FWIW, day 03 and day 04 where solved on SuSE Linux 6.4:

https://movq.de/v/faaa3c9567/day03.jpg

https://movq.de/v/faaa3c9567/day04%2Dv3.jpg

Performance really is an issue. Anything is fast on a modern machine with modern Python. But that old stuff, oof, it takes a while … 😅

Should have used C or Java. 🤪 Well, maybe I do have to fall back on that for later puzzles. We’ll see.

Day 2 was pretty tough on my old hardware. Part 1 originally took 16 minutes, then I got it down to 9 seconds – only to realize later that my solution abused some properties of my particular input. A correct solution will probably take about 30 seconds. 🫤

Part 2 took 29 minutes this morning. I wrote an optimized version but haven’t tested it yet. I hope it’ll be under a minute.

Python 1 feels really slow, even compared to Java 1. And these first puzzles weren’t even computationally intensive. We’ll see how far I’ll make it …

https://movq.de/v/f831d98103/day02.jpg

Hmmmm the AoC site is not mobile friendly 😢 Can someone post the puzzles as Twts? 🤣

Advent of Code 2025 starts tomorrow. 🥳🎄

This year, I’m going to use Python 1 on SuSE Linux 6.4, writing the code on my trusty old Pentium 133 with its 64 MB of RAM. No idea if that old version of Python will be fast enough for later puzzles. We’ll see.

Image

I was looking at some ancient code and then thought: Hmm, maybe it would be a good idea to see more details in this error message. Which of the values don’t line up. On the other hand, that feature isn’t probably used anyway, because it’s a bit ugly to use (historically evolved). And on top of that, most teams need something slightly different, if they deal with that sort of thing.

I still told my workmates about it, so they could also have a look at it and we can decide tomorrow what to do about it. Speaking of the devil, no kidding, not even half an hour later, a puzzled tester contacted me. She received exactly that rather useless error message. Looks like I had an afflatus. ;-)

It’s interesting, though, that in all those years, nobody stumbled across this before. At least we now know for sure that this is not dead code. :-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I think if I was younger, with more energy, and wasn’t blind with leber’s disease (look it up) I’d be fine™ But yeah I get the whole “exhausting” apart. I’ll join you this year, since there’s only 12 puzzles and as you say, we can “take our time” it might actually be fun! (as opposed to exhausting and pressured).

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, lots of people are welcoming this change, saying they are relieved that there are fewer puzzles. And ngl, I, too, have been very exhausted at the end of the month. It’s a lot of fun and I loved it each time, but yeah, it can be exhausting.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de This is actually a good positive change I think!

Personally, I’ll probably stretch it out over 24 days. Giving myself more time to solve each puzzle and I really want this event to last the entire month. 😅

I might even do AoC this year with the elevated stress/pressure! – The last few times I’ve tried, I’ve always felt far too much pressure and felt like a failure 😞 (mostly ya know because of my vision impairment, I couldn’t keep up!)

Advent of Code will be different this year:

https://old.reddit.com/r/adventofcode/comments/1ocwh04/changes_to_advent_of_code_starting_this_december/

There will only be 12 puzzles, i.e. only December 1 to December 12. This might make it more interesting for some people, because it’s (probably) less work and a lower chance of people getting burned out. 🤔

Personally, I’ll probably stretch it out over 24 days. Giving myself more time to solve each puzzle and I really want this event to last the entire month. 😅

Maybe this makes it more interesting for some people around here as well?

Analysis of 4.4-million-year-old ankle exposes how earliest ancestors moved and evolved
For more than a century, scientists have been piecing together the puzzle of human evolution, examining fossil evidence to understand the transition from our earliest ancestors to modern humans. ⌘ Read more

Solving this puzzle took me longer than I care to admit. It’s kind of obvious in hindsight. https://movq.de/v/83e5aa0709/MVI_8895.MOV.mp4

I’m for the first time over 1900 on #lichess puzzles…

Day 19 was a really nice puzzle. 😊

I used to be able to sell my music anywhere in the world - and I have managed to send CDs to quite remote places, or kingdoms with nefarious regimes… but now, well, there is one country where I can not ship cassettes or CDs to: the USA 🇺🇸.

