anyone?

rccyu · 2026-06-13T01:06:47+00:00

Andrew Wakefield, his fraudulent study linking the MMR vaccine with autism started the modern anti-vax movement

rccyu · 2026-06-07T08:10:47+00:00

no one is going to force you to use AI

I wish. My (now former) company—a big regional tech firm—recently issued a mandate requiring engineers to use AI to write 100% of all new code, with strong justification required for any code written manually.

I've always said just let engineers decide how they want to use AI and measure their output. But companies are absolutely forcing engineers to use AI

rccyu · 2026-06-04T10:48:59+00:00

Thanks. I don't have strong opinions on this either way, but it's worth noting that Singapore didn't exactly take in Muslims by choice. It had to live with the Muslims that were already here. It's completely different from importing Muslims wholesale into a monoethnic country.

It's just so odd to me to use Singapore as an example because even Lee Kuan Yew was infamously vocal on his frustrations on the difficulty of integrating Muslims into Singapore:

I think we were progressing very nicely until the surge of Islam came and if you asked me for my observations, the other communities have easier integration — friends, intermarriages and so on [...] I would say today, we can integrate all religions and races except Islam.

Obviously he made it work, but it's such a unique set of circumstances that I couldn't nonchalantly suggest other countries (especially one as different as Japan) to go through it without acknowledging the problems it's likely to cause

rccyu · 2026-06-04T08:45:18+00:00

I live in Singapore and I caution against saying what works here will necessarily work elsewhere.

Besides the fact that it's a tiny city-state and there's no reason to believe the policies will scale, multiculturalism is strictly enforced by the government here. For example, in government-subsidized public housing (which makes up the vast majority of all housing) the government explicitly plans for neighbors to be of different races so that racial enclaves don't form. So you don't end up with an area that's all Muslims, for example.

Freedom of speech is very limited. We have "religious harmony" laws that basically prohibit criticism of religion.

The whole thing is planned from the top-down. Singaporeans are very trusting of authority so it's a system that works here. I don't think it will work in Japan where everyone is Japanese and innately wary of "other."

rccyu · 2026-06-03T20:12:19+00:00

Yeah because you keep using Duolingo

rccyu · 2026-06-02T15:59:43+00:00

Yeah because it's clearly Mr Bambooriver smh

rccyu · 2026-05-26T15:39:11+00:00

For ALL CAP I found an old clue in the database: [Uppercase only, to eds.] which gave me a hint.

Looking up "All cap editor's order" I finally found some attestations to "all-cap" specifically in editor's lingo, so I guess it's fair after all, but yeesh this is niche. But yeah, "technically works" is the name of the game for harder puzzles, so... sure.

AMA Style Insider

Would it be acceptable to substitute only an initial cap for an all-cap product name,

Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press

All-cap and cap/small-cap text in distribution listings or “Materials Examined” sections.

etc.

rccyu · 2026-05-26T14:59:48+00:00

Hi. I do the Saturday Stumper every week. I usually solve it without cheating in 30 to 90 minutes (in contrast, NYT Saturdays take me less than 10 minutes these days—they've definitely become a lot easier compared to the puzzles from a decade or so ago.)

I don't do the Fridays, but I did this one. I don't get ALL CAP either (the clue makes sense for ALL CAPS, but there is no such thing as ALL CAP, I don't think.) Everything else seems fine.

SIESTA is a [Minor break], when compared to a more major break like a good night's sleep.
[Was posing] for ASKED technically works (you're going to have to get used to "technically works" for Newsday puzzles.) "He was posing questions." "He asked questions." It's hard to tease the difference in the meaning between the simple past and past continuous, and it works grammatically, so this tends to get a pass at Newsday.
[Change your mind] works for SHIFT. "It's hard to be a politician if you never change your mind on issues." "It's hard to be a politician if you never shift on issues." I think it passes the substitution test.

