yunruse

This feels if nothing else quite analogous with default mode network, i.e. brain regions which are task-negative (or task-neutral).

It seems that the literature supports the intuition that to meaningfully relax (i.e. exercise the brain with fewer pressures of time, success or similar, and with a relatively low information bandwidth) is really good for cognitive health. And it's very good to destress, which we can all benefit from!

So even if there are more cars than birds outside my own window... I'll make sure to spend a few more moments each day by it :)

epilepsy warning for the 'MAGIC' style :(

Keeping all values of a cell as scalars is literally First Normal Form in database normalisation; it brings myriad design benefits.

But Excel is not a relational database: for simple cases, having an extra table for a non-scalar column is awfully confusing to present to an end-user. From that angle this makes total sense. There's still 1NF for more complex embeddings, anyhow

Kind of! The scalar allows vectors and scalars to be expressed together as one object, which has a lot of computational and mathematical niceties.

The killer feature is that you can put the two together for a rotation axis (~ vector) and angle (~ scalar).

With just three gimbals (rotating circles), if gimbals A and B are aligned, you only have two degrees of freedom (rotating A is the same as rotating B). Because of this, interpolating angles is unwieldy in vector space. 'Gimbal lock' confounds animation (in hilarious but unrealistic ways) but also aerospace (four hours before 'one small step for man', just after landing, Collins joked he would like a fourth gimbal for Christmas).

I loved this article and its interactive elements. The potential field is an elegant abstraction which really elevates this from a math puzzle into something new.

I'd love to see just how Lipschitz continuous, how smooth, the potential field can be; how adding features puts it closer to or further from solutions that fit the consecutive-no-duplicate constraint, say. Adding a smooth 'hill' is probably viable; is a 'river'?

One little critique I have is in the latter third. Using LLMs for proof is pretty standard now, but the way the text focuses on their tribulations was distracting. It might have been cleaner to use the mathematician's "we" after introducing the 'co-authors', so that the casual reader might sink their teeth into the math rather than be reminded LLMs can sometimes cost money and go around in loops.

But otherwise this is a really gorgeous article! The visualisation is really powerful, and something about how the symmetries impose a kind of conservation (which looks like hot soup but actually has a smooth potential) are very exciting, and curiously very physicsy.

Nice! I wanted to share a link to Ripple Effect Hard with my time (23:47), but it seems the URL only captures attempts, so there's no real way to link to the puzzle itself.

Might be useful to

- add a wordle-style 'SHARE' button, and/or

- make the canonical URL that of the puzzle (and only the attempt on completing/abandoning it)

This project is essentially "give me some metadata & a command which takes env $PORT, and I'll handle the rest". Which is neat!

I am also sick of handling port numbers - I end up allocating them on a schema to different services, so for testing I can spool any VM/service combination and avoid crossover. But if I want the same service twice, ah...

It always fascinated me that ports don't have any kind of textual resolver, so you can bind to `:1234` and also say "please also accept `:foobar`". But that would itself require some kind of "port resolver" on a device, and that's another service to break and fix :)

Reports being weaponised is a big issue with asymmetric (report-only) systems, but at least here there seems to be a “report as not slop” button.

“Symmetric” user reporting is dearly needed in some websites; as you say something can be mass-reported with no real recourse.