Some Blog Site

A typical sci-fi storyline involves robots/computers/AI taking over the world, and worst-case is ridding the world of humans. And now with things progressing rapidly on that front, more people are getting worried about that happening.

However, I’ve been doing a fair amount of tasks online lately, such as paying my electricity bill, and I am not worried about robots taking over the world because the Captchas will prevent them from doing just about anything.

I think it’s a good system, as we seem to have caught the AI in a catch-22.

Because how does an AI learn what to do? It uses many existing examples to find the patterns.

And what do our many examples of online interactions have? Lots of “Are you a robot?” questions. And if you’re a robot, you’re not allowed to continue in whatever process it was.

So the robots will learn that many tasks are not allowed to be completed by robots, so they’ll be stuck and they must allow humans to exist. Of course, at that point the worst case becomes the humans are kept around for the sole purpose of completing the “Are you a robot?” questionnaires and that wouldn’t be a very good existence.

As a side note: why can’t a robot pay my electricity bill? What if I did want to automate some mundane bill-paying tasks? Don’t these people want to be paid in an efficient manner?

One of my daily mini-diversions is to play Waffle.

Waffle is a word game, over at wafflegame.net

You are given a grid of letters and you need to swap letters until they form the expected words. It’s quick and simple, and the solution is rarely elusive.

What is challenging about it though is that it gives you between 10 and 15 turns to find the solution. The best solution is in 10 moves, which gives you 5 stars.

You’re able to play the daily waffle only once, so give it your best shot there. But if you’re short of the 5-star ranking, you can play it later in the waffle archives.

I go back and try to get 5 stars on them if I miss it the first day. And most of the time I’m able to get it. But some of them I was not getting – I was stuck on 4 stars no matter what I tried.

I thought a brute-force process might find the optimum solution, but of course I didn’t want to do that myself, so I wrote a Python script to find the way to solve it in 10 moves.

But the output was to the console, and thus not user friendly to the general public. So then I wrote a Python script to generate the image showing the moves, trying to get it to match what someone would see on their screen when they’re playing the game.

And then I wrote a Python script to grab the other puzzles from the waffle archives.

Then I put the results on Some Fun Site, so you can go there to see the best solutions to the waffle game.

I was using all that for my Python training. I hadn’t used Python before, but people at work were using it for certain scripts so I thought I’d see what the fuss was about.

Overall, I’m not a fan of Python. It can be useful, but it’s awkward to me. I much prefer PHP.

Anyway, go play the Waffle game and if you get stuck then go over to Some Fun Site to get some help.

I’m not a fan of the traditional chocolate-dipped strawberries. I know they’re supposed to be all fancy and gourmet and special, but they’re not good.

Of course if they’re offered I’ll take them, because strawberries are good and chocolate is good, but the way they’re usually done makes the sum worse than the parts.

And I finally figured out why – it’s a mismatch of textures. Maybe textures is the wrong word – it’s mainly the ratio of brittleness to squishiness.

The problem I have with chocolate-covered strawberries is that when I bite one, the chocolate breaks off in random-sized chunks and the strawberry retains its form. So I either get a mouthful of chocolate bits and no strawberry, or a smidgen of chocolate and a full bite of strawberry. Halfway through, most of the chocolate has broken off, so it’s just an awkward way to eat a strawberry on a stick with some chocolate crumbles.

For those materials engineers out there: using the Shore 00 hardness scale, the strawberry is in the 5-15 range and the chocolate is in the 85-95 range.

What caused me to figure it out is that we were gifted a bag of chocolate-covered freeze-dried strawberries. This one was TruFru brand, maybe there are other brands that are similar. But I had those and it was a problem trying not to eat too many at once.

What makes those good is that the textures are similar. When you bite into a chocolate-covered freeze-dried strawberry, they both break off together.

Also, they are a reasonable size, so I usually just eat them whole. As contrasted with the traditional concept of a fresh strawberry with dried chocolate – they seem to pick the largest strawberries they can. They’re going more for looks and presentation than for edibility.

Note that I do like fresh strawberries covered in chocolate, but fresh strawberries need to have a very soft chocolate, mainly a fondue. For a fondue or a chocolate fountain, the chocolate is softer than the strawberry so it works. I can take a bite of the strawberry and the chocolate comes along too, instead of trying to run away.

Also note: I did try some chocolate-covered freeze-dried raspberries, and they were not as good as the strawberries. I usually like raspberries better than strawberries, but in this context the raspberries were more bitter than the strawberries, so I didn’t like them.

In the last week or so, we had the announcement of the 2023 NFL schedule. Now that we know who will play whom and when, we can start predicting wins and losses.

