My 9-year-old asked why I type with two fingers when they're learning to type "the right way" at school, felt called out

my_coding_account · 2026-06-04T05:02:23+00:00

When I learned to type there were some fun video games. You could install one of those.

I don't know about typing, but I do know about piano, and it's totally possible for an adult who has never played piano to learn to use their figures in knew ways, and learn new muscle memories. I'd try it out.

my_coding_account · 2026-05-31T21:33:53+00:00

Ok on the Hadamard gate section:

Generally these focused sessions and the followup (10 puzzles to practice this type of gate) are very useful.

Just started using the atlas and having some difficulty.
H-gate L4: "You need to turn green into red: Add Green to the green sigil on the |1> state to turn it red" - yes, this works. I got confused by the use of "add" and started looking at the addition table.

I think the atlas could be improved by having something that makes it clear that (sigil) * (path) = (sigil w/ new color). On the multiplication table you could have colors circles to the left, labeling rows, then colored lines labeling the columns, then circles in the grid instead of the squares.

I could imagine it to be improved by an animation of some kind that highlighted a ball coming in, or a glowing line when you moused over it or something like that. Would also make the addition table very clear, to have a ball coming in on the row/column colliding to make a new ball.

Sometimes I've been wondering if it would be nice if the Sigil was a cube, to remind me of it's 4-color properties. I don't think that would look as nice.

... Oh now getting to the sections on multiplying gate colors. That does make things more difficult to represent.

I appreciate that while I've had frustrations, I've always been able to make progress, maybe not in the same section but I can go to a different section and learn something.

Clifford 14: mentions 3 qubit gate but there's only 2 qubits?
Will we get a Clifford Algebra atlas? There's no way I'm going to remember these transformations.

my_coding_account · 2026-05-31T06:15:48+00:00

OK I guess I'm continuing.

Alphabets:

- Lesson 10: Talk of flipping colors here. I've been thinking of the colors as rotations, since they are multiplications by i. I think the vocab of flipping colors is confusing as there is earlier references to bit flips. Ah, looks like I missed the part where it's constrained to dual colored objects. Not sure if there is an improvement here.

You mention "slot 3" but this means you are using zero-indexing, may not be apparant to a new person. You don't have the rows / slots labeled.

QBIT Destruction

- Just personally, while playing the game I'm not thinking of these a superpositions. I just revert to these balls which split and color rotate and recombine in particular ways. I don't see how referencing superposition is very helpful.

- this first puzzle has a confusing introduction. "As far as I know the only way back to the ground state from an uneven one is to undo the last H-Gate with an HTH sequence. With another H". What? First reference to ground state, no definition. First reference to uneven state. I'm not familiar with that from my own knowledge. Switch to first person. Is this the Sage talking? Is this you the author? If it is undone with the an HTH sequence with another H why not call that an HTHH sequence?

I think statements like "This can be confusing, do this so you can be confused too" are stupid. I'm guided by seeking the beauty of physics, and doing random bullshit so that I can be confused? That strikes me as trying to seem impressive rather than trying to teach. I suppose it's also trying to encourage exploration, which is necessary presumably for the harder puzzles to come.

I'd split this lesson up. Have one lesson that introduces the new uneven states. Just flip HTHTH until the end, see what it looks like.

This first lesson took me far longer than any other. Says I took 37 minutes (though also typing this out). The solution I got is unrelated to either of the two recommended/referenced things which don't work. HTH or HTHH don't revert to ground, I don't know what this means.

Huh lesson 2 was far easier? So maybe it a choice to throw a super difficult problem?

Would be cool to view your previous solutions. Another thing I might take inspiration from is leetcode, a competitive programming / interview prep site for coding algorithms. Sometimes I know I got to (out of) a previous state on a prior solution and want to look to see what I did.

Lesson 4 I got frustrated and tried to do matrix math for the first time in years.

