maxwelljoslyn

IndieAuth is the way. Unfortunately, I don't think there's a lot of incentive for a site to implement it as a login option unless the site already has some reason to cater to IndieWeb lovers (including me). :^(

If you spend time in IndieWeb discussion circles, such as chat.indieweb.org or the get-togethers listed on events.indieweb.org, or if you spend time wandering through the indieweb.org wiki, you will find evidence that many of us share the view that UX must come first[1].

There are one-click-setup IndieWeb entry points. The most prominent is micro.blog which gives you a personal blog/site with all the latest IndieWeb goodness and costs $5/month.

But most people interested in the IndieWeb these days are devs, i.e. nerds, and want to roll things themselves, which is why IndieWeb-related blog posts can feel like tech soup.

This is something IW members would gladly see change! Adoption by non-nerds is something the IW cares about. David Shanske[2], for instance, has spent much time in the last decade on Wordpress plugins that gives you much of of the IW tools out of the box [3].

Finally, you don't need to use all of the tech to be "doing IndieWeb". Having your own domain is the first and most important step. Then maybe you[4] try making a few pages: raw HTML, generated from Markdown, Django, whatever. Then you can add Microformats. Then maybe add a script to send WebMentions, or use a free hosted service to do it for you. Then branch out in whatever direction you choose. At all of these stages, your site is still IndieWeb.

[1] I'm not as active in IW circles as I was a few years ago but still consider myself part of it: my personal site has microformats, I use Micropub to update it, etc.

[2] david.shanske.com

[3] https://profiles.wordpress.org/dshanske/#content-plugins

[4] Generic "you".

I'm on call this Christmas :')

This rules!

Epic is still a heavy user of that language at the lower parts of its stack, but there are other, friendlier/more modern languages in pretty widespread use too. Depends on the team & sub-application.

Ayyyy, my day job is on HN. The campus is indeed cool, and I like working here (though I haven't been here nearly as long as some people!)

If anyone's interested in Epic and wants one employee's opinion, my email's in my profile.

It seems that much like Aider, you use separate models for creating code edits and validating them. That's a win in my book. It seems Claude Code does not do that, which is part of the reason it racks up a (relatively) large bill for long work sessions (that and the cost of sonnet-3.7).

I bounce back and forth between Aider, Claude Code, and Simon Willison's LLM tool ("just" a GOOD wrapper for using LLMs at the CLI, unlike the other two which are agent-y.) LLM is my favorite because I usually don't need/want full autonomy, but Claude Code has started to win me over for straightforward stuff. Plandex looks cool enough to throw into the rotation!

My main concern at this point is that I use a Mac and as far as I understand it Docker containers can have pretty poor performance on the Mac, so I'm wondering if that will carry over to performance of Plandex. (I don't use Docker at all so I'm not sure if that's outdated info.)

That's sweet! I think LLMs have incredible potential for descriptions and for NPC behavior, and I really like that you have this bridge between freeform intent and a rules engine. I'd like to pick your brain about it - I'll send an email.

I feel the same way about Tailspire as I feel about pretty much every other VTT. They might do okay, even pretty well, at combat maps and/or character sheets, but I want is the whole game world in the computer. Maps are just a fraction of what I need as a GM. I need data on economics and population numbers and power structures. And I need computation over all those things.

For instance, my game rules include an economic subsystem, which takes in the production of goods and services at hundreds of in-game cities, and computes prices for over a thousand player-purchaseable goods. The "second app" that I referred to above allows players to (among many other things) purchase stuff at the market nearest their current location and have those items go straight into their character sheet. If the "item" is actually an animal, a hired mercenary, etc. then a different subsystem generates a new NPC with the right statistics and attaches the player to it as owner/liege.

I could write an extension for a VTT that talks to my economic system over an API, and throws items up on screen, lets players purchase them, moves them into their character sheet using the right function calls in the VTT's extension library, etc. But every step of the way, I would be fighting to cram this subsystem into the VTT's conception that gameplay begins and ends with maps and char sheets.

That's really cool, Elias. I keep seeing people try to put LLMs into the role of the GM. But I think you're doing something new and important by working to have the rules available to it.

Is your project available anywhere? Best of luck!

