dgently7

awesome glad you liked it. id love to try it out again if you implement any of them. idk what else to call the black squares so "enemy" felt right for the board fights back vibe.

another nice thing i thought of with enemy block types idea is that you don't need to look anywhere but the board if you get rid of powerups that you just have so your whole interface gets simpler. if you still needed powerups you could have them show up as normal pieces in the chain of pieces.

it def starts to veer into more of a classic tetris how far can you go vibe than maybe the puzzle thing you are going for, but maybe its actually two games. puzzle mode is as now but starts with a fixed set or fixed progression of enemys. you finish the puzzle when you defeat them all. winning then is time or rows cleared or minimum number of pieces even. infinite mode is more like the current. or classic tetris, how far can you go while new enemies spawn in of increasing number and difficulty. winning is how many enemies you clear + lines + time

Also enjoyed this, similar frustration at not being able to use powerups in a loss condition. Never got to the state where it felt like the "board fights back".

This comment above about difficulty made me wonder if there are more interesting things to do with the unclear-able blocks that would both let you ramp the difficulty and achieve more of your vision. A few off the cuff ideas:

* enemy blocks that are clearable if you make a row and a column through them * enemy blocks that require to be surrounded by n deep blocks to resolve * enemy blocks that automatically pop into single cell holes * enemy blocks that grow by infecting neighboring blocks over time or the more other rows you clear * enemy blocks that require multiple row clears to resolve

the thought is having a few types with each enemy block needing a different strategy to resolve would give you more levers on how to control difficulty and give you more variation to the strategy and more agency to defeat them. powerups is kinda a deus-ex-machina currently. you dont feel earned satisfaction when you clear an enemy block.

I think you are right, it's more fast food, or maybe to extend the metaphor its like processed or ultra-processed food. Systematically prepared with lots of ingredients to give you something that is "food" but has been modified to amp up the sugar and salt to levels that make it basically impossible to stop eating. It also loses almost all of its nutritional value and is often cheaper than real food. Just like social media is cheap because its been infused with ads and data tracking sales. A "free range organic" social network would have to cost more.

We do have gov. mechanisms for controlling what can be sold as food so it seems plausible, but those only happened after we went through a period of time where companies would literally put poison into bread as a filler, and the whole rotten meat packing industry thing. Maybe we are in that phase now but even so i dont expect there to be enough of a social movement to control these things (and as you say... how is tricky)

still "real food" might not have the reach of mcdonalds, but it does exit and thrive. maybe there is market for a healthy network? based on the comments here and a lot of anecdotes, I suspect there is some latent demand.

id say maybe marketing? make a "healthy" social network and frame the other one as really bad for you?

I wonder if there is anything to learn from other additive things? like a niccotine gum mode. a social network that starts you off in addictive mode and tapers you down to something better?

i have that rule and the same exception for the 0. it feels like its "cyber" look done actually right with proper design (i dont let other inferior designs steal the word cyber). i would also add any decently good* ev minivan that is actually available to buy in the us.

*vw buzz fails the good test for no one pedal driving and the price for what you get is outta wack. though lots of the 1st gen ones are still sitting on car lots so maybe that could cross the exception barrier if they go for cheaper.

espresso machines are maybe in a different class of "coffee maker" but it seems like even the cheapest of those is pretty easy to service/repair/source parts.

or in some cases even upgrade to improve capabilities...

I did the gaggiauino mod to my gaggia classic and basically everything in there is just pipes and wires... the most complicated single part on the original is the vibratory pump. I'm pretty sure i could keep that same machine going indefinitely with access to parts.

do you know about the slate truck? give it a search. it doesn't even come with speakers. or electric windows. or paint. it does have a backup camera afaik.

real question, how much would you be willing to pay a month for access to a healthy social network? (borrowing another comments clarification on the term vs social media)

healthy as in: has real people that you really know. Has no ads or bots or ai slop. Isn't full of dark patterns that are designed to turn you into a doom scrolling zombie? and maybe even has features that actually help you to stay connected in a real way to other people? oh and you are actually the customer and not the product so won't just be a service to gather bulk data on your "consumer preferences" so other places can target ads...

