Slay The Spire has dailies, but I get your point generally.

Sadly, now that the page has been taken down, maybe this is the last time we will see it here.

You get rid of them: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/28/clever-lazy/

Agreed, but it’s remarkable how well this approach worked for him till then. No approach can solve every problem. I wonder if this one, on balance, was the right one for him, or for others.

Is it repeating in the whole PIN, or in digits next to each other? I'm trying to resist the nerd snipe of what the total number of possibilities would be in the latter case...

I believe it would be 7290, or more generalized, S(N) = 10 * 9 ^(N-1) with N being the length of the code and S being the number of combinations (assuming that a decimal system is used)

And from there, with variable lengths ranging from L to H, S(L, H) = 5/4 * 9 ^(L-1) * (9^(U-L+1) - 1)

So if the bank allows combinations from 4 - 6 digits, there would be a total of 663390 combinations to choose from.

Now, of course, the bank may decide to go from decimal to hexadecimal in the future - or maybe, there systems allow only duodecimal. In any case, the formula can be generalized further to account for all number systems - with B being the base of the system:

S(L, H, B) = (B/(B-2)) * (B-1) ^(L-1) * ((B-1)^(U-L+1) - 1)

This is only defined for B > 2 - in binary system, there's only ever two combinations which fit the constraint

I wonder if there's some threshold to be crossed where it can be surprising for longer. I made a video game name generator long ago that just picks a word (or short phrase) from each of three columns. (The majority of the words / phrases are from me, though many other people have contributed.)

I haven't added any words or phrases to it in years, but I still use it regularly and somehow it still surprises me. Maybe the Spelunky-type approach can be surprising for longer; that is, make a bunch of hand-curated bits and pick from them randomly: https://tinysubversions.com/spelunkyGen/

I’ve been reading most articles in The Economist every week for 20 years. It’s not really relevant to my work. I don’t read every article thoroughly, though. There are some I don’t mind skimming, some I usually skip that are speculation about the future, and also when you’re up to date sometimes articles contain redundant info to bring relative newcomers up to speed.

It certainly has issues in the depth of its coverage, the simplistic endings of its articles, occasional culture war snipes, and lots of other stuff. It’s far from perfect. But for my money it’s still the best general world news source out there, and I check most of them out regularly. I have so many conversations with coworkers and people I meet about their home countries that I just couldn’t without reading The Economist.

I think a neat follow-up image would be a sphere containing the top 2.5 miles of Earth’s crust for comparison to the water.

Super late response, but I play Jumbline 2 these days which is the exact same thing. Only a phone app currently I think though.

I think for most devs, software licenses are not a core competency. Most devs interact with licensing only occasionally, if that, and they may not have a good grasp of the licenses they work under (or if they do, they may forget parts of their understanding later).