"You can lead the horse to puzzles, but you can't make it solve them."
They took out set mode in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet? Yeesh.
And here I was thinking about playing some of the newer games.
Straight-up in an OTIS application:
i'm too lazy to learn coding
Tsk, tsk.
Turns out you can use usepackage("hwemoji") to enable emoji in Asymptote.
size(12cm);
usepackage("hwemoji");
pair P = dir(80);
pair A = dir(210);
pair B = dir(330);
draw(A--B, red);
pair D = foot(P, A, B);
pair H_1 = orthocenter(P, A, B);
pair H_2 = midpoint(P--H_1);
pair E_1 = extension(A, H_1, P, B);
pair E_2 = extension(A, H_2, P, B);
pair F_1 = extension(B, H_1, P, A);
pair F_2 = extension(B, H_2, P, A);
draw(A--P--B, lightblue);
draw(P--D, heavygreen);
draw(E_1--A--E_2, lightcyan);
draw(F_1--B--F_2, lightcyan);
pair X = extension(E_1, F_1, E_2, F_2);
pair C = 0.6*X+0.4*B;
filldraw(circle(midpoint(B--C), abs(B-C)/6), opacity(0.1)+brown, palered);
label("🦥", midpoint(B--C), fontsize(32pt));
draw(C--X, red);
draw(B--C, dotted+red);
draw(F_1--X, heavycyan);
draw(F_2--X, heavycyan);
dot("$P$", P, dir(P));
dot("$A$", A, dir(270));
dot("$B$", B, dir(270));
dot("$D$", D, dir(D));
dot("$E_1$", E_1, dir(45));
dot("$E_2$", E_2, dir(45));
dot("$F_1$", F_1, dir(135));
dot("$F_2$", F_2, dir(135));
dot("$X$", X, dir(270));
dot("$C$", C, dir(270));omg i never realized 🐐 stood for "greatest of all time" that makes so much sense now
Quote of the day: "inner peace is not having any rec letters to write".
It occurs to me I'm now like the professor in the left panel of PhD Comics 1047. (I definitely used to be like the grad student in the right panel.)
I actually think answering email from Vim/neomutt is a speedup of a factor of 2. Using the Gmail web interface just feels awful now.
It occurs to me that when I'm learning Korean, the set of words I frequently use (from my tiny vocabulary) tells much about my personality. I have a lot of words like 멍청하다, 게으름을 피우다, 창피하다.
Feels a bit like a deck-builder game for your thoughts.
Cute patch notes:
7.70.0. We fixed a bug on Microsoft Windows that made the Signal Desktop title bar orange instead of blue. If you've grown to love the citrus-themed color scheme over the past few days and this bugfix makes you feel blue, you can adjust your system accent color in your Windows settings.
Tonight's dream: I'm working on the final meta-meta puzzle of an online hunt,
and I'm pretty stuck on it.
Then it occurs to me I haven't seen FAIR PLAY as an answer yet, so I was
like, "huh, wait a minute... was that not promised?"
And so I call in FAIR PLAY, and it's correct.
How does anyone learn linear algebra taught via matrices? Like, I don't think I could understand what was going on in 18.06 if I hadn't taken Math 55a first, and I have a PhD in math. I can't imagine how confused the poor undergraduates must be.
I appreciate papers like Bluffing in Scrabble, arXiv:2509.10471:
It is well known that in games with imperfect information, such as poker, bluffing with some probability can be a component of the optimal strategy. However, as far as we know, nobody has ever exhibited a Scrabble position in which the optimal strategy involves bluffing, or even a Scrabble position in which the optimal strategy is a mixed (i.e., randomized) strategy. We present a carefully constructed Scrabble position, that could actually arise in a tournament game with no invalid words played, in which the optimal strategy (assuming that a tied score leads to the point being split equally, with no recourse to so-called "spread points" as a tie-breaking mechanism) is to make Move A with probability 1/3 and to make Move B with probability 2/3. Move B can reasonably be called a bluff, in the sense that it sets up a threat which the player cannot in fact execute, but which the opponent may not be able to rule out.
After all these years, there are some MO problems for which I don't remember anymore how I came up with the solution, and others for which I definitely do. I like it when my students ask me about the latter and not the former, because I'm lazy and it's less work for me to answer their question.
Wouldn't it be convenient if those also turned out to be the more instructive problems? I'm secretly hoping that this laziness happens to causes me to have better taste in problems, but I don't think I'd be able to test that.
So Claude Code actually outputted reasonably good Asymptote code for me today, which is a surprise to me, because usually the LLM's are really bad at Asymptote.
I was trying to convert the following into Asymptote:
\begin{circuitikz}[american]
\node (P) at (0,0) [left] {$P$};
\node (Q) at (13,0) [right] {$Q$};
\draw (P) to[short] (1,0);
\draw (1,0) to[short] (1,1) to[R=$x\,\Omega$] (3,1) to[short] (3,0);
\draw (1,0) to[short] (1,-1) to[R=$\frac{1}{3}\,\Omega$] (3,-1) to[short] (3,0);
\draw (3,0) to[short] (4,0);
\draw (4,0) to[short] (4,1) to[R=$y\,\Omega$] (8,1) to[short] (8,0);
\draw (4,0) to[short] (4,-1) to[R=$\frac{1}{3}\,\Omega$] (6,-1) to[R=$\frac{1}{3}\,\Omega$] (8,-1) to[short] (8,0);
\draw (8,0) to[short] (9,0);
\draw (9,0) to[short] (9,1) to[R=$z\,\Omega$] (11,1) to[short] (11,0);
\draw (9,0) to[short] (9,-1) to[short] (9,-2) to[R=$\frac{1}{3}\,\Omega$] (11,-2) to[short] (11,0);
\draw (9,-1) to[R=$\frac{1}{3}\,\Omega$] (11,-1);
\draw (11,0) to[short] (13,0);
\end{circuitikz}The output from Claude
actually worked.
Though the most jarring part is probably the presence of import olympiad; at the top.
A lot of Asymptote users from the AoPS math contest community... it shows.
I cleaned up the output and posted it on AOPS.
Some real Ace Attorney material here:
In one of nature’s most remarkable convergent evolutions, koalas have developed fingerprints that are virtually indistinguishable from human fingerprints, even under electron microscopes. ... Each koala possesses unique fingerprints, just as humans do, with distinctive whorls, loops, and arches.
Snopes says this doesn't seem to have happened yet.
I kind of think "irregular conjugation" was a poor choice of name for the verb conjugations that follow one of several rules depending on the ending, because they're still mostly following a fixed rule.
To me "irregular" should be edge cases like 돕다 becoming 도와 which are actually edge cases (irregular irregulars, anyone?).
One thing you have to be careful about, though, is that duct tape programmers are the software world equivalent of pretty boys… those breathtakingly good-looking young men who can roll out of bed, without shaving, without combing their hair, and without brushing their teeth, and get on the subway in yesterday’s dirty clothes and look beautiful, because that’s who they are. You, my friend, cannot go out in public without combing your hair. It will frighten the children. Because you’re just not that pretty.
How much of life is lost in customer service
(in both directions)
When playing poker with friends:
You know you're screwed when your opponent takes a photo of their cards.