miniblog.

TIL Advent of Code and Project Euler will deliberately look for puzzles where the naive solution is worse than quadratic. This ensures that people can solve them with any programming language. You don't want fast languages to be able to use the naive solution.

Difftastic has been cited in a paper! Modernizing SMT-Based Type Error Localization https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.09034 The authors use difftastic to work out which parts of a buggy program have actually changed, a great use case :)

It's incredibly hard to explain adversarial problems to users. I see gamers sincerely asking "why doesn't the publisher just fix the cheater problem?". This is exacerbated by the fact that sharing too many details of anticheat can make the problem worse.