groggo (u/groggo) - Readit News

groggo commented on A Crisis comes to Wordle: Reusing old words forkingmad.blog/wordle-cr... · Posted by u/cyanbane

Scrabble is a competitive game, not a puzzle, and therefore subject to a different set of constraints. (Players in a competitive game are trying to win; a puzzle author, if they're any good at their job, is ultimately trying to lose.)

In particular, you have to consider the equilibrium. If you only allow a subset of words in Scrabble, this replaces the competitive advantage from knowing lots of words that no one uses in real life, with a competitive advantage from knowing the exact contours of the border between acceptable and unacceptable words. I would argue that this is even worse; at least if you learn lots of Scrabble words you're learning something about the real world.

By contrast, Wordle can self-impose whatever constraints they want on solutions, and people don't have to know what those constraints are in order to solve the puzzle. (It can help a little on the margin, which in a perfect world would not be the case, but it's much less of a problem for the puzzle-solving experience than the Scrabble equivalent would be.)

groggo · 9 days ago

Ya that's a good point for competitive scrabble. However today I think a lot of people's main exposure to Scrabble comes from WordsWithFriends (and recently, the new NYT games version). In those games, there's no penalty for getting a wrong word, it just won't let you play it. In that context, I at least think it would be nice to have a setting with a more limited list... it could be like Chess timed variants.

It's obviously an impossible challenge to draw those contours in language. Wordle did pretty well though! And going the other direction, just allowing everything that could possibly a word, just starts getting ridiculous.

groggo commented on A Crisis comes to Wordle: Reusing old words forkingmad.blog/wordle-cr... · Posted by u/cyanbane

hyperbovine · 9 days ago

It’s this. There are many five letter words that are not “wordley”. Words such as, idk, bokeh, are technically part of the lexicon but would never appear as a solution. The wordle bot will even tell you this if you guess them — “good guess, but unlikely to appear as a solution”. The crossword has a similar sort of unwritten rule, maybe not as strict, but really hard technical words seldom appear.

groggo · 9 days ago

IMO scrabble would be improved by a similar limitation. There's too many nonsense words.

groggo commented on Show HN: I built an AI conversation partner to practice speaking languages apps.apple.com/us/app/tal... · Posted by u/omarisbuilding

omarisbuilding · 11 days ago

To be honest i didn't try them. My purpose was just to provide a nice UI/UX to the AI voice model.

groggo · 11 days ago

You didn't try them!? If you have the ChaptGPT app it's super simple and worth a try. I talk to it in French a lot. It gets tedious though, because after almost every question it tries to end the conversation with "let me know if I can do anything else to help". I really want it to pretend to be curious and continue the conversation. I've thought that this could be fixed with some better prompting, so I'm excited to try out this app.

groggo commented on Apple introduces new AirTag with longer range and improved findability apple.com/newsroom/2026/0... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

c-hendricks · 16 days ago

I bought one for my cat, never did help with finding him, just the general area.

They're not great for tracking things that move on their own, or things that avoid people.

groggo · 15 days ago

we have them for our cats, they're great. Sometimes they're hiding in bushes and we don't realize they're 10 ft away. Other times they're down by the neighbor's house. It's not perfect but it tells us which direction more or less. And definitely more peace of mind if they ever got lost. They

They make breakaway collars so if they get caught on something it won't trap them.

groggo commented on Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back calquio.com/finance/compo... · Posted by u/ivcatcher

groggo · 23 days ago

Congrats! I never stopped coding, but AI makes it way more productive and fun for sure.

$100 seems like a lot. I guess if you think about it compared to dev salaries, it's nothing. But for $10 per month copilot you can get some pretty great results too.

groggo commented on Sora 2 openai.com/index/sora-2/... · Posted by u/skilled

sensanaty · 4 months ago

This "barrier of entry" rhetoric reads like a pure buzzword dreamed up by AI pushers with no actual meaning to it. The barrier has NEVER been lower to produce books or comic strips or anything else like that. Hell, look at xkcd, there's nothing technically challenging about it, it's quite literally just stick figures, yet it's massively popular because it's clever and well thought out.

What exactly is this enabling, other than the mass generation of low quality, throwaway crap that exists solely to fatten up Altman's wallet some more?

groggo · 4 months ago

What about the era of flash cartoons? Remember "End of Ze World"? In a way that's throwaway crap. Or it could have been written as a comic strip, or animated manually. But Flash kinda opened up this whole new world of games and animation. AI is doing the same.

One that comes to mind is a sort of podcast-style of two cats having a conversation, and in each "episode" there's some punchline where they end up laughing about some cat stereotype. Definitely low quality garbage, but I guess what I mean by "barrier of entry" (sorry for the buzzword), is just that this is going to enable a new generation of content, memes, whatever you want to call it.

groggo commented on Sora 2 openai.com/index/sora-2/... · Posted by u/skilled

morleytj · 4 months ago

Not to be a downer, but even as someone very optimistic about technology and AI generally, "TikTok but AI" sounds like a societally terrible thing to try and create.

What's the benefit of this? Curious if anyone has a solid viewpoint steelmanning any positives they can think of.

groggo · 4 months ago

It's pretty entertaining.

People always like telling stories. Books, comic strips, movies, they're all just telling a story with a different amount of it left up to the viewer's imagination. Lowering the barrier to entry for this type of stuff is so cool.

I think you have to be pretty pessimistic to not just think it's really cool. You can find issues with it for sure, and maybe argue that those issues outweigh the benefit, but hard to say it's not going to be fun for some people.

groggo commented on Bringing fully autonomous rides to Nashville, in partnership with Lyft waymo.com/blog/2025/09/wa... · Posted by u/ra7

rangestransform · 5 months ago

I sometimes prefer to enjoy the benefits of vertical integration, like Apple being able to codevelop hardware and software unrestricted from having to provide a public API at every layer (e.g. airpods device switching), and being able to unilaterally dictate user experience guidelines to app developers (e.g. ask app not to track).

groggo · 5 months ago

For sure! It's an interesting point. But from an economic point of view, it's better for consumers if there are clean boundaries and every layer is commoditized.

groggo commented on Bringing fully autonomous rides to Nashville, in partnership with Lyft waymo.com/blog/2025/09/wa... · Posted by u/ra7

charcircuit · 5 months ago

The value of a business is based off how much value they will provide to others. In order to be a trillion dollar business you have to be providing a lot of value to others in the current or people are speculating you will provide value in the future.

groggo · 5 months ago

And you have to have a monopoly though? Farms provide the most value to the world but there's so much competition that it's commoditized, so as far as I know there's no super valuable farms... Hopefully the same thing happens with autonomous cars, cloud computing, etc.

groggo commented on Bringing fully autonomous rides to Nashville, in partnership with Lyft waymo.com/blog/2025/09/wa... · Posted by u/ra7

blinding-streak · 5 months ago

Interesting that Waymo has relationships with both Uber and Lyft now. They can play them off each other for future expansion opportunities, while continuing to learn the nuances of the high-scale rideshare biz from them.

groggo · 5 months ago

That's how competition should work. Every layer should have multiple providers until the companies get all of their profits squeezed away and users get the best possible price.