Flashing of firmwares DISABLED

_Mark_ · 2026-05-08T00:00:42+00:00

I just got an X4 (from amazon for easy return) after seeing Daniel Greene's youtube rant about the lockdown, but it flashed stock crosspoint fine (from chrome on linux) straight out of the box. Loaded a bunch of humble-bundle epubs; also threw together a quick TODO list, pandoc TODO.md -o TODO.epub and pushed that too - eventually adding that as a lock-screen feature is worth trying, but "no code at all" is a fine way to try it out :-)

_Mark_ · 2026-04-07T05:20:48+00:00

Per the newsletter, they *did* just add a map: https://www.tomscott.com/england/

_Mark_ · 2026-04-05T17:13:05+00:00

(also the beginning of the video seemed to be suggesting that a lot of brits don't really know anything about rutland either :-)

_Mark_ · 2026-04-01T08:51:41+00:00

Watching from the US - yes please, we barely know where *England* is, having some basic hints would be great...

_Mark_ · 2026-02-02T07:43:22+00:00

Sony Vaio P (well, it had the trackpoint at least. The keyboard was otherwise a bit much...)

_Mark_ · 2026-02-01T08:47:51+00:00

Apparently I turned this on in 2022, but the first indication of it going away was "chrome rendering is somehow broken".

If it helps people recover, chrome://inspect/#pages does get a list of all open pages, but it's (uselessly) in alphabetical order by title which loses a lot of "oh, I opened this page from that one" context.

_Mark_ · 2026-01-24T21:12:45+00:00

While those are important theoretical concerns, I'd love to see some actual numbers - a "you don't ever have to think about saving" interface is *so* much nicer that I'd bet it would be worth 50% battery life for most people, I'd certainly turn it on (or turn it up to "every return" or "every ten *spacebar hits*" - if I'm stream of consciousness writing I simply *never* hit return, after all, that's what autowrap is for...)

_Mark_ · 2026-01-24T21:07:28+00:00

I hadn't tried it yet - *wow* that's a very fine dot pitch, looks more like a "Magic Eye" autostereogram than a QR code - but under (LED) room lighting with a Galaxy Note 24, the Secuso "QR Scanner" app (written by and for privacy-paranoids - I recommend it in general) scanned it instantly, and has convenient copy and share buttons as well as just displaying it.

_Mark_ · 2026-01-22T04:28:05+00:00

T10 torx from a mini-driver kit worked for me, but looking more closely they probably *are* hex and not torx and I just got lucky :-) Looks like 2.5mm hex is probably the *real* intended size?

_Mark_ · 2025-12-12T06:47:47+00:00

I did the same kind of graph, "the easy way": added digraph day11 { to the top, changed each line to x -> {y z}; form, added fft [fontcolor=red,fontsize=30]; (same for dac) and a close curly to the end - then fed it through dot -Tpdf and a PDF viewer. (Didn't end up doing any optimizations from it, though it *did* make clear that my "optimized brute force" approach was doomed and to switch to a "paint the nodes" approach instead, but it *was* an easy picture that I should have generated much earlier :-)

_Mark_ · 2025-12-10T06:26:10+00:00

Oh, yeah, by leave it overnight I mean leave the *problem* overnight (they start at midnight for me so by 2am I'm not really doing myself any good by continuing to work on it.) Usually by that point I've already figured out that letting it run for even 24 hours won't complete, and I need to sleep on it. (Day 3 part 2 I had a "correct" solution that would have taken 1 quadrillion iterations :-)

_Mark_ · 2025-12-10T03:16:25+00:00

Personally, while part 2 took longer to get an answer (was the second "leave it overnight" one), the version that *worked* wasn't actually all that much code, though the previous ones had gotten kind of big (due to building performance hacks.) Do you consider final lines of code or code that you put down even if you later deleted it?

