Hacker News: boothby

New comment by boothby in "Solving Wordle using information theory"

boothby — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 22:35:10 +0000

That's a typo, I meant CPU! I work with quantum computers, where we do discuss QPU (quantum processing unit) time, but that's not how I did this.

New comment by boothby in "Solving Wordle using information theory"

boothby — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 18:05:02 +0000

This is why I explicitly mentioned that in my puzzle ethics. I reject that as a valid solve.

(And amusingly I said "qpu time" when I meant CPU)

New comment by boothby in "Solving Wordle using information theory"

boothby — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 16:00:09 +0000

I crushed wordle within a few days of its popularity entering my sphere. It was pretty easy to brute-force a decision tree minimizing the average number of guesses using a lowly python script and a few days of qpu time.

Don't Wordle[1] is significantly more interesting; I've got a solver but the maximum score takes my lowly python script upwards of a day (per day) to solve using brute force. For now, I solve it with a heuristic that terminates in about 20 minutes. My old wordle solver was useful to find a good but suboptimal tree for identifying the answer in 5 undos or less.

Today:

  Don't Wordle 1491 - SURVIVED
  Hooray! I didn't Wordle today!
  ..... 8089
  ..... 4647
  ..... 2492
  ..... 1026
  .Y... 231
  ..G.. 100
  Undos used: 3

    100 words remaining
  x 10 unused letters
  = 1000 total score

My puzzle ethics are: you can and should download the dictionaries of valid answers and valid guesses, you're allowed to keep them separate, but you must not keep the list of answers in its original order.

[1] https://dontwordle.com/

New comment by boothby in "My Mathematical Regression"

boothby — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 22:43:33 +0000

A great many real world problems have, at their crux, a mathematical problem. A mathematician paired with a subject matter expert can be powerful indeed when each sees deeply into the others' blind spots. But, I've heard statements like yours a lot over the years: assuming mathematicians aren't fully aware of the limitations of what you think math is.

New comment by boothby in "Leave a Trace"

boothby — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 14:45:57 +0000

If you're going to strike up conversation with strangers, it's best if you make it easy for them. If you're asking for a joke, you're making it easy on yourself and setting a bar for them. I'm a jokester but I don't have a good repertoire of jokes on hand -- I respond to banter. So if you ask me if I have a joke, I often just sputter and throw out the last bad pun somebody shared with me.

Make a joke yourself, if you're feeling funny. But be warned... a stranger once asked me why I was going on a trip. I was visiting my dad who was presently in surgery for cancer that would go on to end his life. I was too emotional to answer with anything but the truth. I certainly wasn't going to respond well to humor.

New comment by boothby in "Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society"

boothby — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 19:28:18 +0000

If tech isn't special, why are nine of the ten richest Americans in tech?

New comment by boothby in "Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society"

boothby — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 19:08:21 +0000

> The math underlying the models is widely known, and there are tons of competitors, including foreign competitors.

Foreign militaries investing in autonomous warfare does not assuage my concerns about my country investing in autonomous warfare.

Also, have you been paying attention to median wages vs median CEO wages since the 1960s? The benefits of computing really have gone to the captains of industry.

New comment by boothby in "DOJ claims xAI's gas turbines are a matter of 'national and energy security'"

boothby — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 06:06:24 +0000

Timnit Gebru was laughed out of town for overlooking research into making LLMs more energy efficient. By the logic used to drag her through the mud, Musk must be a total idiot to be buying so much fossil fuel capacity. Truly, nobody could see this coming. Must be 5d chess.

New comment by boothby in "SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B"

boothby — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 15:17:58 +0000

>> AI products worth $26 trillion, roughly equivalent to U.S. GDP."

> This is unhinged.

The only way for Musk to become a quadrillionaire is hyperinflation. And a week later, we'll be quadrillionaires too!

New comment by boothby in "Can Europe train a frontier AI model on the compute it owns?"

boothby — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 16:59:51 +0000

> What does it say about progress that the same laws that protect human rights also stifle innovation?

Innovative methods to destroy human life are "stifled" by measures intended to preserve human life. What to you mean by "progress" -- the betterment of the human condition, or the enrichment of the few and powerful?

New comment by boothby in "Why does paper fold so well?"

boothby — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 15:43:10 +0000

If anybody has ever tried folding a very large paper (or, bedsheets, tarps, etc), they'll realize the wisdom of this comment. Our intuition from folding paper on the order of several to tens of centimetres does not scale to arbitrary size and precision. Paper is relatively rigid, but its rigidity is finite and ensuring local-to-global flatness becomes a painstaking endeavour.

New comment by boothby in "Why does paper fold so well?"

boothby — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 15:39:37 +0000

It depends what you need that line for -- if you're projecting onto a wall, that sag matters. If you're projecting onto the ground, it doesn't.

New comment by boothby in "Show HN: 3D print Z reinforcement via injected loops"

boothby — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 20:44:13 +0000

I had the same thought -- with a checkerboard pattern of 1:1:2 "brick" voids where each brick would be surrounded by bricks of a differing offset, one could conceivably calibrate the injection step and the print might have less propensity to cleave along xy planes. But, given the complexity of that calibration (and need for a high-flow head) I'd rather use the brick infill available today.

New comment by boothby in "Law Enforcement's "Warrior" Problem (2015)"

boothby — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 19:59:14 +0000

> a land border with a large continent that has a lot of guns and violence and criminality

That's a curious perception indeed, given that guns predominantly flow from the US to Mexico and not the other way around, and guns in Mexico are of mostly US origin.

New comment by boothby in "Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows"

boothby — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 05:32:57 +0000

As in, these kids are crushing tiktok reels?

New comment by boothby in "War Crimes Seem to Be Official US Policy Now"

boothby — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 14:58:29 +0000

There are degrees to these things. A nation's leader repeatedly and explicitly declaring intent to commit genocide is makes that "lift" an extremely light one.

New comment by boothby in "Anthropic/OpenAI may be spending more than $1000 for every $100 you pay them"

boothby — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 15:49:27 +0000

Concretely, I know it's happening in the Vancouver BC school district, and thankfully many students are protesting. Probably many more places.

New comment by boothby in "Anthropic/OpenAI may be spending more than $1000 for every $100 you pay them"

boothby — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 13:48:23 +0000

Teachers in public schools are being told to use AI in their curriculum. In some cases, this means students are being taught not to think (regardless of the intent of the lesson). When prices make this curriculum untenable but the kids already depend on it, that rugpull is going to severely harm a generation of kids whose education was already disturbed in 2020.

New comment by boothby in "You Can Run"

boothby — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 18:28:06 +0000

My favorite (dys|u)topian setting; universal child removal to robo-nurseries, gets closer to implementable every day.

New comment by boothby in "Cessation of public development of Kefir C compiler"

boothby — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 18:11:29 +0000

Yes, and obviously: bots crushing servers in strict contravention of the robots.txt rules.