the fact that you're quick to tell me you're a pardoned felon but not why gives me a creepy feeling, and I say that with a lot of felon friends and family..

probably not the detail to omit to try to hook a readership..

technical aside : on low bandwidth connections your site acts really inconsistent and weird; it appears to be downloading those on-hover sound files.

That’s basically what a Homeowner’s Association is. They can levy fees, prosecute violations of bylaws, and generally do whatever the bylaws say. They have very little oversight.

Thanks so much for your feedback! I originally started with a pretty diverse corpus of prewritten story arcs for diversity, and went back to retrofit them into the engine once I started customizing stories and details for the city. It looks like I missed a few spots, sorry about that!

And yes, I did sketch a version that is even more procedurally generated, but it’s taking longer to get right than I thought

So you are trying to DIY a government but with no prior experience? Sounds like a nightmare.

I have a house in Costa Rica where there a lot of expats living in communities need to self organize because zoning and permit laws are slow, bureaucratic, and basically unenforced.

I cannot tell you how insanely inefficient and impossible it is to get 40 different families who all live on the same street to unanimously agree on something like a communal security system or a communal garbage can where all participants all fairly contribute and consume those services. And this is all done on a WhatsApp group over txt messages where nuance gets lost.

People complain about governments being slow, but until you experience the alternative (I have) you will simply never understand why its the lesser of two evils.

> I think homeowners are too close to the problem to make rational choices.

The homeowners are making rational choices. That's the problem. As the most expensive asset a typical homeowner will ever own is their home, it makes rational sense for them to support any policy that supports it's value and oppose any policy that undermines it's value. Building more housing undermines it's value.

And this is why the local community absolutely should not have any more say about a new development than a hypothetical someone who would like to live there, but can't, because there is no available housing.

The irony is our reaction to the Urban Renewal era was to introduce so many veto points and red tape to projects (both public infrastructure and private property) that we are nearly incapable of fixing the problems that era introduced.

When the NIMBYs of today work to protect and even double down on the bad decisions of that era it makes you wonder whether we've really moved on from it.

I think EPCOT could have been quite successful. The Villages, Florida was centrally planned and designed by many Disney architects (among others) and it is hugely successful and profitable.

Walt's brother, Roy (who remained after Walt's passing), was not the same visionary that Walt was. Simple as that. Most people would never have taken the risks Walt did with the company. Even the idea of a theme park that has tens of thousands of employees and requires millions of people to fly in from all over the world to be profitable sustainably, was quite a bold idea in the 1950s.

I regret that Walt passed too young. Florida would probably be covered in a large monorail network had he lived a couple more decades. And Epcot as a city would have been a tourist destination in its own right, and might have influenced urban development elsewhere.

Kind of like this one[1] which made the rounds on HN a few weeks ago. Looks like the social commentary from them are similar: "Real life is worse than SimCity because of rules and the public getting a say." and/or "Why can't we in real life let the mayor use the Bulldozer Tool to just wipe out any property he doesn't like and put up whatever property he likes in its place?"

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50036864

The various decisions/petitions that pop up can break the immersion by mentioning details that don't fit the city(petitions with signatures from >250% of the town population, traffic issues at the "4-way intersection in front of the feed store" when no such place exists, or the new building causing shadows when there's nothing around it). It would be great if more text was turned into templates that pull game data for accuracy, and if the simulation were able to feed definitive descriptions of the town layout into generative AI prompts to make the text talk about scenarios reflected in the game.

Right, it was so much better during the Robert Moses era where urban planners bulldozed over predominantly Black communities and built interstate highways while locating all of the toxic pollution producing manufacturing to the remaining lower-income minority neighborhoods, obliterating walkability and pedestrian safety everywhere.

I think if you follow actual development stories, you'll see a lot of this continuing to hold true. Seeing NPUs as being actually effective at curbing development is very naive. NPUs rarely push back against development, and it takes a lot of organizing to even get something up for a vote at City Council. And even then, most councilmembers are taking campaign funds from private-equity backed developers.

A lot has been written about this. In my city, we call it the Atlanta Way (derogatroy). There's a recent book covering this that's a great read: https://www.ucpress.edu/books/red-hot-city/paper

There are multiple ways of imposing this structure, laws, and trade-offs between various stakeholders. For example, Japan has a national top-down system where municipalities have little control over development, and therefore by necessity the system is mostly rules-based - if you meet the hopefully well-crafted requirements, you build. Whereas in North America, housing is a top-down and centrally planned economy at the municipal level. In Britain and a lot of North America, decisions are 'discretionary' and subject to reviews and debates and NIMBY tantrums (otherwise known as democratic control by taxpayers). Various bandaids are applied over the North American system to attempt to stop it from becoming a Kafkaesque bureaucratic mess where nothing gets built, and at times those efforts even partially succeed, even if the whole thing has an air of reforming the Gosplan.

