12
Colonal Mass Ejection
For some reason I thought that Daytime Running Lights were required in the US, but apparently they're not (they should be!). I feel like most newer cars I see have them, but I can't say I've been taking a careful inventory.
Have a theme cover! (ngl this cover is the only reason I know about this show because I didn't have cable growing up)
Proof that ancient aliens visited our ancestors to give them advanced Brazilian butt lift technology
Sure is! I've been really into music my whole life, and I'm lucky to have a good musical ear. I'm not a particularly stellar instrumentalist or vocalist or anything like that, but I enjoy playing music and in the last few years I've gotten really into music theory and analyzing music. It's in line with my interest in linguistics and reverse engineering—I just love taking things apart and seeing what makes them tick.
Mega mega THREAD THREAD 
Don't forget the immortal science of Marxism-Leninism
Sounds like a Zork command
Which makes this even funnier:
On March 18, 2020, a man pleaded guilty to threatening to assassinate the governor of New Mexico, Michelle Lujan Grisham. He cited Clyde as an inspiration for his desired attack.
Come on, dude, have some self respect!
12
Need help taking my Minesweeper game to the next level
(hexbear.net)
Ever since I got introduced to the joys of Minesweeper by Girl_DM_ I've been having a lot of fun playing it as a little timewaster. I'm specifically playing the version from Simon Tatham's lovely Portable Puzzle Collection (more specifically the Android port via F-Droid) which unlike the original Minesweeper does NOT require guessing. Most of the time, I'm well-versed enough in patterns and testing candidate solutions that I'm able to clear a 16x16 board with 99 mines in about 3-5 minutes. But on a fairly regular basis I'll run into situations where I get stuck and it seems like I'd either have to calculate an inordinate amount of possible solutions or just make a random guess, neither of which are appealing. Here's one such example:
with annotations
without annotations
There's probably some cool Minesweeper shorthand I could use to describe the constraints, but what I tried to show with my annotations is how I understand that, for each of the annotated squares, there is a mutually-exclusive binary choice (or in the case of the 3, two choices) for where a mine could be located. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, while the choices are internally mutually exclusive, it doesn't seem like there's any permutation of those choices that is invalid so I can't eliminate any possibilities. My usual strategy is to fix one choice and see if it results in a contradiction. For instance, if the other mine for the 2 is the upper choice, we can clear the lower square. That means the lower square for the 1 must be a mine, and this still leaves either of the two bottom choices as valid for the 3 (so this is a possible configuration based on these constraints).
The only remaining sections have a lot of freedom which makes them daunting to analyze. Of the remaining unanalyzed squares, from top to bottom they have 2, 2, and 3 mines remaining, respectively, which is quite a lot of options to fully check, and I can only eliminate a few heuristically (e.g. the top 3 must have at least one mine in either the east or southeast space, since otherwise the 4 to the south can't be fulfilled; the 4 must not have the remaining mines all in the east column because otherwise the 2 and 1 can't be fulfilled). I'm sure if I went through them methodically I would eventually arrive at an answer, but that's pretty tedious, so I usually just give up and generate a new board in this kind of situation.
TL;DR: am I missing some neat heuristic(s) that will allow me to either slash the possible solutions to a more manageable number or eliminate individual solutions very quickly, or is this kind of difficult spot just an inevitable outcome for some boards?
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AernaLingus
joined 3 years ago
I absolutely loved this manga as a kid—come to think of it, it's the first manga I read by a long shot, well before I even knew what manga was (this was published flopped). I ought to go back and read the whole thing, since I think I only had the first two volumes or of four.