You can basically think of this as pattern-matching. I’m very very good at very fast pattern matching and piecing pices of a puzzle together very quickly, sometimes with very little to go on, it’s often gotten me into a lot of trouble at work in my career because I can make a lot of assumptions very very quickly.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh, I understand exactly what you mean. :-) I fully agree with you. And it also completely puzzles me why only so few people share our view.

@kiwu@twtxt.net ahh, I see, and now understand. My niece was homeschooled, and her breaks were always puzzling, but she had to adapt to my sister’s schedule. LOL.

thinking of Masyu. What a great game. Wondering about the perfect algorithm to generate a board of arbitrary size with only one solution. That’s almost more fun than playing the game #programming #masyu #puzzle #videogame

I’m having to write my own functions like this in mu just to solve AoC puzzles :D

fn pow10(k) {
    p := 1
    i := 0
    while i < k {
        p = p * 10
        i = i + 1
    }
    return p
}

Alright, Advent of Code is over:

https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-12-12/0/POSTING-en.html

It’s been quite the time sink, especially with the DOS games on top, but it was fun. 🥳

In case you’re wondering: All puzzles (except for part 2 of day 10) were doable in Python 1 on SuSE Linux 6.4 and ran in a finite time on the Pentium 133. Puzzle 10/2 might have been doable as well if I had better education. 🤣

@itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com Aren’t yhere onlu 12 puzzles this year? 🧐

Day 6 of AoC, and I’m all caught up. 12 puzzles down, 12 more to go!

FWIW, day 03 and day 04 where solved on SuSE Linux 6.4:

https://movq.de/v/faaa3c9567/day03.jpg

https://movq.de/v/faaa3c9567/day04%2Dv3.jpg

Performance really is an issue. Anything is fast on a modern machine with modern Python. But that old stuff, oof, it takes a while … 😅

Should have used C or Java. 🤪 Well, maybe I do have to fall back on that for later puzzles. We’ll see.

Day 2 was pretty tough on my old hardware. Part 1 originally took 16 minutes, then I got it down to 9 seconds – only to realize later that my solution abused some properties of my particular input. A correct solution will probably take about 30 seconds. 🫤

Part 2 took 29 minutes this morning. I wrote an optimized version but haven’t tested it yet. I hope it’ll be under a minute.

Python 1 feels really slow, even compared to Java 1. And these first puzzles weren’t even computationally intensive. We’ll see how far I’ll make it …

https://movq.de/v/f831d98103/day02.jpg

Hmmmm the AoC site is not mobile friendly 😢 Can someone post the puzzles as Twts? 🤣

Advent of Code 2025 starts tomorrow. 🥳🎄

This year, I’m going to use Python 1 on SuSE Linux 6.4, writing the code on my trusty old Pentium 133 with its 64 MB of RAM. No idea if that old version of Python will be fast enough for later puzzles. We’ll see.

I was looking at some ancient code and then thought: Hmm, maybe it would be a good idea to see more details in this error message. Which of the values don’t line up. On the other hand, that feature isn’t probably used anyway, because it’s a bit ugly to use (historically evolved). And on top of that, most teams need something slightly different, if they deal with that sort of thing.

I still told my workmates about it, so they could also have a look at it and we can decide tomorrow what to do about it. Speaking of the devil, no kidding, not even half an hour later, a puzzled tester contacted me. She received exactly that rather useless error message. Looks like I had an afflatus. ;-)

It’s interesting, though, that in all those years, nobody stumbled across this before. At least we now know for sure that this is not dead code. :-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I think if I was younger, with more energy, and wasn’t blind with leber’s disease (look it up) I’d be fine™ But yeah I get the whole “exhausting” apart. I’ll join you this year, since there’s only 12 puzzles and as you say, we can “take our time” it might actually be fun! (as opposed to exhausting and pressured).

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, lots of people are welcoming this change, saying they are relieved that there are fewer puzzles. And ngl, I, too, have been very exhausted at the end of the month. It’s a lot of fun and I loved it each time, but yeah, it can be exhausting.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de This is actually a good positive change I think!