The original EPCOT as imagined by Walt Disney was a master-planned city, with all the pleasant amenities and cleverest design you could imagine in the 1960's: Walkable areas, clean public transit, no traffic congestion, homes furnished with the latest in technology and appliances. It was his greatest ambition at the end of his life to make it a reality.

But it didn't happen. Namely, because of how much central control would be given to one man and/or his company to pull it off. The plan in its early iterations essentially meant that if you lived in EPCOT, you forfeited certain freedoms, such as what goes in your home, where you worked, and so on.

This game gave me a good chuckle as a Sim City fan. I'm guilty of complaining about politicians of all levels. But I don't envy their position of having to cut through the vines of competing motives and regulations. And at the same time, as a citizen, I'm not sure I would opt for the Utopian alternative.

A little too much going on all at once in the beginning. For a complex game like this I think you have to start small and slowly introduce functionality. Why are so many buttons available to me from minute 1? I'm not using them.

I suppose this is the result of a hundred years of democracy, aka having to keep everyone happy all the time.

Municipal rules, zoning, community feedback and so on all operate in the space of keeping people happy. No-one wants noise, so we have noise restrictions. Oops, construction is constrained. We all want no traffic, and lots of parking, so low density please, but that creates housing shortages and limits the usefulness of public transport.

So a rule is added here, a process there, and everyone is fighting everything all the time. Can't build this because traffic. Can't build that because impact on the neighborhood.

But yay, democracy? We can do anything as long as no one is subjectivly harmed.

And when nothing at all gets done, we blame politicians for being lazy, incompetent, or corrupt.

App monetization is wild these days. $9.99/month for a todo app with email that was generated with AI.

Meanwhile, an AI subscription starts at $20/month and you can vibe code your own version to suit your preferences and free forever.

Models have proclivities, and many people use the same model.

Imagine all books on earth were written by just 5 people - and worse, they could not remember what they had written yesterday. You would quickly get tired of reading the same flourishes and patterns over and over.

Whatever style models currently in use have, that's what people are going to be tired of, and it's what they're going to recognize as "AI".

What's with the very distracting cursors of others?

I don't consider it to be one unified story at all, I mean some of the series obviously are connected, but the rest are, as the name suggests, legends about Zelda. Unconnected unreliable narrations about some sort of heroic past events. Everybody agrees about the characters involved but as to what exactly happened, that is lost to time. So each culture is now telling the story a different way, emphasizing whatever is important to them.

I consider as a sort of modern equivalent to the coyote stories. or Paul Bunyan, Finn McCool, Gilgamesh, Or really, any legendary heroic epic passed along by oral storytelling.

So it is fun to try to fit it into some sort of unified timeline. But I don't think it is, that is not how they were actually written and we would loose most of the interesting storytelling flexibility if that is how they write them in the future.

I do not want to rain on your parade, but I find attempts to impose a coherent timeline on Zelda miss the opportunity to engage with it as a legend, a story told over and over with certain essential parts but many changing interpretations. How our very familiarity with the story creates the opportunity for surprise. There are so many fictional worlds with sprawling lore, and so few that engage with the retelling of stories and myths like Zelda does.

I don't think most Japanese media is as concerned with fitting things into a canon as much as American media is. Like, in Gundam, you have 0079, Thunderbolt, and Origin all allegedly in the UC canon, but there's pretty significant deviations in Thunderbolt and Origin from 0079 so they're not really the same timelines. American comics will also have multiple timelines or universes, but they'll make it clear which one each individual series goes with, and have crossover events explicitly acknowledging the existence of the different canons. Japanese media doesn't tend to do that, and I think trying to fit it into a coherent timeline is a fool's errand

Per a scholar in the field [0], clearly The Legend of Zelda Monopoly is the pin which holds the entire Zelda timeline together!

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-25c8Rsobw

What’s the word for trying to do cluster analysis on what is actually randomly distributed data? The games do have obvious similarities and sometimes refer to each other, but they’re independent events.

It’s a neat idea, i think it’ll really take off if you change “before pushing to prod” to “before requesting another human’s time or attention”. If something like this was gatekeeping the “submit PR” and “update PR” buttons it would prevent a lot of waste.

