Python solver: Generate all positive/negative combinations for b, d, e For each, calculate the value of a given that their sum must be -5 Compare the calculated value of a to its acceptable value (+/- 3, +/- 6) Any combination that passes that test is a good solution.

Doing a four-way (set-inclusion) test, we can solve this by only considering eight possibilities:

This gives only one solution,
a = 6
b = 9
c = -3
d = -25
e = 5
f = -1
g = -7
h = -2
i = 8 ✅

All combinations are valid, which gives us 16 possible sign-solutions;
applied to the two number-solutions we already had gives us a grand total of 32 possibilities. 👍

Now we just have to find put which fulfil the grey-box condition.

4/

... er, the opposite (XNOR) 😅

Let's label our cells as
a b c F
d e f T
g h i T
T F T

c = not xor(a, b)
f = xor(d, e)
g = xor(a, d)
h = not xor(b, e)
i = xor(not xor(a, b), xor(d, e))

So we only need to consider the independent variables a, b, d, e.

3/

Next we have to find possible placements of negative factors.

We can solve this as a parity problem, encoding +ve as True and -ve as False.

If we look at possible combinations,
T • T = T
T • F = F
F • T = F
F • F = T
which matches the XOR operator 👍

2/

Puzzle in progress: blue numbers are factors whose position is forced, red are factors whose position is optional, purple are final cell values, green are sets of possible alternative final values. First row: (3 or 6), 9, (6 or 3): product is 162 Second row: 25, 5, 1: product is 125 Third row: (14 or 7), 2, (4 or 8): product is 112

Ignoring negatives for the moment, factorization and comparison gets us two base solutions:

1/

The MAGA War on Science Is Deadly—and It’s Just Getting Started The administration’s anti-science posture has three different sources. Each is as extremist as the last.

This administration is willing to let people die of cancer if that’s what it takes to win the war on supposedly “woke” universities.

https://trib.al/xTrO3UA

Proposed BEAD Changes Could Delay Deployment by Two Years How BEAD delays could impact broadband network rollout

Republicans are rewriting the infrastructure bill to make sure Elon Musk gets a fatter chunk of $42.5 billion in broadband subsidies and to kill requirements that the resulting broadband would be affordable.

This could delay broadband deployments by an additional two years:

I had a simple question: Has President Trump increased has net worth since taking the White House? And if so, by how much?

The answer was more surprising than I anticipated. Simply put, he has more than doubled his net worth in 4 months.

Here's how:

The Ripple Effects of Shrinking U.S. Science Opinion | Severe cuts in research funding will cause a complex cascade of effects across the United States and the world.

Opinion: The Ripple Effects of Shrinking U.S. Science

The US Is Storing Migrant Children’s DNA in a Criminal Database Customs and Border Protection has swabbed the DNA of migrant children as young as 4, whose genetic data is uploaded to an FBI-run database that can track them if they commit crimes in the future.

NEW: The US government has collected DNA samples from 133,000+ migrant children and teenagers and uploaded them into CODIS, a national criminal database originally built for convicted sex offenders and violent criminals, according to documents reviewed by WIRED.

Ingenious 😂

FFS

No kings, masters, overlords or any of that bullshit. Time to take the country back.

Kamala Harris on “the big, beautiful bill:”

“It’s an agenda...a narrow, self-serving vision of America...where they punish truth tellers, favor loyalists, profit from their power, and leave everyone else to fend for themselves.”

Nailed it!

🔥

A weaponized AI chatbot is flooding city councils with climate misinformation Internal instructions accessed by Canada’s National Observer show that the chatbot produces tailored scripts, petitions, reports and even speeches for council chambers. The messaging is all framed to ...

Our exclusive investigation into how a group has turned a chatbot into a custom tool for convincing city councils to pull out of climate agreements.

And it's working.

Shipped to El Salvador: An Austin Immigration Lawyer on Her Teen Client's Forced 'Disappearance' “Due process hasn’t been protected. The process that is set in place in this country that is the basis and foundation of our legal system was not allowed to work.”

"This isn’t a removal. It’s not lawful under the Immigration and Nationality Act. It doesn’t conform to anything that was previously passed in legislation ... Essentially, he was disappeared forcefully."

