I looked at the code for this once. It's sort of a hack. It generates a random puzzle, tries to solve it with a deterministic backtracking(IIRC) solver that detects situations where it's stuck. If it is stuck, it shifts some mines around in the place where the solver got stuck, according to some heuristics, and keeps solving. It keeps doing this until the entire puzzle has been solved, verifying that the puzzle can be solved without any guesswork.
I will second the recommendation. As someone who's wasted too many hours on minesweeper, it radically changes the game. Because I know there's a logical solution, I'm able to find patterns that I never found in the original, because I'd often assume it was just one of those guesswork situations. It's similar to how chess puzzles are easier than an equivalent position during a game. Because you know there's a neat solution, you're more willing to put in the legwork of searching for it. Learned a lot about the game simply by playing Simon's version.
I tried some no-guess variants but somehow there's a kind of sterile feeling to it. For some reason it makes it more boring compared to vanilla variant. It of course excels when I'm getting frustrated at guesses and 50/50, but otherwise I play the normal minesweeper more.
It's an entirely a different metagame if the goal is to improve your personal best time over multiple games within a given time frame. Once you get good enough with the deterministic reasoning, the game transforms into probabilistic strategies for time saves in both the vanilla and the guaranteed solvable game, and at that point the two games are very different.
For the vanilla game the guesses become integral part of the game that you can strategize around. There are guesses where some squares are less likely to contain mines than others. You can also try to uncover guesses as early as possible in a game, so you don't waste too much time on a game that is doomed to fail.
Fully agreed. Norway has this same legislation. It's the kind of thing that only makes sense if you only look at it for 2 seconds, through a thick fog of radical sex-negative feminism.
Yes, it is true that the pimps and human traffickers are the real criminals, and that the vast majority of prostitutes are in fact victims. And yes, it's a good thing not to prosecute them. But when you make buying illegal, you force prostitutes away from the safety nets that could help them anyway. If you're the police, how do you catch johns? Follow the prostitutes, of course. So they're forced to avoid the police, lest they're unable to meet demands from their pimps, and get punished, often violently. And in avoiding the police, they also become more vulnerable to abuse by johns.
The real world just doesn't work like this. You can't nearly separate these things into legal/not legal bins. They're entangled and can't be unentangled merely by way of ideology or wishful thinking.
The other issue is of course, is it wrong to buy sex? If you're a sex-negative feminist, the answer is yes, because your ideology rests on projecting your own sex-negative outlook onto all women, which to me seems hilariously and ironically sexist. Personally I believe women have very diverse attitutes to sex and should have autonomy to do whatever the hell they please with their lives and bodies.
To me, the only thing that really matters if whether the sex is consensual, without clear-cut coercion. Is it wrong to buy sex from someone who is clearly a victim of human trafficking? Absolutely, I think so. This is basically slavery.
Is it wrong to buy sex from someone who's selling it, because it's their only option? This one is trickier, but I think it's about as wrong as getting your iphone screen fixed by someone who couldn't cut it in "real" IT work. Or getting your garbage picked up by someone whose only marketable skill is emptying a bin into a truck. Society is full of people doing jobs they hate because it's all they got. And that sucks, but criminalising their customers doesn't seem like a reasonable solution. It's a systemic issue.
Is it wrong to buy sex work from someone who does it because they genuinely love it(yes, they do exist, though they are awfully rare)? How the hell could it be?
So in summation, it seems to me human trafficking is the real problem. Criminalising johns seems like a stupid way to tackle it, and it demonstrably does not work. Extending it to the online sphere makes even less sense.
Most of what you are saying makes sense, except this:
> I think it's about as wrong as getting your iphone screen fixed by someone who couldn't cut it in "real" IT work. Or getting your garbage picked up by someone whose only marketable skill is emptying a bin into a truck. Society is full of people doing jobs they hate because it's all they got.
Selling sex for money is not in the same bin as other jobs people hate. Sex is an intimate act for humans, like it or not, and being coerced into sex, whether physically or economically, is especially toxic. Like long-term PTSD toxic.