Reason #1 to keep writing code by hand is that you don't ever lose that connection between you and the code.

There was an excellent post here on HN that unfortunately went unnoticed. I highly recommend reading it as it exactly points out this problem: understanding.

Here is the link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50128468

I certainly feel like certain AI coding practices I have leave me with nothing learned in a frustrating way. Sometimes the most effective way to getting what I want is just describing a goal really clearly, and then bashing the AI until it gets there. That bashing process can take a lot of energy and yet I don’t gain useful skills or a “better way” that I would if I was still coding. I generate more training data for BigAI corp, but that’s a slow return cycle.

Not sure if this is the right solution, but I would like to learn/understand/grow more as I pursue reckless efficiency.

Have you ever heard the idiom "ambulance at the bottom of the cliff"?

Adapted from what I wrote on this previously: https://x.com/dgant/status/2106880240907620731

The unsexy perspective on StarCraft is that it's a game about logistics. You need to keep making things, not get supply blocked, fit all your buildings, not get your units trapped, and then bring all your units to a fight at a good time and at the same time.

Astra and Opus both cleared this bar pretty quickly, both settling on one-base Dragoon + Observer play, taking expansions pretty late, on 3 Gateways. This strategy is fine against everything and great against nothing, letting you win against anyone that you can out-execute. StarSkirmish gives agents access to the FastApproximation combat simulation library, which makes better combat predictions than the B-tier bots do, and let their bots win by trading armies better against them.

But the A-tier bots (Locutus and BananaBrain) are already strong at execution, and Astra wasn't making progress against them. It switched to a proxy 2-gate Zealot rush. This worked well on a map pool with mostly 2-player maps (so you can place the Gateways very close to your opponent). But it's also an astute choice for a new bot because it doesn't require you to be good at anything in StarCraft that happens after the first four minutes!

It's also smart as a variance-maximizing strategy. In many games, if your opponent is superior, you want the game to be decided by as few events as possible. Because with a bad coin, you're more likely to win 1 of 2 flips than 10 of 20. Proxy 2-gate shortens the game and the number of interactions required to win.

It's also advantageous given the format, where you get unlimited tries to win a series against each tier's opponents. If you can make the games a coin flip, and then take more coin flips, you can clear a tier even with an overall poor winrate. I do think this aspect of StarSkirmish is worth addressing in the future.

Astra's proxy gates beat the A-tier bots, and it moved up to StarSkirmish's S-tier (Stardust and PurpleWave, though really I'd consider BananaBrain completely our peer in ability).

A brief aside about bot tournaments: The AIIDE conference and historically the COG tournaments had every bot play hundreds of games against one another, and ranked then on overall winrate. I have never liked this because it does not resemble human StarCraft (where players play a best-of-N series), unbalances the races (Zerg vs. Zerg is more volatile and winrates should be closer to 50%), and creates some twisted incentives. One of those incentives is ensuring you beat weaker opponents 100% of the time instead of merely 95%, which means defaulting to reliable-but-weaker strategies to beat weaker opponents, and having a large bag of available strategies to find something which exploits trickier opponents.

And in this iteration of StarSkirmish, where benchmark bots are mostly unable to store data between games, Stardust ran one basic conservative strategy almost every game. This weakens Stardust, but meant that Astra's proxy gates were unlikely to win. So Astra had to do something very uncomfortable for a coding agent: Go back to the drawing board and try something completely different.

Astra completely switched gears, landing on a strategy that PurpleWave also likes to use against Stardust: Use Dark Templar to secure an expansion. This is particularly effective against Stardust, who does not use Shuttles + Reavers, and thus does not gain utility from the Robotics Facility it requires to make Observers.

From there Astra progressed slowly, but discovered a shared weakness of PurpleWave and Stardust: Both of us are designed to dodge Psionic Storms, but that feature was broken in both our bots simultaneously (for unrelated reasons!).

So Astra's Dark Templar opening transitioned smoothly into a two-base timing attack with Dragoons and High Templar. It moved out as soon as it had three storms banked up. By this time Stardust or PurpleWave had usually contained the passive Astra and taken a third base, getting an economic advantage that had not yet translated into an army advantage. Astra's passivity meant that armies had not traded and were very large. This, with the broken Storm dodging, made its Psionic Storms devastating.

As with the proxy gate rush, this two-base timing simplified the game and allowed Astra to minimize interactions and decisionmaking, so it could just optimize its play for a narrow set of situations. As long as it executed the push well, it was in great shape to win. It did not need to skirmish. The game states it had to handle did not vary much. Simplifying the game against sophisticated bots was a pragmatic approach.

