Which browser are you playing in? For me I find it works smoothly in everything except firefox mobile, and I'm just on an M4 Air, so you've got way more compute.
I fixed the text shaving. Thanks for the feedback!
I actually initially envisioned this the way you described with monospaced font and one-letter-per-square, but I found that it wasn't possible because the puzzle became prohibitively wide to such a disproportionate extent that it A. couldn't fit on a mobile screen, B. looked very odd, C. involved so many pieces that the challenge was elevated to a tedious level.
You're totally right about the edges, I just fixed it so that the letters overlap the tile edges, which should help a lot with that issue. Thanks for the feedback! It's a little less clean-looking, I think, but it's worth it for the practical benefit. If anyone has an idea for a better solution, I'd be interested to hear it.
I'll take a look at free positioning pieces outside the board too, but I just want to give that a little more thought.
One small improvement IMO would be to display the pieces at the same scale as the board. It's more difficult to visualize potential positions while the pieces are at a smaller scale than the gaps they could potentially occupy.
BTW- This was really fun to solve! (And I rarely play games or solve puzzles.) Thanks for sharing it!
Yeah I haven't been able to get it to perform smoothly in mobile firefox. It works well in mobile chrome or any desktop browser but mobile firefox specifically has been an issue I haven't had much luck resolving yet. Sorry about that! I use mobile FF too so I'd love to figure out the cause.
I vouch for this story, personally. I love it. I consider it a classic among science fiction novellas.
It does include some brutal sadomasochism with graphic torture, that's true, and that's why it isn't better known. If that part bothers you, which is fair, I would skim past it. The story overall is quite worth it
Years and years ago I saw this story on k5 when it came out and never read it -- but from commentary I always thought was some sort of hard sci-fi exploration of what happens when we get AGI/ASI.
So all these years later AI is real, I see the story again, and I figure, hey, why not read it. And how very surprised I was to find out it's basically a horny kink story with a little bit of AI/SF window dressing!
Tbh the torture scenes are not nearly as disturbing as the underage incest. It's like "Saw" vs. a pedo flick from the 70s. Especially weird since the latter is portrayed like some kind of innocent ideal.
It's frustrating because apart from those (awful) aspects the story is quite thoughtful and compelling. I always recommend people skip the final chapter since the resulting existential cliffhanger is far better than the bizarre last-minute swerve into gratuitous sex abuse.
> the underage incest [...] Especially weird since the latter is portrayed like some kind of innocent ideal.
(Potential spoilers to the story ahead) Are you talking specifically about the "re-population" stuff from the ending? It was many years I last read it, but I seem to recall that there was hesitation and stuff involved, together with "This is literally the only way to re-populate since we're just two people" basically, not sure what other direction it could have gone into, unless you'd just skip describing it completely. But maybe I misremember (or my brain subconsciously suppress my memory) more of the same horrible stuff from the story?
Aside from it being biologically impossible to repopulate from a single couple, it was not really portrayed ambiguously. I don't care to reread it, but from what I remember, the main protagonist was the driving force behind it, grooms her own (single-digit-age?) daughter into the idea, who then sleeps with her own father in graphic detail. He is a little hesitant at first, but relents almost immediately, and this is implied to be a good thing. Cue decades of continued child-incest and inbreeding.
Putting the characters in that situation and resolving it the explicit way he did was a deliberate choice the author makes -- it didn't have to be that way.
— Spoilers, if you’ve not read this and yet are still reading this comment chain
I guess the grooming may start earlier, it’s not really discussed and it’s a bit ambiguous as to when that started
> but relents almost immediately,
Physically, at the time, though this is something they’ve argued about for 6 years.
It’s not a passage I particularly care for, and it could have been less explicit but then I’m mixed on how that would change the story. I’ve just finished it and it’s certainly an interesting sci-fi story.
Does it provide a strange contrast to the other things?
There’s disgusting horrors inflicted by terrible people but to the willing (but are they only willing due to what was done to them before, by PI?).