If you're interested, because I kept seeing "LLM as GM" projects, I got curious about how well it would work to have LLMs as players instead. So I made this:

https://github.com/maxwelljoslyn/gm-trainer

It's a training ground for GMs to practice things like spontaneous description, with 4 AI players that get fed what each other say so they act in a reasonably consistent manner. It's not perfect, but I've gotten some good use out of it.

My master's thesis[1] was half research, half dev project, exploring how we can continue to fully fuse traditional RPGs with computers. This goal is my life quest, my life's work.

I think virtual tabletops (VTTs) as they currently stand are barking up the wrong tree[2]. I want a computer-augmented RPG to allow the GM to do everything he does in the analog form of the game. On-the-fly addition of content to the game world, defining of new kinds of content, defining and editing rules, and many other things ... as well as the stuff VTTs do, of course. The closest we've gotten in the last 30 years is LambdaMOO and other MUDs.

The app I made for my thesis project was an experimental vertical slice of the kinds of functionality I want. The app I made after that last year is more practical and focused on the needs of my weekly game, in my custom system; I continue to develop it almost daily.

I'm itching to tackle the hardest problem of all, which is fully incorporating game rules in a not-totally-hardcoded way. I need rules to be first-class objects that can be programmatically reasoned about to do cool things like "use the Common Lisp condition system to present end user GMs with strategies for recovering from buggy rules." Inspirations include the Inform 7 rulebook system.

[1] See my homepage, under Greatest Hits: https://www.mxjn.me

[2] Anything that requires physical equipment other than dice and a regular computer is also barking up the wrong tree. So no VR, no video-tracked physical miniatures, no custom-designed tabletop, no Microsoft Surface... Again, just my opinion.

You just got a signup :) Free plan, I'll admit. I don't need or want anything other than email notifications, and the free plan for that is very generous. Thanks for building this.

I've had tremendous trouble trying to get my iPhone SE to show up as a USB device. Never did figure it out, but the macOS app iMazing has served me well as a workaround.

Man, when I thought I couldn't like this dude any more for his writing... What a fabulous drongo.

Ahh, these are beautiful. Thanks 'merothwell for linking. I was in Monument Valley for the first time ever this year; if you like these photos, try and pay it a visit. You won't be disappointed.

VWWHFSfQ, you may already know this, but: I recommend this talk by Armin Ronacher (Flask creator) on how Python's implementation internals contribute to the difficulties of making Python faster.

https://www.youtube.com/watchv=qCGofLIzX6g

One case study Ronacher gets into is the torturous path taken through the Python interpreter (runtime?) when you evaluate `__add__`. Fascinating stuff.

Where can we find your MUD?

Thanks for the trivia! I love Frontalot, and this is probably my favorite song by him.

I want you to know this made me laugh very hard.

That concept of "strange consistency" reminds me of my experience writing Clojure, for some reason.

Forget FC '25: this is the football game I really want!

Good stuff, solcloud. Keep following your heart.

I feel your pain. What a dumb system.

This is what all technical tutorials should look like. Well-composed and generally free of grammatical errors, spends just the right amount of time explaining each new topic as it is introduced, comes with full code samples, and includes visual samples of what the code does. Also, lengthy enough to treat the material in depth, while still being sufficiently self-contained that I can follow along -- without having read part 1 and without more than a few months of Common Lisp under my belt from a couple years back (tho I've done a decent amount of Clojure and Emacs Lisp.)

Bravo, awkravchuk/Andrew :^)

(Crossposted from https://mxjn.me/2024/10/17/1)

I love the addition of the infinite domino machine that has nothing to do with ball transport.

I've made more than one friend on Hacker News, one of whom I've met in person. Encouraging that to happen, by way of an app, is a great idea.

Every project has bugs at first, but I see you're dealing with them as they pop up. Best of luck working on it.

I used to use Beancount religiously (before some job and health difficulties left me less capable of tracking my finances as closely.) My biggest complaint was always that I didn't have something like autocomplete/syntax highlighting to cut down on the manual-ness of data entry.

Most of the aforementioned difficulties are behind me, and Paisa looks like an awesome way to help ease me back into Beancount. Thank you! I'm going to try it out soon!

My kingdom for this approach to take the place of (some/all) leetcodes.

I adore this book. A second edition?! Boy howdy is that exciting. Thanks so much Daniel!