This is not the same as cleaning latrines or collecting garbage (which yes, can be a foul work experience). Although as I'm thinking about it, there are other jobs which have a similar soul-toxicity as sex work, like industrial animal slaughter or mass executioner (e.g. in a concentration camp). Jobs that require you to give up your humanity in exchange for a paycheck.
Sex is an intimate physical act, which often/usually has intimate emotional consequences.
Sex work is not foul like garbage collection. Sex work is invasive like body horror stunt work.
How many jobs have an essential requirement to put non-edibles in your mouth? Claude suggests people who are paid to play wind instruments. Note that flutists own and maintain their own instruments. It would be really "gross" to
stick someone else's used instrument in your mouth. Particularly if you had no relationship to the person and didn't know to what extent you could trust them.
Maybe Wayland works without any faffing around for you, but the last time I ran it(via KDE), it completely hung my system whereas X11 worked out of the box.
And Wayland has been around for at least 15 years, btw, not 5. You'd think 15 years would be long enough to get something stable, but apparently not.
No accounting for taste, but my similarly terse vim config includes relativenumber and number. Relativenumber is just so damn useful for doing things to larger chunks of code without having to count lines or anything.
I'm also an IDE user though. I tend to maintain a dichotomy between emacs(with evil-mode, of course) as the "kitchen sink" set up, with all the fixings, and vim with a config so short I can type it in as commands if I need to.
Vanilla vim is really perfect for quick edits to config files, scripts on random servers/VMs etc.
Bigger projects, at least for my usage, all happen on the same system , and having a bit more involved of an emacs set up makes sense there.
I suppose one could do a similar dichotomy with vim/neovim, if one had a distaste for emacs.
This isn't completely true. Tolerance to psychedelics is a thing, and can often ve extremely long lasting. I have a friend that when given heroic doses of 2C-B(50mg or more, orally), hardly experienced more than threshold level effects. This was 2C-B tested and confirmed to have 95% purity, and it affected me exactly as expected. He was not on any drugs except hash, which is typically synergistic.
In his case, according to him he yad used 2C-B very heavily many years previously, and it seems he developed an extremely high level of tolerance which remained unchanged for many years of non-use.
In the cases discussed in the thread, it's possible that something similar was happening. Indeed, many antidepressants also alter serotonin receptor expression over time, and it's plausible that in some people, these effects could linger for a long time.
I agree in that case, long-term SSRI and psychedelic use complicates things. But in general, I would not say the literature points to tolerance being long lasting. Tolerance is built up quickly, and then quickly lost. There have been many (reproduced) studies on the effects of psychedelics and tolerance build up, and they show it doesn't last for more than a few weeks (psilocybin / LSD).
I'd be interested to see those studies. I think there could be a couple different types of tolerance, one of which only occurs with rather heavy use. It's something I've seen reported anecdotally from a number of people who've used psychedelics very heavily. It might not show up in human studies because of ethical concerns. There could be some interesting pharmacological differences too, where this only occurs with specific drugs. The psychedelics are quite varied in terms of pharmacodynamics beyond just the 5-HT-2 receptor subfamily.
We need more studies on the long term effects of heavy psilocybin use. We know how chronic use of alcohol and cannabis affect people fairly well at this point. We also know a lot about regular psilocybin use, but not a whole lot about what happens to people if they take it for 20 years.
I think this is too dismissive of the transformative power of psychedelic drugs. They absolutely can alter your life permanently. They certainly altered mine. I think, in a positive way. But that power cuts both ways. I also know people who had harrowing, traumatic experiences and developed PTSD.
My advice to people who haven't tried it tends to be that if you're scared, you should abstain. Your presuppositions of what the experience will be, will in themselves shape the experience. If you expect a bad time, you're likely to get one.
There's also a group of people who are curious about using psychedelics to treat mental disorder. My advice to those people is to find a way to do it in a clinical setting. Psychedelics have enormous potential for effectively curing anxiety disorders, but it's not just a matter of taking the drugs. The experience must be guided by a psychologist who knows what the goal is. And then integrated and processed afterwards, also with expert help. Psychedelucs are not a treatment in and of themselves, more like an accelerant of psychotherapy. The therapy is still necessary, it's just that psychedelics allow you to do in a handful of sessions what could take years in a sober patient. As a case in point, I have a severe anxiety disorder myself, and my many self-initiated experiments with psychedelics haven't magically cured it. If combined with therapy, it might have. I'm still waiting for clinical practice to catch up, so I can have psychedelic therapy.
