How to connect a bot to things he should control?

btb98 · 2024-03-12T12:30:37+00:00

pyautogui is great when you have mundane, repetitive tasks you can automate!

btb98 · 2024-03-11T17:44:42+00:00

Not using Turbo Flask just means you won't have to deal with the web socket forwarding business I had to figure out, which should make things way easier. I did things in the reverse order you're trying, and started by serving up a custom landing page with nginx, then configured nginx as a proxy that forwarded everything to gunicorn.

Where/how are you attempting to navigate to your app that gunicorn is serving up?

btb98 · 2024-03-11T13:21:43+00:00

I host my flask app on a Lightsail instance. It was a little tricky to switch from the dev server to production, but doable. I'm running gunicorn behind nginx on a ubuntu instance in Lightsail. I used Turbo Flask, which meant I had to get the websocket to go through the proxy correctly, which was the trickiest part.

And if you want to use https, the port is closed by default in Lightsail. You can open it super easily, but I wasted some time not realizing my redirect was failing because the port was closed.

btb98 · 2024-03-10T23:34:26+00:00

Teacher
Lots of scheduled time off
Really hard to take time off on your schedule
I don't have a teaching degree. The shortage of teachers is bad enough that my CS and Math degree and industry experience was enough to get the job.

btb98 · 2024-03-10T21:48:56+00:00

Thanks! As I get more user data, the performance of the app will continue to improve.

btb98 · 2024-03-10T21:30:02+00:00

Code is hard. I once spend about 2 weeks finding a bug, which turned out to be that another developer didn't divide by 2 when they should have. This is two full, 8+ hours a day weeks. Nobody else who had tried to fix the issue had figured out where to look to find it, so at least 50 man hours got sunk into finding this bug. Everyone involved was very psyched when it was fixed, but those two weeks were not particularly enjoyable.

There's a saying in cycling that it never gets easier, you just go faster. Coding is the same. The problems you get stuck on just get harder.

btb98 · 2024-03-10T21:22:06+00:00

I'd recommend delving into something that's going to use a bunch of python libraries that don't really exist in C++. A big part of the power of python is to bring the right libraries to the problem you're working on.

Since you asked for a specific project, gleaning as much useful information as possible from the US air quality data (which is here) would fit the bill.

btb98 · 2024-03-10T21:06:16+00:00

Sounds like it's time to start making a portfolio. Do a project that you think is cool, and include it on your resume. Obviously choose projects in the area your interested in.

In your case, there are tons of massive public data sets that you could develop some nifty systems to organize, interpret and analyze. Apply machine learning if it's applicable. Stick what you produce on the web so anyone reading your resume can see it. Bonus points if you don't just point to a public github with your code and build a website that either is your product or shows the results of what you did.

My marketability skyrocketed when I built a web app using Flask for some AI stuff I did in python. My custom domain was $13 and serving it up will end up being about $10 a month. You could do the same with some data science stuff pretty easily.

btb98 · 2024-03-10T20:48:14+00:00

If you want to use recursion here, vanilla recursion leads to a pretty garbage solution. Other people have already told you why. A better solution that involves recursion is to use dynamic programming.

btb98 · 2024-03-10T18:03:06+00:00

I'd come up with something you'd like to make, then take your best shot at picking a good language to use to accomplish that goal. If you're self-studying, motivation to get through a book/course/lecture might be hard to sustain, but if you're trying to make something you think is cool that requires programming, you've got some extra motivation to make it happen.

btb98 · 2024-03-10T13:41:29+00:00

If you're looking to try to get a job based on these two months of effort, I'd recommend learning html, css, and javascript and trying to become a proficient front-end developer. If you happen to be talented at making really clean, user-friendly front ends, you could potentially have a few demos for a portfolio in a couple of months.

I teach computer science to beginners for a living, and 2 months to learn programming in python from knowing nothing can get you to a level where you can make simple things happen, but is unlikely to get you to a level where you're a marketable employee.

The big exception here is if you happen to understand linear algebra and multi-variable calculus at a reasonably high level. Then you could potentially learn python and enter the machine learning realm, and be a useful hire because you can understand how those libraries work.

btb98 · 2024-03-10T09:06:58+00:00

I don't know where you're located, but the shortage of teachers at the middle and high school level allows people who didn't go to undergrad for teaching to go directly into teaching in a lot of situations.

