Evan Broder

So like do you show up in a tux just in case?

A tour guide today commented on how medieval painters hadn't figured out hands yet and I now want a think piece comparing and contrasting Stable Diffusion to, like, Giotto

Some friends from Death & Mayhem and I are re-running our B(oston)APHL as a BayPHL in San Francisco. Registration opened on Monday. Right now, we're completely full on Saturday but still have a few spots open on Sunday. (And if there's lots of demand, we might try to add capacity on Sat)

I'm mostly excited to go in blind, but any non-spoiler tips for getting the most out of it?

The 2025 MIT Mystery Hunt might be the most ambitious project I’ve ever gotten to work on. I know that all of us are so proud of what we put together, and I’m excited that a little more of the Hunt than usual will live on in the archives. I hope you enjoy it! (12/12)

- And of course, last but *certainly* not least, a full credits page recognizing the 166 supremely wonderful and talented people who worked for an entire year of their lives to bring the 2025 MIT Mystery Hunt to life: puzzles.mit.edu/2025/extras/... (11/N)

- We had a professional videographer at Hunt all weekend, and have collated some of that footage. Since wrap-up, we've added video recaps from Control Room (puzzles.mit.edu/2025/hunt/pu...), the events (puzzles.mit.edu/2025/hunt/ro...), and the finale (puzzles.mit.edu/2025/hunt/in...) (10/N)

We also updated the "virtual radio" page: puzzles.mit.edu/2025/hunt/vi... - while we can't generate the full WDNM 2π stream, you can still enjoy our DJ's banter - and collected the music that was composed and arranged for kickoff and in-person interactions (puzzles.mit.edu/2025/extras/...) (9/N)

(I also probably wouldn't recommend it at scale >= 100) (8/N)

- As promised, there's an extensive 4,500-word writeup on the radios: puzzles.mit.edu/2025/extras/..., with annotated schematics, source files, partslists, and assembly instructions. You could, in theory, use these to assemble your own radio, although at scale of < 100 I wouldn't recommend it (7/N)

- There's an overall Hunt statistics page with customizable slicing-and-dicing across different teams: puzzles.mit.edu/2025/extras/..., along with per-puzzle stats. We also added some special stats and graphs for specific puzzles. Of course, a raw activity log is also available. (6/N)

- Rather than a purely static render of the Hunt site, the archives will let you re-play the Hunt from the beginning, with a client-side port of our backend that is as complete as we could manage. Or just skip to the end and see the murder board in all of its strung-up glory. (5/N)

There is, of course, variation in *how* post-solveable we could make puzzles, but in general we've never let practicality limit our ambitions. (I think puzzles.mit.edu/2025/hunt/pu... and puzzles.mit.edu/2025/hunt/pu... might take the cake for most ambitious adaptations) (4/N)

- For puzzles which were previously only solveable weekend-of, in-person, or while we were staffing the email queues, we've updated them to be as remotely-post-solveable as we could. In total, we made *some* update to 42 (out of about 170) puzzles. Sometimes very minor, others quite major (3/N)

Hopefully anyone at Hunt saw the amount of love that everyone on the team put into everything, and we wanted to do the best job we could of capturing that in the archived site. We've added a bunch of features and content to the archive site that we hope folks enjoy: (2/N)

Since the 2025 MIT Mystery Hunt wrapped up in January, Death & Mayhem has been working (on and off) on getting the Hunt transferred over to the archives. You can now (finally) see our archived version of the Hunt at puzzles.mit.edu/2025/ (1/N)

lol I guess we were doing blueprints before it was cool

Not a game, but we did have a puzzle using the Spectre in this year's MIT Mystery Hunt: www.two-pi-noir.agency/puzzles/the_...

I hope we didn't give you *too* hard of a time when you *did* eventually get to Half-Baked 😂

Ah I saw that Palindrome struggled a bit with the extraction on the last step, and I regretted not stopping by to help out a bit more. But otherwise based on the parts of the hunt you enjoyed, I think it's possible that we should be friends 😃

Do any of my friends know a Canadian immigration lawyer who might be willing to advise another friend of mine? Can provide more details, but it's related to their small (US-based) business. Not looking for pro bono - they have some budget, although maybe not, like, big law firm budget.

Also I wish Duolingo spent less time on transliteration. It is not helping me develop instincts when I can't tell if it's asking me about "vo" (i.e. "βο") or "νο" (i.e. "no"), especially when their Greek font seems to be intentionally chosen to be confused with Latin letters

ohno I underestimated how different modern Greek is relative to Ancient Greek and English-speaking math Greek

Looks like I'm going to Greece next year. Does anyone have tips for learning to read the Greek alphabet more fluently? I don't really have any desire to pick up the actual language; I just want to be able to read place names and stuff on signs.