There's an assured win combo in this game, at least against the Hard AI. The combo is as follows:
Take the top left corner. It takes the center. Take the bottom left corner. It flips it's center piece every time. Take either right corner. It takes the remaining corner. Take the center right. Flip one of your left corner pieces to form a diagonal ghost line
If the AI doesn't take the center and waste its flip, then it can definitely be countered.
As for feedback, I'd say i had a few moments where i was confused as to why a whole cluster of pieces flipped to ghosts. Honestly if that was described in a tutorial better it'd probably be a non-issue.
Thank you for the feedback!
You are so smart to find the "always win" strategy! I don't even think about it.
As for "a whole cluster", do you mean more than 1 line?
Did you try the Learning Mode? I can add the more than 1 line example into the Learning Mode to clarify it.
Yeah it took me a second to understand how the game worked in learning mode.
By "whole cluster" I mean when there is more than 1 line completed with the same piece. For example if you have 2 lines that meet at a corner, placing the corner piece triggers a flip for both / all lines that meet in that corner. I found myself surprised by that the first time it happened.
Plank | Project Manager | Full-time | REMOTE (Canada) | https://plank.co
Plank (Certified B Corp) is hiring a full-time Project Manager!
We’re an award-winning, remote-first digital design studio creating exceptional web & mobile experiences for creative organizations. Manage 5–7 projects (Laravel/WordPress), collaborate with a multidisciplinary team, and deliver impactful solutions for enterprise clients.
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Requirements: 4+ years in project management (agile preferred), experience with Laravel/WordPress, strong organizational & communication skills.
Plank (Certified B Corp) is hiring a full-time Project Manager!
We’re an award-winning, remote-first digital design studio creating exceptional web & mobile experiences for creative organizations. Manage 5–7 projects (Laravel/WordPress), collaborate with a multidisciplinary team, and deliver impactful solutions for enterprise clients.
Perks: Remote flexibility (with a Montreal office if you prefer), flexible hours, profit-sharing, generous PTO, health benefits, a new MacBook, and more.
Requirements: 4+ years in project management (agile preferred), experience with Laravel/WordPress, strong organizational & communication skills.
One of the biggest things that attacts me to a particular product (besides a lot of the good answers here already) is if it's open source and self hostable or not. Maybe not a marketing strategy per-se but it's something for marketers to be loud about.
More, and more companies are open sourcing their core product, and those are usually the ones I'll recommend my employer use.
Besides that having a nice UI that's easy to use and prominently displayed in the marketing material, or available via a demo goes a long way, too.
I'd love to know a little bit more about how you do that. I'd typically feel wrong asking a candidate to show code they've written at a previous employer.
Do you just ask them to walk you through the architecture by memory? If so what how do you come up with questions about their choices without the specificities of the actual way they wrote their code?
No, I don’t ask them to show me any code or artifacts, but to simply describe the architecture, how it’s put together. Any novel code or algorithms they are proud of. Areas of the code that were problematic, and how they would fix them if they had the chance. Talk about non functional requirements and if the architecture addressed them or not.
Basically see if they could communicate how the system worked, it’s good points and bad points, and how deep they could go. This quickly separates the good developers from the cargo culters and pretenders. It also is a good gauge of how much real experience they have had.
Generally, if someone can’t describe at least the rough outline of the architecture of an application they have worked on, that’s a strong signal they are going to struggle as a developer
> Do you just ask them to walk you through the architecture by memory?
depends on the role, e.g. for infra work i can ask "if you had complete autonomy to stand up this project again, what would be your first step" and then we go from there
This feels more or less in line with what my team has found, we gave everyone a copilot seat in our Github org, and anecdotally speaking it feels like we've seen roughly a 5-10% increase in productivity. This is of course self reported and not measured against any metrics. Assuming we're right about that, its an easy sell when we account for what our internal hourly rate is.
we also found the same as the OP, It's good for simple problems or boilerplate, not great for more complex problems.
I use copilot and write a whole lot of code every day. It's very very hard for me to believe anyone could get a 5-10% boost in productivity. It's often incorrect and when it is correct, it's often trivial.
