I'm working on turning our formula engine -- that we use for Calcapp, our app builder -- into a real hosted solution (as well as a library). I discussed it in July last year (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44702833#44704642) and have been working full-time on the project since the beginning of the year.
I figured "I already have a battle-tested solution, I just need to make it modern and spiffy, build a website for it and see if there's any interest -- in the age of Claude Code, this should be fast work!"
Wrong. Taking an internal library and offering it to others -- complete with documentation and modern tooling -- is an immense project, even with the help of AI agents.
Is there a market for a "formula engine in a box"? I don't know. But I also didn't know whether there would be a market for Calcapp either, and that has supported me working full-time for the past seven years. So I'm willing to take another chance.
A podcast that isn’t about AI (in the normal way)! I started Pagenerd with some friends to talk about science fiction - loosely defined - and give us a chance to hang out. It’s pretty good. Find it at https://pagenerd.com which links to all the usual places.
I’ve been working on an OSS backend-in-a-box called [aepbase](https://aepbase.io/).
For the past few years, a group of us from Google, Microsoft, GM, IBM, Roblox, Rubrik + more have been working on a design standard for APIs called [AEP](https://www.aep.dev). The goal is twofold: learn from our companies mistakes around APIs and enable better tooling with less configuration.
We’re at a point where AEP-compliant APIs get a resource-oriented CLI, MCP server, full UI, and Terraform provider for near-zero configuration.
Aepbase has been my way to tie the whole ecosystem together. You run a single binary and define the schema for a resource with one API call. Now, you’ve got a full set of CRUD APIs and support for CLI/TF/MCP/UI. After one API call.
It’s a really cool way to tie together all of the work AEP has been doing.
Love to hear HN’s opinions on all of this. We’re still trying to figure out the best way to sell people on AEP.
a performance-first TypeScript checker written in Rust. Started 5 months ago and it's been mostly AI-written code.
99.8% tsc conformance test pass rate today. Single file benchmarks are 3–5x faster than tsgo.
Social Maps: a user reviews and ratings service for points-of-interest (e.g. cafes) in OpenStreetMap.
I’ve been trying to reduce and eliminate my reliance of the Big Tech and the lack of user reviews and ratings was always a big pain point for me each time I tried to switch away from Google Maps.
I’ve started building a service where users can write reviews and rate “places” (POIs) in OpenStreetMap database, such as a cafe, a museum, or a shop. It’s a quite straightforward CRUD app with bunch of OpenStreetMap-specific features such as logging in with OpenStreetMap and querying places by their OpenStreetMap metadata.
It’s still in active development but it has good docs, a great API reference (including an OpenAPI spec), a demo app with the entire planet imported and queryable, and an early stage Android SDK.
I'm working on a little local first review tool called Review (though I sometimes refer to it as differ since that's it's original name) - you can see screenshots here https://x.com/rhyslikepb/status/2053149881104265599?s=20
The idea was borne out of wanting to use the review tools that you get on existing sites like GitHub, without having to push and start bloating PR lists. You'll be able to leave yourself comments and code suggestions after review, which you can then pull out in a Markdown file to feed back to your coding agent (or anything else for that matter).
I'm also trying to include some optional (very optional) AI extras where you can use your own keys, and then get a tour of what you've changed and a quick overview of the changes.
I'm slowly but surely working on a first update to my Android app, Tunemark (https://tunemark.app), which I released a while ago. Tunemark lets you add bookmarks to moments in songs so that it is easy to jump back to them. It is really convenient when practicing dancing or music and you need to constantly reset back to specific parts of songs. Unlike most DJ-type apps that could serve similar use cases, Tunemark works with most music apps, including streaming services.
I have new features such as sharing bookmarks and possibly BPM detection planned but also some quality of life changes like better UI scalability for different size screens/split screen use.
We're working on Drawers (https://drawers.computer), a macOS app to give each of your projects its own dock, space, and windows.
We integrate with macOS spaces to switch out a project-specific dock on each space, containing only the resources you need for that project. We made it possible to add granular resources instead of full apps to the dock (think specific slack channels instead of the whole slack app), to keep the dock hyper focused on what you need.
We built this to stay focused while working on the computer, and we thought that the native interface mixed all our projects together, causing us to get distracted.
I do calisthenics 3×/week plus Ironman 70.3 prep, which means my training lives across Garmin, Polar, Withings + FIT files and front-lever sessions that no mainstream app models. So I built one that does both (and have been using for the past 4 years+): logs custom strength moves (front lever, FLAC, ¾ pull-ups), aggregates the connected devices (Polar, Garmin, Suunto, Withings, Apple Health) into one weekly view.
Currently trying to see if can integrate some AI insights to my training routines.
App is free for now as it does not cost me much (only servers for now), comment / use cases welcome: https://obitrain.com/
Have you seen that meme template, where the midwit wants to use a thousand complicated things to optimize their experience, but the grug and the genius both keep it simple?