Your points are well taken, though I want to nuance them a bit. My experience(with severe ADHD-C) is that this type of advice can work. It's just that it's not something you can just decide to start doing and immediately find success at. It's just a lot more complicated to get this off the ground, but it's possible. For some complex organisational system, you need to compile that system into "ADHD byte code" and for that, you need to bootstrap a compiler. Create an incredibly simple, extensible system which can do things your ADHD brain can't on its own. Then you need to find ways to force yourself to follow that system using various hacks like alarms tied to QR codes, body doubling, regular therapy or home visits, etc. then you can start implementing more complex structure in that system. And even the simple system is not gonna be easy. It's gonna take months of trying, failing, starting over. The ADHD brain is absolutely capable of developing habits(just look at the comorbidity rates between ADHD and various types of addiction), it's just a lot of work.
I'm in the process of doing this myself, and after 8 months, with many setbacks, I kinda have a base system I'm following that's significantly improving my quality of life and ability to keep up with everyday tasks. And it's still a struggle, but it's getting easier.
I'm writing a blog post about it currently, which will be more structured. It's about how I used my software dev skills to think about and tackle my ADHD(and other issues). Not about writing actual software(although software is involved), but imagining the brain exhibiting ADHD is a software system , identifying the "bugs", and combining concepts from software dev and behavioral/cognitive psychology to fix, or at least mitigate them.
This blog post could be finished two days from now, two years from now, or never. ADHD is still hard to live with, and I'm still quite dysfunctional. I guess if I do finish it, it'll be worth reading since I'll be on to something...
better yet, share the link to your blog if you don't mind making it public so we can follow it and find the post when it's ready. (in my case you can also email me (see my profile) and i'll keep it to myself)
Also, in bigger cities(Oslo in my case), even if you throw empties in public trash cans, they get fished out by various types of poor people who walk around all day collecting them. Though I tend to leave them next to the trashcan as long as it's not too windy, just as a nice gesture to the less fortunate. Or, often you'll see one of them as you finish your drink and you just hand them the bottle. Of course, I'd prefer a society where people didn't need to do this to get their next fix or meal or whatever it is, but it is sort of neat that utrash sorting can just naturally emerge in a society once the trash is imbued with monetary value.
One wonders why we don't do this with larger categories of garbage that needs to be sorted. I suppose bottles and cans are fairly easy to semi-automate given their fairly standardised shapes. But that just feels like an implementation detail.
In the poorer districts of Ho Chi Minh City, like Q4, Go Vap, etc, it is similar yet different. Each evening, folks set their garbage bags directly on the curb. At night, other people rip open the bags and scatter the trash in the street looking for anything salvageable. Finally, around midnight, city employees walk the streets pushing wheeled bins and sweep up the trash. When it rains, the trash is carried to clog drains, causing large-scale flooding.
Not a great system for many reasons, not least of which is relying on truly poor people. But they are remarkably efficient at extracting value from the waste stream.
Automated recyclable separation is hard and fascinating. Magnets for ferrous metals. Something about non-ferrous metal and eddy currents for aluminum. Infrared cameras and mechanical arms to detect and separate types of plastics. Blower systems to extract paper. Tumblers with various sized holes (like those coin counting machines) for other separation. (Source: Not that great. I just watched a few Youtubes.)
Here in Vancouver we have little shelves around garbage cans for the empties to go, and someone will come by in a few minutes to collect it for the deposit.
I will second the recommendation. As someone who's wasted too many hours on minesweeper, it radically changes the game. Because I know there's a logical solution, I'm able to find patterns that I never found in the original, because I'd often assume it was just one of those guesswork situations. It's similar to how chess puzzles are easier than an equivalent position during a game. Because you know there's a neat solution, you're more willing to put in the legwork of searching for it. Learned a lot about the game simply by playing Simon's version.