patrickhulin

Oh, this is neat! I knew posting something that claimed a library didn't exist would inevitably surface one :)

I wanted to build a poker solver that I could host for ~free. This meant running client-side, where the best browser technology is WebGPU. The tensor library I wanted did not exist, but in the LLM era we sometimes don't need libraries at all. I had Codex turn my thousands of lines of PyTorch code into custom WebGPU kernels with parity tests. Codex then spent days optimizing those kernels.

You can use the solver at https://holdem.computer, and the source is at https://github.com/phulin/poker2.

Patches are welcome, especially for UI stuff - the simulation I'd like to keep matching exactly. I have one deviation already: the floors are 0-indexed and lobbies are on 15, 30, ..., which would be 16, 31, ... in the original game.

yes! I've been thinking about how to do it, but it will take some work!

This is the story of building https://towers.world, a ~perfect, tick-for-tick reproduction of 1993 game SimTower.

I spent weeks reverse-engineering the original EXE and writing up a detailed spec of how the simulation actually works under the hood — population flow, elevator AI, the whole star-rating system. The specs are all on GitHub if you want to read them: https://github.com/phulin/tower-together/tree/main/specs

It's also collaborative. Multiple players can connect to the same tower, the simulation keeps running as long as anyone's connected, and build actions sync across clients in real time.

Because I rebuilt the UI, I could add features like shift-click to build grids of rooms - instead of painstakingly clicking to build rows of offices and hotels, shift-click allows a 10-floor grid to be built all at once.

The game runs on Cloudflare Durable Objects, one of my favorite web primitives.

Everything is open source: https://github.com/phulin/tower-together