I think this is a perfect example... somewhere out there a genius and a grug are happily exercising together for the simple joy of doing so and feeling good in their bodies, and nearby is a midwit with the GDP of a small village worth of wearable electronics wondering where the joy has gone as he laments the 0.1% of VO2MAX he's dropped since his last gadget-run.
I haven’t trained for an Ironman but have for a marathon. I do think some metric oriented work is helpful! But I laughed at your post. Happy to see both sides.
For a long time I wondered how SV startups got such pretty landing pages (here’s a comment I left 2 years back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37421273). I wanted one for my side projects but couldn’t afford an agency, and the templates online were boring. Creating the page was only half the problem. I also needed somewhere to collect emails for the waitlist.
After AI happened, I built an app (promptfunnels) to scratch my own itch and generate funnels (fancy name for landing pages with a purpose).
Then came the harder part: marketing it. Coming from a tech background, I knew nothing about marketing, so I started reading and came across the $100M Leads book. I realized codifying those principles together with funnels and marketing automation had a real market. My family, friends, and acquaintances became the first customers.
A friend joined me as cofounder and we both quit our jobs to do this full time.
As we talked to other startup founders, they kept describing a tangential problem they called GTM. At the core it was the same thing we were solving: marketing for non-marketers. So we pivoted to RevMozi(https://revmozi.com/), which helps non-marketers do both inbound and outbound GTM.
We’re dogfooding the product and coming out of beta next month.
some of them are non existent today. Check the parent thread - some good recommendations(for 2023) on both functional websites and pretty websites. At that time if I recall linear landing page was all rage, and there were many copycats.
I’m an application developer by day, but lately Claude Code and Codex have finally made microcontrollers approachable enough for me to start tinkering with them on the side. I built this little “holographic” display that shows the surf forecast for any beach. While my friend built the casing, and mechanical part of it
I am working on a framework that lets you easily create tools inside the Django Admin - https://djangocontrolroom.com
I've published several panels under this banner already (tools for redis, caches, celery, etc.); I am currently working on a base library layer for tools to inherit from and to make it easier to create new tools.
Essentially, the point of all of this is to make it so that you don't need so many external services; Instead, DCR provides self hosted alternatives. This in turn makes it a lot easier to build and productionalize something using Django.
Reception has been decent so far and I estimate several thousand current adopters (Its hard to estimate based on download numbers alone.) For May I will finalize a common design language, further formalize the plugin system and how it works, and likely release a new panel.
It works on MacOS, built with Swift and Metal. My goal is to make a super fast, and free, focus stacking program. I provided a notarized MacOS DMG for the initial release, but if built yourself, it will run on an M4/M5 series iPad Pro as well.
The core ability I wanted was to support RAW files as inputs, with DNG files as outputs. This is done using either LibRaw, or Adobe DNG Converter (runtime options).
I have been really into macro photography the last couple years, and have been slowly working on trying to build my own program to handle the focus stacking.
Very cool! Do you know Thomas Shahan's work? He once contributed his woodcut artwork to a videogame, so he does seem very technically curious. I bet he'd be interested in trying something like this out with his own work and providing feedback...
Being a weightlifter for 20+ years now, I'm working on a barbell speed and path tracking sensor based on newer IMU hardware technologies, which makes it both more precise and cheaper than camera- or actuator-based systems. Ultimately it helps you lift and train safer and better.
It's an intersection of industrial design, hardware, firmware, and software (and some sport science, of course). This intersection is not yet dominated by LLMs so it's a breath of fresh air.
In an early prototype stage as in "strap a Raspberry Pi to a bar", but it looks promising and I'm happy to move forward, also using connections from my previous 12+ years in China.
Wannabe powerlifter here of about 20 years as well. This sounds like an awesome project! Is bar-path the main metric for safety and "better" lifting? A project I had in mind, once upon a time, was an automatic "Form Check Friday" for myself using a Pi + Webcam.
I've found it hard to keep up with movie and TV news (particularly when the new Backrooms film is coming out).
So, I built an agent to help remind me -- it's a subscription based service that sends you updates every morning, and stores your preferences so it can learn what you like.
A desktop client for Repomix. Repomix is a CLI which allows you to summarize all the code in a repo in one txt or md file so you can in turn feed it to an AI model for analysis. It absolutely gets the job done it its current state, but it is a personal project so there may be a few rough edges.
It's open source and has no official connection to Repomix. But the developer, yamadashy on Github, knows about it and seemed to like it enough to add it to the Repomix website under the community projects.
I like being able to paste all the code into a browser window and have lengthy discussions with ChatGPT, Gemini and GLM. Doing so in the browser saves tokens over doing it in Cursor or Codex. I like using the Projects feature in ChatGPT in the browser and Notebooks with Gemini because that gives the model context and history on whatever I am working on. It was one part scratching my own itch, one part learning about Python and Customtinker.
It's made specifically for when you just want to get the code and paste it, no muss or fuss. It doesn't have support for flags (yet?) like the CLI because again it is built for speed. Besides, when I want flags, I like using the CLI instead to get granular. Repomix Desktop is for "just give me the code."
I'm a self taught coder so I'm very open to feedback.
