tikotus

I was also curious about this, and I don't think the other replies understood what was being suggested.

If I understood correctly, the aim of the engine is to lower the in-memory size of the history of game states, by only snapshotting the delta. I'm also curious what would happen if, instead, you'd just run any deterministic snapshottable physics engine, and delta compressed the history on the fly. I think this is how, for example, Braid works.

Might be that it doesn't work, that running the delta check on two big enough snapshots would be too slow, and that's what this engine fixes. But would love to hear if it was considered.

If you like smoothies, I think I've got something for you!

Actually, inspired by this, I went ahead and installed Zed to try it out. After a couple of hours of working remotely using Zed, I'm impressed. It actually works, and the experience feels great. Only little issue was that when I first opened the remote folder, I was greeted with a blank window. I thought it was stuck loading and was about to give up, but turns out I had to open the project panel myself to see the files. Otherwise, working fine so far! Memory-wise it's practically free.

EDIT: Scrap that. After a while it starts running at 100% CPU on my macbook. I'm editing a small, simple PHP remotely over SSH. I haven't yet tested if it only happens with remote editing. Too bad... Well, at least it didn't trash the server like VSCode.

EDIT: Logs showed it was trying to do some auto suggestions every few seconds, but failed due to missing credentials. Didn't seem like something that would eat up 100%, but after disabling all AI features (I'm glad there was an option for this), the problem disappeared, and I'm happy with Zed again.

I'm glad to hear the SSH remote editing is working well.

A lot of the time I'm developing on a remote server using VSCode Remote-SSH. I mostly love it. But! It consumes a lot of memory. And not only that. At times it gets stuck in some infinite loop or such, and ends up consuming all memory on the machine, preventing all traffic. Takes a few minutes for the OS to finally kill it, so I can get back in. I'm pretty this is happening due to large collections of symlinks (the subprocess eating up the memory is rg). But also just JavaScript editing at times launches up a bunch of ts-servers consuming everything and more.

This is super scary, if I'm poking around on the prod server.

Looking for alternatives. Zed is on my list.

I've had two people reach out to me asking about one of my services. They both said ChatGPT recommended it to them.

My service does kind of exist. It's a small tool I created for a client while retaining full rights to the tool. So I created (vibe coded) a site around it, making it look like an established service. Even ran google ads for it for a while.

The service still doesn't show up on google with relevant search terms. There hasn't been another client. I forgot about the service. And then ChatGPT started recommending it to people.

I wonder what I did to achieve this. Did vibe coding the business page inject it into ChatGPT's training data?

I find this very hard to believe. I haven't seen many good AI integrations, and my understanding is that at least Microsoft is now backtracking with them. Going in the opposite direction of adding more of them, even replacing apps with them, doesn't sound like a thing that has proven demand.

How would that even work? What would it replace? Surely not TikTok or games. Email? Chats? Sports apps? Safari?

Am I missing something, is this a serious headline?

Ah, Tiled Words is great! Well done. Did you know Netflix launched a daily puzzle platform, Puzzled, around the time your game came out, and they have a similar game called Bonza (which they acquired, the game exsited as an app before that)? I found it an interesting coincidence.

I still find ads questionable, even if I rely on them. If I spend, say, $100 on ads, after printing and shipping, I make, say, $10 dollars in profit. Meta just made $100 dollars in profit, thanks to my hard work that earned me a fraction of that. It's hard to swallow and fathom what an amazing business they're running.

Same goes for F2P games. They pour millions (billions) into marketing games, with crazy small profit margins. When a mobile game company earns a million, Meta earns 10 millions (or more). Apple opens up the platform for 3rd party appstores with only 15% cut instead of 30%. Where does this new profit margin go? Into ads. Now companies can afford putting more money into ads, to outcompete others. Others follow suit. Instead of a million, the company now earns 1.01 millon in profit. Meta earns 11 million.

This isn't the ad platforms' fault, but I still find it somehow wrong.

Edit: typos

Thanks!

My ad is just one image and some clickbaity headline. The image is very simple, high contrast, designed to pop out. I'm targeting all kinds of puzzle subreddits. I'm getting just about $0.15 cost per click in US. The budget is quite small, but this helps reaching out to new audiences who spread the game further to their friends. The majority of the growth is still organic, but ads do help. I'm still not sure if it's a net positive though, since I don't have strong monetization in the game, and don't do any fingerprinting of users, or much analytics at all.

The best ad we've had was made by an influencer we hired to do an ad. She knew how to grab the attention of our target audience, and speak to them.

But in general we just slap all kinds of videos there. Some perform 2x better than others, impossible to guess whuch ones, but in the end the range of success isn't massive. I haven't marketed many different kinds of products, but here's my take: If an ad is giving something like 20% return on ad spend, getting to 100% can be tough by just improving the ad. What matters more is that it's a product that is easy to sell. We sell escape game murder mystery magazines. Murder mysteries in any form are simply very easy to sell.

