WillMorr

This is excellent, great work. I genuinely think this mix of children's communication and humor is a clever way to make these big stories more approachable. Someone who read some hype article about how competent and clever openai for making a bad sandbox is could read this and immediately understand that it was entirely their own fault.

Interesting write up, the trick to diff renders to have agents check for regression during optimization is clever. The whole thing VERY much scans as an ad to me though. I like company tech demos but I'm not huge on reading to the end of a post talking about how awesome anthropic's walled garden is to read that he's an employee.

Also, the actual website fully crashed Firefox on my phone after making it play horrible grinding sounds over my headphones for like 30 seconds. That's a new one, even for heavy vibe code.

As a heavy user of LLMs professionally, I too am so confused by the decision making process within these orgs. Do people really want them to speak like actual human connections? Why?

I really enjoyed reading this, got invested in learning about this idea, and then realized they they never actually show any evidence that this works? Like the text-based model they are experimenting with did a kinda counterintuitive thing that they thought was worth a section, and then they don't say whether or not it was right? The idea of aggregating chatbot context into a probabilities is super interesting and I really want to know if it's bullshit or not

I've been running these with friends recently, it's very fun. I ran irl bot tournaments for board games a couple times but the agent era opens up a huge amount of possibilities.

Must recently I built out a MMORPG puzzle box thing, I wrote a general game architecture doc but left the specific puzzle design up to Fable. Nobody is actively playing rn but I left it up at bot.willmorrison.net.

I'm a little baffled by this, it's basically like the remote Claude instances I already use every day except it has absolutely no safeguards? If I wanted to make a claude could post to linkedin it would be like one prompt to spin that with playwright. Like you can just have persistent Claude code sessions, if you aren't cost sensitive you can just keep restarting the session whenever.

They're clearly targeting less technical users but in exchange are asking you to upload every login you have to Elon's servers which is an insane thing to do imo. What a world where people are giving their Instagram sign in to the bot formerly known as mechahitler.

When I get out of my domain, I always ask it to describe things to me "like I'm a senior CS student who doesn't know any industry terms". I find it really easy to skim past the definitions I know and very useful to get the explicit clarification on unfamiliar terminology. Telling it to talk down to you a little also seems to calm down it's tendency to talk like it's trying really hard to convince you it's smart like a 8th grader trying to use every single vocab word they learned last week.

The thing I think is so frustrating about this is it's the absolute worst case middle ground between two much more productive experiences. Either solve the problem yourself by understanding the code or just give me the full agent context so I can just use a chatbot too.

For high stakes debugging efforts I'll dig in with Claude, have it do a bunch of testing and give me a writeup, and then review it to extract any useful findings. When discussing with other people, I give them the 2 sentences I'm confident in and then link them to the giant doc so they can review it with their Claude.

IMO once you're working with agents, your whole job is context management. I have a little web server running my Claude markdown docs. When someone sends me a Claude snippet with some partial information I just have them prompt their bot to upload a thorough context dump so I actually know what they did. If someone has had an agent look at a problem they haven't thought about yet, I'd rather just get the info from the bot directly.

Nice work!

It's really interesting hearing moderate takes from an author. It feels like most people with strong enough opinions to make a blog post are either (reasonably) digging in against ai or have completely given up. It feels like the majority of people who self-identify as readers have extremely high standards and don't realise it, there is clearly a large amount of overlap between chatbots and some chunk of human authors. It's already better at technical writing than I ever was, I'm just fine with it because I never wanted to be a technical writer.

I really appreciate that Hugh has the humility to talk about this transition in comparable terms to the one that launched him. It's definitely democratizing the ability to produce words in a similar way but I'm less sure it's otherwise meaningfully comparable. This feels like more of a re-cetralization: we're moving back towards the established players being the only ones able to write novels. Its just that the established players are now model weights being used by different people but with the same biases. Instead of blocking new authors via controlling access to publishing, chatbots and the people using them are functionally DDOSing every open channel for humans to get read and seem to be breaking the pipeline.

As an aside, the idea of streamer authors is fascinating. It'd be a completely new thing, it's like the maximalalist version of authors in serial mediums being overly sensitive to the immediate response to each chapter and overcorrecting.

Excellent read overall, thanks for sharing.

You can always go full Danger and just title tracks with the time you finished them at

I played a ton of ZK back in 2016-21, it's the most polished game of its kind imo. The cold takes series is excellent, rts balance is such a hard problem and it makes for interesting systems analysis.

