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05:43
1
Q: Who wins in this knight-placement game?

Will.Octagon.GibsonTwo players take turns placing knights on the squares of a standard 8x8 chessboard, so that no knight can take another. The player who is unable to do this loses. Which player has a winning strategy and how do they force a win? Clarifications: The players can only place knights on an empty squar...

 
5 hours later…
10:14
@PolygonPotpourri renewable/GREEN energy = energ(-y)* &lit
10:59
ahhhhhhh I missed "new" as the anagrind. clever.
11:39
@oAlt Yep!
@RyanM Thanks!
11:50
CCCC: Twenty One Pilots frontman to depend on time rewinding, getting hopes crushed after heading to Japan (5 6)
(T+YLER)< + J_ + OSEPH*
@Jafe yep!
CCCC: Fully commit energy to find area between posts (4,4)
@Jafe goal line can mean an area between posts in soccer, and that's go all in E. what a convenient construction
that's right
also works in hockey
11:59
@Jafe ha, nice
thanks
12:25
0
Q: IQ test treningmozga with pattern

tuấn lêPlease solve this puzzle for me

 
2 hours later…
13:55
chores in the way, I'll only start making the clue later
 
1 hour later…
15:20
CCCC: Words of wisdom about eating healthily, having a time to rest, requests to continue after a year, to primarily do chore at broken-down road (2 5 1 3 5 3 6 4)
Now you know the other reason why it took long
Hold on, I missed a word – gonna edit it. Ughhhh
CCCC: Words of wisdom about eating healthily, having a time to rest, request to continue after a year, to primarily do chores at broken-down road (2 5 1 3 5 3 6 4)
This should now work. Sorry about that. Just when I thought I accounted for everything...
15:44
@oAlt AN APPLE A DAY KEEPS THE DOCTOR AWAY = A (a) NAP (time to rest) PLEAD (request) AY (a year) KEEP (continue) STHEDOCTORA ((t_ + do chores at)*) WAY (road)
@RyanM yep, well done
is that technically an indirect anagram?
I wanted to add A Y KEEP in PLEADS but I had forgotten a container indicator, which wasn't going to work given the surface
@RyanM some would say it is, although it has been used in crosswords before I think
Yeah, I think The Nation would allow it, for one, based on what I've read from their setters' writing on their thought process
I definitely get where they're coming from though; I did feel it was a bit lacking (better to use only the actual letters there and not unneeded ones), and I only used it as a way to amend the mistake I commited earlier
15:47
I finally managed to solve an entire puzzle of theirs without using any crossword-specific tooling recently
I like that, congratulations
thanks :)
for your c4, my solve process was roughly: "a time to rest" = "a nap" and then spotted the saying and worked backwards from there
CCCC: Soldiers fighting insects (10)
(I found that convenient and seeing plea, plead, and pleads made me more motivated, but clearly it fell apart at the end)
I've yet to be brave enough to try to turn anything that long into a workable surface, so props for making it work at all :)
Lol thanks
15:58
Bonus: my C4 clue in illustrated form (AI-generated)
clearly answering the question "How many legs do insects have?" with "at least six, but I lost count partway through."
16:22
So, I'm happy to respect your wishes here. However, I am extremely skeptical that they have the correct numbers for inference energy usage. For one thing, they've used the wrong model entirely for ChatGPT. For another, their calculated difference, in orders of magnitude between inference and training is at odds with what's known about the cost of training the GPT models.
I do acknowledge that there are other issues as well, and I attempted to address some of those by making sure to clearly label it as generated, and I did not prompt it with any specific artist's style. And I would certainly never try to pass it off as a human's work.
16:43
(also, none of this should be interpreted as a blanket defense of anything, especially not some of the more out-there claims about AI being a reasonable replacement for humans working in creative fields)
@RyanM [soldiers] COMBAT (fighting) + ANTS (insects) = COMBATANTS?
@PolygonPotpourri yep!
@RyanM I do appreciate these measures, because most people sharing ai images don't bother to take them, but I would argue that use of an ai image generator at all is at the very least complicit in plagiarism, given that they (or at least all of the popular ones) use datasets trained on stolen ip
@RyanM and the fact is that no matter how unreasonable it may be (and it is), humans are being replaced by ai in creative fields because corporations see it purely as a way to save time and money by avoiding having to pay someone to do work for them
17:07
CCCC: Duplicated suspicion without time before being shown the way (7)
17:18
@PolygonPotpourri DOUB(-t) LED
@juicifer Yes!