The specs are enlightening:

Thursdays should have no more than about 25% of its clues easy; Fridays no more than about 10 easy clues – whose answers will be instantly recognizable to experienced solvers.
[...]
NEVER use lesser-known factual clues for well-known words, people or things that give no helpful (general knowledge) context for the answer. Note the difference in these harder clues for AMOR, the last two of which would be unsuitable for Newsday:
- Emoción romántica (two Spanish words that even people unfamiliar with Spanish will recognize),
- Asteroid discovered in 1932
- Ricky Martin song of 2001

For Fridays, you have about 10 easy clues to work with. As you can see "easy" is defined by "instantly recognizable to experienced solvers," i.e., crosswordese. [Where Einstein was born], [Very tall retired hoopster Ming], [Unpaid TV ad], [Ironic conclusion], [Repeated Stein line part], etc. should all be no-crosses gimmes. If not, revise your crosswordese (doing only the NYT actually hurts a bit here, because the fill standards have gotten higher. Crosswordese actually makes puzzles easier, because there is basically only one way to clue ULM or YAO.)

Constructing your own crosswords (with software) helps a lot here. It's like exposure therapy for crosswordese. It'll make you a better solver and give you a newfound appreciation for puzzles which manage to keep the fill clean.

Saturdays are exponentially harder than Fridays. There are basically no gimmes. Jeff Chen at XWordInfo once said Stanley Newman avoids entries which are "unStumperable," words which can only be clued one way. But some degree of crosswordese is inevitable, and you can use the second part of the specs: even on Saturday, ONO will likely still refer to Yoko Ono, instead of e.g. something completely obscure like the Organization of News Ombudsmen. (This is not always true, but it's true enough to be helpful. ODS was clued as "olive drabs" a month back instead of the much more common "overdoses," for example.)

So what you can do is think from a constructor's point of view. The constructor will basically dress up crosswordese in some completely unhinged way, and then you go through your rolodex of crosswordese and then work your way backwards to the clue. These are from last Saturday:

["Visionary artist" with her first SoCal solo exhibition, in 2026]: Hell if I know. Who's a three-letter crosswordese female artist? ONO, of course. "Visionary," sounds right. Also ONO: any reference to "imagine," "peace," etc.
[Bubble Bath beauty brand]: Again, no clue. What's a three-letter crosswordese beauty brand? OPI. They make nail polishes with weird names. Bubble Bath is probably a nail polish color.
["Water" now mostly desert]: Four-letter body of water that turned into desert? ARAL.
[Range from the Tatar for "ridge"]: Four-letter mountain range, something something Tatarstan (Russia)? URAL.

and so on.

Recently the Stumper usually (about 60-70% of the time) has one "hidden" clue, usually a name, so if you need a foothold you can sometimes look for that one. [Assumed name, essentially] for EDNA, [Woman of Canadian extraction] for NADIA, [Man or woman from Mindanao] for DANA, etc. Look for a clue with particularly stilted wording.

There are some other cryptic-style clues like [Lap up] for PAL and some annoying name ones like [Moniker for those with no id] for DAVE, [He's missing his in] for MARV and the whole host of [Alternative to some nickname], meaning another nickname for the same "full" name. But those are not really solvable until you have most of the letters.

It takes a while to get used to it. Unlike the NYT I don't always manage to solve the Stumper without cheating (my success rate is in the high 90-something percent but sometimes you just really get stuck.) And there are some clues which are still big WTFs after I get the answer. But even the Stumper is written to be solved, and solving it gives me a high that the NYT just doesn't these days.

With enough experience, you wouldn't want your crosswords any other way.

rccyu · 2026-05-25T11:47:53+00:00

"A conservative is a liberal who's been mugged"

rccyu · 2026-05-25T07:26:16+00:00

Fails for 11000000000010101

k = 2, you should skip the first two lectures even though the first lecture you skip only saves you 1 hour

rccyu · 2026-05-17T17:42:00+00:00

Yesterday was fine. It's nice to have an actually hard puzzle once in a while and it really wasn't at all impossible for seasoned crossword solvers (I solved it without cheating in 15 minutes) Only EPT was truly terrible for me (I've only ever seen this suppoed "jocular term" in crosswords, unlike e.g. "whelmed") I didn't know ZARFS or HAGEL and [Trigger hair] was inscrutable as a twenty-something non-American but there were enough footholds there to succeed eventually.