Hell yeah. I feel like if the world ended there would be a group of trans woman with a wind powered experimental estrogen generator inside of a week.

Clever! I really appreciate how well done the tutorial is, it's just about the easiest game intro I've ever experienced.

Thanks for organizing this! I had a great time playing with the system for a week even though I did not get anywhere close to the prize pool.

I have no idea if anyone checks these threads after a week but not that it's over, I am super curious what strategies other folks used. I used a python script to pre-process my programs to minimize jumps and downloaded the sim to run an iterative optimizer with parallelization. I just put a little writeup and the code on github https://github.com/Will-Morr/MomentSwarm.

I've been working on a surprisingly similar project for the last week: plants grow cells on a grid by executing a raw chunk of memory according to a simple instruction set. I'm aiming more for an evolution simulator, where each plant gets a 1kb brain that is randomized a little when a new plant is spawned.

Most plants right now settle into a simple goto loop that places the requisite cells to survive and then spam seeds until they die. I have seen some interesting variety in body plans emerge where plants sort into discrete species regionally. I'm hoping to eventually get decision making to emerge organically. If things go well this system is theoretically capable of sexual selection (and maybe fisherian runaway) but that's a pipe dream right now.

https://github.com/Will-Morr/PlantBrainGrid

Very nice visualization, the fade out really adds to the organic feel.

I've been playing with a similar system but designed for 3d printing, it's simple to make it self-supporting by just drawing a line from each parent to each child which is neat.

Since IP law is apparently dead, does anyone want to invest in my ai generated novel startup where it just spits out Harry Potter verbatim but uses a bunch of power to do so.

Not a golfer but I'm a big fan of the pretty plots.

It's fascinating how he has fully outsourced his conscience to the TikTok content guidelines. With all of the discussion about what restrictions should exist on platforms it never ever occurred to me that people would start to view them as moral authorities.

I've recently starting posting again on my project blog https://willmorrison.net. Someone else shared my most recent thing here and I wound up sticking around.

I haven't actually measured it but that's a good thought, I may borrow a thermal camera and do some testing! It's not noticeably warm to the touch but this functionally a system that converts potential energy into heat and sound so there's probably a measurable change.

Mostly speed, I'm mostly doing large boolean unions of primitives or chain hulls and OpenSCAD chugs pretty good at large numbers of operations. Don't get me wrong, they're great tools for what they're good at. I need to do more research before I start a port, SDFs seem like the best option but I'm not 100% confident. I am considering using your SDF library though (github.com/fogleman/sdf) but need do do some experimenting/benchmarking first.

I've actually done clear prints with LEDs installed. The bottom is much brighter than the top and it just look kinda tacky. I briefly hollowed out the supports and tried running fiber optics but it didn't help much.

I'm realizing now that I tried a lot of weird shit during this project that just did not work at all or make it into the final product, I should do another video just of all my failed abomination marble runs.

That's pretty much it! It's the simplest method of supports I could come up with that allows for robust keepout zones. I did have a bunch of issues at first with supports blocking the path but with a little tuning it became surprisingly consistent. I doubt I'm the first to come up with it but I have not seen any similar systems.

Thank you! The emergent forms are much more interesting than they have any right to be for such a simple system.

I actually attempted this, the idea of a python script that converts a midi track into a marble run is just too good to not try. I printed a large drum with different track structures inside so I could test various "slopes" by changing the speed and it just doesn't work, the balls bounce around too much to get an audible pitch. A less rigid material or a larger bearing would likely work better but I decided to focus on getting the normal version working well.

That sounds super interesting, do you have a link?

It's actually much weirder than that: banking changes the axis of rotation and thus kills the rotational inertia. The tracks bank super aggressively in order to prevent the ball from accelerating too much and hopping the track. This is part of why the descent is so smooth and all the balls move at more or less the same speed.

Also to be fair the final system does lose a ball every 30ish minutes. The tuning was largely me staring at the run or taking a video trying to catch where they get lost. Instead of hand tuning I would just update the generator and print another one. I'm considering closing the loop with a camera but that would be a whole new project.

It's specifically using SolidPython2 to generate the models. I originally wanted to do a quick code cleanup and have the specific math be much clearer but by the time it was working that was an absolutely massive undertaking. If I touch the code again I'm probably going to refactor the entire codebase and use a different 3D engine.