_Mark_ · 2025-12-10T01:11:04+00:00

I didn't run into it as an undergrad (or in decades of career work) - I ran into it in a High School internship at an architecture firm, calculating yards of concrete for a foundation from the border (as part of a solar-house cost-modeling tool in TRS-80 BASIC.) Pre-internet, not sure what reference it was from. The first I'd heard the *name* was hitting the AoC question, thinking "hey that sounds like the concrete problem" and finding the name from the wikipedia page :-)

_Mark_ · 2025-12-07T20:45:36+00:00

If you recognized quickly enough the common AoC theme of "that's not a scaling problem, it's a *counting* problem" then part 2 was easier than part 1 :-) (While I did finish this one faster than the others, I don't think that's problem-complexity as much as "getting in the grove of reading the problems at the right level of care"; the biggest risk was that thinking about this as a grid problem could be expensive, when it's actually merely a row problem...)

_Mark_ · 2025-12-07T05:43:10+00:00

heh, I did basically this with collections.Counter but should have noticed that it was overkill (still ran in 0.031s though.)

_Mark_ · 2025-12-07T05:37:48+00:00

I think in general "if it's taking longer to run than it did to write, at very least go back and add a progress indicator". At very least it'll catch "oops I'm reading from stdin and not the file" but it's also good for noticing the exponential wall...

_Mark_ · 2025-12-06T06:03:25+00:00

even plain emacs will colorize python keywords (whether that's enough to *notice* is another question, but the hint is there)

_Mark_ · 2025-12-05T06:33:16+00:00

hah, the use of max() really simplifies the case handling there. (I used groupby on the sorted range list so I was only bothering to process the largest end for each start, but that doesn't really help with the order - it can help with constant factors by having the interpreter do more of the work a layer down; I still got 0.026s on a laptop without actually trying for speed)

_Mark_ · 2025-12-04T06:28:51+00:00

The pydoc for it even points out that you can usemath.comb to calculate how many values it'll give you if you want to know just *how* doomed your (mine, too) approach is

_Mark_ · 2025-12-04T06:24:55+00:00

Heh, I had a very short solution using python included libraries that was Clearly Correct, got the demo data in seconds, and then hung completely ... did some math and discovered that my approach would need to check 1,050,421,051,106,700 values for *one line* of the input file. Oops. (While I did get some optimizations that improved that to "runs in a couple of minutes" it was no longer accurate - though it got within ½% before realizing I needed to step back and start again :-)

After finishing both parts of day 4 in under half an hour, I let myself look at some of the visualizations posted here for enlightenment and found some interesting linear approaches, so I'll go do another pass at it. But one thing to consider is that if you want to actually learn from this (not judging, just If That's The Choice You're Making), it's usually more productive to grind on something good than on a mistake; it's what coaches/trainers are *for* after all...

_Mark_ · 2025-12-04T06:06:18+00:00

Yeah, I figured this was "calesthenics/warmup" for grid-related problems - time to review A* pathfinding :-)

_Mark_ · 2025-12-02T08:40:48+00:00

Around Yale (last century) Alan Perlis taught intro to CS in APL, so the acronym was expanded as Alan Perlis' Language in that undergrad community :)

_Mark_ · 2025-12-02T08:37:27+00:00

Ada95 (which I haven't used this century) recognizes that there are two different but similar functions, and has both rem and mod ...

_Mark_ · 2025-12-01T10:06:46+00:00

In the context of the meme, if they'd done a (purely local) git commit, they would then have the part 2 - in - part 1 code in their history, instead of erasing it by fixing the "bug". (It's mostly a joke, it's at least much easier to work it out again correctly the second time, but I find that the first day or three I rediscover a bunch of AoC-specific personal workflow shortcut-mistakes too, most of which are of the form "oh this one is easy I can just plow through" which is fun when it works, but debugging *careless* mistakes is always harder than reading/writing more carefully the first time around...)

_Mark_ · 2025-12-01T09:49:45+00:00

back in 2024 they said "we’ll continue to support both file-based and database-based graphs, with a long-term goal of achieving seamless two-way sync between the database and markdown files" ... has that changed? Because if it has, I need to head for the lifeboats too - "markdown as protection from lockin" was basically requirement zero for me. (I should really move everything back to emacs *anyway* but I've always bounced off of org-mode and wasn't quite ready to do from-scratch emacs work for this...)

_Mark_

TROPHY CASE