Texas upends life for undocumented immigrants, DACA recipients The sweeping rule changes, all enacted outside the typical legislative process, have upended life for noncitizens, including those who are here legally.

Texas is cutting undocumented immigrants off from school, work and driving www.texastribune.org/2026/04/02/t...

Much of this is being done by the Executive bypassing the Legislature, following the authoritarian Trump model.

The Most Dangerous Thing About Trump's Fascism? Getting Used to It | Common Dreams This is how fascism seduces a nation: not by storming the gates, but by wearing down our ability to be outraged.

The Most Dangerous Thing About Trump's Fascism? Getting Used to It www.commondreams.org/opinion/trum...

Good essay; worth a read. Or re-read.

vertical image of a still retention basin and sunlit sky. the sky is split starkly down the middle, clear on the left, gray clouds on the right, sun at the center. the cloud line is reflected perfectly on the basin surface below the horizon. photo by Lindsay Schiel NEORSD

not ‘shopped. not cropped. not stock.

straight from the phone of stormwater inspector Lindsay Schiel snapped yesterday at a basin in Hudson.

I just completed "Playground" - Day 8 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode adventofcode.com/2025/day/8

Finally got back to AoC and finished Day 8 ... after a break of a couple weeks. Not bad, with fresh eyes.

One of the splitters does not encounter a beam, in the example. So 21 is the correct answer.

I just completed "Laboratories" - Day 7 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode adventofcode.com/2025/day/7

Our hero has skills.

My naive Part 2 iimplementation quickly ran into exponential memory allocation issues. After a rethink, though, I found a solution with sub-second performance. Fun.

Yes, I've seen that some folks are using JavaScript.

I just completed "Trash Compactor" - Day 6 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode adventofcode.com/2025/day/6

Well Part 2 was a bit more difficult than expected. Perhaps because I decided to assume UTF-8 input, rather than ASCII input.

Glad to have iter().rev() in the collection I was using.

Day 6, Part 1 is done! But Part 2 looks like the bigger challenge today; it is going to require a break and then some coffee.

Given the Star Wars references in today's adventure, I couldn't help but think: "There is no try. There is only do, or do not."
#AdventOfCode

I just completed "Cafeteria" - Day 5 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode adventofcode.com/2025/day/5

Glad to be done, but this took longer than it should have because a) i didn't read the specs carefully, and b) I was betrayed by my naive understanding of refs, ownership and lifetimes.

Inspiring. If I actually finish AoC 2025, then I may follow your lead and start back at the beginning (2015), but favor quality over speed.

Nice! I didn’t know about Grid2D, so my solution using nested BTreeMap collections was much slower than yours. I knew it was inefficient but not how badly inefficient until I read your post. Thanks for sharing!

That's pretty amazing. I'm doing something similar except I needed more of the Rust book ... like up through chapter 6, plus 8 (collections) and 11 (automated test). That, and StackOverflow of course.

I just completed "Printing Department" - Day 4 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode adventofcode.com/2025/day/4

This time my Part 1 solution was easily extensible to the Part 2 solution. And I learned more about Rust mutability rules and references and error generation and handling. Fun.

I just completed "Lobby" - Day 3 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode adventofcode.com/2025/day/3

Just finished Part 2. This solution is the first one I'm not ashamed of.

I'm sensing a pattern: Part 1 code is a bit of a kludge, a bit messy. Part 2 is cleaner, perhaps because I add helper functions.

I just completed "Gift Shop" - Day 2 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode adventofcode.com/2025/day/2

Part 1 took me a long time as I took the opportunity to learn about processing an input stream of UTF-8 data in Rust. Part 2 was interesting and just a bit tricky.

I’m using rust as well, but just learning it so not sharing until I get proficient.

Same for me, but I’m doing it in Rust … with which I hope to quickly get reasonably proficient. I’ll probably share at some later date.

I just completed "Secret Entrance" - Day 1 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode adventofcode.com/2025/day/1

chess.com seems to be working and performant again.

#chess #chesscom

chesscom seems to be having performance problems or outages at the moment. I was able to play a bot game, but couldn't access the share feature to download the pgn, and the list of games isn't showing up under my profile. Parts of the site seem okay but much of it is not working.

#chess #chesscom

Ng6+ hxg6 Qh6#

Bxf3+ Kh3 Qh6#

Qa6+ Kc5 b4#

Re4+ dxe4 Qxe4#

Rxf2+ Kxf2 Qg2#

I couldn't get this one. Will have to figure out why, but later. Now I need some sleep.

Re6 e4 Rxe4#

Rg8+ Kxg8 Rg1#

f4+ gxf4 Qxf4#