Tales of drunken Brits misbehaving on planes are legion. One group going on a golfing break in Turkey drank a SunExpress airplane’s entire stock of booze within 25 minutes. Flights to Spain’s party spot Ibiza regularly turn into onboard discos. A drunk EasyJet passenger once tried to storm the cockpit, saying he could fly better. Another tried to open the plane door midair.
Ted Herman
@tedherman
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Computer Scientist, mineral collector, gardener, bike enthusiast; un peu de français; nederlands maar erg roestig.
@regehr Social Beamforming.
"Officials will flush 50,000 toilets to flood a Utah lake in order to generate electricity"
@regehr $\Rightarrow$\textit{awesome} https://blog.mathieuacher.com/TeXCCChessEngine/
TeXCCChess: How Coding Agents Wrote a Chess Engine in Pure TeX
What happens when you ask a 2026 coding agent like Claude Code to build a chess engine from scratch (with no plan, no architecture document, no step-by-step guidance) in a language that was never designed for this purpose? Building a chess engine is a non-trivial software engineering challenge: it involves board representation, move generation with dozens of special rules (castling, en passant, promotion), recursive tree search with pruning, evaluation heuristics, as well as a way to assess engine correctness and performance, including Elo rating. Doing it from scratch, with minimal human guidance, is a serious test of what coding agents can do today. Doing it in LaTeX’s macro language, which has no arrays, no functions with return values, no convenient local variables or stack frames, and no built-in support for complex data structures or algorithms? More than that, as far as I can tell, it has never been done before (I could not find any existing TeX chess engine on CTAN, GitHub, or TeX.SE). Yet, the coding agent built a functional chess engine in pure TeX that runs on pdflatex and reaches around 1280 Elo (the level of a casual tournament player). This post dives deep into how this engine, called TeXCCChess, works, the TeX-specific challenges encountered during development. You can play against it in Overleaf (see demo https://youtu.be/ngHMozcyfeY) or your local TeX installation https://youtu.be/Tg4r_bu0ANY, while the source code is available on GitHub https://github.com/acherm/agentic-chessengine-latex-TeXCCChess/
I just asked Google AI a question and got "AI responses may include mistakes" along with some nonsense answer.
With the conclave looming, here is my pet peeve about cardinals. So I was growing a bunch of dill plants and there was a monarch caterpillar munching away. Doing my bit to promote butterflies. Suddenly a cardinal zoomed down and gobbled it up. End of story.
tariff business opportunity: coffee made from Kentucky coffeetree beans with artificial caffeine
Every sophomore wonders what is the meaning of life. Well, finally we know the answer: generating tokens.
@regehr It's not just twisters. https://mastodon.social/@AssociatedPre[email protected]/114181717691133047
RFK: We are going to quantify the risk of vaccines.
Reality: herd immunity vs prisoner's dilemma makes a mess of quantification