What is it?

The XY problem is asking about your attempted solution rather than your actual problem. This leads to enormous amounts of wasted time and energy, both on the part of people asking for help, and on the part of those providing help.

• User wants to do X.
• User doesn’t know how to do X, but thinks they can fumble their way to a solution if they can just manage to do Y.
• User doesn’t know how to do Y either.
• User asks for help with Y.
• Others try to help user with Y, but are confused because Y seems like a strange problem to want to solve.
• After much interaction and wasted time, it finally becomes clear that the user really wants help with X, and that Y wasn’t even a suitable solution for X.

The problem occurs when people get stuck on what they believe is the solution and are unable step back and explain the issue in full.

What to do about it?

• Always include information about a broader picture along with any attempted solution.
• If someone asks for more information, do provide details.
• If there are other solutions you’ve already ruled out, share why you’ve ruled them out. This gives more information about your requirements.

Remember that if your diagnostic theories were accurate, you wouldn’t be asking for help right?

// Published 2026-03-27, with 233 words.

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In game theory, the centipede game, first introduced by Robert Rosenthal in 1981, is an extensive form game in which two players take turns choosing either to take a slightly larger share of an increasing pot, or to pass the pot to the other player.

The payoffs are arranged so that if one passes the pot to one’s opponent and the opponent takes the pot on the next round, one receives slightly less than if one had taken the pot on this round, but after an additional switch the potential payoff will be higher.

Therefore, although at each round a player has an incentive to take the pot, it would be better for them to wait. Although the traditional centipede game had a limit of 100 rounds (hence the name), any game with this structure but a different number of rounds is also called a centipede game.

The unique sub-game perfect equilibrium and every Nash equilibrium of these games results in the first player taking the pot on the first round of the game; however, in empirical tests, relatively few players do so, and as a result, achieve a higher payoff than in the subgame perfect and Nash equilibria. These results are taken to show that subgame perfect equilibria and Nash equilibria fail to predict human play in some circumstances. The Centipede game is commonly used in introductory game theory courses…

// Published 2026-03-27, with 233 words.

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Chromium has officially deprecated XSLT, including the XSLTProcessor JavaScript API and the XSLT processing instruction. We intend to remove support from version 158 (November 17, 2026). The Firefox and WebKit projects have also indicated plans to remove XSLT from their browser engines.

// Published 2026-03-22, with 55 words.

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// Published 2026-03-19, with 17 words.

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