It’s not like I’m expecting any loss: I rarely sell music, and when I do it is rarely to the states (I don’t know why, I think my stuff ought to be way more popular! 😁). But still, it is disheartening to see there is now an effective wall, a country where I won’t be able to (directly) reach. Congratulations to everyone involved.

[PS: if you’re puzzled about what is this all about - a number of European countries, including Portugal, won’t be shipping stuff to the US due to legal uncertainty regarding Trump’s tariffs.]

10 Unsettling Incidents We Still Can’t Explain
When something strange happens, we try to make sense of things by putting the scattered puzzle pieces together. For example, when Flight MH370 dropped off the radar in 2014, most people eventually accepted the theory that the pilot was suicidal. But how do we know that for a fact? The reality is that no one […]

The post [10 Unsettling Incidents We Still Can’t Explain](https://listverse.com/2025/06/03/10-unsettling-incidents-we-still-cant-e … ⌘ Read more

** Admitting that they’re really never weekly notes **
While everyone is up to their eyeballs in puzzles playing Blue Prince I’ve been playing some Fire Emblem: Blazing Sword on the Gameboy Advanced. I’ve also set up the playdate to mirror at my computer and have been having fun exploring the games in season 2! Mostly just Dig! Dig! Dino!, so far.

I decided to learn OCaml a few weeks ago. I’ve been writing a rogue clone in it. I am enjoying is and the entire ML fami … ⌘ Read more

New (February 2025) paper, https://cms.mgt.tum.de/fileadmin/mgt.tum.de/faculty_and_research/mppe/39_Nora_von_Ingersleben-Seip_How_the_European_Union_Fell_Out_Of_Love_With_Open-Source_Software.pdf , describes “How the European Union Fell Out of Love with Open-Source Software”:

“A coalition of determined open-source software (OSS) advocates and a handful of technology experts working in the European Commission set out in 2004 to end Microsoft’s monopoly. They almost succeeded. This article reveals how they managed to change the EU’s software policies, made Microsoft lobbyists work overtime - and in the end, and despite their best efforts, could not withstand the power of proprietary companies’ lobbying campaigns.

Drawing on the Multiple Streams Framework, the article explains the European Commission’s decision to promote OSS and open standards in 2004, and its puzzling decision to reverse course just a few years later, in 2010, despite its unchanged rhetoric about the benefits of openness. The analysis reveals three key factors that drove the changes in the EU’s policies.

In 2004, OSS advocates managed to frame the EU’s dependency on proprietary software as a problem – and the promotion of OSS and open standards as the solution.

In 2010, #Microsoft and other proprietary companies used their existing connections in Brussels to sow doubt about the maturity and cost of #OSS among #EU policymakers.”

25 years later we’re where we started.

#OpenSource #EIF

Vim vs. Kakoune puzzles
Comments ⌘ Read more

Finding hard 24 puzzles with planner programming
Comments ⌘ Read more

Internationalization puzzles
Comments ⌘ Read more

The tiny avatars, as expected (because they showed normal to you too @prologic@twtxt.net), do not show under macOS’s Safari, but they do show on iOS’s Safari. It truly is a puzzle.

Aside from fetching feeds every three minutes (which kind of adds mystery to this puzzle), I think there is something else going on with the client you are using, @andros@twtxt.andros.dev. Some of those twtxts are seconds apart, making me truly stumped. 😅

Security updates for Monday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (abseil, atop, jetty9, ruby-saml, tomcat10, trafficserver, xz-utils, and zfs-linux), Fedora (chromium, condor, containernetworking-plugins, cri-tools1.29, crosswords-puzzle-sets-xword-dl, exim, ghostscript, matrix-synapse, upx, varnish, and yarnpkg), Gentoo (XZ Utils), Mageia (augeas, corosync, nss & firefox, and thunderbird), Oracle (container-tools:ol8, firefox, freetype, and kernel), Red Hat (firefox), SUSE (chromium, gn, firefox-es … ⌘ Read more

