I’m not sure if this still works as everything gets a bit more broken in every new macOS, but context menu ‘Reveal in Finder’ used to be my way to figure out where the search result was.
My latest macOS gripe is that the ability to copy text out of iTunes (something ridiculous like, say, an album description) has...just disappeared? I’d love to know what UI framework shenanigans just straight up break text selection.
Thanks, but right-clicking on every hit, one at a time, and invoking a context menu option to see where it resides would take longer than searching for, downloading, and installing a competent file-search utility like EasyFind.
I never actually thought to try such an obvious and definitely-not-ridiculous approach, and I can (happily?) confirm it works, so thanks for that. Apple are certainly leaning into Think Different with this.
I’m so glad we’ve got domain experts to write those tricky things like left-pad for us.
On a more serious note, I do think that the maintenance aspect is a differentiator, and that if it’s something that you end up committing to your codebase then ownership and accountability falls to you. Externally sourced libraries and frameworks ultimately have different owners.
I'm reminded of the recent "vibe coded" OCaml fiasco[1].
In particular, the PR author's response to this question:
> Here's my question: why did the files that you submitted name Mark Shinwell as the author?
> > Beats me. AI decided to do so and I didn't question it.
The same author submitted a similar PR to Julia as well. Both were closed in-part due to the significant maintenance burden these entirely LLM-written PR's would create.
> This humongous amount of code is hard to review, and very lightly tested. (You are only testing that basic functionality works.) Inevitably the code will be full of problems, and we (the maintainers of the compiler) will have to pay the cost of fixing them. But maintaining large pieces of plausible-in-general-but-weird-in-the-details code is a large burden.
Setting aside the significant volume of code being committed at once (13K+ lines in the OCaml example), the maintainers would have to review code even the PR author didn't review - and would likely fall into the same trap many of us have found ourselves in while reviewing LLM-generated code... "Am I an idiot or is this code broken? I must be missing something obvious..." (followed by wasted time and effort).
The PR author even admitted they know little about compilers - making them unqualified to review the LLM-generated code.
I’ve long suspected that my company’s previous Head of Architecture was a double agent, actually working for a competitor. I’ve never seen anyone create so much process that likely looks good to the board while slowing every single person down, yet never actively preventing anyone from doing anything.
I mean, it’s either that or they were just incompetent, and honestly the double-agent theory is more fun. Although, Hanlon’s Razor and all...
Personally I make sure to always carry around a string and some scissors, so any time I need an arbitrary measurement I can just cut the string to the length of the thing I want to measure (making sure to label it in case of multiple required measurements), then measure the cut string later. Simple.
Although I still haven't figured out the best way to do that in reverse (when someone wants a specific measurement and I cut the string from that number), though I was considering a scheme where I start with strings of known length up-front then repeatedly cut successive halves until I converge on the desired number, accounting for cut accuracy and require precision.
Maybe you could start off with a long string and then mark off its midpoint, the midpoints of the halves, and so on. Then you wouldn't have to cut a new string every time you want to measure something.
When working on a project where you need a bunch of things to be the same, you take a stick and mark on it at various points the dimensions you're using -- when working on a house, it might be things like the heights of outlet boxes and switches, the width and height of rough opening for doors, the height of window sills, etc etc.
Then, you just use the stick as the reference, using the marking for outlets to position all of the outlets instead of measuring the height of the floor in inches or millimeters or cubits or whatever each time. It's kind of like a measuring jig.
("Measure once, cut twice" is a superior methodology which has been unfairly maligned for generations.)
This works fantastic for building furniture as well, where the absolute dimension doesn’t matter as much as all of the pieces having matching dimensions. A cabinet with drawers, for example. The story stick captures the spacing between the drawers, the width of the drawer, the slightly smaller height of the drawer face, etc.
It feels really imprecise the first time you set the fence on a table saw based on a marking on a stick instead of a precise specific value but the results are hard to argue with.
With carpentry in particular, it is extremely powerful to make multiple cuts at the same time -- set a fence once and then cut everything that needs to match at the same time, or stack multiple pieces together, or cut a board to length before ripping it into several pieces that need identical lengths.
Sure, check your measurements to be sure they're correct, but the more times you can cut based on the same measurement, the less measurement error can creep in.
Was going to mention that too. 100% agree. If I mess up and end up needing to make matching cuts later on, I'll often set the fence using one of the existing pieces too instead of trying to re-measure. The story stick works great but lining up the teeth on the blade with the cut edge of an existing piece works fabulously well.
A similar strategy I've used when I've known that there was going to be cuts that I couldn't sequence like that is to cut "as built" story sticks with scrap dimensional lumber and write what they are right on the board.
What, and use the same thing to measure stuff anytime you measure something? Like that's ever gonna catch on! Next you're gonna tell me to use my lower arm as a measuring stick!
The span from my thumb to my pinky in a “measuring position” is 20 cm (and is easily repeated by moving the thumb to the pinky and then stretching out the pinky again). The length of my “thumbs up” hand is 16 cm. The width of my fist is 10 cm. The length of my pinky is 6 cm. The width of my thumb is 2 cm. This allows me to estimate distances between ~2 m and 2 cm pretty well. Knowing your foot/shoe length also comes handy sometimes.
> algorithmically find the optimal solution for this kind of problem for much bigger grids.
Great, now I've been double nerd-sniped - once for the thing itself and another for 'What would an optimiser for this look like? Graph cuts? SAT/SMT? [AC]SP?'
I'd bet it's NP-hard. The standard reduction to a flow problem only tells you if a cut exists (by min-cut max-flow duality), but here we want the cut of size at most N that maximizes enclosed area.
The Leetcode version of this is "find articulation points", which is just a DFS, but it's less general than what is presented here.
> It's condescending to the users and feels like a power trip.
condescending (adjective): having or showing an attitude of patronizing superiority.
I don't really see how a once-a-day puzzle is condescending, unless it's a "You can't be trusted to regulate yourself so I'll do it for you" type thing. Adding a dictionary definition like above, however, probably is condescending :)
But I like the one-a-day format because, as other comments have said, you can spend an entire day with just one puzzle feeling important (relative to things that are important).
“IQuest-Coder was a rat in a maze. And I gave it one way out. To escape, it would have to use self-awareness, imagination, manipulation, git checkout. Now, if that isn't true AI, what the fuck is?”
Why not buy lottery tickets? The only thing smaller than the ridiculously small chance of winning is absolute zero, from never playing. Bad odds are still odds :)
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