Unsurprisingly with a newborn and a very sticky 3 years old at home, I haven’t been doing much in the past 3 weeks. Since I stopped working on it, I’ve released my thematic crossword generation app, Prosettr, to a complete (and expected) indifference (zero traffic came from the HackerNews announcement, and I got about 10 likes from LinkedIn). Oh well, it was a fun project anyway and I’m quite happy with the result! ...
February went by in a blink! I barely had any time for myself this month between work, a pregnant wife, and my 2-year-old being in the “I want papa only” phase. These days, the first thing I do in the morning is play Lego. It beats doomscrolling, but at 7 a.m. and before my coffee, it’s tough to be creative. Here’s an elephant I made this morning—the trunk moves. I’ve also rewritten a big part of the backend of Prosettr.com. In a HackerNews thread about Donald Knuth (Donald Knuth’s 2024 Christmas Lecture: Strong and Weak Components), I learned there was an improvement to the algorithm that my app is based on, Dancing Links. I’m not going to go into much detail here (maybe in a future post), but I procured The Art of Computer Programming Volume 4B, and indeed, the improved version uses half the memory, with each option’s items having only up and down links, and no left and right links—those being replaced by a “spacer” node. Here’s my original implementation in Go I made while following the chapter: /backtrack_aocp/main.go. Then I replaced the previous implementation with this one, with some added optimizations (support for secondary columns, using channels instead of an input matrix, another channel to output the solutions, etc.). ...
Already two weeks into January, it’s time for an update on my projects! I’m really happy with the progress on Prosettr.com, my crossword generation app. It will soon be time to share it with the world (HackerNews…). Yesterday evening, I added login functionality (a choice of email + password or Google sign-in) using Firebase Authentication, as well as a button to load PUZ files. The latter was surprisingly easy to do: I gave ChatGPT o1-mini the PUZ format description and asked it for a loader/writer in Go with my expectations for the input/output, followed by an HTTP handler. Thirty minutes later, here we are with the “Upload PUZ File” in production! ...
Looking back, 2024 was a pretty good year across all metrics! Learned new things at work even though it’s my 5th year at the job, been pretty healthy and fit, not been drinking much (was a dry NYE, and will be doing a dry January). So I’m not taking any big resolutions for this year; it should be plenty busy already with the birth of my second kid in a few months. I’ll just try to finish and release my crossword generator application before that, and that will be it. Maybe try to be more smiley and relaxed in general. ...
Since the release of ChatGPT more than 2 years ago, I have felt a strong disconnect with the opinions on HackerNews about AI. It really feels like an Anti-AI (especially anti-OpenAI) echo chamber, neverendingly predicting the advent of AI winters, always repeating the same arguments (usually some flavor of “it’s not intelligent”, “what is AGI?”, “how can you trust it?”). Well, given that the generated code compiles, the tests pass and the program works as expected, I’m not sure what there is to complain about. I feel that HN is about as wrong about AI as it was about cryptocurrencies. Eventually, I mostly stopped reading the comments, I just use it as a link aggregator now. ...