It's a short chain-reaction game in which you explode balls bouncing in the screen, and need to build up to target scores. You build bigger and bigger combos as the game progresses.
It was a blast to work on it, starting with a small toy and just adding features that "felt right" until I had a game that was fun to play. It was quite hard to find a balance though, so a lot of numbers are arbitrary - but I enjoy seeing people breaking the game in new ways and finding new builds.
These days I've been working on patching reported bugs and sharing the game with people. Now after the latest patch, I feel like I'm done, but I feel like going back at it and adding an idle mode. And maybe simplify the codebase so I can test and iterate better, and then add many more ball types...
I know that any good LLM could replicate this pretty quickly, but I made this myself and I'm still feeling proud of the accomplishment :)
It's been three months now of building Crit - https://crit.md - local first, open source tool for reviewing markdown and code output from your favourite AI agent.
It's inspired by GitHub PR review workflow, only with quick iterations and local.
It's been great! I found some dedicated users, dogfooding it every day with Claude and starting to get more contributions from the little community. We just got accepted into Homebrew core which was my target.
I'm expanding the team features now as I've got a few users keen to get the sharing service deployed in their private networks!
After quite a few years of coming up with and implementing 'great ideas' but not being able to follow through to making them revenue generating products, I'm on my best bet so far.
I always wanted to build a real-life puzzle game, which is app/mobile assisted. Had yet another eureka moment, and built a usable prototype (backend plus iOS app). Good feedback from a small circle.
For a while I was aware of someone (I knew by sight) who worked in the same sort of subject matter (but a non-tech). I approached her, we had a coffee, I pitched the idea and how she could bring it to life, as I made the tech side. She jumped on board.
We're two and a half weeks in, have gone full speed and are making something great (for our audience). My future co-founder is amazing, great insights, opinions, drive. We're potentially launching in a couple of weeks, a free/MVP version of a puzzle game.
I've been through many iterations of trying to get something off the ground. Tried tech co-founders, and the last years of going solo (very hard after you've done the coding). But this now feels right. A puzzle app/game for every day people to have some fun. And a future co-founder whose life is outside tech, who's bring a sort of fun energy outwith let's make loads of money or isn't the framework/AI cool.
Balance is good. Contact with reality is good too :)
Mainly working on https://localhero.ai, automating i18n translations for product teams. Basically runs as a GitHub Action, translating new strings on PRs matching your brand voice and glossary. Got our first fully selfserve customer a few weeks back (found us through the docs). Interesting work lately has been improving how the system learns from manual edits, when someone tweaks a translation in the UI, it feeds back into translation memory and influences future translations in a smart way. Also did stuff like improving our agent skill, so coding agents get glossary/style guide context automatically and they can write source copy that better matches the brand.
Been pushing some new stuff on https://infrabase.ai as well, my AI infrastructure tools directory. Traffic growing steadily from comparison and alternatives pages. Interesting finding is that blog posts rank better but get fewer clicks now because AI Overviews, interactive comparison pages still earn clicks. ChatGPT has also started citing the site more as a source. Adding new content and polishing existing parts of it, added a page focusing on EU based services at https://infrabase.ai/european.
A civilization clone, but going way deeper than is reasonable (inspired by dwarf fortress). I'm currently building the geophysics simulation that will allow for realistic terrain generation, powered by actual mantle convection and plate tectonics. Once this is finished, then an actual per-cell atmospheric and oceanic model. This should keep me entertained for at least a year, at which point I can start working on the actual gameplay part of things.
Been working on https://searchcode.com/ again which I bought back, albeit as code search tool for LLMs. It solves the “should I use this library” by allowing the LLM to inspect search and analyse it before integration. Can use it to compare multiple repositories before downloading. It comes with a large amount of token savings and can be really useful when wanting to learn about a codebase.
Currently developing https://pelicantools.app, a collection of tools to rework YouTube. Any YouTube video can be transcribed to an elegant text or a complete article.
If you're a creator, researcher or developer looking to reap the rewards of a video without consuming it fully, then it's helpful.
Whole thing is up and running on vercel.
It's a work in progress — would be great to get some input!
I'm working on a diffusion-powered UI design tool. My short term goal is to make AI-designed UI not look like Tailwind. My long-term goal is to be Figma, but powered by diffusion.
I quit Figma about 4mo ago to start working on this, and the gpt-image-2 drop really legitized the bet. I recently release Brands for diffui, which let you establish a design system and consistently generate with it. I made a Brand out of the recent UFO files release, which allow for some really fun designs:
I've been going through Nora Sandler's Writing a C Compiler book and writing a compiler in Python. I'm excited to start the chapters on optimization - those seem like the most fun algorithm problems.
I recommend the book. It certainly isn't easy (maybe 3x harder than Crafting Interpreters), but I've learned a ton (eg how to deal with operations on different sizes of types, or the trick of using pseudoregisters to avoid having to figure out registers up front).
An LLM benchmark for open-weight models only, with secret questions.
The questions are asked multiple times to calculate a consistency score.
