Solving Factorio Quality Simon Sapin, 2026-02-15 I play Factorio the normal way: by writing matrix math code to plan the factory. But we’ll get to that. Or, TL;DR, go to my new online calculator tool. Intro to Factorio and Quality … Read more
Or: Why do I always do things the hard way? Jane Street periodically puts out challenges, and this one thoroughly nerd-sniped me and sent me down a month-long rabbit hole that I’m only now emerging from. This post is an … Read more
On her blog, Lea Verou makes a case that each user-facing website dark-mode toggle should only ever show two options, but in a smart way. The challenge is that any dark mode toggle needs to actually accommodate three options: dark, … Read more
Solving Fermat: Andrew Wiles Andrew Wiles devoted much of his entire career to proving Fermat’s Last Theorem, the world’s most famous mathematical problem. In 1993, he made front-page headlines when he announced a proof of the problem, but this was … Read more
The problem and why it resisted the usual induction For pairwise-coprime integers a,b,c>1a,b,c>1a,b,c>1, consider the numbers aibjck(i,j,k≥0). a^i b^j c^k qquad (i,j,kge 0). aibjck(i,j,k≥0). The question asks whether every sufficiently large integer is a sum of distinct such numbers, with … Read more
19 May 2026 – …and finishing the game while at it. It’s been two years since my last Zork adventure and I finally got time to finish it. But before I restored my last save, I checked my blog notes … Read more
By Susam Pal on 20 Nov 2025 Fizz Buzz is a counting game that has become oddly popular in the world of computer programming as a simple test of basic programming skills. The rules of the game are straightforward. Players … Read more
┌───────┐ │ = │ ┌───┴───┬───┴───┬───┬───┬───┐ │ 6 │ 12 │ 5 │ │ │ ├───┬───┼───┬───┴───┤ │ ├───┐ │ │ │ * │ ≠ │ │10 │ * │ ┌───┘ │ ├───┼───────┤ ├───┴───┤ │ 18 │ │ * │ 10 │ … Read more
April 28, 2025 This post is the first of a two-part series that describes my computer-assisted solution to a physical puzzle I got. In this first part, I describe the problem and model it in Haskell. This post is a … Read more
In a previous life, I wrote a Sudoku solver that relied on Poetry’s dependency resolver. We ended up selling that startup to EDB (not because of the Poetry hack), which means that they now own this IP. And, since then, … Read more