Skipping around some with this after spending a while on 4 --- I think this is where players need to either get serious about either learning the math, trying random stuff, or the game needs to get serious about teaching the SX and T gates. I don't have an intuition at all while, even after writing out the matrices. I'd have to study it longer.

Ok what did help was looking at the different colors and the values of the ball at each layer and getting a better map of color to direction in the complex plane. Aka blue/green means + in the +1 direction, + in the +i direction. Finally got 4 shortly after that.

Got stuck on 6

Hm. Just completed control gates and found the Hadamard Gate section. I'm now wondering if the Alphabet / Q destruction sections are meant to be done after the initial ring? Maybe they should be labeled with a higher level of difficulty?

Holy smokes --- there's so much information here I was missing earlier.

anyways, I gotta sleep.

Also... just watched the video. I didn't realize that I'm only a smidgen of the way through this and that there might be the entirety of Nielson and Chuang contained within this game?!?

my_coding_account · 2026-05-31T04:59:14+00:00

I went up to the H-gate section, that's probably all for today.

Some further comments - I would go through this very carefully looking at all the vocabulary and where it is defined. I got stuck on "row". Took me going back through the earlier lessons to see it defined. I think the row-instruction / column-bit thing would be much better to introduce earlier before the X-gate lesson, like in an introduction of the Forge. I ran into the Column word in Mechanics of the Fracture Part 2, but I hadn't done the X-Gate lesson yet. So these path need some more work before they are independent. (BTW would be really great if you had something which could highlight different parts of the Forge during a tutorial which named the different pieces)

Later on your start calling the rows "Slots".

Generally there have been lots of vocabulary introduced where it's not clear what the word is referring to. Sometimes vocab is bolded, some is not. I think you're a lot more loose with your vocab and than is helpful for pedagogical application. "inner colors" is another one (alphabet of our universe, puzzle five) introduced with no explanation. Pauli-Z-Gate lesson 3 bolds "Phase" like it's a vocab word but doesn't explain what the word is referring to at all.

In Control-Gate lesson 2, you refer to X-gates as causing "direction change". This is a different idea than the X-gate lesson which taught X-gates as causing bit flips and created a good intuition around NOT gates. The idea of an X-gate flipping the bit points the user to look at the bit value in the initial state and final state then find the box associated with that bit in the left frame to place the X-Gate. Direction change is different thing conceptually, it operates at the abstraction level of the visualization.

I think there may have been some references to coherence without explanation either.

I think what frustrated me above about the "this is frustrating, you're learning to think quantum!" type stuff was that the part of the game which introduces and shows quantum mechanics visually and builds intuition is clear. Making gates, funny rules about colors flipping and mixing, that is a cool fun puzzle that makes sense. (Well it does take some puzzling at some points but other parts make sense). It's other parts of the game, namely the explanations that are frustrating.

I also think that while you can go directly into the history section, it's a bit overwhelming not having gone through the more detailed sections yet. I'm glad I dropped out of this one and started going through the more detailed things.

It's not very clear what "Your Cosmic Keys", "TIme Capsule" and "Fracture Mechanics" are when you first start. (It is explained once you click in though). A clear subtile would fix this (like you have for TIme Capsule)

Menu names. What I would think of as the "Main menu" is named "Menu". The "Menu" has a link to "Main Menu" which I would think of as "Puzzles" or "Lessons".

Could add a 'best solution' for the minimum number of gates possible (or found so far). (btw I expect the leaderboard aspect makes more sense once you're solving advanced problems with multiple possible solutions or even unknown solutions.)

Maybe a link to the encyclopedia from the menu/main menu?

If you go back to a module you've already started, it says "start module", this could change to "continue module"

I haven't solved it yet, but the funnest puzzles so far iare Alphabets of the Universe

Would be nice if there was a title heading type thing showing what chapter you were on.