@juicifer I think that there's a meaningful difference between artists using AI as a tool to achieve an effect that they want to create, and replacing artists with AI. It's a line that can be very blurry, though there are certainly clear-cut examples on both sides (consider, for instance, Photoshop's content-aware fill features). Marvel maintains this example is the former; from a quick watch of the sequence, I'm skeptical that it's as clear-cut as they claim, though I don't think I have enough context surrounding its creation to comment.
@RyanM this is true, but even just using ai to create a specific effect can be a slippery slope because the effect that some people want to create is deepfake p*rn
maybe regulation can solve that but I'm of the opinion that some people out there will continually use tools like this for evil no matter how much you try to regulate it
I guess the overarching point I'm trying to make is that there are a lot of problems caused (or potentially caused) by ai-generated images and there's not all that much upside in comparison
17:35
@juicifer Sure, but...I don't really buy the slippery slope argument, generally, since you could say that same thing about almost any tool. For example, I think everyone accepts that the benefits of hammers are worth the fact that sometimes people use them for evil. One needs to (as your next message suggests) figure out where to draw a line with benefit vs. cost, and regulate appropriately (for example, hitting people with hammers is often more illegal than hitting people without hammers).
(and once again, today is not the day that I remember to put the second parenthesis after a markdown link that ends a parenthetical)
(also, I should add as a side note, as tone may not always carry well through text: I do appreciate your points here; they're thought-provoking and well said, and I'm glad that you've shared them with me)
@RyanM yeah I think it's definitely good to have discussions like these with people who don't necessarily share your viewpoints, especially considering how echo-chamber-y the internet can be nowadays
definitely agreed!
and your points have also been very well-articulated
CCCC: Capital within borders in which the chief was killed (4)
(not with a hammer, incidentally)
17:51
my experience with non-cryptic crosswords tells me that all four-letter capitals are OSLO
Not-C4: It used to be the case that the chief was killed (4) wait no this doesn't actually work, can't anagram a thing to itself, oops
(pretty sure this isn't the approach taken in the actual one, otherwise I'm missing something)
18:10
@juicifer more so than text-generative AI does?
not to be confused with this Capital within Borders?
@msh210 probably about as much as text-generative ai
not to make my generalizations too sweeping here, but much the same people and companies are making text generators and image generators, and they've shown en masse that they are not all that concerned with getting permission for what their datasets are trained on, and in some cases openly flaunt that they didn't do so
@RyanM "Hi, I'd like a round-trip ticket to Oslo." "Certainly, sir. Will that be Oslo, Norway, or Oslo, Switzerland?" "No, no: Oslo, Fiji." "Very well, sir, but there's no direct flight. You'll have to stop over in Oslo."
hahaha
also while I'm there, I'd like to listen to Etta James, in an apse, near Mt. Etna, then make my way up to the Alps.
Can do; would you like some Oreos or some bread buttered with oleo as a snack?
18:30
@juicifer thanks. Have now done so, and the other one you linked to, above. Food for thought.
19:12
@TakingNotes Wait, so a cryptic clue can have a non-alphabetic answer??
19:32
Okay, so I'm nearly positive that this is wrong, but I'll try it just in case. Capital = WIEN. "within" borders are WN, in which DIE (the in German, spoken in Wien) chief (first letter) was killed yielding IE. @juicifer
@msh210 that's correct! it is in fact wrong
:-D
20:15
1
Q: DEKADOKU, the new challenge

Xavier CastilloThanks to @Beastly_Gerbil for the name. I'm sharing a new puzzle challenge with you. This is the first one I ever created, inspired by the Scientific American magazine cover from 1959. You can search for the answer online, but I will only award points if you explain the solution procedure in deta...

20:33
@DannyuNDos i mean you can do whatever you like really
you wouldn't see it in a published cryptic because they typically only use the roman alphabet
but in here we don't really have that same restriction
we've had answers in the hebrew and cyrillic alphabets before iirc
@DannyuNDos This was one of 13 C4 answers to use at least one character that is not a letter, punctuation, or a separator (as defined by Unicode as implemented in Visual Studio Code; one answer of "V̅" appears to be, upon looking that up, a letter in the conventional sense).
21:05
So 13 out of 6120. That's 0.21% of C4 answers. Not statistically significant. :P
not significant but it certainly can happen
21:37
Note that "letters" here includes letters from non-Latin alphabets.
21:48
Besides V̅, the other non-letter, non-punctuation, non-separator characters were all numbers.

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