Personally, I’ll probably stretch it out over 24 days. Giving myself more time to solve each puzzle and I really want this event to last the entire month. 😅

I might even do AoC this year with the elevated stress/pressure! – The last few times I’ve tried, I’ve always felt far too much pressure and felt like a failure 😞 (mostly ya know because of my vision impairment, I couldn’t keep up!)

Advent of Code will be different this year:

https://old.reddit.com/r/adventofcode/comments/1ocwh04/changes_to_advent_of_code_starting_this_december/

There will only be 12 puzzles, i.e. only December 1 to December 12. This might make it more interesting for some people, because it’s (probably) less work and a lower chance of people getting burned out. 🤔

Personally, I’ll probably stretch it out over 24 days. Giving myself more time to solve each puzzle and I really want this event to last the entire month. 😅

Maybe this makes it more interesting for some people around here as well?

Solving this puzzle took me longer than I care to admit. It’s kind of obvious in hindsight. https://movq.de/v/83e5aa0709/MVI_8895.MOV.mp4

Day 19 was a really nice puzzle. 😊

Prime Number Mystery Is Key to Magic: The Gathering Game Strategy
Comments ⌘ Read more

The tiny avatars, as expected (because they showed normal to you too @prologic@twtxt.net), do not show under macOS’s Safari, but they do show on iOS’s Safari. It truly is a puzzle.

Aside from fetching feeds every three minutes (which kind of adds mystery to this puzzle), I think there is something else going on with the client you are using, @andros@twtxt.andros.dev. Some of those twtxts are seconds apart, making me truly stumped. 😅

Solving a “Layton Puzzle” with Prolog
Comments ⌘ Read more

Thank HN: The puzzle game I posted here 6 weeks ago got licensed by The Atlantic
Comments ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org for a brief moment I was confused, and puzzled, on how were you able to count read statuses, and messages on cache, with such high precision. Then I remembered you are using German numerical notation. LOL.

@eapl.me@eapl.me I looked at the first few puzzles and they are pretty cool so far! I haven’t actually implemented any of them, but I’m fairly certain about how I’d solve them properly. I went through some linked reference articles yesterday, they’re also really good. I will recommend this to some workmates. :-)

I always find the ‘Adven of code’ challenges difficult to follow.
i18n-puzzles.com has been a blast, but I don’t like having to think about puzzles on weekends. Like with exercise, doing it every day without rest doesn’t sound healthy.

I’d rater have a weekly challenge, at most three.

Wow, this is a nice way to practice internationalization for our systems
https://i18n-puzzles.com

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com hmm, I see all of your twtxts just fine. Now, that’s a puzzle!

A Crossword Puzzle
⌘ Read more

Silicon Valley’s top AI models are terrible at rebus wordplay puzzles
Rebus puzzles provide wordplay challenges involving both images and text, and they can confound Silicon Valley’s most powerful AI models ⌘ Read more

@xuu@txt.sour.is That was one of the horror puzzles where I had to look for help. 🥴 I modelled my solution after this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pDSooPLLkI

(I can’t explain it better than the video anyway.) It takes a second on my machine and that’s with my own hashmap implementation which is probably not the fastest one.

But when you do take the time to analyze / reverse-engineer this puzzle, then it’s really cool. Might be my favorite one so far. 😃

I’m really bad at competitive programming. 🙄 For today’s #AdventOfCode puzzle, I spent an eternity trying to understand exactly what kind of bG9naWMgY2lyY3VpdAo= the puzzle input describes – I haven’t done that in well over a decade, so I made little progress. I knew right from the start that SSBoYWQgdG8gbG9vayBmb3IgY3ljbGUgbGVuZ3RocyBhbmQgdGhlbiBmaW5kIHRoZSBMQ00K. It just didn’t occur to me to just run my program on cGFydGlhbCBpbnB1dAo= and print those numbers. 🥴 I only did that after over 4 hours (including time to debug my nasty C code) and then, boom, solution …

Puzzles
⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de so the pathfinding puzzle has arrived?