Security updates for Monday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (amd64-microcode, flatpak, intel-microcode, libdata-entropy-perl, librabbitmq, and vim), Fedora (augeas, containerd, crosswords-puzzle-sets-xword-dl, libssh2, libxml2, nodejs-nodemon, and webkitgtk), Red Hat (libreoffice and python-jinja2), SUSE (389-ds, apparmor, corosync, docker, docker-stable, erlang26, exim, ffmpeg-4, govulncheck-vulndb, istioctl, matrix-synapse, mercurial, openvpn, python3, rke2, and skopeo), and Ubuntu (ansible, linux, l … ⌘ Read more

@eapl.me@eapl.me I looked at the first few puzzles and they are pretty cool so far! I haven’t actually implemented any of them, but I’m fairly certain about how I’d solve them properly. I went through some linked reference articles yesterday, they’re also really good. I will recommend this to some workmates. :-)

I always find the ‘Adven of code’ challenges difficult to follow.
i18n-puzzles.com has been a blast, but I don’t like having to think about puzzles on weekends. Like with exercise, doing it every day without rest doesn’t sound healthy.

I’d rater have a weekly challenge, at most three.

10 Puzzles of Evolution That Scientists Still Can’t Explain
Evolution has shaped life on Earth for billions of years, gradually refining species through natural selection and adaptation. Yet despite everything we know about the process, there are still considerable gaps in our understanding. Some biological traits appear too complex to have evolved gradually, others seem to contradict traditional evolutionary principles, and a few remain […]

The post [10 Puzzles of Evoluti … ⌘ Read more

Wow, this is a nice way to practice internationalization for our systems
https://i18n-puzzles.com

Apple Stepping Up Plans to Expand News App to More Countries
Apple plans to scale up its News app by adding new countries to the platform beyond the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia, according to the Financial Times.

Image

The plans reportedly include building its locally focused news coverage in the UK, as well as bringing its puzzles section to the coun … ⌘ Read more

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com hmm, I see all of your twtxts just fine. Now, that’s a puzzle!

** I made another thing, and continue trying to learn about logic programming **
After having dithering-fun making dither it and pico cam I made a little game, currently called“ puzzle dungeon,” which I admit isn’t a very good name at all. Puzzle dungeon is part logo, part dungeon crawling rogue-like … ⌘ Read more

A Crossword Puzzle
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Spatial Puzzle Game ‘Where Cards Fall’ Now Available on Apple Vision Pro
Apple is continuing to add to its lineup of Apple Arcade games on the Vision Pro, today adding puzzle game Where Cards Fall.

Image

Where Cards Fall has previously been available on [iPhone](https://www.macrumors.com/guide/ … ⌘ Read more

Kotoni Staggs’ emotional family reunion in vegas
It took Kotoni Staggs 21 years to meet his American father. Now the Brisbane Broncos star is using the NRL’s historic trip to Las Vegas to put together the final pieces in his fractured, and at times heart-wrenching, family puzzle. ⌘ Read more

NFL owner’s bizarre Taylor Swift dating call
New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft has left NFL fans puzzled with a bizarre Taylor Swift take. ⌘ Read more

Chess puzzle book generator: https://www.codemadness.org/chess-puzzles.html

Seeing a video like this from Jeff Geerling about the MNT Reform Laptop, I am both amazed and puzzled. It’s probably a cool project to work on such an open hardware and source project as a hobby. And it’s great that there’s still the alternative to proprietary hardware. But has this any other use than just being a toy for people that have more than a thousand bucks to spend on such a thing? Especially given that it’s the opposite of powerful. Thinking about it more, the only thing that comes to mind are people wh … ⌘ Read more

@xuu@txt.sour.is That was one of the horror puzzles where I had to look for help. 🥴 I modelled my solution after this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pDSooPLLkI (I can’t explain it better than the video anyway.) It takes a second on my machine and that’s with my own hashmap implementation which is probably not the fastest one.

