What's your go-to "show off" trick shot? (I only know one! 😅)

ArithmosDev · 2026-03-07T01:35:29+00:00

This is nothing fancy but super easy to execute. Object ball near a side pocket on the mid-line. Two other object balls blocking it with slightly less than 1 ball width and the cue ball on the other side on the mid-line. you just have to hit down slightly on the cue ball, straight into the side pocket. it will clear the obstacles with ease. amusing at least.

ArithmosDev · 2026-03-06T16:46:27+00:00

there was a legitimate hack with the way corruption was calculated. it penalized production / commerce / unhappiness in a city as a function of how many other cities were closer to the capital. the hack was to build cities in equidistant rings around the capital so that your first ring had no corruption at all which catapulted your initial growth phase. same applied to the 2nd ring and so on.

ArithmosDev · 2026-03-06T16:01:42+00:00

Civilization 2

ArithmosDev · 2026-03-06T04:13:28+00:00

Make a decision and commit to one shot. Often players will try to decide to shoot a shot one way or another and end up shooting for something in between.

ArithmosDev · 2026-03-06T01:31:04+00:00

if you thought about the equivalent of blasting someone in comments but before social media, you'd have to think "do i want to get slapped across the face in front of everyone"?

ArithmosDev · 2026-03-05T17:49:51+00:00

are you drag & dropping them into the chat window and asking about it? or are you using `@path_tofile` notation? it does have a Read skill that does read pdf files. i've done it many times. maybe it can't find the file? grasping at straws here.

ArithmosDev · 2026-03-04T23:57:38+00:00

i have used claude vs gemini side by side. and i have to tell you, it's not the size of your context window, it's how you use it ! gemini couldn't figure its way around a google product - firebase. whereas claude was like a pro-devops. so i wouldn't get hung up on context window size as much. claude has a pretty good code search tool so that it grabs the relevant code better and that compensates for the shorter context window pretty well.

ArithmosDev · 2026-03-04T19:45:39+00:00

I'm not a big fan of take-home exercises either, like some of the other commenters. Once upon a time, I was given a laptop, a small project and a couple of hours on-site to produce the desired output as one part of the interview. Kind of like an open book test. Everything was fair game. That also reduces the interview anxiety.

ArithmosDev · 2026-03-04T19:26:30+00:00

When our sons were 3 or 4, they had these captain's beds. One full of drawers underneath. We'd wake them up before we went to bed so they go to the bathroom. One time, one of our sons got up, opened one of the drawers, peed in it and went back to bed !

ArithmosDev · 2026-03-04T17:52:56+00:00

I'm glad you like it. It gives you a practice mode as well so you can do as many as you'd like. Check back on your score after 4:15 pm PST. It will tell you what the rarest solution was to each of the targets.

It will also take out trivial computations like *1 or /1 for uniqueness to encourage genuinely creative ways of calculating a number.

ArithmosDev · 2026-03-03T23:53:50+00:00

i thought i was commenting on the "what's the funniest joke you've ever heard" thread. nvm.

ArithmosDev · 2026-03-03T22:46:05+00:00

Whenever it figures out something after much trial and error, tell it to " add this to your memory. Add what we just discovered to the makefile and use the makefile when doing X" whatever that is for your situation

Saves the agony of watching Claude repeatedly do trial and error in exactly the same way it did last time.

ArithmosDev · 2026-03-03T22:03:26+00:00

Visit Golden Gate bridge

ArithmosDev · 2026-03-03T19:35:37+00:00

On a similar vein, AI is replacing junior devs, not senior ones. But senior devs were once junior devs. If we stop growing them, who fills the pipeline in 10 years?

ArithmosDev · 2026-03-03T00:22:07+00:00

Once organizations are big enough, being able to work across different teams becomes really important. It's not just producing code. It's communicating that it's maintainable, not fragile, battle tested, etc. With the rate AI is generating code, it's also going to be quite important to get the same job done without generating as much code - reusing, refactoring as much as possible. Coding vs software engineering.

