I found this solution (actually, it's 4 solutions, each B is a different Bishop placement and at the same time it's the only 4 spots on the board not covered by queens):
I started with 4 queens placed symmetrically on c7,g6,f2,b3, which covers everything except corners. Then I shifted all of them diagonally, i.e. to d6,h5,g1,c2. And it turns out, then only a8 and b7 are not covered, which can be easily solved by placing bishop anywhere at diagonal, e.g. h1.
I wonder how reliable this is. Will AWS lightsail continue to work indefinitely for free? What if AWS changes the system in some way? What if the person hosting my locality becomes unavailable?
I suppose you can use any nameserver you like, the only problem is it’ll be a PITA to change it.
(I’ve recently registered a .bt domain by filling out a PDF form, hand-signing it, scanning and sending to a Bhutan Telecom admin. Changing a nameserver would probably be a similar procedure now, and involves a one-time fee if I recall correctly.)
I laughed when I read this, but there is something to it. I like to say "intellectual relaxation" or take a break. Sometimes getting up from your desk to do some mindless admin task like photocopy a document for HR can free up your mind. If we were line workers at a factory, this would be mandated breaks. Business/Financial newspapers and factory executives love the old quote: "With robots, they never need a break, never need holiday, and can work 24x7." With the advent of agentic LLMs, a tiny fraction of that reality is leaking into the white collar world.
It's definitely theoretically possible, but not there yet. I use cursor, claude (opus 4.7), and several proprietary LLMs/LLM frameworks at my job. The institutional knowledge I have wouldn't fit in the context window, and AIs lack my mental index/intuition of where to look for answers. When my AI makes a PR, I generally have to make some important changes, without which it's solution would be fundamentally broken. AI also cannot be trusted to make the right business tradeoff decisions.
Many things at my software engineering job are like this, which require constantly changing human institutional knowledge that is almost always undocumented, or changing so quickly that it isn't relevant anymore. By the time you decide to automate it, the process changes. Tribal knowledge used to be something I hated seeing senior engineers keeping to themselves, but now it seems like an asset.
Can't access the paper, but I'm curious how they measured statistical significance. I wonder how much to interpret the result as "we didn't measure any effect" (which is a largely meaningless conclusion) versus "no effect exists." The latter wouldn't be a rigorous statement, but it seems to be the conclusion we are being led towards.
As someone who has never heard of most of these concepts before (plane trees, catalan numbers, ballot sequences, depth vectors), I found the question "Can you think of a way to efficiently generate a random plane tree?" confusing, and I only understood the problem being solved by first trying to understand the solution. After reading through, it seems like it's asking about generating a random plane tree drawn from a uniform distribution of all possible plane trees with a given number of nodes? Cool idea once I understood it though!
Do you have a source for GDP/kWh? Last time I was curious I dumped some raw stats (copied from wikipedia) into excel and venezuela was among the bottom three. I recall being surprised that there wasn't any strong correlation between GDP/kWh and any other obvious metric like technological development, population, land size, climate, etc.
This is a bit of a tangent, but cookie consent dialogs have exhausted my will to navigate anything blocking the content I care about. If I go to a new website and encounter any sort of popup, modal, or large banner, I will reflexively feel an urge to close the page unless there is an obvious dismiss button. I often need to see the content on the page and resign myself to navigating the dialog, but just as often I decide the content wasn't important anyways and close the page in <1 second.
Yeah, cookie banners, newsletter signups, “please disable your adblocker”, etc are the ultimate “hmm maybe I’ll just do something else” reality check for me.
Not only do I close the page but I typically lose interest in whatever I may have wanted to do on that page in the first place, and generally just put my phone down or close my laptop and do something else.
The web basically died several years ago for me. It was fun while it lasted.
The leftmost icon on my browser toolbar is the "kill sticky" bookmarklet (https://github.com/t-mart/kill-sticky). I grew tired of sites hiding the dismiss buttons or omitting them entirely, so anytime something pops up on the page, I instinctively click that. Works on the vast majority of sites.
It's worth noting that the "obvious dismiss button" that OP allows for is a legal requirement. By law rejecting cookies has to be just as easy as accepting them
Of course in reality enforcement of this is non-existent. Just yesterday I had an especially egregious popup where dismissing it required about 7 button presses (selecting "other options", then manually toggling on 5 categories of use before I was allowed to click "save settings")
That requires deciding which element to zap, which takes more brainpower than I'm willing to invest into a webpage that doesn't want to show me its content. Ctrl+W works every time.
Chrome installs additional software that 99% of users don't use. It can intercept and modify code running on your computer, and spies on all network requests. Hackers use it to analyze potential vulnerabilities. 90% of users aren't even aware that it exists!
I experience similar, but I'm pretty sure it's just rest and a fresh mind, not overnight learning/thinking. When I'm bashing my head against a wall, I'm stuck in a local optimum, and sleeping lets me reset and try something new that often works better (and I execute it better since I'm not as tired).