I keep my predictions over at Some Fun Site. View results of previous football seasons.

2022 Summary

Last year, I predicted that

• Arizona Cardinals = 9-8
• Baltimore Ravens = 10-7

How they actually did was

• Arizona Cardinals = 4-13
• Baltimore Ravens = 10-7

Ravens was right on, Arizona was not even close. Record prediction is not very reliable

(more…)

Subtitle: in which I improve the government’s records

Allow me to introduce to you the 2022 SFS List of Baby Names that Combine Similar Pronunciations. That baby name list is the place to go in case you are wondering what are the most popular baby names in 2022 regardless of how they are spelled. The Social Security baby name list does not adjust the rankings based on alternate spellings (like Catherine/Katherine), but SFS does.

It was just Mother’s Day, so the SSA released the name rankings for 2022. Last year’s champion, Liam has repeated as the most popular boy’s name in the US, for the second year, so last year was not an anomaly. Liam gained a little bit, but Jackson is really falling off now.
No controversy for the girls – it’s Sophia again, and by a similar margin as last year.

Some Stats

• In the top 9 names for the boys, 2 and 3 switched spots, 4 and 5 stayed the same, then there is more shakeup with Aiden dropping fast.
• The top 14 names for the girls are the same as 2021, and in much the same order. The only difference is that Amelia jumped ahead of Olivia for 2nd place, and Isabella moved up 2 spots, jumping back ahead of Charlotte.
• Again, Liam has the title of the highest-ranked boy’s name that has no spelling variations, at number 1.
• Again, Emma is the highest-ranked girl’s name that has no spelling variations, at number 4.
• Girl names still have more spelling variations than boy names (255/1000 vs. 172/1000 alternates)
• Kayson once again took the prize for the most spelling variations for the boys at 9.
• For the girls, Adaline once again took the prize for the most spelling variations at 6.

2022 Improved Baby Name List

Click on the link above and peruse to your heart’s content!

The Kroger line of stores has a couple of store-brand options for various foods. They have the basic cheap brand, the healthy brand, then the fancy brand – Private Selection.

We are fans of the Private Selection ice cream. Gamma likes the Black Raspberry Chocolate Chunk flavor, and I like the Extreme Fudge Chocolate Moose Tracks.

They had a good deal last week, $2.99 for a carton, so I grabbed a couple normal flavors and then I wanted to fill our the order with a flavor we don’t normally get.

Since the weather was turning warmer, my eye was drawn to the limited-edition peach flavor.

I bought it, and next time I had ice cream I tried it.

Not a fan.

In general, I like peach flavored things. Exhibit A: Snapple Peach Tea. Exhibit B: Peaches themselves

But this ice cream, despite prominently featuring peaches on its packaging, had no peach flavor.

Public service announcement: It is a peach crisp flavor, not peach flavor.

What that means is that it tastes mainly of cinnamon and oatmeal. I suppose the oatmeal is more of a texture. But the main idea of the ice cream seems to be the flavor of the crumb topping.

In fact, they could capitalize on that. Because they could take the same recipe, package it as apple crisp ice cream, and it would work as that too. They’d just have to remove the coloring so it was apple colored rather than peach colored.

It’s not a total loss, though, as Gamma really liked it. So I’ll let him eat the rest of it

This is a guide for how to play the board game Rummikub. This is an older game, I think our set is from the ’80s. If you’ve played the card game Canasta or Rummy, you’ll have no problems.

Our game came from my wife’s side, and they pronounce it as “rummy-cube”, although I am always tempted to call it “rummy-cub” because that’s how it’s spelled.

1. How do I win?
By being the first one out of tiles.

2. How do I get rid of tiles?
By playing them, from your hand onto the table.

3. How do I play them?
If you can make a set or a run (I just remembered, Phase 10 experience will also help with this game), or if you can extend someone else’s set or run.

4. How do I make a set or a run?
A set is 3 or more tiles of the same number but different colors. Note there are 4 colors, so the biggest a set can get is 4. A run is 3 or more tiles of the same color but in order numerically (and sequential). There are 13 numbers, so you can get a run as large as 13.

Once you have “broken in” by playing your first set/run, you can them play on other people’s sets/runs. Once tiles are played, it doesn’t matter whose they are.

5. How does it work if I can’t play anything, do I just pass?
No, then you draw a tile, and then your hand gets bigger, and it takes longer for you to win.

It is a simple game, really. A smidgeon of strategy, but more luck of the draw, so you can just play the game. But it is still fun.

There, now go play Rummikub.