Current and past otters can play OPAL 3 now, while the public teaser is published too. The full public edition comes out on September 14.
Labeled Trees is particularly cool and if you only look at one puzzle I think you should try that one.
So somehow my zombie wordpress blog accidentally fired off a draft of a post that never made it in my site migration onto my Facebook and LinkedIn (which gave everyone permission errors when they tried to open it). Whoops. At least now I realized that draft was missing?
I think one of life's greatest pleasures is watching the answer log in realtime on a puzzle hunt you're organizing.
(A lot of times, even from the wrong answers, you can see how far the solvers have gotten into the puzzle.)
https://blog.anserena.com is live now! featuring a comment and mailing-list backend written by yours truly 😉
Records for small gaps and large gaps between primes both broken within less than a week of each other:
Something I wrote in an email reply today, to a student asking about judging problem difficulty:
(begin quote)
While you can tell whether you have a correct solution without talking to others, I think you generally can't tell the difficulty of a problem without external contact, even if you solve it. Usually to make a judgment you need to at least know what alternate solutions exist, or whether you found the best possible solution, etc., and I don't see a way to do this without talking to other people.
However, during an exam, this is a completely academic debate for you. The only thing that matters is the problem difficulty for you personally. It is totally irrelevant to you how hard the problem is for anyone else and trying to think about that is just a distraction.
If the problem is easy for you, maybe because you've seen the right idea recently, or the problem just clicks, then it doesn't matter that it's hard for other contestants; go solve that one. Whereas if the problem is impossible for you, it doesn't matter that other contestants might solve it.
(end quote)
In January 2025 I was secretly hoping that by January 2027 I would be able to hold a basic conversation in Korean. It's becoming increasingly clear that I'm not going to make that goal.
I finally put two and two together
and realized that size(8cm); is actually size(8*cm); in Asymptote.
That is, cm is actually just a real number:
Welcome to Asymptote version 3.13 (to view the manual, type help)
> cm
28.3464566929134Was trying to clean up unused Google resources yesterday from my account. (There is so much random junk built up over the years that I can't keep track.) But while doing so, I accidentally deleted the OAuth credential for my script that emails me birthday reminders, because it had the useless name "App Scripts".
To my relief, I noticed the next day. ("Isn't today my friend's birthday? But I don't remember seeing an email…")
LAMV is now updated with inspirational quotes in preparation for September 2026. Well, depending on your definition of "inspirational".
The newly announced changes to AIME are quite something. I appreciate how changing the AIME into two 90-minute sessions is considered a "minor adjustment".
More seriously, glad to see that AIME qualification will finally be done by absolute AMC score rather than percentile-based AMC rank, and that AMC is being dropped from USA(J)MO qualification.
PG quote I found today:
This is particularly valuable for undergrads, because the concept of users is missing from most college programming classes. The way you get taught programming in college would be like teaching writing as grammar, without mentioning that its purpose is to communicate something to an audience.
I still actually hold my breath every time I watch Django apply a nontrivial database migration on production.
me finally learning what a mutex is
It finally happened, I forgot my carry-on suitcase on the airplane. (Realized before I got past security, though.)
Spotted in Therapy Stores:
You're the reason shampoo has instructions.
Still scratching my head a bit at vEnhance/napkin#342. Guess if I wait a bit maybe I'll find out what the story is?
So apparently in ProCreate:
You can't apply blends or opacity adjustments to groups of layers at once (planned for ProCreate 6). As far as I can tell, you have to merge the layers.
But if you close the design you're working on, you can't unmerge any layers. So merging layers is really dangerous and irreversible.
Am I missing something?
how can the default encoding of text/plain not be UTF-8 in 2026 are you kidding me
Regrets on apply.evanchen.cc source code:
Application was a really bad name for a Django modelapplications was a really bad name for a Django application