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bittwiddle

39 karma · joined November 21, 2023

I made a puzzle game that teaches programming using a visual Lisp like language. Its like SICP but fun for kids. You can try the first few levels in your browser too.

https://www.bittwiddlegames.com/lambda-spellcrafting-academy/

Feel free to reach out at contact@bittwiddlegames.com

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bittwiddle··on Neovim have a ~$800k Bitcoin donation sitting untouched since 2023
https://bitcoincalculator.tools/calculators/lightning

Its about 2 cents for a coffee(10k sats ~= 7.6 usd), or 0.2%.

Versus 1.5-3.5% that visa typically charges.

bittwiddle··on Ask HN: Building a solo business is impossible?
Or the better formula: Find a small niche you're passionate about, thats too small for the large companies but perfectly reasonable for you and small/mid size team.
bittwiddle··on HyperCard Changed Everything [video]
Nice video. There have been some modern hypercard attempts, has anyone used any of those? They seemed pretty promising during the wave of "no-code" just before LLMs entered the scene. But hypercard still grants users the joy of creation, which is mostly lost when interacting with an LLM.
bittwiddle··on Show HN: I made an esoteric programming language that's read like a spellbook
A while back I built a magic-themed game to solve the problem of getting younger kids past visual block-coding tools(scratch etc) and into real programming. It's called Lambda Spellcrafting Academy. Kids craft spells using logic and function composition, learning core concepts like conditionals, functions, and recursion in a fun way. If you’re a technical parent and want your child to have a strong foundation, consider taking a look.

Free demo: https://www.bittwiddlegames.com/lambda-spellcrafting-academy...

bittwiddle··on How WhatsApp for business changed the world
While great for a personal Whatsapp, this kind of defeats the point of using it for a business.
bittwiddle··on Epic Allows Internet Archive to Distribute Unreal and Unreal Tournament Forever
Did you know the soundtrack was composed in a module tracker? Someone recently recorded the full soundtrack playing back in Milkytracker. Pretty neat since you can see how the composers wrote the songs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iONsjiiqeKg

bittwiddle··on Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?
Hey this is pretty cool! Have you thought about putting it online? I've occasionally used tools like Adobe's color scheme finder, where you upload an image and it suggests a fitting colorscheme derived from the photo. Though honestly theirs doesn't perform too well.

Yours looks like a nice improvement.

bittwiddle··on How ham radio endures
With packet radio you can transmit digitally, and basically have IRC via radio.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_radio

bittwiddle··on Ryujinx (Nintendo Switch emulator) has been removed from GitHub
So I understand wanting to build emulators so that people can continue to play their old games after the hardware fails. But in building an emulator for a current generation console, it seems likely that much of the audience is just interested in pirating the games.
bittwiddle··on Quake runs in just 276 kB RAM on the Arduino Nano Matter board
Impressive memory optimizations. Streaming out converted pixel values was a neat way of pulling off the "framebuffer" without having enough memory for storing all the 16 bit values. Solid engineering.
bittwiddle··on How AlphaChip transformed computer chip design
Far more people / companies are designing PCBs than there are designing custom chips.
bittwiddle··on We need visual programming. No, not like that
I built a little game around the idea of a visual representation of s-expressions. It is meant to make it easier for newcomers to learn to program. The visualization not only allows you to edit programs more easily, but also to observe it as it runs.

Heavily inspired by MIT's Lisp-based SICP course.

The game uses Rust+SDL, and is playable in the browser thanks to WASM. https://www.bittwiddlegames.com/lambda-spellcrafting-academy...

bittwiddle··on ModRetro
Palmer Luckey founded Anduril which makes military drones.
bittwiddle··on 84–24
I had the same thing. Tested on desktop for others in the game boat: its a story about repairing an old macintosh. Some pretty nice scrolling effects.
bittwiddle··on I sold TinyPilot, my first successful business
Thanks for sharing! I'm currently trying out a bootstrapped hw project myself, and have enjoyed following along with your progress.

You mentioned having trouble working with vendors, was this for ex: having boards assembled? I guess I've probably gotten "lucky" with relatively low scale so far, but been happy with the assorted online PCBA services.

bittwiddle··on The Myth of Loss: Bitboys
This is why most "semiconductor" companies are actually fabless, focusing on design while working with a partner(like TSMC) to have their designs manufactured.
bittwiddle··on Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years
I've found Rust very pleasant for building little games. I've mostly been using SDL + a my own little shim so I can target web through wasm & canvas.

I had professionally worked with C++ for a long time so getting comfortable with Rust wasn't too bad.

https://www.bittwiddlegames.com/ You can see a web build at https://www.bittwiddlegames.com/lambda-spellcrafting-academy...

bittwiddle··on Stanisław Lem's vision of artificial life
You might enjoy this paper : https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconscious...

Its a bit long but I thought it was completely worth the read. It proceeds in a very gradual series of steps to make the point that societies could very well be conscious :)

bittwiddle··on Show HN: New visual language for teaching kids to code
I built a game you might find interesting. It's basically a visual Lisp wrapped up in the idea of arranging magical cards to build spells.

https://www.bittwiddlegames.com/lambda-spellcrafting-academy...

The demo is playable in the browser too thanks to Rust + WASM.