k0k0r0

Great to see you here!

That send me down memory lane...

My favourite technique for solving the Rubiks Cube involved orienting the edges in the first step (resp. with a lot experience possibly on-the-fly). I believe it was called the ZZ method or something like that. It reduced the number possible 3rd layer combinations to a few hundred. On his blog, Friedrich mentions an upper limit of roughly 1200 combinations. Back then ZZ was not invented, yet. It's been a long time, I don't remember well, but I believe a naive upper limit is higher. Nevertheless, in contrast to Friedrich's method (today refered to as CFOP, as a sibling commenter points out) solving the third layer was possible in a single step instead of two. There was situations were the two-step algorithm is far more ergonomic than the single step one, so one wouldn't reasonably choose the latter. This further reduced the number of combinations. Ultimately, ZZ was a manageble amount of algorithms to memorize. Also, the solving process felt much more natural than the Friedrich Method. More like, how it is supposed to be.

For experienced cubers this method lead to a low average solving time. On the other hand, due to the complexity of the edge-orientation step, instinctively exploiting advantageous situations was much harder than with Friedrich. Friedrich often allows you to skip steps or merge steps together, i.e. looking ahead in the solving process and reacting to what you see. While that is possible with ZZ, too, the simplicity of Friedrich's method allows for a much more freestyle solving process if you master it. Hence, for masters of the Friedrich Method the solving process becomes more similiar to the Heise method (Edit: Previously, I mistakenly wrote Roux), which not really is a method at all, but rather a way of understanding the cube. In principle, that's equally possible with ZZ, too, but in reality it is likely too complex for humans to master it as well as Friedrich's method.

In effect, the ZZ method while arguably superior to the Friedrich method did not allow for state-the-art speed. The best cubers not only achieved lower records with Friedrich, but lower average times, too (we're talking here about a difference of a one digit number of seconds). The ZZ method nevertheless lead to more reliable worst case times. If looking ahead in Friedrich fails, the ZZ method shines due to its overall smaller average number of turns necessary to solve the cube.

(However, all this information is 10 years old memories, so please check for yourself, if at the top level that's still true today or true at all.)

Also, it was a lot of fun to learn the ZZ method. I can highly recommend doing so. Learning several hundred algorithms is less than it seams. It likely takes at least a year, though, and that is if you learn several new algorithms per day. One does not need to learn them all at once. One can always resort to a two-step 3rd layer approach if necessary. But, getting the 3rd layer in a single step felt so awsome! (I was not even halve way through all algorithms, when life dragged me to focus on other things.)

I should definitely give cubing another try someday. Last time I took a cube, I couldn't even remember the two-step algorithm necessary to solve the particular 3rd layer situation that came up. However, this time I would rather focus on mastering ZZ's first step, i.e. orienting all the edges, instead of focussing on memorizing all 3rd layer combinations.

Kagi appearently had a project "expertGPT" (contrast to FastGPT). Does anybody know what happened to that one?

On a side note, there is now a - to my best knowledge - completely unrelated product "ExpertGPT" from some totally different company. I am not talking about that one.

Best vim cheatsheet I have seen so far. OTOH I haven't looked at one in a while, and back then my understanding of vim may have been insufficient to appreciate other lists.

I am polish, but was raised in germany. I can confirm the observation about eastern europe, at least regarding poland. Man are man, and Woman are Woman. In general, (non-trans, non-homo and somewhat binary people) seem to have a healthier relationship with their core-gender identity. People in western societies certainly should take an example when it comes to modern gender roles. I would not glorify the situation there, though.

Of course, this already implies problems with people with non-traditional orientations and identities. But I wouldn't regard those as the main problems. They even seem somewhat easy to overcome when compared to the usual sexism in Poland.

I find sexism in Poland to be a very different thing than sexism in Germany for example. With regards to both genders. It is more reciprocal, with more obvious sexism against man than in germany. It would be a too big subject, to even outline it here.

My assumption is that @chubot ment that malloc'ing each time you need some memory has been bad practise ever since. Mostly, pre-allocating stuff for whatever you need is the way to go, but that is not far away from writing general purpose arenas. At least not conceptually. So, arenas are nothing new (I guess... I had not been around back than).

Related: Github published a vim plugin to use Copilot.

Once again, "The only reason I do not take my medications is that I can not afford it." seems like a thrid world country thing to say, while you're most likely from USA. It is absolutely crazy to me that you do not have public healthcare.

I agree with the intention of this comment. However, "fog of war" usually refers to the situation the fighting soldiers and commanders are in, not to the situation the ordinary population. It refers to the fact, that the soldiers and commanders themselves need to fight. Where they need to base their decisions on an understanding of the situation high uncertainty.

Using a different then my own true reasoning is completely normal, and everybody does this. One adjust your reasing to the understanding of the other person for example. Moreover, there is like a miles wide gab between rhetoric and manipulation.

This surprisingly remind me of the last to birthday parties I organized for myself. Unexpectedly I managed to get much more people together than I expected. Simply by actually trying to ask as many people as possible. I was really happy about this. Both times.

Maybe that student was doing the same. Simply asking a lot of people. And other studends usually do not. I find it really hard to overcome my own shyness in this regard. And I wouldn't consider myself particularly shy. I assume a lot of people simply do not try asking enough people in order to get a decent amount of them to join.

Of course that guy might be simply cheating, but I just wanted to share the story.

If the whole script is run with sudo, then all parts of the script that wouldn't have needed suddenly become dangerous.

I really appreciate the reply and found another no-option. I would like to do something less... "abstract". I would definitly agree that crypto has meaningful usecases, but I guess it is not so easy to find those that are meaningful to me.

Exactly this bothers me a lot. I do bare metal performance optimizations, but I worry to never find a job outside of academia in that field. as I don't want to do high-frequency trading nor develop games.