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taormina

762 karma · joined February 21, 2013

https://taormina.io
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taormina··on Facebook Support Ignoring Anything Their LLM Can't Summarize Easily
I'm the OP on X, so LMK if you have any questions or want any context!
taormina··on U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat
Many of them come from a background in law. Most of Trump’s experience is how to file in bankruptcy court.
taormina··on Ask HN: Where do seasoned devs look for short-term work?
I mean, don’t undervalue your own network without trying. Maybe you haven’t worked with anyone famous, most of us haven’t! But someone you know might be in the right place at the right time and mention you to the right person. Of course it’s imperfect but you have interacted with a lot more people in the past than you are giving yourself credit for. It’s about putting yourself out there and allowing that to happen. No one said to just pray to the network and quit looking though. But people who already know you are a good apple from past experience are the best.
taormina··on People are just as bad as my LLMs
Have you heard of Las Vegas? The 777 being the grand prize? Maybe it is not universal to all of western society but I have never before today heard of a culture where 3 was the lucky number. The USA’s culturally lucky number is absolutely 7.
taormina··on Qualcomm Claims New X85 Modem Creates 'Huge Delta' in Performance versus Apple
The history of overstating technological claims seems relevant.
taormina··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)
Well, I know that I was just saying that HN is not the place to look for gamers, but I am still working on a video game.

Danger World (https://linktr.ee/playdangerworld) is well underway and should be coming out later this year! Danger World is a 2D narrative adventure written using Flutter's open source game engine, Flame. I am the solo developer. I've been working with a very talented art team to do the art and animations in Spine. The composer has just finished the soundtrack!

Danger World is running on iOS, Android, MacOS and Windows. Last week, we got Danger World compiling on my Steamdeck for SteamOS instead of having to use the Windows .exe + Proton. I'll be getting the Linux depot setup in Steam soon.

In the spirit of doing things that won't scale to get some interest bootstrapped, I've been doing a sticker giveaway. I have a bunch of stickers featuring the cast of the game and the Danger World logo and I have been mailing them out to anyone who wants them. I've sent out 40 envelopes or so with about 10 stickers in them each.

So far, in experimenting with the various social media platforms, Bsky seems to be where my potential users are. I posted a boxart concept that I was using for IndieDB and got 100 followers from that single post of who all appear to be real actual users. Certain engagement metrics like impressions are non-existent in Bsky, but in exchange for real actual engagement from people who seem interested in my game's art, who cares?

X feels extremely P2W, except you buy their checkmark and they still don't show your content to anyone. I'm still experimenting heavily in social media land. Meta and Tiktok seem to show more promise, but since I've been scoping out and planning a visual novel mode I have also been considering taking Reddit up on their free ad credit.

I'd love to talk with anyone more experienced in marketing games like mine.

taormina··on Show HN: AI-native browser game that users can craft unlimited 3D items
Any can build games in an agile way and people have been for years. That's not new.

People who don't understand that HN and PH are really not a good places to find real gamers are a dime a dozen. Don't worry, I have done this myself as well.

Games take a while to make if you care about the details. If you want to create an engaging and interesting world that players want to engage with, that polish takes time. But AI is saving the entire industry time and effort. But sure, dump a game out incrementally. I just don't see a new opportunity, just the opportunity that has always been there.

No Man's Sky was there to tell us that you can generate a whole universe but if you forget to put anything your players want to interact with, you'll only get so far.

I mean, good luck. I don't mean to be pessimistic, I just spend enough time every day watching indie devs pitch their half-baked game ideas that this is unoriginal.

taormina··on Why Ruby on Rails still matters
Because cyrpto exchanges and newspapers make up the majority of startups? Most scams don't advertise themselves as startups and most newspapers are just dying and going out of business, not rebranding as startups.
taormina··on Why Ruby on Rails still matters
I mean, any scenario? I'm not trying to be snarky but server-side Javascript has always been a weird code smell from first premise. Now, when to use RoR vs a lighter-weight framework like Sinatra is a more interesting question, but it's about what you need out of the box.
taormina··on Multiple security flaws found in DeepSeek iOS app, incl sending unencrypted data
They ask. Encryption has a whole bunch of weird laws around it.
taormina··on You Wouldn't Download an AI
Why would it be in the public domain? Anything you create, under US copyright law, is the opposite of being in the public domain, it's yours. According to the legalese of YC, you are granting YC and YC alone a license to use the UGC you submitted to their website, but if anything, the YC agreement DEMANDS that you own the copyright to the comment you are posting.

> User Content Transmitted Through the Site: With respect to the content or other materials you upload through the Site or share with other users or recipients (collectively, “User Content”), you represent and warrant that you own all right, title and interest in and to such User Content, including, without limitation, all copyrights and rights of publicity contained therein. By uploading any User Content you hereby grant and will grant Y Combinator and its affiliated companies a nonexclusive, worldwide, royalty free, fully paid up, transferable, sublicensable, perpetual, irrevocable license to copy, display, upload, perform, distribute, store, modify and otherwise use your User Content for any Y Combinator-related purpose in any form, medium or technology now known or later developed. However, please review the Privacy Policy located here for more information on how we treat information included in applications submitted to us.

