nojs's comments

On: Making Explainable Minesweeper

[nojs]

The first example is not ambiguous. You can solve it starting at the bottom left

[red369 → nojs]

Do you mean the first screenshot of Windows Minesweeper (the left half of ems02.png)?

Could you explain how? I haven't played a huge amount of Minesweeper, but I can't see how that can be solved without risk/luck.

[nojs → red369]

On the left side, the 1 at the bottom means that the third from the bottom must be a mine (since the 2 can't point to the bottom two). The 1 touching that mine then excludes a bunch more, and that's sufficient to solve the rest.

[red369 → nojs]

Thanks - I finally saw it just as you replied. I agree that it looks like that mine layout is the only possible one which satisfies the vertical 1,2,1 boxes. I need to play more :)

[greentec → nojs]

Thank you. I didn't see that!

On: The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million

[nojs]

This was the plot of a Monk episode if I recall correctly, except jelly beans

On: Why email startups fail

[nojs]

It’s AI slop

On: Claude Code now supports hooks

[nojs]

    Exit Code 2 Behavior
    PreToolUse - Blocks the tool call, shows error to Claude

This is great, it means you can set up complex concrete rules about commands CC is allowed to run (and with what arguments), rather than trying to coax these via CLAUDE.md.

E.g. you can allow

    docker compose exec django python manage.py test

but prevent

    docker compose exec django python manage.py makemigrations

[rco8786 → nojs]

You can already do this in .Claude/settings.json

[paulhodge → rco8786]

That's limited to simple string matching with `*` so it can't handle anything complex.

[nojs → rco8786]

Ah you’re right, but for more complex logic it’s useful to be able to run it through a custom script

On: Gemini CLI

[nojs]

The best approach is never to get remotely close to the point where it auto-compacts. Type /clear often, and set up docs, macros etc to make it easy to built the context you need for new tasks quickly.

If you see that 20% remaining warning, something has gone badly wrong and results will probably not get better until you clear the context and start again.

On: iPhone customers upset by Apple Wallet ad pushing F1 movie

[nojs]

Yeah, it’s basically the “I accidentally bumped my ear buds” track

On: Is there a half-life for the success rates of AI agents?

[nojs]

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-claude-bliss-attractor

On: Is there a half-life for the success rates of AI agents?

[nojs]

> decided to delete the test to make the test suite pass

At least that’s easy to catch. It’s often more insidious like “if len(custom_objects) > 10:” or “if object_name == ‘abc’” buried deep in the function, for the sole purpose of making one stubborn test pass.

On: Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

[nojs]

This does not contradict the article - it may be true, and yet not significantly more productive, because of the increased review burden.

On: The international standard for identifying postal items

[nojs]

I’m surprised this article didn’t mention the LPC code [1]

1. https://youtu.be/jPhXVrp0_oI