aji

the star battle interface diverges from penpa, puzpre, and puzzleteam in a number of basic ways that actively make the solving experience worse imo:

- having to switch between "star" and "exclude" modes is annoying on desktop, and most sites allow right click for placing "exclude" marks. it was a surprise that right click not only popped up the context menu but also placed a star (in a wrong spot, of course).

- counting mistakes doesn't make sense for a binary determination puzzle like star battle imo (or most logic puzzles for that matter). solving on paper doesn't count mistakes so what does a digital solving interface gain by doing so?

as someone who does a lot of logic puzzles (and thus would be in the market for buying a puzzle set) these usability obstacles make the inclusion of star battle feel like an afterthought.

i never really liked CDATA but i'm not buying the argument here since you can do the escaping with replaceAll("]]>", "]]]]><![CDATA[>") instead of four replaceAlls. (assuming you are writing your own xml serializer in javascript in 2026 for some reason)

trying to figure out if this is a joke about stack allocations

fun idea but "perfect pitch" is a little off the mark imo, as other people have mentioned. i think this sort of exercise would be good for training transcription skills and relative pitch if you weren't able to hear your guesses and the grading factored out global transposition i.e. by always considering the first note correct and applying the offset to the remaining notes

the author invented a definition of "flow" which is different from another common definition which roughly means "getting in the zone" and the result is dangerously clickbaity imo

i do my best work when i'm in the zone and it has nothing to do with whether the work itself is challenging or not. in fact, the more challenging something is, the easier it is for me to stay focused if i feel like i'm making progress

New performances might show up, maybe

I've heard good things about the new DOOM remake, which seems to be in that direction.

the importance of console verification is to make sure a TAS isn't relying on any emulator bugs (such as timing, uninitialized memory, etc) and would theoretically be possible on the actual hardware. it also speaks to the accuracy of the emulations themselves

I like using cumulative distributions because they make small changes in the data a little more obvious. e.g. if all the buckets are 10 but there's a section where they're 11, that difference will show up in a cumulative distribution as a bend in an otherwise straight line, which in my opinion is a much easier difference to see

I lucked into this pattern when I used ratpoison. Window 0 was always my terminal emulator (running tmux), window 1 was always Firefox. Additionally, tmux window 0 was always my IRC client. Getting between those apps quickly became muscle memory. I use a more conventional window manager now and it's noticeably clumsier.

or instead of relying on the domain name existing, look at the contents of the web page

I'm certainly no expert in motivation, and can't give you advice on your specific goals, but I personally find that reframing long term goals into short term goals can be a big source of motivation. for example, don't focus on bench pressing your own weight, focus instead on getting to the gym 3x or 4x a week and working on your bench press. don't focus on finishing that personal project, focus instead on making a little progress on your personal project every day or every week. having long term goals is still valuable, but having short term goals to focus on can make it a lot easier to find motivation. it's easy to get demotivated on big goals, but if in a given day you meet every single one of your daily goals, then you've aced that day as far as your goals are concerned. and you'll ace the next day, and the next, etc.

having a job with big impact and big money is a sizable goal that you won't reach overnight. you might not even reach it in a year, or several years, who knows. it's a big goal that's easy to lose motivation on. but reframing it into daily goals, and focusing on taking one step at a time, could be a source of motivation. just my 2¢

to clarify: it's not the dam itself that's at risk of failure, but the emergency spillway. while this scenario would be catastrophic, it's far less catastrophic than the entire dam failing