It is a value add, but I'd put it closer to 0.5% if that. Over, say, 8 hours of coding time, it might save me a couple of minutes total.
Which, from a company expense perspective is still worth it, but an order of magnitude less than your anecdote.
It's very hard for me to envision how copilot could save someone that kind of time.
I'm not diagnosed but I almost certainly have something like ADHD. It feels like my brain will take the most insignificant excuse to start paying attention to something else. Copilot boosts my productivity by 25-30%, easily, by removing many of these "excuses".
I am an experienced programmer, but sometimes I'll have a clear intention in my head of what I want to do, and the knowledge/experience of what code would accomplish that thing, and I still back away from it and start looking at something else, whether work, social media, whatever. Writing this, I know it might sound ridiculous or lazy, but it's true.
Copilot bridges this gap, often miraculously. The gap between thought and code is shortened, and the windows of time where I might lose focus seem to be drastically shortened.
For me, the key is that I do know how to write most of the code that Copilot writes for me, I'm just not good at actually writing it, or at least doing so in a sustained, consistent way.
I feel like a lot of this is just that ADHD brains (and brains in general) want to work at the right level of abstraction. If I have to add headers to 20 word docs, it’s probably a bit quicker to do that manually than to write a script to do it, but I write the script anyway because the alternative is too boring. A lot of code is like that too, and “getting the AI to understand what I’m trying to get it to do” is more interesting.
what is the cost of analyzing the proposed solution and fixing it so it does what you want and how does that compare to not using AI and writing the code yourself?
That's an excellent question. I'm typically able to stay focused on a task in spite of distractions, but working with generated nonsense while coding something new has derailed me quite a few times.
The novelty has definitely worn off for me, at least.
I've really fallen for Obsidian myself. I became somewhat of an evangelist for it in my office. Much like the author i tend to use it as a "backstage for my life". In the interest of sharing my system with my colleagues i even turned my work vault into a template of sorts [^1].
Though that's also the most interesting part about Obsidian. What works for one person doesn't necessarily work for another. When i presented my template to my colleagues i definitely got some comments like: "oh man, my brain doesn't work that way" or "this feels overly complex". It's interesting how a simple markdown editor has become this analogue for some of our brains.
As a fellow Montreal-er I agree with you in principle. Our city is beautifully diverse, and it's decently lively. Many of my peers agree that living in Toronto is infeasible, economically, and culturally. That said, I've found that living in Montreal is far from ideal.
A big issue is that Montreal's salaries are, as other commenter have said, upwards of 30% lower here. With rising rent and real estate costs, people are living outside their means. More than that, though, companies outside of Montreal are loathe to hire Montrealers remotely as well. It's not just because of the decline of remote friendly workplaces, but also the language laws in Quebec. Any legal department worth their weight will look at Quebec's requirements for companies to serve Quebec employees in French, and promptly conclude hiring there isn't worth it.
It really seems like no matter where you end up in Canada the cards are stacked against you. Vancouver is just as expensive as Toronto, and Montreal has all the aforementioned issues. At this point I'm considering running off to Europe, but I know that has its own host of issues as well. I might just be falling victim to analysis paralysis, but I definitely feel stuck.
Ahhh yep! I had to deal with that while looking for another job a few months ago. I had it in mind that remote work meant I could work anywhere. Not here! You really are locked into Québec once Revenu Québec is handling your taxes, got dropped for being a Qc resident multiple times.
I’ve thought about Europe as well, I’ll need to reevaluate in a few years to see if that’s still a positive move for me. The French expats I work with they have their own complaints and reasons for crossing the Atlantic.
Take the top left corner. It takes the center. Take the bottom left corner. It flips it's center piece every time. Take either right corner. It takes the remaining corner. Take the center right. Flip one of your left corner pieces to form a diagonal ghost line
If the AI doesn't take the center and waste its flip, then it can definitely be countered.
As for feedback, I'd say i had a few moments where i was confused as to why a whole cluster of pieces flipped to ghosts. Honestly if that was described in a tutorial better it'd probably be a non-issue.