because while the thing you want isn't a technology or a business model I think if you actually wanted it to exist you need both, and we all mostly agree the old model where the social internet is just ad/data supported is not a path to something good. so the very real question is how much would you be willing pay in dues for that social network? how much would your friends pay? if it existed would you push for them to go there?

its hard to imagine a paid service that is basically the web version of kale being popular enough to get to network effects scale vs tiktok's double fudge oreos, but it would need to start somewhere... and some people do choose kale over oreos.

or the the similar but unrelated... "there are only 10 kinds of programmers, ones who can read binary and ones who can't"

my personal distinction I use is about measurements. while you may model to a specific scale for use in 3d gfx (game by engine/animation/vfx) you cross over from "modeling" to "cad" as soon as you are creating geometry with specific real world measurements. (probably for manufacturing or engineering reasons bc thats when it matters most)

like I can model a table that is the right size and looks like it will not tip over for my game, but I am going to cad that table to run a stress sim and make the plans for building it for real.

though id still call the action of doing the building in the cad software "modeling"... so idk.. language is weird.

so software that lets you work accurately with measurements and real units == cad. (fusion360) software that just makes geometry == modeling. (blender)

but if you wanna go get real confused look at "plasticity" an app targeted at "modeling" but uses a cad engine and sells itself as "cad for artists" it has real scale measurements and everything too.

if we dont want it we need to vote with your wallet then, buy a slate truck when they come out. if you dont want a pickup thing buy it anyway so they eventually make a car in the shape you like when they learn there is a huge market for simple cars.

(yes i know its not as dumb a 90s toyota or whatever, but its the dumbest you can probaby get that is ev* and complies with modern regulations)

*not from some ecovangalist pov but because by almost every measure of what a car needs to do for most people ev is better at that, but thats an argument for another thread.

im surprised that none of the comments have called out haber bosh (or maybe more generically the discovery of the role of nitrogen to plants)

w.o that (and other agri improvements) we wouldnt have enough spare calories as a species to devote to these other non food production related activities, like say poking rocks with electrons until they can become computers that can run excel. its really hard to visualize how much of human effort across history has just been about food production.

the best. also great replacement for moments when you might pull out your phone by habit if you are trying to unplug or screen detox or whatver.

But a permanent license… that more than makes up for the node locked. I don’t have more than two machines I want to edit things like this on anyway. And even if I did I think it’s like 200$, which is like 1/6th of a month of Onshape.

Yeah I’m not saying you shouldn’t have a file that is possible to sanity check if that’s important to your system, but I would say (contrary to op and many comments) that we shouldn’t design around that as the core feature assumption. We don’t have trouble sanity checking our normal db tables so I’d imagine that any format that has a reliable way to see the loaded-in-memory representation would meet the same level of sanity checking.

Yes this ^

It totally is a pipe dream to find some magic flat human readable file that does all this, you need to think of it as a config system not a config file.

So then why aren't we questioning our core assumption here that the solution has to be the shape of a human readable file format at all and accepting "syntactically optimal" as the best we can come up with?

Other than that text files are a compatible format to work with for the tools that coders use to interact with everything (text editor/git) why does it need to be a text file at all? or even human readable? Should we even call csv human readable... ?

The perfect config system you describe could equally be implemented on top of any kind of storage (file, db, whatever) with a configuration editor ui to drive it all. And thanks to llm's even for totally one-off custom configuration files making a small web editor for them is basically free if you can give it the schema and some examples.

And ui doesn't mean it can't be keyboard driven (just to preempt people griping about using a mouse). But it does mean that you can present your config in the way that makes the most sense to actually do the configuration instead of having to work around any limitations of a syntax. An example is the configs out there with the trailing comment "foo bar #foo bar sets the the foo bars the bar in the blaze." Maybe you've configured foo 100 times, you don't need the comment to know what foo sets but the syntax demands it so you have to see it every time. In a dedicated visual config editor the comment can be pulled up only when needed.