The results are available in JSON, containing the hash of the question with the number of correct and incorrect answers, the number of unique answers, and the number of times no answer is given. (Uses \boxed{})
https://vistacker.com - local first task and note taking TUI and iOS app, disconnected operation, auto sync across multiple machines with optional encryption so the service can’t see your data.
A high-throughput multicast Bitcoin transaction distribution system, with a roadmap towards billions of transactions per second.
Features:
- Control channel for block header announcements, operational mechanisms, and network topology automation
- Separate channels for subtree, subtree grouping, and transaction load
- Transaction load sharding by deterministic multicast group membership based on TXID
- Transaction specialization filtering and retransmission both unicast and multicast, to connect edge networks only interested in a portion of the transaction load for whatever reason
- NACK-based retransmission of missed packets via hash chain gap sequence tracking (per sender, per shard) with automated caching endpoint beacon discovery and tiered network distribution
- BGP-AnyCast based transaction ingress
Basically all the topology pieces to scale the actual small-world network for Bitcoin miners or transaction processors; dense at the core, with layered and sharded group distribution towards users at the edges. Right now just site or org-scope multicast in planned, but provisions are being made to extend via MP-BGP eventually.
For BSV Blockchain but could work for the other Bitcoin variants too, if they ever wanted to scale.
Read your most recent piece and I like it. Beat generation sort of feel, extemporaneous, haunting in a good way. Keep writing even if only a handful of people read it.
I'm building a chrome extension that scans everything you read and highlights text if it maps to a market on kalshi. On hover, a tooltip pops up allowing you to drop money on it.
Use this to doomscroll nba twitter and sports bet, or if you're feeling more highbrow, peruse the NYT and passively gamble on geopolitical events.
A language learning app called lexaway. Premise is people can learn like LLMs learned - word prediction. I use tatoeba, an online sentence pairing thing, and it's nice well it's worked for me. I hate the green bird fyi so it's free and open source.
A non-profit to deconcentrate power over AI through better infrastructure for external auditing/oversight, and better infrastructure for local/federated inference/training https://openmined.org/
I'm working on Repple (https://repple.sh)! It's a modern spaced repetition x incremental reading/PDF library app with a few (tasteful!) QOL AI features.
I've been using Anki for 10+ years and love it but always wanted something with a cleaner UX and a reader view. The recent Anki ownership change pushed me to finally make something, and it's seeing some traction :)
Right now I'm focusing on getting the reading and note-taking view to be nice. I used to use Polar Bookshelf (RIP) but that went away, trying to make something better.
The other day I got into some pretty weird territory with Claude, trying to map out what an immortal ASCII cat would look like. Basically an autonomous Tamagotchi.
The idea was to create a quine that runs forever on something like Akash network with its own crypto treasury to support and pay it's bills and try to replicate. It would then talk to an LLM for support and actions on what to do to stay alive.
It got pretty out there. Stored some of the ideas here.
Main project is a deterministic .NET runtime (https://github.com/Smaug123/WoofWare.PawPrint). Today I upgraded it to net10, which has naturally caused dozens of regressions which Claude is beavering away at.
Side project is my own agent harness, https://github.com/Smaug123/writ , which is being built sandbox-first and with Nix as a first-class citizen. Obviously everyone has to write their own agent harness as a rite of passage.
Been working on and off on a Spotify recommendation egnine after getting tired of Spotify’s repetitive recommendations.
You get to choose the genres you're interested in, and it creates playlists from the music in your library. They get updated every day - think a better, curated by you version of the Daily Mixes. You can add some advanced filters as well, if you really want to customise what music you'll get.
It works best if you follow a good amount of artists. Optionally you can get recommendations from artists that belong to playlists you follow or you've created. If you don't follow much or any artists, then you should enable that in order for the service to be useful, as right now that's the only pools of artists the recommendations are based on.
I'm working on Isola (https://github.com/isola-run/isola), a passion project of mine. It allows you to easily create and control sandboxes for executing untrusted code on any Kubernetes cluster (one helm install). To support some features I wanted (like on demand snapshotting of specific containers' filesystem in a sandbox pod or limiting egress rate from the sandbox I am working on now) I contributed some changes to gVisor. Happy to chat about the design and implementation of such a project if anyone interested!
My own browser game. I created a browser game engine and building my first ever game with it. I can’t wait to launch it, I think it’s pretty cool. I’ve been working on it for 6 years!
The tech surrounding the game is awesome, the game and engine are fully deterministic, discrete (not float based), and bit-packed data structures throughout, powers of 2 everywhere for really fast operations, and logic and rendering are fully decoupled.
I wrote a simulator for the game and can simulate 10,000+ games in around 50 seconds on my MacBook M1 Pro. Purpose of the simulations is Monte Carlo method to tune my enemy AI (not LLM - conventional bots etc)
Currently working on `imgsrv` which is basically a container registry but it holds disk images. Enforces versioning, allows attaching multiple formats for a single release, prioritizes immutability, etc. Intended to build fully automated image release pipelines. I use a PXE setup for my homelab, so having a common place to manage image release lifecycle is helpful.