But when you do take the time to analyze / reverse-engineer this puzzle, then it’s really cool. Might be my favorite one so far. 😃

I’m really bad at competitive programming. 🙄 For today’s #AdventOfCode puzzle, I spent an eternity trying to understand exactly what kind of bG9naWMgY2lyY3VpdAo= the puzzle input describes – I haven’t done that in well over a decade, so I made little progress. I knew right from the start that SSBoYWQgdG8gbG9vayBmb3IgY3ljbGUgbGVuZ3RocyBhbmQgdGhlbiBmaW5kIHRoZSBMQ00K. It just didn’t occur to me to just run my program on cGFydGlhbCBpbnB1dAo= and print those numbers. 🥴 I only did that after over 4 hours (including time to debug my nasty C code) and then, boom, solution …

Puzzles
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@movq@www.uninformativ.de so the pathfinding puzzle has arrived?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de so the pathfinding puzzle has arrived?

Ah, there it is. Today’s AoC puzzle is of a categeory that I find the least interesting. Gonna take my time with this one. 😴

I bet today’s AoC puzzle was the last easy one before we descend into madness. 🤣

Today’s Advent of Code puzzle was rather easy (luckily), so I spent the day doing two other things:

• Explore VGA a bit: How to draw pixels on DOS all by yourself without a library in graphics mode 12h?
  
• Explose XMS a bit: How can I use more than 640 kB / 1 MB on DOS?
  

Both are … quite awkward. 😬 For VGA, I’ll stick to using the Borland Graphics Interface for now. Mode 13h is great, all pixels are directly addressable – but it’s only 320x200. Mode 12h (640 x 480 with 16 colors) is pretty horrible to use with all the planes and what not.

As per this spec, I’ve written a small XMS example that uses 32 MB of memory:

https://movq.de/v/9ed329b401/xms.c

It works, but it appears the only way to make use of this memory is to copy data back and forth between conventional memory and extended memory. I don’t know how useful that is going to be. 🤔 But at least I know how it works now.

Image

One thing to note about #AdventOfCode: It is really, really important to inspect your input data.

Your data could be considered part of the puzzle description. By inspecting it, you can find clues and you might find out that you can make certain assumptions.

(I mean, what’s the alternative? There could be a list of allowed assumptions in the textual descriptions, right? That wouldn’t be a lot of fun, I think, as it would give away too much information about the solution. It’s more interesting to find those clues yourself.)

Today’s AoC puzzle is a very simple problem on modern machines, but quite tricky for me: It involves a number that doesn’t fit into 32 bits. 🤔 I wonder if/how I can manage to port this beast to DOS. (I once wrote a “big int” library myself, but that was ages ago and I hardly remember it anymore.)

Day 3 of #AdventOfCode puzzle 😅

Let’s go! 🤣

Come join us! 🤗

👋 Hey you Twtxters/Yarners 👋 Let’s get a Advent of Code leaderboard going!

Join with 1093404-315fafb8 and please use your usual Twtxt feed alias/name 👌

Twtxt/Yarn AoC > Leaderboard

@xuu@txt.sour.is Ah, you went with the “scanning” approach as well. I did that, too.

It’s quite surprising to see (imho) how many people on reddit started substituting strings (one becomes 1 etc.). That makes the puzzle much harder by introducing nasty corner cases.

(Maybe I was just lucky this time to pick the correct approach right from the start. 🤣 Or maybe it’s a bit of experience from doing past AoC events …)

~22h to go for the 3rd #AdventOfCode puzzle (Day 3) 😅

Come join us!

👋 Hey you Twtxters/Yarners 👋 Let’s get a Advent of Code leaderboard going!

