Interesting/Fun

Things that are interesting or for fun. Not sure where to put these yet.

Links

• Hakari (HN)
  • An online puzzle, like Notpron or Cicada 3301
• YouTube: Self-solving Minesweeper | Have a Luke at this Code
  • Had to admit that watching the program solving the game is satisfying
• The largest island in a lake on an island in a lake on an island (HN)
  • Wikipedia: Recursive islands and lakes
• My High-Flying Life as a Corporate Spy Who Lied His Way to the Top (30 min long read)
  • Excerpt from the book Ruse: Lying the American Dream from Hollywood to Wall Street about being a corporate spy
• Early computer art in the 50s and 60s (more examples in the HN discussion) — early creation of art using computers
• QR Codes in Anime that works — the code is simple but still quite creative and impressive
• The Password Game
• Wavy walls use fewer bricks than a straight wall
  • Crinkle Crankle Walls | Wikipedia, Crinkle Crankle Calculus | John D. Cook
  • A straight wall needs more layers or buttresses, which requires more bricks
• The Egg | Andy Weir — worth spending 5 minutes to read
• The secret life of Jimmy Zhong | CNBC
  • Stole $3 billion worth of Bitcoin from Silk Road. The story of how investigators tracked him down
• I trapped scammers in an impossible maze | Kitboga
  • A fake website and phone tree to waste scammers' time trying to claim Bitcoin
• How to Build a Better Social Network | Every
  • Interesting idea, to use a decaying points rewarding system to redistribute the rank
  • Might not work because of possibly no one have that attention span to rank by numbers, but it does point out the problems of existing social network and possible approach to address them
• Reading QR Codes withOUT a computer
• The possibility of making money from shredded banknote pieces using computer vision
  • Hong Kong Monetary Authority sells shredded banknotes equivalent to $138,000
  • Computer vision could possibly put them back like a jigsaw puzzle
  • And the paper weight contains stones inside, possibly contained far less money than HKMA claimed
• Making a PDF that's larger than Germany
  • The size claim is not the limit to the file format, it's what Adobe Acrobat supports
  • How to create a simple PDF file, the internal structure of PDF
• Staying Alive | Philosophy Experiments
  • Probing the edge of what it means to be alive, body or soul?
  • How your feels might be conflicting
• No Vehicles in the Park
  • Why is it hard to enforce rules.
  • Why it's impossible to agree on what's allowed (HN)
  • This HN Thread has good arguments
• Reverse Graffiti — graffiti by removing dirt
• My mother declared my bedroom a disaster area
  • President Reagan responds to a unique request for funding
• Drone flying 101 FPV Sim (HN)
  • Raw, pitch, roll
  • Fun video about FPV on YouTube: Nurk FPV Flight of the Year, over, under, into moving trains
• The t-test was invented in Guinness Brewery (HN)
• YouTube: How One Small Change broke Wikipedia's First Link Rule | Not David (20:32)
  • Getting to Philosophy | Wikipedia: keep clicking on the first link in a Wikipedia page will lead to the Philosophy page
  • Using math to determine why the Philosophy page is important in the network
  • How to break the game? What happens if we do the second link, or a random link?
• The Art of Andrew Wulf — cool generative art
• YouTube: Changing a light bulb at the top of Salisbury Cathedral's Spire
• YouTube: Smaller Than Pixel Art: Sub-Pixel Art | Japhy Riddle — nice music and storytelling too
• What are these dots on tin can lids (HN)
• On medieval cats (HN)
  • There is no massacre of cats in the middle age
  • Misinformation spreading on tiktok with so many likes
  • Wikipedia: List of common misconceptions about the Middle Ages, List of common misconceptions
• Spurious Correlation
  • "Unrelated" correlation, with GenAI's made-up explanation, scatter plot and GenAI image
  • Wind power generate in Taiwan correlates with Google searches for 'i am tired'

April Fools

• History's Most Outrageous April Fools' Jokes | National Geographic
• April Fools' Day might be the world's longest-running joke. No one knows how it began | NPR

Ever-expanding drawing with tons of details

• Reddit Wimmelbilder — "A place for the amazingly intricate Where's Waldo-style illustrations you can stare at for hours, and still not pick up on all of the tiny details"
• Reddit D&D Maps — "A catalogue for user-created maps and links to maps by other artists suitable for use in any D&D campaign, adventure, or encounter"
• Floor 796 (HN, HN) — Ever-expanding animation of the life of the 796th floor of a space station
  • In Russian: Author Pikabu posts, Explanation of how the page works
  • Animation Editor, YouTube videos
• YouTube: How to Draw Medieval Cities
• A hand-drawn map on Reddit

Elon Musk

• Elon Musk | Ashlee Vance — the 2015 book
• Elon Musk | Walter Isaacson — the 2023 book
• Elon's decision making: an anecdote compilation
  • Some non-conventional decisions collected from books, whether the decisions are success or not
• Book Review: Elon Musk
  • A collection of Q&As with stories from the 2015 biography by Ashlee Vance