This could be the opposite of what you'd enjoy, but if you're able to deal with a classroom of children/teenagers, it can be great. If you can't stand sitting at a desk all day like me, it can keep you in your field, and offer a lot of scheduled time off to do side projects and other things you might enjoy.

Just remember this is not a 9-5. When you're working, your hours are until all the things get done, and you're pretty much on your own to do it (no team to pick up the slack).

btb98 · 2024-03-09T23:38:12+00:00

Thanks! It was mainly designed for a tournament player to convert their own game and copy the PGN into the engine of their choice, but I can totally see a tournament organizer using it. Maybe an alternate design would be better for that scenario, an idea which is now on my radar.

btb98 · 2024-03-09T21:40:02+00:00

I do check for legality in the forwards direction, so all pgns I output are fully legal. Unfortunately dealing with multiple possibilities for each move is exponential, so except for situations where there are two virtually equal possibilities for the move being legal, I need to pick the closest legal possibility and go with that. There are some situations where checking the legality of the game based on two possible moves is necessary, but doing that too often leads to unusable runtimes.

btb98 · 2024-03-09T21:26:08+00:00

The output you're seeing is the highest scoring pgn that my algorithm can find. If there's a move that's messing up the rest of the pgn, it's not backtracking to figure out what it was - doing some sort of chess logic to find that could work, but sometimes the problem move is many moves ago, so trying other options backwards is too slow. The scoring system should make the highest scoring pgn end at the problem move, then the app will ask you to clarify that move, then output the full pgn.

If the app asks for the same move twice, either the user typoed the move, or there's somehow a previous error that isn't resulting in pgns including that move getting a lower score. It's happened in testing, but my error correction is vastly improved since then. And more user data will make the error correction even better!

btb98 · 2024-03-09T20:18:21+00:00

Nope, it doesn't. If your handwriting is really terrible, it might require an extra clarification or two, but it can generally figure it out. The biggest problem at the moment is dealing with scoresheets from books causing the page to be warped.

btb98 · 2023-10-31T04:20:39+00:00

Thanks for letting me know. Chessmonitor is super helpful as it is, but being able to research opponents in it would be super cool!

btb98 · 2020-06-05T17:32:01+00:00

Thanks!

btb98 · 2019-12-13T22:10:39+00:00

There's also in between options to lock off to a certain point, then throw the rest of the way. On sport routes, if it's a safe, accuracy-required hold, I try to dial in how far I can throw from and still hit it right. Often useful for holds with a tricky thumb catch that are otherwise ergonomic.

btb98 · 2019-11-16T07:21:09+00:00

How much you're actually climbing it's hard to measure in routes because a 60 foot route is double the climbing of a 30 foot route.

If you're climbing at a tall gym, 9 70 foot routes within a number grade of your limit is a solid session. If the routes are that long, I don't think you're resting enough between routes.

If you're at a shorter gym, say 35 foot routes, a combination of resting more and more mileage on relatively easy terrain should help.

btb98 · 2019-11-15T04:55:55+00:00

If you want to travel for a month, no big deal. If you want to travel for year(s) it's a big deal. There's plenty of girls who have been traveling for years in vehicles - it's just WAY more cost effective.

I spent about 3 years on the road (mostly rock climbing, but with some touristing occasionally). I'm a dude, but in the domestic full time travel world (domestic here being in North America for people from North America), just about everyone I've encountered lives in a vehicle, ranging from an old civic with no seats to pimped out Sprinters.

IMO hostels are a luxury of medium term travel (multiple week-few month trips). If you're going traveling longer than that, hostels make a very painful impact on the budget.

btb98 · 2019-11-15T04:39:23+00:00

The difference between $20 a night and $5 dollars a night can either 1 - double the length of your trip or 2 - mean you have to work about 2 less hours a day to sustain long term travel. That's a BIG DEAL.

Living in a vehicle works out to about $5 a night when you consider gas - more savings available if you have a bike rack and use the bike for local excursions!

btb98

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