@smmbear@twtpub.com Hey 👋 Welcome to Yarn.social / Twtxt 👌 Just in case you are not ware a) spam is not really tolerated by this community and b) doesn’t work anyway, you’ll just be ignored, and there are exactly zero ways to promote spam or advertise on this social system – on purpose.
Oh man wow 😮 Problem 9 was quite hard 😱 I had to build two new functions in the Mu stdlib for computing combinations and permutations, but then the combinations of range(1000) for triples such as a + b == c is enormous! So i had to write iterator versions of these to do lazy evaluation. Anyway solution follows:
#!/usr/bin/env mu
// Special Pythagorean Triplet
import "iter"
fn usage() {
print("Usage:", args()[0], "<n>")
}
fn sqr(x) { x * x }
fn main() {
if len(args()) < 2 {
usage()
exit(1)
}
n := must(int(args()[1]))
print("n:", n)
// For a < b < c and a + b + c == n, both a and b are strictly less
// than n/2. Generate only (a,b) combinations and derive c directly. This
// keeps the search lazy and reduces n=1000 from C(999,3) = 165,668,499
// candidate triples to C(499,2) = 124,251 candidate pairs.
pairs := iter.combinations(iter.range(1, n / 2), 2)
triples := iter.map(pairs, fn(xs) {
a := xs[0]
b := xs[1]
return [a, b, n - a - b]
})
// Enforce b < c; a < b is already guaranteed by combinations over an
// increasing range, and a + b + c == n holds by construction.
triples = iter.filter(triples, fn(xs) {
return xs[1] < xs[2]
})
// Euler 9 has one answer for n=1000. find() stops the entire upstream
// iterator chain as soon as the first Pythagorean triple is found.
answer := iter.find(triples, fn(xs) {
return sqr(xs[0]) + sqr(xs[1]) == sqr(xs[2])
})
print(answer)
if answer != nil {
print(answer[0] * answer[1] * answer[2])
}
}
main()
Transcript of a phone call with AI developer relations: http://a.9srv.net/b/ai-devrel
@movq@www.uninformativ.de @david@daiwei.me @thecanine@twtxt.net Yeah, I’m with you. It is just a tool, but it’s a tool that burns rainforests and boils lakes when you use it, owned by some incredible awful human beings, and built on the backs of an increasing number of crippling mass-scraping campaigns. These costs are just too high.
I have to use it at work, but it’s “the new norm” in software, so I’m hoping to use it just enough to get by until either 1) the bubble pops (and we don’t have to use it anymore) or b) I retire. And actually, 1) happened for a minute back in June when M$ increased the prices of tokens, so it’s certainly possible it could happen again.
All that having been said, I think the technology itself has some interesting uses, and I’m looking forward to the day when I can host some open source models on local hardware. But I can wait.
And yes, the site is unreadable on mobile, which is kinda wild for 2026. 🦆
I’m still on a deckbuilding kick, so I was thrilled that we managed to get 3 games of Magic in last night.
In game 1, my Marvel Villains deck couldn’t stand up to Doctor Who’s Missy and her army of Cybermen (and Daleks). Since someone else was playing a dark lord Sauron deck, I guess that means she’s even more “villainous” that anything Marvel or Tolkien could offer.
For game 2, I ran my Guardians of the Multiverse deck (formerly known as The B-Vengers or Marvel Heroes 2: Electric Bugaloo). It was working well, and I had quite an army going, but I was still one turn from a win when an opponent’s tribal elf deck went off, killing everyone with 19 19/19 forest-walking elves. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Then in game 3, I ran my Avengers deck, and finally got the win thanks to a Heroes’ Podium, a pair of Hawkeyes, and a flying, shield-wielding Captain America. Assemble, indeed.
Last night will likely be my final Marvel-only game night for a while. I still need to test the decks out some more, but they’re basically complete (I don’t currently plan on adding any more cards to them). Plus, while I’m on this kick, I’d like to finally finish my Sauron deck, and I’ve got some cards on order for both a Dune-themed deck and a couple of decks inspired by the old-school Beatdown Box.
Summer Season 2026 at the NLJ: America at 250 ?~L~X https://thenewleafjournal.com/b/E3c
Supporing the Pumpernickel Bagel ?~L~X https://thenewleafjournal.com/b/E3X
What’s your motivation for running this, btw? 🤔
Basically, two things a) feeling generous for folks that either can’t afford or find it hard to have a little place to call home (webpage, feed, whatever) and b) a real opportunity to test some of the components that make it possible sshbox, which I know works well as it fronts my Gitea instance’s Git+SSH service and box, a container runtime I wrote a while ago, recently improved, hardened and polished.