Right now I intend to make it compatible with Incus as a remote. So it's just a matter of adding it as remote and then you can consume all of your versioned images.
I'm working on Tidepools, a daily journaling / task management app (local-first, Mac/iOS/web) with a proactive AI coach. Mostly what the coach does is ask you questions. It can also suggest tasks. Right now I'm working on sandboxed plugins that the coach can modify, so the user can request behavior changes.
I’m working on a ground-up implementation of RADIUS with everything running on stateless compute. It’s a beast with many problems to solve but I have EAP-TLS, TTLS and PEAP all working. I’d love to connect with folks interested in this kind of thing.
I was responsible for multiple RADIUS services used by millions of people every day. The existing software is slow to build with, difficult to scale and expensive. I couldn't let it go.
Step one was building the platform to run it on and make it sustainable as a business. Step two is implementing protocols like RADIUS that lack a separated compute/storage model but should really have one.
I chose C# because I know it, and build native single-file executables using AoT.
I am working on mesh (https://growmesh.io)
I started working on the topic of human development two years ago and I dived into the topic of how humans have been trained, manipulated, educated or brainwashed.
My central idea which I am investigating is that whenever a person is interacting a highly tuneable ML model such as the X/Fb/TikTok feed or chat interfaces with LLMS, does the thinking and development of the human happens more times or less due to the new experience.
Anydrop.org A zero-friction, cross-platform alternative to AirDrop. If your device have a browser, you can drop text or files to it. Doesn't matter if the device is a pc, mac, linux, phones, tablet or smart tv.
There are no installation or login, just load https://anydrop.org on the devices needed. Also support live realtime notepad sync and clipboard for easy share of text snippets. All shares are end to end encrypted.
I’m working on Recoil, memory safe, compiled static language (yeah, I know, everybody’s doing it) with Rebol syntax and built-in candies like parsing, finite state machine and rich syntax (that’s given, because of Rebol).
It’s nice to see how well-thought language design can pay off years later, with lower token usage. From entropy POV, Rebol syntax is certainly close to optimal state.
Better GitHub insights: https://temporiohq.com - still new and there’s a lot of question about how to adapt to the age of accelerated software engineering.
I’m building a small map application that allows me/friends/family to explore data overlays about morel mushrooms phenology and habitat (ground temp/moisture/terrain/aspect/tree species/etc) in our area. There’s some lightweight forecasting and timing models to help guess at near-term fruiting. I had a big push about a mouth ago to tighten things up, and initial experiences in the field this year have been very promising.
I’ll keep chipping away at it this year, and probably expand beyond morels to other seasonal natural phenomena that my people enjoy like smelt/salmon run, wildflower blooms, etc.
I’m working on bomberman in ClojureScript, using no libraries, and making sure I write every line myself, it feels good to go slowly for a change having used a lot of LLMs in the past year.
A timelapse platform powered by community photos. The idea is to place a mount and QR code at fixed viewpoints around the neighbourhood. People scan, photograph the view, optionally add their name, and submit. Over time, the platform stitches those shots into a living record of how the place changes with seasons.
Just finished the software side using a boring technology and am about to order the materials for the first few locations. Curious to explore photo alignment once real submissions start coming in. Stitching all slightly different angled photos into a smooth animation seems interesting.
I can't really go into details of what I am working on. But I'd like to say that a lot of European corporations are running their stuff on Azure and are very much interested in having Data Lake(house) platforms tailor made to their business and IT requirements based on Databricks and their stack. I mention this because I find this mismatch of what I see being relevant in business and what is being upvoted on Hackernews quite interesting (for the lack of a better word).
I’m working on a tiny terminal config / dotfiles / tool installation manager so I can keep everything in sync between my machines. Also includes profiles so I can tailor each machine how I see fit. https://github.com/phalt/pauldot
I've been working on something in the vein of a indie game for a little over a year now. It has been a passion project, but I'm starting to come around on showing it to people.
I am a big fan of Telltale style narrative games. I think Baldur's Gate 3 was the biggest revelation of this for me. Taking that branching dialogue and freedom of choice, and tacking it on to a fun combat system was just everything.
When text based GTRPGs started popping up, I found it hard to connect with them stylistically. I found that I needed the multimodal stimulus of visuals and audio. This led me to start building something, and it ended up being somewhat of a cross between a Telltale game, a Visual novel, and a TTRPG.
Orpheus (https://orpheus.gg) is a fully on-the-fly generated tabletop simulator, with graphics, audio (TTS), and the freedom you can usually only find at a real TTRPG table. That means you can play a sci-fi, fantasy, or even a modern setting in your campaign. The assets are made for you as needed. It runs in your browser so nothing to install or tinker with.
Getting the harness right so the AI GM can stay coherent and organized has been the biggest challenge. It took a lot of iterations to get it to a point where it could understand the scenes it was building as the player changed them.
I've built it to be played with either a keyboard or a gamepad so you can play from your couch. You can switch between them as you feel like it. There is a 3D tabletop for combat, full character sheets, dice rolling, lore tracking. I want it to be dense.