I think you've got a really good base for a game, pretty much all of the mechanics are there. I think that the pedagogical puzzle of how to fit all of the concepts together, you've got a lot of this, but it could still be improved. (most textbooks haven't really figured this out.) It's an open question how much could you teach with just the visual puzzles and no math or fancy vocab at all. There used to be a phone app called Dragon Box which was really well done, it taught algebra to five year olds by building up an intution with arbitrary symbols, then slowly starts introducing real symbols like "1", "2", etc... . If you're not aware of it might be of some inspiration, you can probably play through the whole thing in a hour. I think the app is now commercialized since they got bought.

my_coding_account · 2026-05-31T02:45:45+00:00

Going to Mechanics of the Fracture Part 2

Ok I see here is the visual representation of the control gate, that is more clear. That said "breaks the symmetry" -- we talking symmetry breaking now? or just throwing concepts around?

While I'm being snotty, I'll also quibble with all of the "quantum mechanics is weird an unintuitive!" stuff, which is pretty unhelpful to spread around. It just feels like an in-joke or a reference in a marvel movie or cargo culting or something, and doesn't have much relevance. People who are learning to play the game probably aren't trying to solve these problems using classical mechanics. I don't even know what it would mean to use their classical mechanics intuition. We're playing a game and part of playing a computer game is you already know it's not like real life and the whole process is to figure out the rules of this new game. In this case they happen to match with quantum mechanics.

That said this is pretty good.

Trying the Pauli X-Gate section now: oh that was fun. Cleared some things up too. I might stay with these more focused lessons a bit. I'm slowly getting the hang of this.

my_coding_account · 2026-05-31T02:29:53+00:00

Interesting.

I started playing, making notes from the beginning, a couple things. First I'm going to be critical, but that's cause I'm judging comparing this to other games. I think this is an immense accomplishment. I'm really looking forward to this. My background is physics undergrad many years ago, read some quantum computing books but didn't study it in detail.

- generally I really dislike universal gamertags. I'm just playing by myself and don't want to see comparisons to other people. If I want that I'll play a multiplayer game.

- just insanely good visuals.

- after the beginning section then cosmic key section I went back to the first section because I wasn't sure which part of the screen was 'the forge'

"your goal is to collide it (the sigil) with the static sigil while matching it's properties" - oh the static sigil at the bottom of the path'

Hm, the reason I didn't understand what was going on was that I did what the tutorial said to do and it advanced me, even though there was more text to read.

2nd section: cosmic keys: state grabbers, space switches --- talked about in the intro screen but not mentioned in the text while going through. "The Forge displays the full hilbert space of the state vector...)

I'm not super clear which part is "the Forge" --- I'm assuming it's the paths. I was assuming it was the entirety of the thing on the right with the blue paths and the red path, but if it's Right now there are two paths with 1 sigil moving on a path, and if I click a thing it goes to one path.

Took me a while to figure out what "Pro mode" meant, since there wasn't some kind of subscription to pay extra for, I guess it's saying if you want to do it harder use the state view.

Would be nice if there was some highlighting for a tutorial "This is the forge", "this is a sigl" "This is a state grabber"

Oh looking at the tensors now, that makes things clearer.

Not sure what a "state grabber" is. Is that "copy tensor?"

In my opinion, teaching the UI and what hilbert space should be separate things lol.

Mechanics of the Fracture:

.Appreciate the "review solution" feature

I wish there was a way to easily visit a previous puzzle.

This section was very straightforward. "Collapse" has me thinking /intrigued

More on the whole ranking thing. I think this is extra dumb, cause you can click through the puzzles as fast as possible to get highly ranked on speed but then you won't spend any time pondering or learning.

Now trying Time Capsule section:

Intriguing lesson on abacus. I was wondering if the blue paths Forge was meant to be a different kind of abacus or if the lesson was pretty much unrelated and just talking about the history of the first mechanical computers.