On Complaining About AI in Pinterest on Reddit ?~L~X https://thenewleafjournal.com/b/E3S
From Missing the Playoffs to the NBA Finals ?~L~X https://thenewleafjournal.com/b/E3N
@movq@www.uninformativ.de I just ran across another thing. At least I personally couldn’t care less about CI infrastructure changes. Whether they’re using github action a or b or c or version v or w, it is not of my interest. At all. (It might be useful to estimate the supply chain attack risk, though.) If the maintainers want to include them in the changelog – and there are probably people to whom this information is crucial – it’s probably best to document CI infrastructure changes in their own section.
Finding Backlinks to Your Articles and Blog Posts ?~L~X https://thenewleafjournal.com/b/E3C
caddy-pow. So now going forward, you'll have to (sorry) have a HS-enabled browser to hit git.mills.io which will hopefully make most (if not all) bots just go the fuck away 🤦♂️ #Hostile #Web
@prologic@twtxt.net Ninjababypowpowpow, NINJA BABY POW POW POW! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dK8NeTWN7w
The lyrics are also fitting quite well I have to say. :-) https://www.die-aerzte-archiv.de/bela-b/songtexte/song/ninjababypowpow.html
Discovering the Former “The New Leaf Journal” ?~L~X https://thenewleafjournal.com/b/E35
Fallen Double Arrow Sign in Columbia Street Waterfront District ?~L~X https://thenewleafjournal.com/b/E30
@movq@www.uninformativ.de Related reading (if you’re interested): Let’s Talk about LLMs by James Bennett
First, it quotes the DORA report on the “State of AI-assisted Software Development”:
The research reveals a critical truth: AI’s primary role in software development is that of an amplifier. It magnifies the strengths of high-performing organizations and the dysfunctions of struggling ones.
At the end, it quotes the late Fred Books:
The first step toward the management of disease was replacement of demon theories and humours theories by the germ theory. That very step, the beginning of hope, in itself dashed all hopes of magical solutions. It told workers that progress would be made stepwise, at great effort, and that a persistent, unremitting care would have to be paid to a discipline of cleanliness. So it is with software engineering today.
May 2026 at The New Leaf Journal ?~L~X https://thenewleafjournal.com/b/E2o
Playoff Success of 8.5+ Regular Season SRS NBA Teams ?~L~X https://thenewleafjournal.com/b/E2i
NBA Finals Appearance Droughts ?~L~X https://thenewleafjournal.com/b/E2e
Years ago, I used Kate, no, not somebody’s wife, but the KDE Advanced Text Editor, to export source code files and fragments into HTML with syntax highlighting. I think that’s where I got the initial <b> idea from. There were also bucketloads of <span style='color:#644a9b;'> all over the place, even inside <b>. No CSS classes defined upfront, all colors inlined. The final rendering in the browser looked great, but the source code ugly as hell in my opinion. However, I’m thankful for hinting me at <b>. I think this kicked off everything. :-)
@movq@www.uninformativ.de It’s the “Lyse types the entire HTML by hand” generator. Yes, no kidding. I write articles so rarely, that I can do that once in a while. It’s fun to some degree, but also not.
After some time, I finally recorded some Vim macros to insert <b>…</b>, <var>…</var>, <span class=s>…</span> etc. around the tokens. This helped a little bit. But I was still questioning my mental state doing it like that. I also had to fix a bunch of the end tags by hand, because the word movement wasn’t enough or the end movement went too far. Quite the annoying process for sure.
But I think the HTML looks a wee bit nicer and is maybe even semantically a little bit better than having only <span>s everywhere. I find the <span class="whatever"> just soo awfully long. Of course, I never look at the code again, but knowing, that e.g. there is a <b> and it saves so many bytes in comparison, makes me happy. It is a more elegant solution in my opinion. Not by much, but better nonetheless. It’s a matter of simplicity. Admittedly, even I can’t avoid the <span>s alltogether. Oh well. On the other hand, I’m sure that this does not make any difference whatsoever. I bet, nobody and nothing, like a screenreader, analyzes the HTML for that, where this would be truly useful.
Oh! Maybe text browsers, though. It just occurred to me while composing this reply. :-) Haha, I lost my bet quickly. w3m picks up at least the <b> for keywords and builtin types, <u> for filenames and <i> for comments. Yey. No different styles for <var> and <mark>, unfortunately. elinks only renders the bold. It’s cool that I had the right intuition right from the beginning, despite being unable to pinpoint it. :-)
All the <span> hell with common syntax highlighters is a downer for me that keeps me from looking more into them. If I wrote more articles, I might rig something up with Pygments. At least that’s somehow positively connotated in my brain. Not sure if it actually deserves it, but I dealt with that in some loose form (can’t even remember) years and years ago. Apparently, it wasn’t too terrible.