Mostly, I’m looking for people who want to try it, break it, and tell me what feels magical, confusing, boring, or broken. My biggest roadblock currently is that asset generation is relatively expensive. I'm currently mulling over whether a playtest would allow for a BYOK setup so people could try playing as much as they'd like, or if I should add turn limits.
You can join the playtest waitlist at https://orpheus.gg/ -- and I just setup a discord (https://discord.gg/pychWyzf) that I will use for early playtests. (Just me right now! Come hang out!)
I've been the DM of a weekly campaign with the same group of friends for nearly a decade now. Over the past few years, I’ve seen a lot of attempts at AI meets D&D, and most of them suffer from fairly pedestrian puzzles and stories, and don’t really compare to what a decent, semi-competent human writer can come up with.
I'd love to see a more modern day attempt at something like Bioware's Neverwinter Nights - which was designed so that someone could create a campaign, and then the game would provide the behavior, pathfinding, assets, and everything else with a virtual (or human) DM behind the scenes. You could still tell a human-driven story, but the engine would do a lot of the heavy lifting.
I agree, there is no way to perfectly capture a real table with your friends. This is more an alternative for when life gets in the way of meeting every week.
I think a lot of those attempts you mentioned try and brute force the problem or trust the AI too much on what to generate.
A lot of the same problems that AI coding agents run into also apply to this problem. You have to really manage context (avoid sending a novel at the model) and enforce strict rules in the "engine". The hard part is world building that is consistent without railroading the player and forcing specific paths. I have an agent (for lack of a better term) that manages arcs across each tier. World arcs (nations, factions), player character arcs, NPC arcs, individual scene arcs, and location arcs (towns, cities, dungeons, etc). By prompting all of these as tight, individual arcs with flavor and context peppered in as needed, you end up with stuff that is more compelling. It has to be loose enough that you don't railroad the player. When you decline that NPC's quest, down the road that might have changed the overall arc for a town in a meaningful way.
I won't pretend that I've perfected anything but I have definitely noticed a spark in its writing and world building that I personally have really enjoyed.
Why not generate some asset libraries to help with some of the rote generation? You could theoretically serve the same asset for a pack of rats to multiple campaigns.
Yes! I am doing a lot of this where it won't break the illusion. Not everyone needs a unique innkeeper generated in every town, but I want to avoid that "Officer Jenny" effect like in Pokemon where she looks the same in every town they visit.
I have a private vs public flag for assets that I'm considering more unique or sensitive, at the AI GM's discretion. I'm using embeddings from there to try and parse if an asset already exists in the public pool or not, and reuse it if possible. The thinking is that eventually I will have pretty decent asset coverage on most standard campaigns. I can't account for people going way off book though.
I have an asset pipeline that tries to determine player intent and pre-generate assets before they're needed. That way we can attempt to hide the "load screens" like retro games did with elevators. I have a kind of sliding scale for player coherency, and if the player has too many "misses" on the pre-generation pipeline it will increase its requirements for when it starts generating.
I may have wildly over-engineered this but I love it. =)
Still working on ghidra-delinker-extension, trying to wrap up the OMF object file exporter at the moment. Then I'd like to implement generation of debugging symbols (at least DWARF and CodeView, maybe STABS and CTF), although lately I've received a PR for PowerPC and an issue for delinking shared objects.
I'm also thinking about writing the Necronomicon of delinking at some point. The extension keeps spreading by word of mouth and there's only so much UX improvements I can do, for something that requires throwing everything you've learned in CS 101 into the trashcan before you can "get" it.
I started a new software defined automation project. I wanted something that I could just open a webpage and start writing code that could just be uploaded and ran instantly. I picked an ESP32-P4 for the first hardware. It’s MIT licensed and has a git repo that I put up this morning https://github.com/OpenPiLab/pilab-esp32-p4-plc
Been writing in my blog every day, reading more, created a poker equity calculator, and working on a city wide project where I document attractions, restaurants, and stays I've experienced in my city (very early stages).
Trying to make a stab at improving RSS feed discoverability. There's a website portion and an app portion. Hope to have something to show off in a few weeks.
I am working on a task manager that’s way more informative and resource efficient than the windows task manager and works on Linux. It also provides an informative dashboard for docker containers and web servers with proxy support and preference for streaming sockets supporting http and web sockets over the same ports.
I have been working for some time on a budget body/facial mocap solution with Unity. Mocap is hard, and what exists is locked behind subscriptions or is just very expensive.
With Unity I'm trying to bundle a bunch of different free, cheap or open source solutions together. For facial, that includes a custom converter from the output of Deadface (based on Mediapipe) with ARKit blendshapes, and also eye movement. For body it's a custom hook to SlimeVR that allows you to mocap with cheap-ish IMU-based DIY trackers, and all that on top of a custom made (not free but open source) physics rig solution that gives you accurate rigid body real time collision, saving on cleanup work.