Deliberate and horrible suffering of a single person caused for minor gain.
There’s calm destruction of trillions, unfeeling, for protection out of a measure of harms and trying to protect one set. There’s the good goal or perhaps just self indulgent goal that led to that too.
There’s the deliberate killing of trillions with glee at breaking things for one persons view of humanity. There’s the deliberate doing of this by the original catalyst, but with less clear direction. Perhaps a lack of logic and more boredom?
And yet this, done for improving survival chances of a group, feels over the line. I don’t disagree that it is quite disgusting but I do find it interesting at that being my reaction given what else has been done up to this point.
I take your point, but for me at least the disgust is more in the way the different situations are used (and characterized) by the author.
Freezing all alien life is obviously horrifying, and Caroline says as much. It's not as bad as genocide but is treated as nearly as bad.
Flipping the table on Cyberspace is more ambiguous -- it might free those other species on the one hand, but might destroy all life on the other. Lawrence is far more resistant here (though he does eventually relent). But at least in this case the dilemma serves to hammer home the central point of the story: that life is given meaning by challenge and striving and that removing all limits is the existential equivalent of mainlining heroin. It's a provocative idea, but there's at least a point to it.
The incest stuff, though, is completely unnecessary. There's no reason why breaking Prime Intellect would result in the two of them (and only the two of them) existing in an empty world. It's a totally artificial scenario, seemingly contrived to set up an excuse for endless incest, even though that wouldn't work biologically. It might make sense if there were some sort purpose for it, or if it were treated as a horrifying dilemma. But he portrays it as this sweetly innocent thing that is primal and right, and it's shown to work flawlessly to set up a harmonious and healthy society superior to both the old world and what Prime Intellect built.
Again, I love most of the story and revisit it every few years, but this ending is thinly-veiled fetish gratification with no redeeming value.
My issue was that the violence and incest were one of the main drivers of the story. It felt like reading some sex novela that happens to have some great scifi elements rather than the other way around.
>It appeared to listen intently as a man in a cleric's uniform railed. "God made all intelligent creatures," the man was saying in a powerful voice. "You may have the apprearance of thinking, but you are really just parroting the responses taught you by that man there." He pointed at Lawrence.
I put this novella into the same bucket as the altered carbon books. So glad I read them, absolutely packed with weird ideas, but I will probably never have the stomach to revisit them.
I used to admire that guy. I don't understand why anyone still works at Basecamp with posts like this to be honest. How do people justify it to themselves? Maybe it's just harder to switch jobs now with AI, I don't know.
To empathize a bit with the Basecamp employees, DHH has sort of slowly worked his way into the gutter racism that he displays openly now.
Like a lot of his peers, the first Trump administration seemed to unlock a permission structure to be increasingly reactionary in public, facilitated by the overt political bias of Musk's X. We've now reached a point where this sort of "vice signaling" is a great way to gain clout in the overtly nativist tech bro niche in the US.
Which is to say, he wasn't always like this, and it feels like each new blog post is getting worse in a way that, if I were at Basecamp, I might have initially overlooked as the frog was slowly boiled.
HN is full, absolutely rampant, with bots. Lotta reasons, e.g. hyping the latest YC unicorn, etc.
influencing wealthy and influential tech folks is very much a serious concern, since they're often online and high extra hard with regards to the 1-9-90 rule
Maybe a lot of people actually agree with him, and would rather we expect more of people, rather than simply defining criminal activity as an unconscious effect of one's being somehow oppressed, or one's great-great-grandparents being oppressed, or whatever.
The culture in question have been infamous for centuries for their value system which is incompatible with most others. Just as it's okay for devout Islamists to find the whole American value system disgusting and want nothing to do with it, it's okay for DHH and other Westerners to find the Roma value system disgusting. It's a belief system they choose, it's not something like skin that people cannot change.