It nevertheless took most of the 50 hour contest for Astra to convert this plan into a winning evaluation run. By then it had learned to make Reavers and ferry them with Shuttles, but I suspect it was not doing this well enough to gain an advantage. Its winrates appeared to very gradually improve over this window, but I couldn't tell from the stream what it had changed.

After eventually passing an S-tier, Astra had a few hours to try to beat Pluto. This was plainly an impossible task for it, but I was surprised to see Astra suddenly stagnate with few changes in approach.

Astra's build order was pretty flawed, cutting workers needlessly for no advantage. It was a survivable error against Stardust forced to use its defensive "seal-clubbing" strategy, and against PurpleWave (which without learning data was constantly at risk of throwing an eval with goofy cheeses like its half-baked cannon rush). But against Pluto, Astra consistently hit the five minute mark with fewer workers, less army, no expansion, and often permanently trapped in its base. This was no less true in its 1000th game against Pluto as its first.

Astra's approach to StarSkirmish was in some ways unsexy: It simplified the game, won mainly in games where it could keep the game state simple, and against top opponents either steamrolled or got dissected in a short window at time. But winning StarCraft has always been more about bland fundamentals than fancy tricks, and I always love re-learning lessons about how the game actually is versus how we are tempted to perceive it.

Wow this is interesting to me from another angle. A friend of mine created a benchmark to evaluate LLMs on 9x9 Go (using KataGo opponents as Elo anchors) [1]. The relative rankings of this (StarSkirmish Bench v0.2) benchmark (GPT-6 Astra > GPT-6.1 Sol > Gemini 4 Argon > Claude Opus 5.5 > Claude Fable 5.1 > Claude Sonnet 5.5) matches the order of his GoBench rankings exactly, even though they are different problems at surface level.

[1] https://rolandgao.com/blog/gobench/

Is "paste your OpenAI API key" the new form of "paste your credit card number with exp/code" for example, to check if its been compromised?

Why not open source? You modified GPL-3 ladder; I don’t know whether it’s legally required, but I feel it’s morally expected and important in practice (since yours may get taken down).

Not a new revelation, but I think its funny that there is a inflate_signal_strength_bool setting and many carriers set it to true

interesting you're not slightest angry at Apple

This is super cool. Particularly for the fact that it just showed my country's operators rather than the usual America First.

Are hordes of developers now going to port all sorts of open-source software to Rust using LLMs and passing it off as their own work?

I don't see any need for this. Rust is brilliant but the Quake C++ code was already more or less bug-free.

Oh my god, and the author even supplied a "proof"[0] visual diff harness... that it replicates the original game pixel for pixel.

Just the cherry on top of great demonstration of our collective new superpower: asking computers to do something we can describe how to do, but would (probably) never take the time to do ourselves.

[0] https://github.com/terrapapagalli1516/quake-srp/tree/main/or...

Neat idea!

Fun fact; it's not as widely usable but data URLs work for this too.

Maybe you could add an option to copy the data URL for a page?

e.g. this one

https://bigwords.page/#%23%20Gate%2012%0ABoarding%20now&bg=0...

becomes

data:text/html,<!doctype html><meta name=viewport content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1"><body style="margin:0;height:100vh;display:flex;flex-direction:column;align-items:center;justify-content:center;background:%230b3d91;color:%23fff;font-family:sans-serif;text-align:center"><h1 style="font-size:18vw;margin:0">Gate 12</h1><p style="font-size:9vw;margin:0">Boarding now</p>

(paste this ^^ into your URL bar)

Hook it up to voice control so I can put an iPad in the back window of the car and tell other drivers… things.

I had the idea for BIGWORDS.PAGE when I wanted to display a message on a tablet that I had remote management control over, but no physical access. Configuring it to be a kiosk browser is easy, but how do I get the browser to show my message? So I made the URL be the message.

It uses a URL fragment to configure the message. Browsers don't send URL fragments to the server, so I never see your message. There's no backend, and no storage.

All parameters are documented, so generating a message link is easy. There's also a built-in editor to make it extra easy.

https://bigwords.page/#Hello,%20HN!&bg=ff6600&fg=000000&font...

There are a few extra features like slides, animations, and countdowns and timers. QR codes too. Not too fancy, but hopefully enough to be useful.

I know the uses for this are pretty niche. But it may be one of those things that you keep as a nugget in your brain, a tool in your back pocket. Not something you use often, but when you do it makes things just a little bit easier.

