Minesweeper is complex enough in its rule set that it needs a little bit of thought in order to program, whoever, it’s not so complex that it needs extra libraries and all sorts of fancy programming tricks. Researchers gave four different AI code assistant instructions to recreate the game, and each delivered different results.
Author: Patrick
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A neat JavaScript calendar generator
If you have ever done any web development at all and tried to make a calendar, you’ll know that it is one of the more difficult things to get right. It’s more than just generating boxes and numbers. There’s other sorts of logic that need to be taken into account. Here is a neat JavaScript calendar generator.
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The Cassandras predicted our current political reality
Back in 2015, 2016, there was a minority group of people who saw what Trump really was, Modern-day Cassandras who had a vision but were not listened to.
Why were they afraid of this? Or, put better, how did they correctly see all this coming? Virtually all the Cassandras would make the same points. They used different examples and discussed them in different ways, but the bones of the argument were the same. The experience for me, as interviewer, was like hearing the same song played by different musicians—once by a folk guitarist, then sung by an opera singer, then played by a heavy metal band, then a string quartet, and so on. Very different styles, but clearly working from the same sheet music.
I started to think of this as “The Cassandra Song.” It plays as follows:
- Trump (or senior people in the movement) said (insert bad outcome or values).
- We had good reasons to think he/they meant it.
- We had good reasons to think his base wanted it.
I still remember how the arguments with family members were that this was not going to go well. While they may not concede that I was right, they can definitely see that a lot of things did come true.
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Rolling back the Constitution
It’s no surprise that, with recent Supreme Court rulings using questionable logic and some dramatic mental gymnastics, the entire goal is to roll the country back to an older era.
What this means in practice is that if you are not white, you cannot go certain places without the risk of being kidnapped by federal agents. That is not “common sense”; it is the nullification of the Constitution’s guarantee of equal rights under the law.
This decision is only one of the ways that the Court, under Chief Justice John Roberts, has been chipping away at the parts of the Constitution dedicated to ensuring equal citizenship to all through rulings on voting rights, immigration, and equal protection. It has done this even as it insists—while striking down affirmative action and school-integration programs—that the Constitution is “colorblind.”
The Constitution of the Roberts Court is not color-blind. It is a Constitution that permits discrimination on the basis of race, but forbids alleviating discrimination on the basis of race. And over the next year, the Court will face more cases that could further erode both the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, pushing America back toward what some on the right believe is the true, Antebellum Constitution.
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SNL’s alternate Home Alone ending
Ariana Grande and the SNL cast provide an alternate Home Alone ending.
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Thick vs Thin desires
A new to me concept: thin and thick desires.
A thick desire is one that changes you in the process of pursuing it.
A thin desire is one that doesn’t.
The desire to understand calculus versus the desire to check your notifications are both real desires, and both produce (to a degree) real feelings of satisfaction when fulfilled.
But the person who spends a year learning calculus becomes someone different, someone who can see patterns in the world that were previously invisible, who has expanded the range of things they’re capable of caring about, who has Been Through It.
The person who checks their notifications is, afterward, exactly the same person who wanted to check their notifications five minutes ago.
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45×45, a game
I don’t think this game has a name, but judging by its sparse, direct instructions to make 45 groups of 45 individual items, I’m going to call it 45×45. Part puzzle, trivia, logic, and clicking, you group individual items by a genre or topic. For example, you need to make a group for cheese, flowers, trees, and more. You’ll definitely need to play this on the desktop with a big screen to make your life a little bit easier.
It’s such a simple concept, but entirely immersive as you hunt for items to group together. A few improvements I would make would be to be able to move the little buttons around and also to color code them. So that once you find a certain category, you can go back and spot it easily.
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My favorite media of 2025
I watched, listened, and read quite a bit last year. Below are my favorites from each category. Italicized items are a thing that I really liked.
Movies
- Weapons
- Sinners
- Nouvelle Vague
- Predator: Killer of Killers
- Bugonia
- One Battle After Another
- Ladies & Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music
- Naked Gun
- The Ballad of Wallis Island
- Primitive War
TV
- The Pitt
- Adolescence
- Nobody Wants This
- Task
- Pluribus
- Bon Appetit, Your Majesty
- Slow Horses
- Andor
- Common Side Effects
- Paradise
Music
- Geese – Getting Killed
- Wednesday – Bleeds
- Sleep Token – Even in Advance
- Racing Mount Pleasant – s/t
- Disiniblud – s/t
- Turnstile – Never Enough
- Human Pyramids – Thank You
- Jeff Tweedy – Twilight Override
- Not for Radio – Melt
- Dijon – Baby
Books
- The Sacrificers vol 3 – Comic – 2025
- Chris Whitaker – All the Colors of the Dark – Mystery – 2024
- Dete Meserve – The Memory Collectors – Scifi – 2025
- Chuck Tingle – Bury Your Gays – Horror – 2024
- John Steinbeck – The Pearl – Historical Fiction – 1947
- Alexander Boldizar – The Man Who Saw Seconds – Scifi – 2024
- She Rides Shotgun – Crime – 2017
- Kevin Hazzard – American Sirens – Nonfiction – 2022
- Arthur C Clarke – Rendevous with Rama – Scifi – 1973
- MJ Wassmer – Zero Stars, Do Not Recommend – Thriller – 2024
- Gareth Brown – The Book of Doors – Fantasy – 2024
- Richard Powers – Playground – Literary – 2024
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Tech Force
In an attempt to fix a self-inflicted wound, the US government is launching a program called Tech Force to hire technology workers.
But shortly after coming into office, Trump folded the USDS into the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) before renaming it to the DOGE Service and firing dozens of workers at the agency. The administration has sought to cut large parts of the federal government, including its tech talent, pushing out many workers and demoralizing the ones who remain.
Now, the Trump administration is turning to some of the nation’s biggest tech companies to revamp the technology used by the government. In June, the US Army similarly brought on executives from Meta, OpenAI, Palantir, and Thinking Machines Lab to advise the military branch on tech.
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The making of a crash test dummy
A lot of consideration goes into a crash test dummy — making sure they move like a real person.
But it’s absolutely essential that they move like a real body would, and record the forces a body would experience.
That means a head that weighs what a human head would weigh, moving on a neck that’s about as bendy as a real neck. The dummies’ design is informed by data taken from living people’s bodies, as well as from cadavers put through their own crash tests — and the new female dummy design, crucially, is informed by data from female bodies. Previous “female” dummies were modified versions of male dummies, and safety advocates have long argued that the resulting anatomical inaccuracies contribute to higher rates of injuries among women than men in real crashes.