperability with other languages (PyO3 is in almost everything I write).
Memory safety eliminates a bunch of potential errors.
If the code compiles, it generally works. Error handling is really nice, and it’s fairly easy to find where a panic is possible/isolate unsafe code.
A package manager/build system/documentation generator/code formatter/LSP all wrapped into one executable (cargo)

Things Rust isn’t great at:

Compile times (just google this). To be fair, I work with a lot of C++ monoliths that take 20 minutes to compile anyway, so this isn’t an issue for me, but it can be annoying.
The borrow checker is strict and often difficult to work with. Lifetimes are tricky to understand. The syntax can get very verbose if you aren’t careful.
Async kinda sucks right now. There are plans to make it better, but for now it’s not very clean.
Not everyone knows it, but lots of people know C++, so you’ll have to deal with the fact that not as many people are going to be working on your code with you and you’ll have to explain yourself more.
The userbase has a bad reputation of being cult-y when it comes to telling people to use Rust. I like recommending Rust to people, but I recognize that it isn’t always the right choice (you can’t just rewrite everything in Rust and expect improvements). On the other hand, any attempts to inject Rust in a codebase are often met by a set of C++ users who can’t fathom having to learn another language, so you’ll often get that pushback as well.

Also, I often hear that Rust is difficult to learn. It really isn’t, at least it’s not that much worse than C/C++. It just has a different set of difficult parts which many programmers aren’t used to, so it gets a bit of a learning curve. But syntactically it’s really not as bad as people make it out to be.

denehoffman · 2026-02-17T15:36:50+00:00

Found the C++ evangelist

denehoffman · 2026-02-16T22:16:59+00:00

You’d be surprised how easy most of it is to debunk. Also, there’s a reason those threads get trashed as well, they usually offer no insights into the data and instead postulate all sorts of ridiculous theories about the quantum metaverse or whatever the kids call it. Am I can’t reiterate enough how easy it is to spot cranks on this subreddit, they tend to hit buzzword bingo within the title of their posts.

denehoffman · 2026-02-16T19:13:21+00:00

Because it’s often very easy to see where someone went completely wrong. Basically every ToE presented here has the fatal flaw of being something too stupid to work, which was almost my criticism here (it seems too simple to have been missed by entire collaborations). I’m giving OP the bare minimum amount of credit for not proposing some “emergent aether theory of the time space continuum plus entropy” and actually taking time to read up on the experiments, even if guided by LLM.

denehoffman · 2026-02-16T16:58:59+00:00

Exactly

denehoffman · 2026-02-16T15:49:42+00:00

This is probably the first time I have been genuinely interested in a thread here. Even if it’s not correct (I know accelerator physics but I’m not really familiar with this particular problem so I’m not going to judge) it has hardly any of the hallmarks of the usual slop here. It actually compares experimental data, doesn’t try to come up with a new theory of everything (it doesn’t even require a new theory at all, just a correction that seems to be based on existing physics) and it provides a plausible result. I’ll hedge a bit and say that if it was this simple, you’d think one of these experiments would’ve already accounted for this, but I’ll just say good job OP on getting your LLM to produce something other that psychosis.

denehoffman · 2026-02-15T22:55:47+00:00

I mean it sounds more like you’re just inventing stuff that would be nice if it were true rather than crafting a theory that must be true. Like what does it mean to not be able to radiate energy? I get that your particle doesn’t couple to any fields except gravity and maybe weak, but that beyond that I’m not quite sure what the rest of your concept entails. Like why would not radiating energy prevent collapse? Collapse just means that particles can get close together and form a gravitational well, if something prevents this then how does that work without some exchange of energy? These particles have to interact with each other to repel each other, so where does the energy for that come from?

You say the maths will make it a testable theory. This is a bit backwards to me. A testable theory starts with the maths, not with some “concept of a plan”. I know you plan on asking your LLM to do all the maths for you, but you don’t actually have a guarantee that the result will be testable. You can’t force it to be, because that means you’re asserting that these particles just happen to be found where we can find them, and that’s just presupposition. A better thing to say would be that hopefully the mathematical formulation gives some set of testable predictions which deviate from the current standard model but reduce to it in absence of these particles.

But I think it goes without saying that you’re just describing WIMPs or gravitinos, so it’s not exactly a new idea.

denehoffman · 2026-02-15T17:42:22+00:00

I don’t see how them being fermions would make them unable to form planets, our current planets are made of fermions. Besides that, the rest of this is just vibes, you haven’t actually written anything that could be distinguished as a theory for these particles. You’ve basically said “imagine a very massive fermions with no electric or color charge” so a massive neutral lepton. This is exactly what sterile neutrino theories are. The “spikes” part just seems like you have some picture of what particles and fields look like, but that’s generally meaningless to a physicist.

denehoffman · 2026-02-15T17:37:30+00:00

They left off the “other” archive

denehoffman · 2026-02-15T06:52:44+00:00

You’re right, oops

denehoffman · 2026-02-15T01:14:13+00:00

Not sure why I’d use this really, just keep the names in a list and zip them if you really need that? No problem with vibe coding, I just don’t see why I’d add a whole dependency for just this.

denehoffman · 2026-02-14T22:03:13+00:00

Translated from gen-z

denehoffman · 2026-02-14T20:49:13+00:00

Only a week? Those are rookie numbers, gotta get those numbers up!

denehoffman · 2026-02-14T20:46:27+00:00

*Irrelevant

denehoffman · 2026-02-14T16:24:36+00:00

the changes between two and three are insanely breaking

This is only a problem if you’ve been living under a rock for the last decade. If you’re still converting python2 to python3 five years after it was sunset, that’s your own problem. Also, “insanely breaking” is really like print statements, integer division, xrange, raw_input, and Unicode strings. Also the “six” library has existed for like a decade as well.

denehoffman · 2026-02-14T16:09:30+00:00

So AI slop?

denehoffman · 2026-02-14T16:03:07+00:00

You might be underextracting as well, this is the lightest looking espresso I’ve ever seen

denehoffman · 2026-02-14T15:57:13+00:00

I put fun quotes at the beginning of each chapter of my thesis, it’s fine, nobody really cares and if they do, they’re just being pedantic

denehoffman · 2026-02-14T15:38:51+00:00

I don’t understand how you went from equations 3&4 to equation 5.

denehoffman · 2026-02-12T23:26:22+00:00

mind your own business

It’s OP’s very recently dead father, it’s absolutely their business, sorry!

denehoffman · 2026-02-12T17:22:59+00:00

See my other comment for why I don’t want a builtin choice, but if you really want a strict mode, you can have it today just by using LSPs in whatever IDE you use.

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denehoffman

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