Leveling the playing field for non-native speakers
Updates
24.01.2022: What I love about the community is the playful creativity that inspires a game like Wordle and that in turn inspires others to create fun tools around it:
Robert Reichel has reverse engineered the Wordle application, so in case you want to play tomorrow's word today .. you can. Or have that one guess "Genius" solution experience.
JP Fosterson created a Wordle helper that is very much the Python version of my grep-foo above. In case you play regularly and can use a hand.
And Tom Lockwood wrote a Wordle solver also in Python. He blogged about it and ... is pondering to rewrite things in Rust:
I’ve decided to explore Rust for this, and so far what was taking 1GB of RAM in Python is taking, literally 1MB in Rust!
Welcome to 2022.
01.02.2022: OMG. Wordle has been bought by the New York Times for "for a price in the low seven figures" (Source).
Joey Rees-Hill put it well in The Death of Wordle:
Today’s Web is dominated by platforms. The average Web user will spend most of their time on large platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Google Drive/Docs, YouTube, Netflix, Spotify, Gmail, and Google Calendar, along with sites operated by large publishers such as The New York Times or The Washington Post. [..]
The Web wasn’t always this way. I’m not old enough to remember this, but things weren’t always so centralized. Web users might run their own small website, and certainly would visit a good variety of smaller sites. With the increasing availability of internet access, the Web has become incredibly commercialized, with a handful of companies concentrating Web activity on their own properties.
Wordle was a small site that gained popularity despite not being part of a corporate platform. It was wonderful to see an independent site gain attention for being simple and fun. Wordle was refreshingly free of attention-manipulating dark patterns and pushy monetization. That’s why it’s a shame to see it absorbed, to inevitably become just another feature of one large media company’s portfolio.
Still kudos to Josh Wardle, a Million Pounds for Wordle. Well done!
It was fun while it lasted. Let's see what the next Wordle will be. This one has just been absorbed into the borg collective.
I think we need more creativity in statistics
" 'Boa constrictors swallow their prey whole, without chewing it. After that they are not able to move, and they sleep through the six months that they need for digestion.'
I pondered deeply, then, over the adventures of the jungle. And after some work with a colored pencil I succeeded in making my first drawing.
My Drawing Number One.
It looked something like this:
I showed my masterpiece to the grown-ups, and asked them whether the drawing frightened them.
But they answered: 'Frighten? Why should any one be frightened by a hat?'
My drawing was not a picture of a hat. It was a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant. But since the grown-ups were not able to understand it, I made another drawing: I drew the inside of a boa constrictor, so that the grown-ups could see it clearly. They always need to have things explained.
My Drawing Number Two looked like this:
The grown-ups' response, this time, was to advise me to lay aside my drawings of boa constrictors, whether from the inside or the outside, and devote myself instead to geography, history, arithmetic, and grammar.
That is why, at the age of six, I gave up what might have been a magnificent career as a painter. I had been disheartened by the failure of my Drawing Number One and my Drawing Number Two.
Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them."
from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupéry
from the Corona Fun with Statistics department at Worldometers (source, archive.org link)
Tales from the Edge. #Security.
Late 2017, King county, Washington
An overworked team with an impossible mission, to create a secure Internet browser, on Windows, is called to the weekly time-waster product team meeting.
Product Manager:
Team, you know that Edge needs to be the most secure browser on the planet, right?
So how can this thing segfault if some dude from the security consultancy fuzzes the Backup.dat?
You MUST make sure this is protected. It MUST be a violation of Windows Policy to modify the file. Go, make it happen! Report back next week!
The team disperses.
Early next morning, at a set of tables in the middle of a dimly lit cube farm...
Developer:
Hey, team lead, do you know what the PM meant with "Windows Policy"? I never heard about a "Windows Policy". Is this the "Group Policy"? Or did he mean the product license? Like the shrink-wrap contract? Do we need to consult legal?
Team lead:
Oh, ffs, Bob. No time for discussion. The requirement is crystal clear. Implement it. You're the security lead. We have a deadline approaching.
Developer:
O.k., boss. I'll see what I can do.
855 years and counting
Dear marketing managers:
- Test your scripts before using them on real customers
- Server images don't show in emails these days anymore
Dear developers:
- Test your scripts before deploying them in production
- Add (configurable) sanity checks to customer visible output according to the underlying business logic
SPG mailing fail