2024-12-16 01:07:16
I haven’t watched The Game Awards live, as it is broadcast in the middle of the night in Europe. But I was extremely happy to learn that Astrobot has been awarded Game Of The Year. As I wrote before already, I absolutely support this decision. The game is fun and continues receiving updates, with a new Winter Wonderland level released just a few days ago.
There were also a few intriguing announcements this time.
The first is Split Fiction, a co-op game from creators of It takes two. We spent some good hours with my wife playing that game, and we already can’t wait for their next release.
The next one is an absolutely mind-blowing Witcher IV trailer. Unlike many other trailers, it shows a complete scene from the game, which is a great story in itself. And it showcases the Unreal 5 in the best possible light. The quality of graphics, rendering, models, and motion capture has come to a level where it is hard to distinguish from the real life. The Witcher 3 is still in my backlog. And now I have a good reason to play it sooner rather than later.
The last but not least trailer that caught my attention is the announcement of a new Naughty Dog project. I’m a big fan of their games, I keep replaying Uncharted 4 many times, and The Last of Us is one of the best games of all time. I’m excited to see what they will bring us this time around.
2025 is going to be a great year for video games.
This is post 24 of #100DaysToOffload
2024-12-04 03:32:17
The third day required the use of regular expression for the first time this year. The puzzles are progressively harder each day, but I still can solve them during my morning coffee.
The first puzzle required just taking the regexp match result, while the second one was about processing all matches sequentially.
I’ve come up with a simple when for that:
when (command.value) {
"do()" -> enabled = true
"don't()" -> enabled = false
else /*mul*/ -> if (enabled) {
// add to the sum
}
}
Today I also had time to convert the project to Kotlin Multiplatform. Originally, I used an Amper template, which runs on JVM. I’m going to evolve it further in the coming days.
As usual, my code is on GitHub: kropp/aoc24. See you tomorrow!
This is post 23 of #100DaysToOffload
2024-12-03 03:52:19
The second puzzle is there, and with its second part I got my first wrong answer. Of course, because I wanted to trick the game and get tricked myself instead.
Checking if a report is safe is actually quite easy:
val diffs = levels.zipWithNext { a, b -> b - a }
diffs.all { it.absoluteValue in 1..3 } && diffs.map { it.sign }.distinct().size == 1
We first calculate all differences and then check if they are between 1 and 3 and have the same sign, which means that the sequence is either increasing or decreasing.
In the second puzzle I wanted to replace the all condition with all but one, but it obviously didn’t work,
as single outlier may spoil two differences.
I ended up trying all possible combinations.
Since there are not many of them, it works pretty fast, albeit it isn’t an optimal solution.
As usual, my code is on GitHub: kropp/aoc24. See you tomorrow!
This is post 22 of #100DaysToOffload
2024-12-01 19:00:00
It is December 1st, and it means that it’s that time of the year again! Many years I start the month of December with programming puzzles from Advent of Code.
I usually drop from the event after a week or two because of some unexpected busy day or nasty sickness. This time I have some additional motivation, though, which I’ll share later.
I’m going to publish my solutions on GitHub: kropp/aoc24. The solution to the first puzzle is already available there.
The first puzzle is a pretty simple one, and the most straightforward solution just works. I expect the following ones will be more challenging. See you here in the coming days!
This is post 21 of #100DaysToOffload
2024-10-25 22:16:20
I highly recommend watching Cabel Sasser’s talk at XOXO
I don’t want to spoil it, so I won’t share much, but please watch it till the end, as it is not what is seems about.
And after you’ve watched it, visit this link.
This is post 20 of #100DaysToOffload
2024-09-27 02:39:08
Another month is over, and here is a fresh portion of articles that caught my attention recently.
An essay by Sam Altman where he predicts unimaginable prosperity in the age of AI but also warns that we should act now to make it available for everyone. Well, let’s see what he himself would do. The rumors of OpenAI converting to a for-profit company may mean that this prosperity is reserved for them.
A collection of examples of interactivity in the software as well as in real life.
Distilled rules of great interface design.
What’s inside small disposable NFC chips used in public transportation?
Not really an article, but an interactive webpage to learn how floating point numbers are represented in memory.
I’d highlight Apple Notes, Calendar, and Reminders, which I cannot imagine myself living without. I’m using each of them many times daily, to schedule meetings, take private notes, and compile a todo list.
A Kotlin Multiplatform library for calculating information about the sun and moon.
An illegal number is a number that represents information which is illegal to possess, utter, propagate, or otherwise transmit in some legal jurisdiction. Any piece of digital information is representable as a number; consequently, if communicating a specific set of information is illegal in some way, then the number may be illegal as well.
This is post 19 of #100DaysToOffload