> You acknowledge and agree that any questions, comments, suggestions, ideas, feedback or other information about the Site (“Submissions”) provided by you to Y Combinator are non-confidential and Y Combinator will be entitled to the unrestricted use and dissemination of these Submissions for any purpose, without acknowledgment or compensation to you.

taormina··on S Korean crypto-boss Do Kwon to be extradited to US
Maybe they should take advertising deals from reputable companies? And skip the scam coins? And here’s a hint, they are all scam coins. Promoting a crypto project is just a bad idea.
taormina··on Cognitive load is what matters
And you can also do it with triple quotation marks if strings are involved, but it’s still more work for the compiler that someone explicitly did, it’s not magic.
taormina··on Cognitive load is what matters
But the language spec for Python is what allows for this, not the compiler. \n is just the magic character now except now we also need a \ to make multiline expressions. It’s all trade offs, compilers are not magic
taormina··on 93-year-old YouTuber back in business after being kicked off platform
What’s the job title of that live customer service agent? And how do you reach them? To the observing world, they act like it’s $0. There’s a world of difference in “sure, this is an always an expected edge case” and “oh well, let’s just let our systems systematically screw everyone”. We have this dog and pony show every week. Most days of the week. They don’t only destroy creators who do well on YT, you just don’t usually get critical traction on your Tweet. Then you what do you do? Beg on HN and pray?
taormina··on 93-year-old YouTuber back in business after being kicked off platform
That is absolutely hilarious. There is definitely a middle ground between today’s “spend $0 on live human support” and “spend X% of YT revenue on the support a platform like YT demands”. There exists an X% where they are plenty profitable. It’s a video hosting platform subsidized by the largest ad network in the world.
taormina··on Show HN: I made a site to quick identify any plant and learn how to care for it
FWIW, even ignoring the fungi aspect, you probably have a related issue around small red fruits.
taormina··on Show HN: I made a site to quick identify any plant and learn how to care for it
Can your LLM always detect that? You realize that foraging is a huge reason people do this, and bad directions have very real consequences. From a culinary perspective, does it matter? Is it a growing, potential edible (technically not a plant the way tomatoes are technically a fruit) thing on the ground?
taormina··on Show HN: I made a site to quick identify any plant and learn how to care for it
If this is just a wrapper around an LLM, what’s the game plan when a poisonous mushroom gets misidentified as something edible?
taormina··on Why to Not Write a Book
Check out how Snow White has been going. The film industry is absolutely there, but the good news is it's going exactly as horribly as you predicted.
taormina··on Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and cheaper than mined
Many marketers have convinced you of that. To many, the story is a story of blood and tears. Diamond mines are terrible places.
taormina··on Keyhole – Forge own Windows Store licenses
I don’t know, the number of cheaters appears to be non-zero and present enough in my games. Why give any random game studio kernel level access to anything? There are absolutely server-side solutions, likely cheaper solutions because the licensing fees for the anti-cheat software aren’t cheap.

We gave up something real. But it has not been proven whether we got anything. Maybe we got nothing, maybe we stopped a few of the laziest cheaters, but we still see tons of cheaters. The number of possible cheaters is based off the quality of the software. No amount of aftermarket software will magically improve the quality of your game in a way that 100% deters cheaters. I’m positive that their marketing claims they reduce cheaters by an order of magnitude, but I have not observed them successfully catching cheaters with these tools.

taormina··on Intel Honesty
As a Texan, who has considered moving to California many times, this is laughable. I pay maybe $10k-$11k in property taxes (https://tax-office.traviscountytx.gov/properties/taxes/estim...). I work for myself at the moment, but if I took my previous salary of $200k and earned that in CA instead, I would owe CA closer to $15k, and I'm not grandfathered into prop 13. Never once in my career has the math made any sense for living in CA over TX from a tax perspective. And you if you don't own your property, you don't owe TX anything.
taormina··on Founder Mode
Which is the same thing. You've also heard them called rockstars or x10 before. They are referring to the same folks, but calling them "easy to manage" is a hilarious statement.
taormina··on Ask HN: What are you working on (August 2024)?
I’m working on a new game. I’ve been trying to get back to the basics of the adventure genre. A fun and engaging story, choices, strategic combat and a simple, straightforward approach.

No microtransactions, no advertisements. No networking! The game is meant to function completely off line. The game will start with a mobile release in probably October and should be available on Steam shortly after.

I’ve been using Flame, Flutter’s game engine to develop my app. My artists are amazing and have been providing fully animated sprites using Spine. I’ve used Flutter before but this is my first time getting into Flame.

If you’re curious how it’s going, hop on the mailing list at https://danger.world to learn more. I’ll be looking for my initial playtesters here in the next few weeks.

taormina··on Accident Forgiveness
Heroku is not Fly.io. Heroku was bought by the MBAs a while back, and they do something different than generic cloud hosting (they are closer to a hosted EBS). If you bother scrolling at all, you'll notice immediately below the fold that the pricing is not remotely as clear as you're pretending it is.
taormina··on Spine – 2D skeletal animation for games, with physical secondary motions
It's a comparable tool, yes, and common in the industry, but I have not personally used it yet.
taormina··on Spine – 2D skeletal animation for games, with physical secondary motions
This is basically what the community is already doing. This is the package I've been using in Flame and its license (https://pub.dev/packages/flame_spine).

"License

The code and all associated assets of the flame_spine package is distributed under the MIT License (see the LICENSE file). HOWEVER, as flame_spine includes Spine Runtime libraries, your use of flame_spine in your games or other products is also subject to the terms and conditions of the Spine Runtime License Agreement (see the LICENSE file).

In particular, in order to use flame_spine you are required to obtain a valid Spine Editor License."

taormina··on Spine – 2D skeletal animation for games, with physical secondary motions
Spine is fantastic. I'm using it for my latest game, Danger World. All of the animations my artists are working on are done in Spine and I'm able to use a bridge package that someone wrote to integrate what I need into Flame's engine.
taormina··on Dungeons and Dragons taught me how to write alt text
https://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/articles/snowflake-me...
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