Consumer solar has been a game changer, so doing the same for wind would be a huge innovation. But the reasons everyone doesn't already have wind generators on their roof is it's a much harder problem to solve. Not least of which is wind speeds are significantly lower closer to the ground. So I expect their 1kw output has a very narrow "optimal conditions" window. This might work if you live in a desert? Though given enough time with climate change...
There are two sides to this with companies automating hiring with AI as well, so the whole interface between employers and job seekers seems to be getting an ever thicker layer of bots talking to bots. I've heard stories of interviewees clearly reading responses off their screen in video interviews even.
So although it seems like an inevitable arms race, having built engineering teams in the past this is all really unsettling. I've worked in, and hope to continue to work in, a remote-only job. So much of my process in hiring relied on relatively subtle signals. It seems like in person interviews will still be able to provide those signals for now, but I have a feeling personal recommendations are going to become increasingly critical for remote companies in their hiring efforts.
This is all giving me flashbacks of Rehoboam in Westworld.
Appreciate the feedback, thanks for checking it out.
To be clear, LLMs were not used to design this game, just to edit my post talking about creating the board generator. And I do play it every day, today was definitely a tougher one, but the variety day by day is by design, which is pretty common in word games.
Mini Mot | Jul 1, 2026 ⣤s⣤y⣀e⣀b⣀i⣀o⣀u⣀t⣀o⣀d⣀
Max Mot | Jul 1, 2026 ⣿d⣿b⣿i⣶r⣤i⣤o⣤e⣤l⣤c⣤t⣤s⣤o⣤e⣤
The key to this game is to use your general intuition about English phonetics to deduce where a letter can't go among the available spots on the board. Kind of like Sudoku logic applied to a crossword. So in theory you can solve quite a few words you've never seen before because certain letter sequences just don't work in English, (the premise behind XKCD for example).
Thanks for the feedback. The premise of the game is you solve each individual word in order, so greyed out cells are places that aren't the next letter for any of the words right now. As you place the letters those cells open up.
Yeah that's fair. I might dust off my draft and re-edit myself, I foolishly thought this would lead to a better post, and I guess am not as attuned to the AI smell as others.
Sorry about the turn off ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I tried to put my best foot forward by reading about prose, engaging story telling, and did use an LLM to help me edit and reword parts of the post. Either way, I appreciate the feedback.
Yeah no criticism of the devs here, it's a great project. I meant to point at Apple. Though I'm a customer and like many of their products. I do hate their rigid clearly profit driven walled garden.
Information theory has been a really fascinating topic to get more acquainted with. Not really related to the crossword, but I highly recommend 3Blue1Brown's video "Compression is Intelligence", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6DKRf-fAAM
Yeah I understand. But there are plenty of good headphones that work with Android and include most of the features. That's kind of the point of Librepods right? To bring AirPods up to par for non-Apple devices and make them a viable option for Android and/or non-Mac users. So "this working" means those features.
FWIW I was aiming for this to be a "connections" level of difficulty. My sample size is small but the past week win rate is about 65%, which is actually very close to connections. But I also don't want to cause frustration, since a game is supposed to be fun. So I want to think through this hint idea, maybe it can help lessen the load and also give a fun dynamic of deciding when to use your hint, so I'm thinking you just get one and have to decide when to use it?
Really great idea. And not going to ding it for kicking off with an LLM. But it might be worth thinking about how you could build a community of human contributors in a future stage. I personally don't feel comfortable with handing AI-generated stuff over to the kids in my life, and I imagine that would be a big barrier for your project as many others share this sentiment. That's a shame because encouraging kids to think deeply from a young age is something I would deeply support.
There are tons of knowledgeable teachers out there, and they are very often motivated to help the next generations thrive and grow beyond their day job. I'm sure you could find people to help with editorial work on this version to give it a human stamp of approval, and involve the many talented and inspiring educators and communicators that are out there to help grow this into a true value for the next generation.
My family plays a lot of word games, some are board-game style and of course we all love the NY-Times catalog of puzzles. The idea for this game came to me when I played bananagrams, and lost, after having binged way too much sudoku earlier in the day.
I became obsessed with the idea of making this work, and it was way harder than I expected. The journey took me into the depths of confusability graphs and zero error capacity in information theory. I might write a post about it some day.