Not sure about the mailage of the voyager probes (wikipedia states a distance from death of 16billion mi) an they also have batteries with them. Does this count?🤔

Agree, grip of the lock-in is sitting tight … But as you mentioned, its less the lack of software than it is path dependencies.

In LibreOffice you can code marcos using Python. The actual problem is cross compatibility ( while its possible to execute VBA in LibreOffcie

Yes, this would work — but it comes with a subtle statistical bias: the character ‘W’ ends up underrepresented. With a naïve “avoid COW” approach, only about 25% of the grid will typically be ‘W’.

A more elegant solution would be:

• fill the grid completely at random
  • search for every “COW” cluster
    • whenever one is found, copy a random character from one cell in the cluster into another cell of the same cluster
  • Iterate until no “COW” remains

That keeps the distribution much closer to uniform while still guaranteeing a valid puzzle. Then just insert the single “COW” manually wherever you want the hidden solution to be.

s= (320,180)            #size
m=rand(['C','O','W'],s) #random init
c=1
while c>0      #iterate till solved
    c=0
    for i in 1:first(s)
        for j in 1:last(s)

            #check for 'COW' in each cluster of 3 and copy a character
            #from a rendom cell to an other random cell of the cluster if found
            
            if i>2 &&  m[i-2:i,j] ==['C','O','W']   #vertical
                c +=1
                r =shuffle([1,2])
                m[i-r[1],j] = m[i-r[2],j]
            end
            if j>2 && m[i,j-2:j]  ==['C','O','W']   #horizontal
                c +=1
                r =shuffle([0,1,2])
                m[i,j-r[1]] = m[i,j-r[2]]
            end
        end
    end
end

The neat part is that this preserves an almost perfectly balanced character frequency.

For comparison, the puzzle in the example image seems to contain roughly:

C: ~260 (~25%) O: ~520 (~50%) W: ~244 (~25%)

So the original author clearly used a different generation strategy.

Possibly on purpose: visually, ‘C’ and ‘O’ are much easier to confuse than ‘W’. Reducing the number of 'W’s therefore increases the search difficulty. In that sense, the approach suggested by @Snazz@lemmy.world is probably preferable: keep the distribution mostly balanced, but intentionally bias it just enough to make the puzzle psychologically annoying.

I wonder if there is a non iterative way to generate this puzzle with a ‘uniform’ character distribution 🤔

Right the brackets … and functional notation…

Just had a quick read on wikipedia s order of operations an now I know why I can not remember any more… Every peace of software does its own Thing so one can not relay on conventions.

Have a PhD in physics and this is the first time that I hear of some kind of “order” here. May be I forgot but I only remember that I used associative, distributiveand commutative properties of mathematical objects.

They did it during daylight so there are no black holes involved. The stuff is coming from the sun. Anyway, still funny pictures

“Thermal reuse” or “thermal utilization” is how its actually called.

I think it is often simply burned to generate heat/electricity

Well, at least thy were trying, whil other archtiects just use the rnd() function for placement:

actually it is already meged and on v16.0 milestone list

This is not contradicting. It can happen . but I was talking about liquids in general.

But ambiguity arraises from the lack of a coherent explanation, because there are so many parameters to consider when doing the experiment (especially when doing this with water). Therefore hot liquids can freeze faster than cold ones. Its not a must. That it can happen is proven. A quite entertaining read about the general phenomenon can be found here

Hot liquids can freeze faster than colder ones Mpemba effect

That’s also what I currently experience in my position. A lot of workflows are going to be automated by some AI stuff, but whenever someone is planning to produce physical goods in masses you can not effort doing stupid misstakes. When you simply put the output of the LLM in to the input of your CNC, Ion-Implanter, Litograph-Machine, Welding Robot, Aribag or Breaking systems. A mistake is going to be sooo fucking expensive that the human in the loop is not an cost factor anymore. And when you do high precision stuff an approximate solution is never sufficient.

I know, I should not tell this publicly but… I route /96 subnets and assign single /128 addressed to virtual hosts inside my vpn. Sure than there is no auto configuration possible anymore (wich is THE killer feature in v6) bit I only have to pay for a single /64 block and all host can get a public v6 if needed.

I definitively also observe the recent increase of spam (mostly on info@domain) however spamassassin (after some training) does a decent job sorting the trash out. Also I use a unique email address for each website I register, this way a lot of spam was removed by blocking an email-address I’ve used for login to facebook 10 years ago.

YSK also this

Thanks for doing the research

Not sure what to think about that a CNN is involved in the reading process.