It's open source (MIT), and self-hostable if that's your thing.

Let me know what you think.

I built a website that compares 68 of these tools: https://agentmgmt.dev/

Offrun is added.

Because we all contain multitudes, I can simultaneously accept that:

1. I hate everything about this because I vastly prefer text over video for the same content, especially AI generated video

2. There are a lot of people for whom video is their preferred medium and so this will be valuable to them.

It's a technically cool project and your cost-per-video is impressively low. Best of luck!

No specs. No examples of models it can run. No idea if any of the source will be available.

Basically vapourware.

There's a lot to like here, but too AI-generated for me. The pixel art for Tokyo & Hong Kong don't use proper Chinese/Japanese characters. The pulsating badges in the non-pixel UI are also pretty AI-indicative in a way that is distracting.

The product hunt ad is breaking the immersion for me. I know that most cities have ads but still, I prefer ad free pixel art.

It’s also not realistic, in one landscape the billboard is taller than a 9 story building.

That was how I first implemented it. Jev sadly never left Pallet Town.

A pre-trained universal classifier that can replace specifically-trained ones would have been considered just as much science fiction in the 2010's as the capabilities of modern LLMs. I'm not sure Jev is actually there yet, but at least it sounds theoretically doable today.

That being said, one thing having been unrealistic 10 years ago and just about possible today doesn't mean that it's going to change the world the same way another technically related, previously-impossible thing did. The Jev hype gives me a bit of the "you're still early to crypto" vibes of some later altcoins. I really like the idea, I think it's going to open up possibilities for using classifiers where we wouldn't or couldn't have trained one before. I'm crossing my fingers for an open weights version to drop. But it's still just a classifier, people have built similar things before Jev, the one thing that really stands out about it is their ability to generate hype.

This entire conversation around Jev seems weird to me. Like... we started from neural nets that could do basic decision making and classifications pretty well, then trained larger and larger language models to get to where we are now. Now suddenly everyone is going crazy because someone trained a smaller model that is adequate at making decisions? We already went through the "look this AI can play pokemon terribly" phase like a decade ago.

This is so interesting to watch. For a couple minutes I was in awe of how quick and cheap it was. Then I saw just how bad the decision are and how it would get stuck in strange loops of going in and out of the same door to no end.

This seems like a technology heading in the right direction but not quiet there yet. Excited for what they are cooking up but probably won't start building around it yet.

with such a fat harness, this is more like watching a walk thru play the game.

Your tool looks interesting but the readme file is very "wall of text" heavy and example light. In comparison the site for this tool shows exactly what it does. Perhaps that explains the difference in response. This is a classic case of the need for "show don't tell".

So at first I misunderstood your tool, thinking it was like a tool I made a little over a year ago that creates new fonts from existing font glyph paths, combining them in a couple of ways. It began as an ambigram generator (png image) using an arbitrary ttf or woff of your choosing and once I had that working, I realized that since I was just transforming vector paths, I could mix paths from multiple fonts, still focusing on ambigram generation.

Eventually, scope crept until it became an interesting and useful thing to be able to combine say, the top half of Arial with the bottom half of Times New Roman's letters (and combine with various boolean operations on the paths, with outlines, etc, and I assumed others would be as pleased with this ability as I was, so I documented some examples and shared it here and in a fontography subreddit.

To my surprise, it got essentially no interest when I posted here, and the response from the typography folks was basically negative with people somehow framing it as a piracy-adjacent thing, and not a fun thing to do, just mashing up vector paths to get interesting unique results. shrug

Seems like you and maybe some other participants in this discussion might actually appreciate this little tool and get some enjoyment and perhaps utility out of it, so I'll share it here. https://github.com/scottvr/fambigen

There are examples in the README that show what it does in ambigram mode or "font compositor" mode. Enjoy!

calm down, Satan

If you want to make a designer have a nervous breakdown, upload a copy of Helvetica and make every second or third character be Arial.

Temu Sans is an absolutely beautiful demo choice. I love this. Thank you for making it.

Inspired by the sample text for "Nervous Sans": "Anal", an Arial with bad keming

Royal Ransom Note just downloaded! It will be great to never have to cut magazines again!

I have never felt quite so cacklingly nefarious as a designer as I did just now carefully adjusting vertical scale and offset so that the x-height and baseline of Papyrus optically match Comic Sans when mixed together.

I don't yet know who I'll be pranking with the downloaded font, but I look forward to their reaction.

could you make the website look more vibecoded please