!0hn0@discuss.tchncs.de

If you'd like to learn how to speedrun a niche puzzle game, check this one out :)

I haven't written all the tutorial posts I've wanted to yet, so stay tuned.

There's some unexplored territory I haven't explained for myself, like the connection to graph theory (i dont have any foundational knowledge for graph theory so maybe someone smarter than me can help ;) i figure it would help formalize some proofs)

Feel free to share your progress!

Yeah, thinking about it more, the similarities are kind of narrow.

You could make a better comparison with a regular crowd, but then it wouldn't feel like much of a showerthought at that point because it's just observing that the crowd has moved online.

Laugh tracks might be used to improve there ratings of a show, but with memes there's not really a show and no one's forcing a laugh

I think the essence of what I was thinking of though is that just like a regular crowd, an online crowd can still influence you to think something is funnier or better than you would alone (at least for me)

Happy to participate!

The one thing I wasn't super sure on was the undo timer... was it really 30 seconds 😅? I thought it was 5-15s, but i didnt really time it. And I'll be honest, I missed it maybe 3 times, so not much.

Besides just increasing the delay, there's 2 other thoughts:

• A bigger target takes less time to hit (tho making it bigger might bother some, as it obstructs the canvas)
• Two times I missed were bc I failed to notice my mistake. Maybe some extra visual feedback when you place a pixel could help. For example: when the void made it to my art, I accidentally made a dark gray become black, so it was harder to notice the color change. i was too busy focusing where to place the next pixel

Overall if you feel that the undo time was fine as it was I could easily respect that decision :)

1. RIP Apollo
2. I almost didn't join lemmy because the first time you sign up in the fediverse it feels like a big deal. What got me to actually follow through was to impulsively join a silly instance (RIP iusearchlinux.fyi)

You might be okay with this:

macro_rules! span {
    ($line:expr, $column:expr) => {
        Span {
            line: $line,
            column: $column,
            file_path: None,
        }
    };
    ($line:expr, $column:expr, $file_path:literal) => {
        Span {
            line: $line,
            column: $column,
            file_path: Some($file_path.to_string()),
        }
    };
    ($line:expr, $column:expr, $file_path:expr) => {
        Span {
            line: $line,
            column: $column,
            file_path: $file_path,
        }
    };
}

Playground

However, sometimes I don't want to pass in the file path directly but through a variable that is Option<String>.

Essentially I took this to mean str literals will be auto wrapped in Some, but anything else is expected to be Option<String>

Another optimization:

• The first index of each index array can be filled by a function. For 257x257 that would remove 8,487,169 checks out of... 2,164,392,321. Not much, but it's basically a free optimization, so might as well!

More progress on the Finite Projective Plane (incidence matrix) generation from last week. There already exists an algorithm to generate boards of order p+1 where p is prime. It is stateless, so with CUDA we can generate huge boards in seconds since all you need is the x, y position and board size. 258x258 under 3s!

However, p+1 isn't the only sequence. It seems by our observations that the fermat numbers also generate valid boards, using our "naïve" algorithm.

Unfortunately 3x3, 5x5, and 17x17 might not contain all the nuggets of generality to find a nice algorithm like the p+1, so we're gonna generate the next up: 257x257. We've been improving the naïve algorithm since it is too slow. (The resulting image would be 65793x65793)

• Rather than allocating the 2d boolean grid, we represent where the true elements would be using row and column indexes. This is okay because of the constraint which limits how many true elements can be in a row/column
  • benefit 1 — less memory usage: "O(2n)" vs O(n²) ((for 257x257: 129MiB vs 4GiB))
  • benefit 2 — faster column-major lookups (flamegraph spent a lot of time sitting in iterators)
  • overall speedup: about 2.7x
• Speed up index lookup with binary search
  • The index list is sorted by nature. To exhaustively check a dot is valid, it checks n² spots in 2 lists of size n. Slightly more expensive than the grid given the 2 index lists. Rather than slice::contains, use slice::binary_search(...).is_ok()
  • overall speedup: about 2.1x

Next steps:

• Assume a square grid and exploit its diagonal symmetry to treat row lookups as column lookups
• Use multi threading to gain a partial speedup
  • Essentially if row 1 is 50% completed, row 2 can be up to 50% completed.
  • I think you get different speeds depending whether the threads and symmetry folds are both row/column major or one is row-major and the other is column-major. My gut says both need to be aligned because there's less waiting involved.

Apparently generating "Finite Projective Planes". For context on how I got here, I went camping with my family and brought the game Spot It. My brother was analyzing it and came up with the same type of pattern.

When we got home he made a python script to generate these boards, but it was quite slow, so he half joked asking me to rewrite it in Rust.

I kinda struggled a bit since I didn't fully understand what it was doing. Near the end I even got a segfault using safe code😃! (i was spawning a thread with a large stack size, and allocating huge slices on its stack, rather than you know.. boxing the slice Lol.) When I finally got it working, it ended up being in the ballpark of a 23x speedup. Not bad for changing the language choice!

There's lots of room for improvement left for sure. The algorithm could benefit with some running statistics about cols/rows and the algorithm itself is quite naïve and could maybe be improved too :P

/dev/sdX is a file, and both dd, cat can read files in full. You can even try something like zstd to compress it too.

One of the nice things about dd though is you can see the progress with --status=progress

Screenshot woulda been better just so everyone sees the same thing lol. I wasn't sure what it would look like because on browser it highlighted some things green, and on Voyager it seems to highlight 4+ space indented as gray. No clue what is going on there :D

vim with :set virtualedit=all gets pretty close being able to "paint" text anywhere... unfortunately i was on my phone and didn't think to use it

Woahh thats so cool!!

I think your QMK config counts (for now;)) What are some useful things you've changed?

Yeah, im a bit worried about vim binds for alternative layouts as well. I think some people use a layer mod to keep normal mode as QWERTY (or a "normal mode" layer) but insert mode uses their regular layout. Others apparently use their non-qwerty layout for everything (but i guess change hjkl). Apparently it's not too bad.. but probably depends on the person.

The clamps lol, i love it!

Ooo cool, thanks for sharing!