Ah, there it is. Today’s AoC puzzle is of a categeory that I find the least interesting. Gonna take my time with this one. 😴

I bet today’s AoC puzzle was the last easy one before we descend into madness. 🤣

Today’s Advent of Code puzzle was rather easy (luckily), so I spent the day doing two other things:

• Explore VGA a bit: How to draw pixels on DOS all by yourself without a library in graphics mode 12h?
  
• Explose XMS a bit: How can I use more than 640 kB / 1 MB on DOS?
  

Both are … quite awkward. 😬 For VGA, I’ll stick to using the Borland Graphics Interface for now. Mode 13h is great, all pixels are directly addressable – but it’s only 320x200. Mode 12h (640 x 480 with 16 colors) is pretty horrible to use with all the planes and what not.

As per this spec, I’ve written a small XMS example that uses 32 MB of memory:

https://movq.de/v/9ed329b401/xms.c

It works, but it appears the only way to make use of this memory is to copy data back and forth between conventional memory and extended memory. I don’t know how useful that is going to be. 🤔 But at least I know how it works now.

One thing to note about #AdventOfCode: It is really, really important to inspect your input data.

Your data could be considered part of the puzzle description. By inspecting it, you can find clues and you might find out that you can make certain assumptions.

(I mean, what’s the alternative? There could be a list of allowed assumptions in the textual descriptions, right? That wouldn’t be a lot of fun, I think, as it would give away too much information about the solution. It’s more interesting to find those clues yourself.)

Today’s AoC puzzle is a very simple problem on modern machines, but quite tricky for me: It involves a number that doesn’t fit into 32 bits. 🤔 I wonder if/how I can manage to port this beast to DOS. (I once wrote a “big int” library myself, but that was ages ago and I hardly remember it anymore.)

Day 3 of #AdventOfCode puzzle 😅

Let’s go! 🤣

Come join us! 🤗

👋 Hey you Twtxters/Yarners 👋 Let’s get a Advent of Code leaderboard going!

Join with 1093404-315fafb8 and please use your usual Twtxt feed alias/name 👌

Twtxt/Yarn AoC > Leaderboard

@xuu@txt.sour.is Ah, you went with the “scanning” approach as well. I did that, too.

It’s quite surprising to see (imho) how many people on reddit started substituting strings (one becomes 1 etc.). That makes the puzzle much harder by introducing nasty corner cases.

(Maybe I was just lucky this time to pick the correct approach right from the start. 🤣 Or maybe it’s a bit of experience from doing past AoC events …)

~22h to go for the 3rd #AdventOfCode puzzle (Day 3) 😅

Come join us!

👋 Hey you Twtxters/Yarners 👋 Let’s get a Advent of Code leaderboard going!

Join with 1093404-315fafb8 and please use your usual Twtxt feed alias/name 👌

Twtxt/Yarn AoC > Leaderboard

Un punto bastante interesante sobre la preservación de juegos ‘vieeeejos’ es tenerlos en museos y bibliotecas. El reto es poderlos disfrutar en toda su duración de una forma relativamente cómoda. ¿Tu cómo lo propondrías?

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-art-world/the-puzzle-of-putting-video-games-in-a-museum

Today’s “Where in the World” puzzle was tough. gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/witw.cgi/play

Summing the first n odd positive integers yields n^2. For twisty puzzle enthusiasts, an interesting consequence of this is that a Pyraminx has the same number of stickers per face as a Rubik’s Cube, a Master Pyraminx has the same number of stickers per face as a Rubik’s Master Cube, and so on.

@xuu@txt.sour.is, how come I can’t see your lovely mouse avatar on my pod? I know you might not have an answer; I am puzzled, and mostly thinking on loud voice here. I see your avatar fine at twtxt.net.

I saw the allegedly animated GIF @thecanine@twtxt.net uploaded gets a PNG extension, yet remains animated. I know PNG can be made animated, but I don’t think that’s what’s happening here, so I am puzzled. Let’s see how this Nyam cat looks like.

reading: starting forth. possible practice, puzzle, game, eventually dance? | https://compudanzas.net/forth.html