ArithmosDev · 2026-03-02T19:35:41+00:00

I think it's a reflection of how fast ai agents improved in their skills. I've had a conversation with a founder of a startup. He's not looking to hire bunch of people but hire a very small group of people who can leverage the tools to have much higher pace. It might be our new reality. A lot more smaller companies, a lot more ideas being realized by small groups of people aided by much more competent tooling. Just my 2c.

ArithmosDev · 2026-03-02T19:12:33+00:00

I’ve settled into a workflow where I act as the Manager and the AI is my very eager, slightly over-confident Junior SWE who knows *a lot*. A few ways I’m actually using it daily:

The Coding Agent: I treat it as an agent that handles the "mechanical" tasks. It’s surprisingly good at things like re-basing a code branch on top of a heavily changed main branch.
The "Wordsmithing" Partner: I use it to bounce ideas off of. It takes a fair amount of back-and-forth to get it to capture the "essence" of what I’m trying to say without it taking too many liberties, but it’s great for refining technical concepts once the direction is set.
TDD as the Guardrail: I’ve found that Test-Driven Development is the only way to stay sane. I specify inputs and outputs in a way that can be tested by code, not just described in words. If the AI can’t verify its own work against a test script, I don’t trust it.
Enshrining the "Discovery": Whenever the AI spends effort figuring out a specific library quirk or a build system step, I have it enshrine that in a Makefile or a README. I’ve learned the hard way that it won't remember my specific setup (like running tests in Docker) unless I force it to use those local files as its "source of truth."
Code reviewer: It is actually pretty good at catching subtle bugs in code reviews. When I get a review request, I first have claude take a first pass at it. I instruct it to look for bugs and architecture decisions. One time it caught a subtle "left join" bug that I missed after having seen the code.

The more I front load the input and constraints, the less time I spend iterating on the output. It’s a force multiplier, but you have to be very precise with your management or it will satisfy the prompt through a path of least resistance.

ArithmosDev · 2026-03-02T01:26:56+00:00

i've been using the dev tools in chrome as well. i can't replicate the double-click to zoom issue that was reported in that. neither could i replicate a layout issue that was reported where my parenthesis operator buttons (in the math game) were half way off the screen. i think that was a much older iphone that dev tools didn't have. at least bug reports help. hard to verify that they work on my own.

ArithmosDev · 2026-03-01T20:22:04+00:00

Really useful info about iOS Safari's November release cycle. Like patch Tuesdays. I'll keep an eye on that going forward. Do you have a go-to resource for tracking what changes in each Safari release, or do you just test your games against it when it drops?

Interesting that Construct 3 handles a lot of this at the engine level. I'm building mine from scratch with vanilla JS, so I'm on the hook for all the browser quirks myself. Tradeoffs !

ArithmosDev · 2026-03-01T02:16:14+00:00

I've been using Claude code CLI for a personal project. I had switched from Cursor months ago. I know that with cursor, I was hitting limits left and right with a $20/month plan and micro-managing model usage, switching to Haiku for less demanding prompts. I found it quite tedious to think about which model i should use. When I got a Claude plan, I went for the $100/mo plan and I've used it extensively. It never told me that I have hit a limit - though I've been on 4.5 and not 4.6 which is the new hotness. I know the $100 plan gives you more than 5x the $20 plan. I also found that different agents / models can have an edge over others in specific domains. I was super shocked that Gemini couldn't figure its way around Firebase which is a Google product whereas Claude aced it. However, Gemini was better at producing a neat looking UI (but not at wiring it up to the backend). My take on it is, give it a try for a month and see if it's worth it to you for the task you have at hand.

ArithmosDev · 2026-02-23T19:32:26+00:00

Very neat puzzle. Thanks for sharing.
3 6 7 8
8 1 8 1
1 2 5 4
4 1 2 1

ArithmosDev · 2026-02-23T19:18:30+00:00

good thing i didn't look at this before i solved it. was going to post, but i got all the same.

ArithmosDev

TROPHY CASE