It's being going really nice despite being an unusual workflow. Hope to release it as a plugin for a in-development sandbox game in the near future. Mocap and animation has been my passion long before i started with tech stuff, and finally I'm able to pursue it.
I've been working on Mesaphore, an Excel-like spreadsheet app[0] backed by a Parquet-based file format. The premise is when Excel starts off as the starting point, then over time becomes a data exchange format between systems, and eventually becomes a bottleneck for the system. You still want to provide your users something Excel-like but also want to address the limits of Excel[1].
Majority of code (almost 70%) is generated by Gemini Pro and is extremely ugly. Due to a recent eye injury, I've not been able to code as much as I want, so I'm delegating many things to Gemini. Eventually, as my health improves, I plan to rewrite the entire thing.
I am working on the Learnix operating system (https://gitHub.com/sagi21805/LearnixOS)
Mainly an educational project, to understand and teach about OS and Rust concepts (The OS is written in Rust)
I've been working on a AI app to replace Claude Desktop and Mobile for personal use.
The main goals are to own my data (memories, artifacts, chats), be able to switch AI providers at any point (if one is down or I want to try a new model), have the same experience between desktop and mobile especially when it comes to working remotely on code.
A bigger vision is to offer everyone a alternative to Claude and ChatGPT they can own just like OpenClaw but with a great app experience.
I hope to have the first beta published by the end of next week.
I'm building Lexeme (https://trylexeme.com), a SaaS service that tracks how AI models like ChatGPT cite and describe your product vs. competitors, and tells you what to fix first based on estimated revenue exposure.
1) “AI harness plugin build system” to help improve reliability of and increase compatibility across the fragmented AI coding harness plugin ecosystem.
2) Claude code plugin based on some ideas found in https://www.anthropic.com/research/emotion-concepts-function
The main idea is to add hooks that inject “baselines” under some conditions to counteract certain “emotions” that can cause subtle misaligned behavior in agents
3) Final Fantasy XI custom client remaster in Bevy/Rust alongside an MCP integration that aims to allow agents to play autonomously on private servers à la “Claude plays Pokemon”
Dealing with some rough stuff in life so I'm involved in random stuff to distract myself. Moved my personal blog to Astro. I wanted to scratch and itch I had about self hosting my comments. So I built a lightweight node-based opensource comment system called discuss - https://github.com/karthikeyankc/discuss.
I'm making a surf forecasting site a la surfline.com, I started mostly to have an API to use for my tidbyt, but I figured I might as well make it a full thing and built my own features! It's on quickswell.com but it's only Socal at this time (fewer spots to compute)
An EU replacement for PagerDuty, focusing on the absolute basics - SSO as the minimum even on free, no AI driven workflows, overviews etc. but may include ML/AI driven insights in future since that’s the way the world seems to be going.
Wrote a Forth VM in C in about 1996 based on TCJ articles by Brag Rodriguez. Managed to get it to compile with modern GCC this morning and fix all the horrible issues with valgrind. Trying to adapt it to a context where it'll be usable for a spreadsheet-like system with reasonable decimal numeric precision. Consider it an RPL calculator with an Excel-like front end.
I'm working on GPS tools to help support my current contract. I've found there are no good tools for tracing a route on a map and having a mobile device think it's traveling that route. I'm not just talking GPS coordinates, but speed, direction, motion detection, precise timing between waypoints, being able to play these trips forward and backward, step by step, etc. I'm talking time-travel debugging for GPS applications.
I’m working on a project that blocks agents from breaking rules. The rules are enforced through hooks and work across Claude Code, Codex, and GitHub Copilot.
I have been experimenting on using AI for hardware development. I showed some experiments on HN a couple of weeks ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47801255). I am now trying to make my approach a little bit more comprehensive and structured, instead of several disjoint MCP servers, a single platform that connects lab instruments to AI assistants: https://teasel.tools/
As a demo, I repaired an old Philips PM5190 function generator (about 40 years old) and connected it to Claude Code. Lots of fun. Going to post a follow up video the next couple of days.
My wife and I continue to work on Uruky, a simpler and cheaper Kagi alternative, based in the EU [1].
Since last month we’ve stabilized the search UI/UX and have 5 search providers you can choose from and sort as you prefer.
We entered May with over 50 paying customers and have recently launched Uruky Site Search [2] (for website owners, this effectively is our own search index and crawler, which we’ll be bringing into Uruky soon as another search provider option)!
Customers really enjoy the simple UI (search doesn’t require JavaScript) and search personalization (from choosing the providers to the domain boosting and exclusion). We also have hashbangs (like "!g", "!d", or “!e”) when something doesn’t quite give you what you’d expect, though.
You can see the main differences between Kagi, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, etc. and Uruky in the footer (right side), but one huge difference is that with Uruky, after being a paying customer for 12 months, you get a copy of the source code!
Our main challenge right now is outreach because we want to do it ethically, and it’s hard to find communities or places to sponsor which are privacy-focused and don’t require €5k+ deals. Ideas are welcome! We’ve been sponsoring a project per month (Qubes OS, The Tor Project, and Hister so far), with our limited budget of ~$100 / month.