Politico screenshot: “By the numbers: A quick trawl through the archives suggests Trump 2.0 has done media on 111 of his 138 days back in office — an 80 percent hit rate that includes weekends and must put him on course to being just about the most-accessible president in modern history. And aside from the lamentable attempt to ban AP, he’s basically taken questions from all-comers. It’s impressive stuff. And it matters: In case anyone still needs this hammering home for them, the Joe Biden experience shows just how important it is that leaders are held up to regular scrutiny. Trump’s answers may sometimes be rambling, erratic — or even downright unpleasant — but every American voter can see where he’s at.”

The Trump regime has gutted the govt; assaulted the constitution; apprehended immigrants off streets w/o due process sending them to foreign gulags; blown up alliances as economy hurtles towards uncertainty.

Yet here is POLITICO fawning over his media appearances while throwing shade at Biden.

Her stats line up with CDC data…

RFK Jr. says he may bar scientists from publishing in top medical journals Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took aim at reputed journals such as the Lancet and said the agency will create “in-house” publications instead.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that he could bar government scientists from publishing in the world’s leading medical journals, instead proposing the creation of “in-house” publications by his agency.

The last solution I found was
1/12 + 1/20 + 1/30 + 1/72 + 1/90 + 1/110 + 1/156 + 1/182
+ 1/210 + 1/240 + 1/272 + 1/306 + 1/342 + 1/380 + 1/420
+ 1/462 + 1/600 + 1/650 + 1/702 + 1/756 + 1/812 + 1/870
+ 1/930 + 1/992 + 1/1056
= 1/4 🥳

or on one machine across 10,000 different sessions.

What would *really* help would be a better algorithm; but I can't picture what that would look like, I think I've got this one pretty well cinched down tight. 🤔

4/

I can get around that by making the solver reentrant; that would let me parallelize it across time or hardware.
I could run the basic solver until my state-table is ie a million entries, then split it into hundred-entry chunks and restart each on 10,000 different machines,

3/

I can try porting it to a different language (Julia or Rust) - but I suspect that 98% of the memory consumption is simply a huge table of partial solutions, which is a basic necessity for the solver.

2/

I rewrote my program on my desktop machine, refactored it, and tried to minimize memory usage.

That ran for 11 minutes and got me up to 188 solutions before locking my machine (Python using 28.3 GB of RAM) 😂.

1/

"Dumbest" isn't a huge problem - Americans survived Dubya mostly intact.

Unfortunately Trump is also the law-breaking-est president, and surrounded by idiot goons happy to break the law for him.

Ukraine’s Defence Intelligence records 150 executions of soldiers in Russian captivity Defence Intelligence of Ukraine has reported that the number of executions of Ukrainian soldiers on the battlefield is increasing – over 150 such cases have been recorded.

‼️ Ukraine's Defence Intelligence records 150 executions of soldiers in Russian captivity

A new analysis finds that projected growth from the GOP budget's tax cuts would only cover 2.7% of their $3.8T cost.

That's nowhere close to the cuts "paying for themselves." 

Notice how nobody ever asks, "but how will we pay for it" when it comes to trickle-down economics?

I need this monopoly version...

Musk’s team was caught using a customized version of the Grok chatbot, without approval, to sift through sensitive government data inside the Department of Homeland Security. They used a modified version in an attempt to hide the fact that they were doing it.

The worst part is (the usual) skewing benefits for the rich: Yes, everybody gets a tax cut, but the tax cuts for the poor are peanuts—and the rich are getting not just personal income tax relief.

Republicans have thrown all kinds of things in that help those at the top.
https://trib.al/TOX5eu9

Jon Stewart fears Trump will 'burn our country down for insurance money' Comedian Jon Stewart had a grim outlook for what the endgame of President Donald Trump's second administration could be, in an interview on the Bill Simmons Podcast flagged by The Daily Beast on Friday evening.The part that alarms Stewart most, in particular, is all the money that media outlets and ...

Comedian Jon Stewart had a grim outlook for what the endgame of President Donald Trump's second administration could be, in an interview on the Bill Simmons Podcast flagged by The Daily Beast on Friday evening.