Ryan Hart

Family. Programming. Games. Big fan of Project1999 EverQuest. This is a personal account. My tweets are my own.

[Ryan Hart @ryachart]

Have a great day everyone.

Here’s me and my 6 year old doing our best mobile game app icon faces.

[🍻Bathildis Ironstout ➡️ #Blizzcon2026🍻 @IronstoutBrews]

Ach! Time fer me t' get out o' retirement! Who all am I meetin' at #Blizzcon2026 next weekend?

[ThePrimeagen @ThePrimeagen]

There has never been a "we're so back" moment as this

[Ryan Hart @ryachart]

@fdotOnline 😍

[Blizzard Entertainment @Blizzard_Ent]

We're gearing up for #BlizzCon2026… are you ready?🔥

[Tim Sweeney @TimSweeneyEpic]

Apple broke mobile gaming, in three ways.

First, by using its 30% junk fees to inflate prices of in-game purchases, extracting the far majority of profit from games on the App Store, and depriving developers of the ability to reinvest.

[ASHA @asha_shar]

The Blizzard community has spent decades in some of gaming's most enduring worlds. Soon they'll be playing The Witcher, too. Welcome to https://t.co/YindbRqLP3, @CDPROJEKTRED.

[Tech with Mak @techNmak]

In 1948, a 32-year-old at Bell Labs published a paper nobody fully understood.

Engineers found it too mathematical. Mathematicians found it too engineering-focused. One prominent mathematician reviewed it negatively.

That paper - "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", became the founding document of the digital age.

The man was Claude Shannon. Father of Information Theory.

At 21, he wrote the most important master's thesis of the 20th century.

Working at MIT on an early mechanical computer, Shannon noticed its relay switches had exactly two states - open or closed. He had just taken a philosophy course introducing Boolean algebra, which also operated on two values: true and false.

Nobody had ever connected these two things.

His 1937 thesis proved that Boolean algebra and electrical circuits are mathematically identical, and that any logical operation could be built from simple switches.

Howard Gardner called it "possibly the most important, and also the most famous, master's thesis of the century."

Every digital computer ever built traces back to this insight.

At 29, he proved that perfect encryption exists.

During WWII, Shannon worked on classified cryptography at Bell Labs. His work contributed to SIGSALY, the secure voice system used for confidential communications between Roosevelt and Churchill.

In a classified 1945 memorandum, he mathematically proved the one-time pad provides perfect secrecy, unbreakable not just computationally, but provably, permanently, against an adversary with infinite power.

When declassified in 1949, it transformed cryptography from an art into a science. It laid the foundations for DES, AES, and every modern encryption standard.

At 32, he defined what information is.

His 1948 paper introduced one equation:
H = −Σ p(x) log p(x)

Shannon entropy. The average uncertainty in a probability distribution. The minimum bits required to encode a message.

Three things followed:

> He defined the bit - the fundamental unit of all information. His colleague John Tukey coined the name.

> He proved the channel capacity theorem, every communication channel has a maximum rate of reliable transmission. You can approach it. You can never exceed it.

> He unified telegraph, telephone, and radio into a single mathematical framework for the first time.

Robert Lucky of Bell Labs called it the greatest work "in the annals of technological thought."

Where his equation lives in AI today:

Cross-entropy loss - the function training every classifier and language model, is derived directly from H. Decision tree splits use information gain, which is H applied to data. Perplexity, the standard LLM evaluation metric, is an exponentiation of cross-entropy.

Every time a neural network trains, Shannon's formula runs inside it.

He also built the first AI learning device.

In 1950, Shannon built Theseus, a mechanical mouse that navigated a maze through trial and error, learned the correct path, and repeated it perfectly. Mazin Gilbert of Bell Labs said: "Theseus inspired the whole field of AI."

That same year he published the first paper on programming a computer to play chess. He co-organized the 1956 Dartmouth Workshop, the founding event of AI as a field.

The man:
He rode a unicycle through Bell Labs hallways while juggling. He built a flame-throwing trumpet, a rocket-powered Frisbee, and Styrofoam shoes to walk on the lake behind his house.

He called his home Entropy House.

When asked what motivated him: "I was motivated by curiosity. Never by the desire for financial gain. I just wondered how things were put together."

In 1985, he appeared unexpectedly at a conference in Brighton. The crowd mobbed him for autographs. Persuaded to speak at the banquet, he talked briefly, then pulled three balls from his pockets and juggled instead.

One engineer said: "It was as if Newton had showed up at a physics conference."

He died in 2001 after a decade with Alzheimer's, the cruel irony of information slowly leaving the mind of the man who defined what information was.

Claude, the AI model, is named after Claude Shannon, the mathematician who laid the foundation for the digital world we rely on today.

[Paul Cheon @HAUMPH]

Echoing everybody's sentiments on HOB sealed deck being quite bad. This was box number 3, which doesn't look too far off from box number 2 and box number 1. It's correct to be Rakdos like 80% of the time.

[Ryan Hart @ryachart]

@teej_m @jeiting You beat me to it

[Ryan Hart @ryachart]

Im using this the next time someone asks why that change needs another week on the schedule.

[World of Statistics @stats_feed]

Babies are born on their predicted due dates just 4% of the time

[Tim Sweeney @TimSweeneyEpic]

@HuinGuillaume @X Bring back Chicken McNuggets made with real chunks of chicken, with at least 50% dark meat, as God intended.

[Ryan Hart @ryachart]

@teej_m

[Johanna Faries @Joh_Burg]

this was the year I told myself I’d finally get into D&D. November, we roll 🗡️

[Dungeons & Dragons @Wizards_DnD]

Roll for Azeroth.

Cross from desktop to tabletop with D&D: World of Warcraft, coming November 17.

[Dungeons & Dragons @Wizards_DnD]

Just Announced: New Dungeon Masters Campaigns

D&D's actual play series Dungeon Masters featuring Devora Wilde, Mayanna Berrin, Christian Navarro, Jasmine Bhullar, and Neil Newbon is heading to Azeroth starting September 23, then will travel back to the Forgotten Realms (Icewind Dale, specifically) for some Faerûnian adventure with familiar faces.

[The Kobeissi Letter @KobeissiLetter]

BREAKING: Microsoft stock, $MSFT, surges +15% and is now on track for its biggest daily gain since 2020.

From one of the most hated to one of the most loved names literally overnight.

[Office of Nuclear Energy | US Department of Energy @GovNuclear]

Nuclear energy is back in a BIG way.

[ThePrimeagen @ThePrimeagen]

i made a graph to represent one shot gaming demos

[Dave W Plummer @davepl1968]

@chamath Alcohol is poisonous. Regular use is a one way door to becoming a wino.

While you're waiting with your fingers dug into the armchair for the microwave clock to finally read noon, remember that cannabis also isn't addictive like alcohol.

[dr. calle 🟥 @callebtc]

Bitchat android downloads surging in India

As long as governments try to silence free speech, there will be demand for Bitchat.