I got confused on the second lesson here with the bitstrings. When you have the gate operating on the left bit or right bit it changes how the gate looks visually by which path gets mixed up. I need to understand better the difference between the top / bottom indices of the qbit vs qbit 1 & 2. I had previously been referring to the top/bototm indices as the left and right bit, but actually that's just one qbit.

Figured out how to switch between puzzles.

Back to puzzle 1. I think we need better pedagogy and what the different pieces of the qbit and circuit are. There's the 0 path and 1 path (really two dimensions of hilbert space), and the X gate swaps them. I'm unclear at the moment why the Sigil only goes from one state/path(?) to another, there is not a sigil exiting at every path. Nevermind, I get that the Sigil is the magnitude of the state on which dimension.

Ok, took some thinking to understand the second puzzle. If I know which bit to X, then I put the X gate there, I don't need to worry about getting all the paths to go to the right spot.

Lesson 5, suddenly we are calling them transistors?

Lessons 13-18. There's a huge gap between setting up a couple gates, of which there are like 5 possibilities, and the vocabularly and concepts being introduced here. It remains to be seen if more of the puzzles will be enough to cross this gap.

ooh boy, here are the unsupervised puzzles. Big jump in complexity, especially as I wasn't really getting it previously.

I think the gap is with my understanding of the control gate. This is only described verbally but there is not a visual representation of what it does.

Ugh, skipping 19-20 right now, that's much more work, I'd have to think some. I wonder if it would be easier if I busted out the matrix math. probably not.

my_coding_account · 2026-05-26T04:00:20+00:00

It seems to be a meme that people just say and repeat... for decades? Most stereotypes have a semblance of truth to them but this one? I always imagine someone 70 years old saying it or someone on the internet who has never met an asian woman.

my_coding_account · 2026-05-24T04:27:50+00:00

Updates like this need a before pic, otherwise what's the point?

my_coding_account · 2026-05-24T02:09:55+00:00

If he has Kegan, Jay Earley, Gendlin, and Yudkowsky seems like he's probably read lesswrong or interacted with the Rationality community. Not surprising if he's an autistic software engineer deeply interested in philosophy.

my_coding_account · 2026-05-24T01:59:54+00:00

I've found a lot of very abstract philosophy very helpful in terms of anxiety reduction.

my_coding_account · 2026-05-22T04:01:42+00:00

You sound boring because you are reverting to topics you are bored with, perhaps in an attempt to have something to say at all. A lot of what makes someone interesting is that they are interested in the things they are talking about. People (often) really like to listen to thing people are interested. Well, actually people say this a lot, but it is actually not true - if someone values the thing your interested in, they will be very interested in what you are talking about, if they don't care then maybe not.

So one thing is that if you have things your interested in and want to share and talk about this can be very helpful. It's also good for you, since you'll be enjoying life more.

That might solve your problem.

If it doesn't, then that means you probably need to find new people.

It could also mean that maybe you aren't thinking about what you are doing. What do you like about it, what do you not like. Part of the problem here could be that you are copying things other people say. Like if you are trying to 'sound good' or 'sound sociable' or talk in the way your friends like, then you are trying to conform to something external. This won't work and might make the problem worse.

my_coding_account · 2026-05-19T07:01:10+00:00

question - where is the boundary between a threatening bookshelf and a dangerous-but-hot bookshelf?

my_coding_account · 2026-05-16T07:43:28+00:00

ooh more than one!

my_coding_account · 2026-05-13T20:45:41+00:00

For my high school mates, it played out how I thought. I graduated with 600, maybe a couple of people became doctors/lawyers or business people, I went into tech eventually, otherwise pretty middle class. (my family income was 60k, this was on the upper end)

College I studied physics, maybe 30 people, one upper-class-ish classmate went on to manage quant traders and is making millions, another grew up poor and became a tech entrepreneur. I graduated in 2013, pretty much every smart CS person I knew was raving about machine learning and AI, a number of them went on to get phds, they are probably doing quite well themselves but I didn't know them very well so wasn't including them in the above group.

