Gemini 3 plays games, privilege laundering, and price increase
Today we learn how the new crop of LLMs perform at text adventures.
Software control levels and go in 9×9
We look at how to determine how dangerous software can be in any given application, and then we enjoy some small-scale go games.
Deprecations and avoiding them with NixOS
We joke a little about how to handle deprecations in a way that makes people take them seriously, and then we look at how to use Perl on NixOS to avoid suffering from backwards incompatible changes.
Transparent leadership, AoC in Dialog, the flu sucks
Inventing buzzwords since 2014! A look at the Dialog text adventure programming language. I have the flu so my text is not good today.
Feynman vs. Computer; renewing GPG subkeys; Mallows is stuck in his chamber!
Quick look at renewing GPG subkeys, before we dive into the basics of Monte Carlo integration which is oh-so-useful – and simple.
Entropic Thoughts Premium Newsletter #9
Mixed topics: some test code optimisation, text adventures, the NetBSD machine for the five-year old, a guide in compass sighting, making and reading stories, and three recommendations for small games.
Cloudflare; software never fails; Newton; compasses
We find a flaw in Cloudflare's initial assessment of their problems, we learn what it means for us that software never fails, and poke amateurishly at physics.
Tiny game, what killed Perl, and some linear algebra
You get to play a fun game! And learn about how popular Perl really is. And an identity from linear algebra there's a chance you already knew.
Z-machine coding problems, and what to automate
The Z-machine was perhaps the original fantasy console, and we can learn it by biting into some Advent of Code problems. Then we discuss what criteria not to use when deciding on what to automate.
DynamoDB outage analysis and asking experts for timelines
We get a tour of a method by which AWS engineers could have prevented the expensive outage they had. (And you can prevent your outages too!) We also talk a little about extracting knowledge from experts and how to do it right.
LLMs playing text adventures, weather forecasts, making a base template in Yesod
Curious how the latest crop of LLMs do on text adventures, I set them at it. They're better, but not great. You'll also learn how to interpret meteograms, and how to set a base template for a Yesod site.
Entropic Thoughts Premium Newsletter #8
For this premium newsletter, I'm trying something new: I'll keep it more informal and conversational. Both to take some pressure off myself, and to see if...
Bind-to-LambdaCase, text adventures, and insurance claim frequencies
Everyone loves Haskell idioms, right? But we also love text adventures. And do you know how often major claims are made against home insurance? Soon you do!
Hazards, accidents, and data processing
We look at some fundamentals of system safety – everyone's favourite overlooked topic. Then we talk information theory because that's always a hoot.
Emacs blogging, ViewPattern argument transform, and named pipes
In case you didn't know, org-babel is amazing. How do we avoid naming intermediary values in code, which we don't care about? And what happens when we open a named pipe for writing?
Getting open data out of ECMWF, drunk driving, and mangled English
We dig into a classic faulty machine translation, we learn how to get some data out of ECMWF, and then drop an unexpected (?) statistic about drunkenness in traffic.
Procedural rhetoric and the accounting equation
We learn what procedural rhetoric is and how it affects the players of games. We also look at how to interpret the expanded accounting equation.
Technology warts are a good thing, actually
We learn why we should cherish the warts of our technologies, and what the difference is between Hong Kong and decimal odds. Plus new premium newsletter!
Entropic Thoughts Premium Newsletter #7
A games-heavy premium newsletter, where we look into MCTS for card-shedding games, teaching children poker, house rules to make Risk more complicated, but! also an approach to teaching children computers.
Nix package debugging, getting correlation from sources of variation
We figure out how to debug a Nix package build. But more excitingly, we also learn how we can measure variation with and without an effect present and get an intuitive sense for what the correlation means!