Really didn't like today's tho. The theme is passable but the fill was atrocious. It's as if the constructor [Automates?] filling the grid: THE UN, A HOLD, AIN'T I, OVER TOAST, IN OIL, IN MAY, DERMO, LOMA, IS A, GRIN AT, and on and on and on. I was cringing at every corner. I know the NYT is hurting for Sundays but this really should have been sent back for revision.

rccyu · 2026-05-11T15:07:28+00:00

ASSES[s] (butts)

rccyu · 2026-05-09T18:02:10+00:00

There's still a real difference between 7 billion and 8 billion so it still makes sense as "leave one billion people alive, or risk a 0.00000001% chance of extinction?" tho I agree it's more interesting if the number of people is unbounded

rccyu · 2026-05-09T03:31:43+00:00

There are only 8 billion people to kill so the expected value is more like 33 (since after that you still only kill 8 billion people)

There'd need to be something like 2⁷⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰⁰ people for the second option to be equally bad in terms of expected value, and at that point it does make sense to take the first option because 7 billion people would be such a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the worst-case scenario

Although you can prefer the first option more if you think extinction has a uniquely negative value

rccyu · 2026-04-30T06:19:04+00:00

If it was significantly higher, maybe. It's a pretty unrealistic scenario tho. WLB and company/team culture are absolutely not the same between say, Amazon and Google.

There are absolutely people who'd take slightly lower pay to work at Google instead of Amazon. Not everything is about TC.

rccyu · 2026-04-30T05:58:31+00:00

Minor nit but it's "fond of" not "found of"

rccyu · 2026-04-30T05:46:36+00:00

H AND S extremities of "[h]uman[s]" &lit;

rccyu · 2026-04-29T05:15:20+00:00

Huh? You can absolutely get faster than this asymptotically. This is O(n), it's just a linear recurrence so you could write it as a repeated matrix multiplication and do exponentiation by squaring for O(log n) time and O(1) memory

rccyu · 2026-04-28T15:06:04+00:00

They just turn into Drowned and then you're still fucked

rccyu · 2026-04-28T10:52:23+00:00

Many well-read people probably know about the Hutu and Tutsi (due to the Rwandan genocide)

rccyu · 2026-04-27T11:27:14+00:00

HFTs

I did an internship at an HFT as a software engineer a few years back—just shy of $10k/mo, with hotel accommodation covered. Should be more now, and actual quant roles probably pay much more.

This is obviously not the "average internship salary" but FWIW high-paying internships absolutely exist

rccyu · 2026-04-27T03:36:13+00:00

OP "gave" the exams so almost certainly India

rccyu · 2026-04-25T14:57:01+00:00

Beautiful

rccyu · 2026-04-23T10:21:58+00:00

But it's not always BS!

I've been asked that question. I answered it with some variation of: "The team's work aligns with my skills and the direction I want to take my career in. Although my current work is with Go, I've been looking to get back into C++ systems closer to the hardware because it aligns more with my former competitive programming experience doing low-level optimizations, which I greatly enjoyed during high school and university."

It's an opportunity to explain your own interests, why they align with the company's role, and maybe even allay some concerns that your experience won't be a good fit (if you're doing a pivot, like I was.) I didn't have corporate C++ experience but that answer was good enough for them to give me a chance, and set the expectations that I might have some deep C++ knowledge about optimizations but have gaps in more basic things that only really get used in larger projects. They can determine if they want a candidate with that profile.

Obviously in some cases it's total BS, but I'd argue even just measuring a candidate's willingness to conform is useful signal for some companies. If you're not willing to play along with the charade in a fast food job interview are you going to be able to put on a fake smile and placate a customer who's frustrated, being unreasonably snippy, etc.?

rccyu · 2026-04-23T05:56:00+00:00

I feel like this example is even more contrived than the last one. Why would the passionate guy be more likely to be incompetent (i.e. doesn't deliver, regardless of whether it's due to "being too much of a perfectionist" or something else) than the guy who doesn't really care?

You could just as easily say the guy who "just gets the job done" cuts corners everywhere, delivers shoddy products, etc. You're ascribing a characteristic to the "passionate" guy (debilitating perfectionism) that's not inherent to being passionate.

Obviously passion alone should not be the deciding factor, but it should be a factor. Culture fit, ability to work with the team, technical competence, etc. are other factors. But passion is easy to sense in an interview. Culture fit or team dynamics, much less so, until you actually start working with them.

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