Will your config "file" end up with some extra cruft to store things about how to show it properly in the ui? totally. but we don't care because we don't actually edit that "file" directly anymore remember?

I’m sure it’s for many reasons but I guarantee that one is that they don’t get the ancillary sales. Eg I go to Amazon looking for socks, they have lots of time to show me other things I might buy. Maybe some other customers who bought socks liked these shoes etc.

If an agent can go and buy exactly and only the thing I need that is going to crush those other sales.

There are also a bunch more available information channels that this doesn’t use that could communicate more information. Color, shape, pattern line type, “backdrops”/groups could all be implemented to provide additional visual clarity on any range of parameters you might care about.

I used to use the dcc application Nuke and it had some very complex graphs but the different nodes were all color coded so zooming out you could get a good idea of what was happening where just from the average color of a section.

It didn’t have an auto layout algo as good as this though.

I consume all text as images when I read as a vision capable person so it kinda passes the evolution does it that way test and maybe we shouldn’t be that surprised that vision is a great input method?

Actually thinking more about that I consume “text” as images and also as sounds… I kinda wonder if instead of render and ocr like this suggests we did tts and just encoded like the mp3 sample of the vocalization of the word if that would be less bytes than the rendered pixels version… probably depends on the resolution / sample rate.

Like everything apple it’s not that they made something wildly new, they just found a way to do something more polished than anyone else that then is successful with a specific subset of vocal people.

I’m not much of a digital artist and views in this space probably vary wildly.. but if I steel man the pro iPad case I think it’s a few things 1. Screen quality. iPads look better than cintiq bc the display in the iPad is actually pretty awesome. Like recommended by the color nerds for being the best color you can get for the price, 2. Pen distance on iPad your pen is closer to the actual pixels. The cintiq had more space between the screen and the surface, feels like you draw above the page a little. 3. Biggest of all is portability. Artists love desks but they also love drawing everywhere all the time. iPad is just better at this because it’s designed as a tablet totally. The pre-apple pencil Wacom stuff existed as tablets but from what I remember was mostly just windows laptops. So software wasn’t built for touch and wanted keyboards and stuff. Responsive multitouch and the os(and drawing apps) built to integrate it tightly is a level of polish Wacom couldn’t do as just a pen input system. 4. Cost cintiqs always cost a ton and a lot of them don’t even have the computer part, iPads aren’t cheap but are way more accessible.

Maybe Wacom has caught up with newer offerings? it’s been a while since I looked at their stuff. There are also totally reasons why you’d wanna go that route for some digital pen stuff (eg high end digital sculpture or texture painting type stuff that really needs the power and integration you can get from a desktop and desktop os)

Agree pens are underrated as input over mice. Or for ar (fingers).

Maybe apple will make a pen input for a Vision Pro thing someday… though knowing them it’ll be some crazy vision based tracing system thing that requires special hardware in the headset that would require you to update your Vision Pro to the newest model to use it.

I was playing with this same idea. Even the clay part, except I was expecting to use clay to sculpt then scan that into cad to make a 3dp case. I got a bunch of keys and some “monster clay” bc it’s more solid than sculpy and jammed em in there to try and made a 3dayout like this but getting things in the right place in 3 dimensions with the clay as the base was hard and it ended up in the dead projects pile. Using the wire endoskeleton is such a great idea for holding the keys right where you need em.

Anyway I got a bunch of the khali(sp?) choc low profile keys for that. they are basically half the height of regular keys, I think they could be even better for this. One thing with a chord keyboard is that the keycaps that are big enough to reach across and find blindly might not need to be that big when you finger is just resting on them. I thought making some custom narrow caps might let you get more keys in a similar handheld form factor.

I might have to give this project another shot with what you’ve made here. awesome stuff!

Not sure if it’s still around but there was a local bartender there who made his own high quality version of Malört. You could find it at a few distributors around called “franklins malort” but I heard they got a cease letter and then renamed it to “bësk”. Compared to the jepesens was like bud light to a craft brew. Way better balance, still the bitter grapefruit, but also with a ton of other aromatics and spices. That stuff was delicious.

