The complaint that these algorithms aren't "realistic" is ostensibly valid, but you could just as well aim that cannon at 95%+ of math research too. Complexity theory is interesting and fun. Isn't that enough?

If that's true, there may not have been many at Riot who were super passionate about it. Obviously Ghostcrawler was but was probably spread very thin.

O(n) is: "there exists a K such that, for sufficiently large n, K*n is always larger".

o(n) is: "for every K, for sufficiently large n, K*n is always larger". (So o(2n+1) and o(2n) and o(n) are the same thing.)

That said -- like The Witness, OotSS also reaches for a message beyond just its mechanics. In this case, it focuses on how a small number of mechanics interacting can produce a combinatorial explosion of situations; the role of the puzzle designer in surfacing "interesting" situations; the relationship between designer and player; and the way we pass an understanding of design on to the next generation.

I appreciate the attempt, but I thought it fell far short of The Witness; it didn't really saying anything insightful about the themes and also didn't even hint at them until you're 30+ hours in.

The point of e.g. art isn't just to produce a finished piece, so people may care about more than the end result, making AI replacement of human artists more contentious.

Tao is arguing that the point of math is also not just to produce solutions to problems.

I wonder: maybe the state is overly compressed? Could it speed things up to store (boxes, [every position the keeper can reach without pushing]) rather than (boxes, representative keeper position), so we can reduce recomputation of the keeper walking around?

I wonder: maybe A* is counterproductive, as obvious heuristics have traps? Maybe BFS is better?

I wonder: the search doesn't actually "skip over" walking states, it just hides them in the processing of each element in the queue, so adding them to the queue might actually be faster?

I wonder: are there any other simple pruning techniques that you could incorporate? Any learnings from state-of-the-art Sokoban solvers, like this one? -- https://ieee-cog.org/2020/papers/paper_44.pdf

Many interesting questions... sadly, the webpage is written by AI, so there's zero discussion of these tradeoffs, future avenues, or rejected ideas, in favor of meaningless self-congratulatory copy about the "provable optimum" and silly claims like a bucket queue being allocation-free.

AI hair often doesn't follow proper "form" and looks like overcomplicated, random tufts that can clash and overlap. It might not be obvious on a first glance, but you can learn to tell the difference pretty quickly.

For example, AI has made zero progress in the last few years in surpassing professionals at art or writing. Its prompt-following skill is much better, and sure, it can render hands and text now, but its artistic sensibility is completely stagnant.

Since you asked for feedback: in terms of usability, I found the 'seek next' and 'seek previous' buttons confusing, since they're positioned left/right but control motion up/down, and even switch their direction based on loop. (This is because "forward" and "back" also change based on loop -- an indicator for that would help.) Adding navigation via mouse wheel would be perfect here too.

Sorry to ask for even more, but I'd personally love to see door opening / door closing sounds added (along with 'ドアが閉まります' and the alarm) to fully round out the soundscape.

Don't mean to be too picky! -- it's very enjoyable as is.

Maybe it's because (unlike others in the VN space) it totally eschews unusual settings, gimmicks, or flashy set pieces to sell itself... I only bought it because I liked the tidbits of story in Shenzhen and Infinifactory, by the same author. Every part of it is unbelievably strong though.

The project is cool! It’s a simple visual graph layout system for making your own clock.

We have to draw the line somewhere with art, of course, and that usually comes down to a combination of what consumers value, and broader perceived cultural merit. Nobody really cares about the well-being of artists who specialize in making pretty paper airplanes, or drawing pictures using only the MSPaint pencil brush.

I think the audience, not the tools, deserve the most scrutiny here. Look around at this very thread, and all the people defending what the LLM wrote. Their feelings can't be argued with. But they make me feel sad and alienated, because I see a vast difference, so vast and so obvious, and they see none at all.

In the future, perhaps people will enjoy LLM work -- genuinely enjoy it -- as much as I've enjoyed Vonnegut or more. It may be the inevitable result of a broader cultural shift away from reading and writing. I guess with time, maybe we'll find out how valuable it actually is to have a strong command of one's language... I imagine, at least, people today are much better at other things to compensate.

Today, the demonic vice of the old is not that they are hard and demanding on the youth — instead they do not demand enough from us, and they cannot quite believe that we have not lived up to the little they have demanded. They think too well of our generation.

Without defending the quality of the rest of the essay, it's a great start. LLMs today could never match it.