My wife and I have a small life style business, selling a physical product. We make a nice daily profit using Meta ads. X dollars go in, X*A dollars come out, A > 1.0. When not running ads, it's just tumbleweeds.

I also have a digital daily browser puzzle. I've grown the user base quite a bit by running one simple ad on Reddit with amazingly good metrics.

In the past I worked for F2P mobile game companies. Their business is based on running successful internet ad campaigns.

This is very interesting and well done.

I've gone through something similar, but for a more functional language (a Scheme). It's interesting how here the biggest wins are from optimizing the objects, while the biggest wins in my case were optimizing closures. The optimizations were very similar.

"Three implementation models for scheme" gives all the answers to make a fast enough scheme, though it has something of a compilation step, so it's not interpreting the original AST.

https://www.cs.unm.edu/~williams/cs491/three-imp.pdf

I don't want to be judgemental, but I do find it funny that you're paying $180 for this convenience, and use it to pirate movies.

A bit tangential, but I believe dynamic vs static typing works the same. I switch quite often between them, and when ever I've had a longer break from dynamic typing, coming back to it feels quite heavy. "How did I ever do this?" It feels so heavy.

But a few hours (or days) in, I forget what the problem was. A part of my brain wakes up. I start thinking about what I'm passing around, I start recognizing the types from the context and names...

It's just a different way of thinking.

I recognized the same feeling after vibe coding for too long and taking back the steering wheel. I decided I'd never let go again.

I had to see if it was a joke. Oh, my.

I've slowly evolved from just writing to and looking up json files to using SQLite, since I had to do a bit more advanced querying. I'm glad I did. But the defaults did surprise me! I'm using it with php, and I noticed some inserts were failing. Turns out there's no tolerance for concurrent writes, and there's no global config that can be changed. Rertry/timeout has to be configured per connection.

I'm still not sure if I'm missing something, since this felt like a really nasty surprise, since it's basically unusable by default! Or is this php's PDO's fault?

It was really cool, unlike my phone after doing it for 5 minutes!

There were social games that used it as a feature, and it was fun when it worked, but it had to be disabled soon as it drained the battery so fast.

For me it's throwaway scripts and tools. Or tools in general. But only simple tools that it can somewhat one-shot. If I ever need to tweak it, I one-shot another tool. If it works, it's fine. No need to know how it works.

If I'm feeling brave, I let it write functions with very clear and well defined input/output, like a well established algorithm. I know it can one-shot those, or they can be easily tested.

But when doing something that I know will be further developed, maintained, I mainly end up writing it by hand. I used to have the LLM write that kind of code as well, but I found it to be slower in the long run.

All games I've installed on Steam Deck, with our without official compatibility, have worked well. Steam Deck runs a Linux. It all works thanks to Proton. And I'd go as far as saying, it just works.

Much of that is at least for my company handled by our accounting company. We just print the correct VAT on the invoice, and report the same VAT to the accountant and they take care of the rest. The shop/payment processor etc doesn't need to be integrated to any of it. Though I have to post-process Stripe's reports, as they refuse to include the used VAT rate in there, despite them knowing it. Stripe does try to sell the tax service to us, but I refuse.

I had the same question a few days ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47162828

I didn't receive an answer besides "that's what people like", but I still can't think of (m)any situations where anyone would prefer it.

I ask for code snippets, occasional recipes, translations... I don't have memory enabled. I start a new chat for each question. At times I ask things in different languages, if the question is tied to culture or location. If I notice I asked the wrong question, I start a new session instead of continuing the old one, so it doesn't try to merge the questions somehow.

I don't see any benefit in it knowing anything about me. Instead I'm usually quite vague to avoid biased answers.

I hear the claim that people already have their conversation on ChatGPT and can't move them. I'm curious, what are these discussions like? I've never continued an old discussion, I just start a new one every time I have a question. If the discussion is long, I often start a new chat to get a blank slate. My experience is that the chat history just causes confusion.

So I'm curious to understand: What are the discussions like that people go back to and would lose if they moved to another platform?

I'm also interested in hearing more about this!

In my own game scripting scheme, I use implicit argument passing, like a cancellation token to async calls, and a rendering context used for immediate mode esque rendering.

Something worth adding to the list: Enable rate limiting.

I'm also running my business on a single server, works perfectly, except for one time when someone tried to find some content with hash IDs through bruteforce. No problem, a tiny VPS can handle one malicious user. Except the amount of errors logged by nginx filled up the disk.

Right? I don't do much web dev, but now that I do, I don't see why I'd use anything else.

I'm doing PHP for the first time in years. I needed a function that returns the date of last week's Monday. Turns out PHP has a funky date querying language. I can just do: $today->modify('monday last week'). Makes me happy.

Congrats on getting it to that point! Exciting to see how others approach this, as there's also a solver as part of the puzzle setting process ensuring all valid deductions are allowed.

Indeed! Thank you, fixed!

Thank you so much! Also, you might find this interesting regarding testing LLMs: https://www.nicksypteras.com/blog/cbs-benchmark.html