I wonder if toyota reads hn, because I pitched this exact idea here previously.

To everyone who will say this is dumb and pointless, you are not wrong. But if we were always just practical we’d all just take public transit or drive corrolas and minivans. We do all kinds of pointless things with cars that bring joy into the experience. I’m looking at you “off road” style suvs everywhere. If all of that stuff is ok, this is also.

I had a buzzer that was basically a button on the handset of a phone which would Open the door, I wasn’t allowed to open it up to wire directly into it so I slapped together a node red script on a rpi with a servo that would push the button to buzz open the door anytime I said “open seasame” with Siri via an iOS automation thingy. Never needed to carry keys again while we lived there.

there are two things I’ve built that maybe aren’t groundbreaking but I think fit the brief. Might be helpful context that I’m not a professional programmer so these are both hobby projects.

1. I have too many aunts/uncles/cousins but we have a long (30 year at least) tradition of doing a family gift exchange over the holidays. After one too many years of forgetting who I had or having my mom get asked by my aunt what my cousin should get me I build a website for my family that allows them to manage a gift list. Started as a super basic Django app and that was about 7 years ago and every year I add one or two features. Now it’s got all kinds things like notifications and will even help you track your incoming packages and know if they are gift wrapped or not.

Thing 2, was a wedding evite/website for My wedding. At the time I looked around and hated how impersonal all the evite options were, so I created a website with a cms that would give every user a customized, personalized experience. Invited to the rehearsal dinner? you see that dates and details. Are you one of my friends? You get the set of content with our inside jokes. It didn’t need any kind of login or passwords but provided everyone with a custom page. It also provided me with a full database to manage rsvp, song requests, track who gave us gifts (and what), etc. Yes my partner thought it was overkill (to answer that question) but it was super fun to build and ended up getting retooled for my sister in law’s wedding last year.

Yeah but people said the same thing about 4 cylinder turbo cars vs beefy v6s, but they made em anyway, they are super fun and people who want to drive a fun car but don’t have tons of cash bought tons of them.

This isn’t the solution for the purists with cash to spend 10-20$/gallon of gas it’s the thing for the rest of us who love to drive but cant justify an ice.

I mean I think you are right in that it’ll never happen. It would be a lot of engineering for a super small segment of the market, but I can dream…

I’ve dailied a mt in LA traffic since 2009. I’m one of those connected to the car people. I don’t even like cruise control bc I can’t feel what is happening.

That said, I will never buy another ice engine if I can help it. That’s coming for all of us ”enthusiasts”. For better or worse “boring” electric motors with all the smoothness and infinite torque across all rpm’s are the future…

Mt and even ice will be only for the affluent as a recreation item. (See who currently can own a horse and what they use them for as an example)

So what are the enthusiast masses to do?

My pitch is that electric sports cars of the future should have digital simulations of the mt experience. We just need to modulate the electric motors to simulate the torque curve of an ice engine.

Either put a real clutch and mt gear box in and pump the output into that. Or fake the whole thing with a haptic clutch pedal.

Sim racing has just about all the tech figured out for how to make it believable enough. And we already pipe fake engine sound around ice cars to make em sound better.

The best part is that you could simulate different types of engines and new and fun combinations of manual and auto stuff. And when you want efficiency just plonk it in the middle gear and let the electric motors be electric mode. You get all the options. Full manual, sequential shifter, paddles dual clutch, and full auto electric.

Maybe that would be better in electric retrofits but if Mazda made an electric Miata with that option the haters would hate until they tried it and saw how fun it would be. Really that’s the only reason anyone has to get a mt anymore. They are just fun as hell to drive so all we need to do is figure out how to make the electric cars we will all have to drive fun.

Idk about any big online ones but there are a ton of awesome coop games that reward(and require) collaboration.

Overcooked I think is the best example of this genre. Super simple gameplay mechanic basically 2 actions and move. But all the fun and complexity comes in from needing to work with other people.

There is a major distinction in my mind between that type of actual collaboration and many “co-op” games where you are basically just playing at the same time and usually actually competing for kills/points.