> I do not agree that slice() should operate on extended grapheme clusters. Don’t lump the grapheme cluster/scalar value split in with the sins of UTF-16 and its unreliable code point/code unit split.

Maybe a simpler argument against this idea is that the definition of an extended grapheme cluster changes between versions of Unicode. The relevant standard is on its 47th revision (not all of which change extended grapheme clusters, but many do): https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr29/

In old-school chess AIs, zugzwang is also of interest because it can break null-move pruning[0], which is a way to prune the search tree. "Null move" just means "skip your turn", and the assumption that skipping your turn is always worse than the optimal move. But in zugzwang positions, that assumption is wrong, so you have to avoid doing null-move pruning.

Stockfish's heuristic for "risk of zugzwang" is basically "only kings and pawns left over", alongside logic for "is null-move pruning even useful right now" [1]:

    // Step 9. Null move search with verification search
    if (cutNode && ss->staticEval >= beta - 16 * depth - 53 * improving + 378 && !excludedMove
        && pos.non_pawn_material(us) && ss->ply >= nmpMinPly && !is_loss(beta))
    {

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null-move_heuristic

[1]: https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/blob/1a882ef...

Leads me to discover: https://www.twitch.tv/chat_loadtest_01 ... neat!

Theres a lot of weird channels on twitch, I run into ones with "ingest" in their name quite often.

I've almost never needed any of these, but there's all sorts of weird redirections you can do in GNU Bash: https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html#Redirecti...

agentic ai tends to use it ALL the time.

It is news to me that manipulating ASCII art is something AI can do well! I remember this being something LLMs were all particularly horrible at. But I just checked and it seems to work at least with Opus 4.5.

claude(1) with Opus 4.5 seems to be able to take the examples in that article, and handle things like "collapse the sidebar" or "show me what it looks like with an open modal" or "swap the order of the second and third rows". I remember not long ago you'd get back UI mojibake if you asked for this.

Goes to show you really can't rest on your laurels for longer than 3 months with these tools.

Eddie Izzard was joking in 1998 about the "The" and the prohibited names for The City (https://youtu.be/QRB_GhLXCds?si=R4kYkodzvYDxe33H&t=276), so it's probably been like this for many decades thence!

For those unfamiliar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 ... It's basically a bunch of posts that 'dang and 'tomhow (others too? idk) think are underrated, so it tends to be potent hacker-catnip stuff.

For others, I'm sure parent knows: OKLCH is largely a bugfix for CILEAB. Both try to make a color space where even steps feel evenly spaced to a human. But CIELAB had procedural flaws in its creation.

See slide 19: https://www.w3.org/Graphics/Color/Workshop/slides/talk/lille... -- if you ask CIELAB to make "pure blue" (RGB 0 0 100%) become grayscale, the intermediate colors become purple to the human eye. The entire point of a perceptual color space is that that doesn't happen. OKLCH fixes that.

BTW, credit to Björn Ottosson, who basically side-projected a color space into the web standards and more: https://bottosson.github.io/posts/oklab/ ... folks like him are why we sometimes have nice things!

Kind of moot anyway; 100x zoom is equivalent to a 2400mm lens (with no stabilization assist). If you can hand-aim that on target, you're an elite marksman.

> Into the Past by Jim Hildreth

The area in this photo -- the Caineville Mesa, Factory Butte, "Long Dong Silver" (I'm not aware of a more polite name) -- is some of the strangest land in America. It really is that lunar blue gray. The Temples of the Sun and Moon (enormous natural sandcastles) are also nearby, and are similarly eerie in the evening.

The closest I've ever felt to being in space. Recommend!

Agree. Found his site, but that shot’s not listed: https://www.hildreth-photographer.com/portfolio.html?folio=F...

Seems their IG has some of these, including the shot from the article: https://www.instagram.com/tripodtales/p/C8hRS0ctzCp/

Factory Butte: https://www.instagram.com/tripodtales/p/C6gg-wpS-tr/

"Long Dong Silver": https://www.instagram.com/tripodtales/p/C-yLCskOGiC/