A few months ago I was getting  excited about the kind of logic puzzles where it looks like there's no way to extract the information you want, but it can be done with the right clever insight ( Read more... )

A couple of Scott Alexander's latest posts (and some of his earlier ones) relate to the balance between how much you rely on incoming sensory information versus priors, or bottom-up versus top-down processing. (This is not as simplistic as saying "some people won't change their pre-existing beliefs even when confronted with contradictory evidence ( Read more... )

I've been playing a programming-puzzle game on my phone called Hacked, and enjoying it a lot. It feels really good to be coding again, to be thinking algorithmically, to go "OK, how will I code this?" and then "Let's figure out exactly how it's not working and fix it." I hadn't realised how much I missed that. I've hardly coded anything since I ( Read more... )

This post prompted me to reminisce about my own childhood experiences of computers and IT teaching at school.

State primary school, 1986-1989There were one or two BBC Micros in each classroom. I remember getting to play games like Granny's Garden. There was a basic word processor, I think called Pen Down, which we were allowed to type up our best ( Read more... )