To prepare the table of contents, I used grep and sed with some manual intervention in the end. The entire process can be improved. Absolutely.
You wrote your own site generator, didn’t you?
Replace Yourself With a Human, Not Bot ?~L~X https://thenewleafjournal.com/b/E2Y
It’s one of the reasons in fact I’ve been working on bob so I have a very concrete and strong foundation for how these things work, how they behave and how bad or good they can be. I am on-purpose building bob to be not only a decent coding tool and general task completion tool, but with serious security boundaries, sanitation, auditing and compliance. If I’m going to succeed at building autoonmous agents that can cope with a wider array of varying inputs (mostly natural language, some structural language) then it needs to be both a) Safe and b) Robust
@prologic@twtxt.net Ahh, I see. Okay, I’m with you there. On this high level, I can understand how the thing works.
Maybe my wording isn’t good. 🤔 Let’s take a real life example from what we do at work.
There’s this AI chatbot. It gets support requests from users, so the user says something like “I need access to a particular system”. This triggers the bot to “run” the instructions stored in a large Markdown file, like “check if the user is authorized to do this, then issue the following API requests”, and so on. This is essentially like running a little script, except it’s written in natural language (German) and there’s no “script interpreter” but just the AI.
Now, suppose that the AI doesn’t quite do what was intended. There’s some subtle bug. How do you debug this? How do you find out how the AI came to the “conclusion” to run step A instead of step B? And how do you find out how exactly you have to change your prompt so this doesn’t happen again next time?
If this was an actual script/program instead of AI, you could repeat the request and attach a debugger or throw in some printf() or whatever. How do you do that kind of thing with AI? How do you pinpoint exactly what the problem was?
(Or is this just a stupid idea? Do we have to give up that way of thinking when using AI? Is the era of debuggability over?)
Be the Blogger You Want to Be (Or Read) ?~L~X https://thenewleafjournal.com/b/E2M
On Spotify’s SpotifAI Podcasts ?~L~X https://thenewleafjournal.com/b/E2J
Happy 5.25 day to anyone who celebrates.
(“Colour diskettes”. Ha.)


Choosing How to Build and Host a Blog ?~L~X https://thenewleafjournal.com/b/E27
ActivityPub for WordPress and fediverse:creator ?~L~X https://thenewleafjournal.com/b/E1x
The Emu Café and Blog Hospitality ?~L~X https://thenewleafjournal.com/b/E1k
April 2026 at The New Leaf Journal ?~L~X https://thenewleafjournal.com/b/E1U
Blogging Promises, Schedules, and Burnout ?~L~X https://thenewleafjournal.com/b/E1N
Sliwa for NYC Mayor Lawn Signs Seen in May 2026 ?~L~X https://thenewleafjournal.com/b/E1J
Blogging and the Niche Question ?~L~X https://thenewleafjournal.com/b/E1B
Belleville (NJ) Fire Seen From Red Hook (Brooklyn) ?~L~X https://thenewleafjournal.com/b/E11
Inflatable Mother’s Day Flowers in Brooklyn ?~L~X https://thenewleafjournal.com/b/E0r
Some Benefits of Blogging and Writing Online ?~L~X https://thenewleafjournal.com/b/E0f
Memories – Recording Mario Kart: Double Dash on VHS ?~L~X https://thenewleafjournal.com/b/E0a
Weathered White Brooklyn Banana Bench ?~L~X https://thenewleafjournal.com/b/E0W
NLJ Sixth Birthday Project ?~L~X https://thenewleafjournal.com/b/Dzo
Proctoring a High School Exam While in High School ?~L~X https://thenewleafjournal.com/b/Dzf
My One-Game Stint as a Baseball Coach ?~L~X https://thenewleafjournal.com/b/DzZ
Attending to Surroundings and Thoughts on Walks ?~L~X https://thenewleafjournal.com/b/DzT
Staying the Course in Writing in the LLM Moment ?~L~X https://thenewleafjournal.com/b/DzF
“Stick Library” in Brooklyn Heights ?~L~X https://thenewleafjournal.com/b/Dz6
Spring Season 2026 at The New Leaf Journal ?~L~X https://thenewleafjournal.com/b/Dyy
@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org hmmm, pizza! With that amount of food (a) I wouldn’t complain, and (b) I will be obese on my return. LOL.
AI Today, Calculators Back in the Day ?~L~X https://thenewleafjournal.com/b/Dyu
Bam Adebayo’s 83 and Scoring Averages in 60+ Point Game Seasons ?~L~X https://thenewleafjournal.com/b/Dyk
2000-01 Bucks vs Second Three-Peat Bulls ?~L~X https://thenewleafjournal.com/b/Dyc