u/ezbluff

I've been curious how everyone feels about helpers/solvers and hint pages. My friend and I play Wordle pretty religiously and we are okay with helpers but draw the line at hint pages.

I've always had the same tedious process:

1. Start with a good opening word
2. Look at which 5-letter words could still fit the spots from my first one using some ad-littered word-finder tool
3. Cross-check against the list of past answers to eliminate words that have already been used (also ad-littered)
4. Pick the next guess trying to be smart about which letters help narrow down and also which words are more common than rare

I was so excited to build a tool to do all these things (vibe-coding with Claude) and it takes the tedium out but is still the way I would play. I didn't think it's bad to use it (I guess you can debate whether using the tools above is frowned upon too, am curious there as well). Also the one part I think is actually cool in this tool, similar to the past word list I made, is it knows whether today's answer has been played before and adjusts based on that.

I also made a separate spoiler-free hint page for people who don't want a helper/solver at all that reveals clues one at a time (vowel count, first letter, etc.), but honestly I would never use it myself because that crosses the line for me. Some friends like those types of pages so I added one just to make my site feel more complete.

TL;DR

Do you consider a helper/solver cheating, or just a faster version of the mental process?

Is a "one clue at a time" hint page different in your mind from a solver?

Is using word-list and word-finder sites already 'cheating' in your book?

Hi everyone, I'm looking for some advice from those experienced in robot arms. I want to decide on the appropriate robot arm to purchase that I can program to play on an official Hasbro connect four board. I'm new to robotics but have an extensive background in software engineering. I had a few goals/requirements:

1. I'd like it to have grippers to pick up and drop pieces (not suction cups or other easier forms). Ultimately I want to repurpose the arm for other fun projects.

2. I'd like it to be controlled by a Jetson Orin Nano that is powerful enough to run my AlphaZero model locally and control the arm to pick up and drop pieces based on vision recognition possibly controlled by a trained VLA model of some sort.

I am leaning towards the LeRobot SO-101 if it meets these requirements. Another arm that looks appealing, though expensive, is the Hiwonder JetArm (I've purchased a Hiwonder JetAuto Pro car before and the build quality was excellent). Ideally I'd like to fit a budget of under $1000 for the whole project (which Hiwonder does not meet) and I'm okay with assembling though would prefer mostly built.

The software portion for gameplay/vision is all done, so I'm excited to find the right arm and learn the robotics portion. Thanks so much for any advice!