Join with 1093404-315fafb8 and please use your usual Twtxt feed alias/name 👌

Twtxt/Yarn AoC > Leaderboard

So, according to the latest @HackerRadioShow, several house appliances’ manufacturers (of dishwashers and things like that) are puzzled, wondering why don’t the owners of such appliances allow their devices to connect to the home’s wifi. ½
So, according to the latest @HackerRadioShow, several house appliances’ manufacturers (of dishwashers and things like that) are puzzled, wondering why don’t the owners of such applia … ⌘ Read more

Erlang Solutions: Advent of Code 2022 – Every Puzzle Solved in Erlang

Christmas is getting closer and with that, the annual Advent of Code begins. For those who do not know, Advent of Code is a fun and inclusive event which provides a new programming puzzle every day. The fun is that these puzzles can be solved in any programming language and are accessible for varying levels of coding experience and skills. The real test is in your problem-solving. This year, we’ll be solving each of the problems in … ⌘ Read more

public relations is a reality-masking puzzle.

@xuu@txt.sour.is, how come I can’t see your lovely mouse avatar on my pod? I know you might not have an answer; I am puzzled, and mostly thinking on loud voice here. I see your avatar fine at twtxt.net.

I saw the allegedly animated GIF @thecanine@twtxt.net uploaded gets a PNG extension, yet remains animated. I know PNG can be made animated, but I don’t think that’s what’s happening here, so I am puzzled. Let’s see how this Nyam cat looks like.

Image

Day 16 of Advent of Code is so confusing that I will not finish today’s puzzle. I wonder if yesterday was my last day with Advent of Code, or will the puzzles become more understandable and easier again in the next few days? Maybe I’m just more the practical type. I like programming, but such complex algorithms are not really my thing. And in the end, Advent of Code is supposed to be fun… ⌘ Read more

reading: starting forth. possible practice, puzzle, game, eventually dance? | https://compudanzas.net/forth.html

Cosmic Queries: Absolutely Puzzled with Heather Berlin and Soleil Saint-Cyr ⌘ Read more…

⌘ Read more…

On the blog: Daily Nonogram https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2021/02/21/nonogram.html #announcement #puzzle

Why is programming fun? What delights may its practitioner expect as his reward? First is the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own design. I think this delight must be an image of God’s delight in making things, a delight shown in the distinctness and newness of each leaf and each snowflake. Second is the pleasure of making things that are useful to other people. Deep within, we want others to use our work and to find it helpful. In this respect the programming system is not essentially different from the child’s first clay pencil holder “for Daddy’s office.” Third is the fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts and watching them work in subtle cycles, playing out the consequences of principles built in from the beginning. The programmed computer has all the fascination of the pinball machine or the jukebox mechanism, carried to the ultimate. Fourth is the joy of always learning, which springs from the nonrepeating nature of the task. In one way or another the problem is ever new, and its solver learns something: sometimes practical, sometimes theoretical, and sometimes both. Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly re- moved from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. (As we shall see later, this very tractability has its own problems.) Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming? | Hacker News

Baba Is You review: one of the best puzzle games in years - Polygon https://www.polygon.com/reviews/2019/3/13/18263824/baba-is-you-review-nintendo-switch-pc

Mathematical and Puzzle Fonts/Typefaces http://erikdemaine.org/fonts/

Puzzle Montage Art by Tim Klein https://puzzlemontage.crevado.com/

“Puzzles, Problems, and Programs” by Chris Martens - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TT0r6-B5YHA

Book review: The puzzling empathy of debugging https://wozniak.ca/blog/2018/05/07/The-puzzling-empathy-of-debugging.html

This Game Teaches You How to Build a Quantum Compu… https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a3jkya/quantum-game-physics-computer-puzzle

New repository: aquilax/tgwc-puzzle - Great Wall of China Puzzle generator

Wireless Spectrum Allocation: The Invisible Puzzle https://tedium.co/2017/05/11/wireless-spectrum-allocation-challenges/

This Simple Philosophical Puzzle Shows How Difficult It Is to Know Something - Facts So Romantic - Nautilus http://nautil.us/blog/-this-simple-philosophical-puzzle-shows-how-difficult-it-is-to-know-something

Oliver Stone’s Putin puzzle: An evil genius who made history, or a shrewd, small-minded nonentity? - Salon.com http://www.salon.com/2017/06/17/oliver-stone-deconstructs-putin-an-evil-genius-who-made-history-or-a-shrewd-but-small-minded-apparatchik-writ-large/?curator=MediaREDEF