In America there's a lot of ethical ambiguity given how recently most current residents' ancestors arrived. But in Denmark? Did the Roma build that society? (Possible) EU citizenship aside, I find it hard to judge Danes who feel that ethically, they don't have a right to degrade that society with crime and vagrancy. Same as I don't blame English people who don't like certain things going on there.
The article being referred to says "When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them" - it doesn't say "you deport everyone of that race," it's about the people causing problems. If you allow literally any behavior, no matter how antisocial, bad actors will ruin everything for everyone. Only the most obtuse person doesn't recognize the truth of that, deep down.
By that logic, how can we even justify finding Nazi ideology disgusting? "Sure, a lot of Nazis committed a ton of heinous crimes, and their value system told them it was good and proper to do so, but some of them are probably nice people who didn't commit murder!"
To be clear my point is that not all cultures are equally good - due to their different value systems. Pretending they are always leads to the most harmful, unfair, and cruel ones taking advantage of the most trusting ones.
Again, nobody here is arguing for harming anyone, nor for taking any action at all towards those of that ancestry that aren't doing the crimes. But I'd be all for deporting those that do.
Which is where, exactly, for the people in question? i.e. what is the legal home country for most Roma in Denmark? Given folks like DHH have such strong opinions about this, I would expect they should be able to detail the specifics of the mass deportation plan they're proposing!
Presumably, if they are immigrants, then they have a passport and a legal home country. I agree with you that mass deportation (i.e. deportation of a whole group not based on individual guilt or innocence) is bad. Just saying that this particular argument isn't relevant.
Pardon my skepticism, but cursory web searching and LLM prompting is giving me responses like "a significant portion of the European Roma population faces high rates of statelessness or lacks basic civil documents", while citing real website articles with titles such as "Many Roma in Europe are stateless and live outside social protection".
That aligns 100% with things I've read previously, but that said, I'm not terribly well-informed on the topic and maybe I'm entirely wrong here. Do you have any links/info that support what you're saying?
Being literally stateless is not the same as not having a passport. (My father-in-law doesn't have one, but he's a perfectly respectable citizen!) Being in a foreign country without a passport is also not being stateless - it may well correspond to being an illegal immigrant, however.
It is quite hard to be made stateless. You have to be born in a very unlucky place.
All of this means that immigrants can be deported to their country of origin.
The articles I read yesterday indicated that it would be quite difficult to determine country of origin in many cases, due to complete lack of official identity documentation.
But somebody who comes into a country must know where they come from! So you can just ask them. If they refuse to say, then that seems like a them problem, no?
I don’t know what proportion of gypsies are literally stateless… though like you I can ask ChatGPT. So I did, and it gave lots of links and an answer of “well under 1%”: https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6a6d93888f208191a02d5e6edd0ceea9
Regardless of whether they are "truly" stateless, if they have no identity documentation -- which your AI answer repeatedly indicates is a situation applying to a larger number of Roma -- and they refuse to say where they're from (or they say they're from that country; or they name a country that isn't where they're from; or the named country refuses to take them) then once again, where are they being deported to exactly?
My point with all this is that it is VERY important to ask specific questions of the folks like DHH who are promoting mass deportation plans, because otherwise having public support for this kind of thing is exactly how you end up with people getting sent to concentration camps (or worse). They're demanding "just deport them!" while hand-waving away even the most basic details of what that might mean, and simultaneously making disturbing analogies to shooting wolves. It's not hard to connect the dots here.
As for "That seems like a them problem"... For a directly analogous situation currently happening in the world, consider all the people the US has blindly deported to the CECOT prison in El Salvador. Is that a "them problem" too, where a large number of undocumented Venezuelan migrants with tattoos are being sent to a concentration camp for gang members in an entirely different country?
The Nazis are defined by their ideology. Gypsies are an ethnicity; judging them all by the actions of some is unfair. That doesn't mean you can't ever criticize another culture. But it does seem obvious that crimes committed by gypsies, no matter how serious, pale compared to the past crimes committed against them.
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