Wow. thank you so much for the writeup.

I'm just now (last few months) dabbling with agentic coding, but being an oldschool tech guy I had to dive straight into assembly. It was just too hard for me to level up my agentic skills given the deadline.

I wrote a... slightly substantial writeup: https://hallofdreams.org/posts/agents-and-ants/

Thanks!

This challenged coincided with my first dabblings into agentic coding. I wrote all my attempts in hand coded assembly, without doing any basic research. but your site is very entertaining and is reminding me of why the connection of ants/swarms cellular automata to gradient discovery to AI always blows my mind

Thank you, Thank you, Thank you. I'm absolutely having a great time immersing myself in this, but I'm super sad about the day it will be taken down and i cant play anymore. Maybe that day is when the contest is over? Will there be some way i can keep enjoying this beautiful little world after the contest?

I know opening up the source or keeping the hosting up might be really hard to do for legal, security, cost or a million other complicated reasons. so if its not possible, thank you anyway :)

So simple and beautiful. So addicting. Love it! Thank you!

bravo!

On the advice of a 19 year old (I'm 60) I tried using the polarized sunglasses i keep in my car, at night.

I helped.

Ida know, can someone comment on whether that actually does reduce noise in whatever information is needed to drive safely?

I would suggest you check your eyes as well.

Age progressively adds deposits in the lenses in your eyes, and at some point cataract surgery replaces the lens with a clear one.

Thing is, these deposits work like a dirty windshield in sunlight - you can't see because of the glare. The glare is just off-axis light hitting a surface and scattering - it illuminates the entire surface reducing contrast.

The more deposits and/or the brighter the light, the more it behaves like an completely fogged windshield.

(there is also another kind of glare that affects young eyes - a very bright point of light can cause pain in the retina where it focuses)

Not polarized since glasses, but I've start wearing specially made night driving glasses at night. They have a yellow tint, and so they strive to reduce glare. Doesn't solve the issue of some asshole in a Tesla who tunes his lights to be aimed as high as possible, but it helps

yesss! this x 1000

pretty sure there is no salt water in the central valley either.

yesssss. 1993 is when linux found me.

i loved alt-F[1-4] on a vga screen i somehow managed to get higher (character based) resolution.

when i started runing xwindows, i still bounced out to the console with (afair) ctrl-alt-f2?

and just a few weeks ago, I forget why, but i instinctively was able to get a console on a messed up (xwindows or whatever it is today) console. good ol console.

probably anyone this far in the thread remenbers long term capital managment, I did, but couldnt remenber if it was in the 80's or 90's. (1998)

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/longtermcapital.asp

Blame for using comic sans ? :)

Few companies experienced the explosive growth fb did, though many will claim to have done so. Hack made the existing codebase of php scale to insane levels while reaching escape velocity for the overall company to even attempt to transition away or shrink the php codebase, as i recall (i was an SRE, not a dev)

zeus likewise.

You worked at FB, but you call yourself an SRE, not a PE? ;)

haha .. but i did work at google before fb.

my memory is hazy, but when i started i was called an sre. Then someone made up the term "app ops". then it was production engineering. then I called myself an SRE when i was interviewing to leave fb.

Oh, and i was called a DBA before being acquired by google.

You still call it Facebook?

PEs are still quite new remember....