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My coping mechanisms for November 2024
(30 Nov at 23:20) |
SON OF A ...! You can tell American politics is having a deleterious effect on me because of two behaviors reflecting low mood: In a late-night Wikipedia session I let myself get nerd-sniped into trying to solve an old unsolved geometry problem that's a distraction from my already needless project that is well underway. I'll save the details for a later post or video, but something struck me as "that doesn't sound like it should be hard" (of course false, but that means there's an opportunity for me to improve my intuitions; a humility response) but also "perhaps no good programmer with a GeForce 4090 has ever tried this in the history of humanity" (possibly true; a hubris response) and so two weekends later I've confirmed that the problem is indeed hard.
Behavior two is I bought Call Of Duty Black Ops 6. It's not just the sixth Call of Duty, it's the sixth Black Ops game. Multiplayer is an artless mess of obvious cheating and cash-4-hats, but pretty soon I will be maximum level and I can put it to rest. The single-player campaign seems fine, at least. I know better than to declare that I'm done with these kinds of games, but I do wish to be. Before that I played Arranger, which might be the polar opposite! It's cozy puzzle/adventure game where you're shifting around the grid as you move (toroidal), to the dismay of everyone else who is living like normal grid-dwellers. The puzzles were pretty easy (think "Zelda shrine") but there were plenty of good ideas to keep me interested. I really liked the soundtrack, which when I bought it on Bandcamp is by a guy who calls himself "7omas", and I thought briefly of a trademark lawsuit but then thought more like "parallel universe," because I would rather that the thoughts have positive valence. I also finally played Inscryption, which was very cool. It's not the polar opposite of Arranger nor Call of Duty Black Ops 6, but it is definitely not "cozy." At least in this game, the cheating is narratively valid!
Another mood-leavening distraction was that I participated in a group distributed-Secret-Santa algorithm with Matt Parker and some other YouTube celebrities. Unless the chaos energy of the in-algorithm logistics were a preview of the collecting and assembling footage logistics (which, this is a bunch of S-tier professional video people—present company excepted—so you'd think not? But on the other hand, I did end up shorting DropBox after a brief encounter) then there should be a video (on standupmaths) in time for happy Honda-days, so be on the lookout for that!
Lastly, my Christmas-colored square from post #1234 looks almost exactly the same this month, but I am quiet deep into a fancy way of turning a few more pixels red. I think that is at least an interesting enough story for a Tom Academy video if it works. I just gotta keep myself from staying up late reading Wikipedia. |  |
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Were you trying to find eight points in a Euclidean plane with pairwise integer distances, no three on a line and no four on a circle? Trying to find the smallest number of points on the Euclidean plane that can't be covered by any number of disjoint unit disks?
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thanks for your blog, its always a delight.
have you seen this video yet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNMWkD5VsZ8 |
Thank you for your post, Tom!
I felt something reading it. I am not a scraper or AI. |
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