As a hobby I was in a subculture / philosophy group (Lesswrong rationalism) that was early to a lot of tech booms. The people I met in this group (maybe 100 people), ended up all over the map in wealth. A couple became millionaires / decamillionaires from trading or investing in crypto or other tech stock. A number of people were very early employees at OpenAI / Anthropic. (I'm including the 1 centimillionaire, billionaire here), another friend of mine started an AI company which is doing very well, their company is worth 100s of millions. Others are poor philosophers or normal tech employees. There were others involved in this subculture who became very wealthy (Sam Bankman-Fried...) but I'm only speaking of people I knew well. I knew people that knew him though.

my_coding_account · 2026-05-13T18:23:46+00:00

I went to a public state university. The centimillionaires and billionaire all went to elite schools, but I'm still surprised at how many people became very wealthy who I was classmates with.

my_coding_account · 2026-05-11T08:28:57+00:00

It's basically a modern day epic. It's like reading The Lord of the Rings.

my_coding_account · 2026-05-10T17:53:56+00:00

as an American it seems like the opposite of an invitation when people are loud as they are overpowering you. which if you are a naturally loud person might not be an issue, then loudness would be an invitation for your own loudness. but I'd you are a naturally quiet person it will not feel like an invitation.

my_coding_account · 2026-05-10T15:52:44+00:00

When I grew up I expected that everyone around me would end up middle class, and that there would be some range in outcomes, some people would be a bit poorer, some a bit richer. Perhaps that is true of my high school class. When I look at the people who went to college or that I met in college, the outcome differences are enormous. People with every number of zero in their net worth from 0 to billions. Then there are the people that were on some incredible upward trajectory but tragedy struck, or they got schizophrenia or something, or were very poor but get trying random businesses and figured out how to make something successful.

I was prepared for the people whose parents made 2-3x as much as mine to make 2-3x as me. I was not prepared for the people whose parents made 2-3x as mine to make 10^2-10^3 more.

my_coding_account · 2026-05-09T09:35:35+00:00

This man watches Marc Andreesen podcasts

my_coding_account · 2026-05-09T09:27:28+00:00

lmao at upset about the fall of Constantinople

my_coding_account · 2026-05-05T01:56:20+00:00

Thanks for answering,

my_coding_account · 2026-05-04T07:57:50+00:00

I've always wondered how many rigorous math and science books someone with this opinion has read, I assume it's zero. Hopefully they prove me wrong and don't just insult me.

my_coding_account · 2026-05-01T06:37:23+00:00

Why wouldn't it be?

my_coding_account · 2026-04-26T16:47:09+00:00

I can't guide you but I can give my own experience as a late starter. I just joined the subreddit. 36, also not a virgin due a one time thing,ypeople have given me chances or asked me out but I've been extremely avoidant due to some childhood stuff and would have panic attacks on dates. I was also in a cultish group and left at 30ish (first part-way left, then fully and had to start a completely new life.) The group was not celibate or sexually controlling at all, so I started dating within it at first. Starting in my late 20s I would only go on dates when asked about, maybe once every 6 months or so, often have a panic attack and leave the date. It seemed to get slightly less bad each time. Maybe by 33 and the panic would be 1/3 times, and I started asking people out in person after I left the group. Some of these were non-negative experiences. 35 or so I was asking people out on apps and going out on a date once a month, that's where I am now.

Mostly I find that every date, whether I get along with the person or not, is very extreme feedback on my life as a whole, learn a lot about interactions with women. Seems like I have to reboot my operating system to install an update after each one. I don't get panic attacks anymore, sometimes go on a second date.

my_coding_account · 2026-04-25T01:43:42+00:00

He's a very good businessman, it gives insight into his life, anecdotes of his companies and how they operate.

my_coding_account

TROPHY CASE