Because of bots and abuse there isn’t a free trial easily available, but if you’re a human and you’d like to try it for a week for free, reach out with your account number and we’ll set that up!
Hey, I'm from the EU and love to see such a project!
One thing I can recommend right off the bat is Reddit - there's many privacy focused subreddits, and also you can share the whole project in EU related subreddits and e.g. r/SideProject.
Would love to try it for a week, this is my account number - 9772263817629091
From 50 to 5 seconds. The world's fastest and most up to date investment ai. It's powered directly through our database to ground the information and reduce hallucinations. Still in development though.
A small, generic Go library for retrying fallible operations with exponential backoff and pluggable jitter strategies.
https://github.com/nodivbyzero/try
For example, if I downgrade from Max to Pro I'd still be able to use the subscription, but also run sessions with other models (less expensive/local) as desired:
ccode init-config # initializes a new config file for me to set everything up
ccode edit-config # opens it in my editor so I can change, can also include editor as argument e.g. vim
ccode # launches whatever my default profile is
ccode --deepseek # Using their API key, they have a discount this month
ccode --openrouter # Whatever OpenRouter model I have configured in the config file
ccode --openrouter-preset # Also supports OpenRouter presets e.g. if I don't want to use quantized models
ccode --deepseek --control # launches a Remote Control session, shows up in web/desktop app as a regular session
ccode --deepseek --auto # overrides the default permissions, --yolo also works
... (and so on, there's more examples on the website)
Source available, pre-built binaries on itch.io, pay-what-you-want with a minimum price of 0 USD, probably get it for free first if interested in taking a look.
Also thinking that I might make it an Anthropic API --> OpenAI API proxy that allows talking to providers that don't support the Anthropic API directly, alongside allowing switching models dynamically during a session (Claude Code wouldn't even have to know about it, it'd just send requests to a local endpoint and the proxy would do the rest).
Early on, but Go is lovely to work with, mdBook is great for getting a site off the ground and I'm really surprised that more people don't use Itch.io for distributing software (or the pay-what-you-want model in general), it's dead simple!
I'm learning about inference by running vLLM on a k8s cluster (EKS), building a gateway to keep a <2s TTFT SLO.
Most recent ha-ha moment: I kept wondering if it was normal that my cluster was only able to process 4 requests per second per vLLM engine (just seemed really low to me).
I realized a better metric is in-flight requests... Each engine is processing 70 requests at any given time, streaming tokens for over 30s.
Deeper dives into those uncover interesting limitations that don't seem to be documented anywhere. On the other hand, it is through those reverse shibboleths that I am now able to tell that my boss's boss has no idea what he is talking about llm-wise.
Working on a bread recipe community where you can share and iterate on bread recipes.
It's out of personal interest to be able to record my bread recipes and thought it might be interesting for others too.
However, I worked on it for the past ~5 years on and off (well, mostly off) and rewrote it too many times. Now finally close to releasing, bought a domain and setting up all the last remaining things.
while I was using claude code, I was playing some lofi music in the background while it was 'Combobulating' and I thought what if it could auto-play lofi beats while working and stop when it has finished running. So I built a claude code plugin, I call it vibe-coding. Can check out/add the repo as a marketplace and plugin from here:
https://github.com/Vinayak-Shukla/vibe-coding
Retired so two projects; a 2D arcade board using a RP2350, and my 3rd sci-fi/techno-thriller novel: Currently approx 140,000 words into a 100,000 word novel and about 50% complete.
cascade-editor.pages.dev - a free node-based image editor that works with image sequences and has an associated desktop app. It’s pretty incredible what you can do in browser these days with wgpu and wasm- everything is cross compiled from rust.
i am working on an offline weights harness for non-technical people, writers mainly. it's designed to work forever but also be adaptable as more weights get released etc.
it enforces very few paradigms, runs in the browser, and allows users to view and edit agent config files within the UI.
it's kind of a nightmare to try to figure out how to do this appropriately, but it's an interesting challenge and i have seen very few (~0?) projects with an approach like this ...
all the offline harnesses are optimized towards coding, vs. general text manipulation aka "writing."
Just rolled out a big new update for my video cloud platform https://www.kollaborate.tv with a new player, side-by-side playback comparison and a big improvement in accessibility.
Currently we’re using AWS and Backblaze B2, but I’m formulating a plan to move to colocated servers. Not being billed per GB will open up a lot of new opportunities. Even at today’s server prices the math still adds up.
I've been working on Betterleaks for the past three months. It's the successor to Gitleaks since I'm not focused on that project much anymore. I just released v1.2.0 which added GitHub as a source to scan for secrets against and a new filtering system powered by CEL for more expressiveness.
Well, all of a sudden, now that I kinda quit my gaming time sink, all my mini projects are finally being completed. All small, but useful, things for my setup that seem to slowly become a part of a bigger personal project. And between that kid and lots of books.
Ngl, it is weird for me now. If this is midlife crisis, I am loving it.
The same thing for 10 years and every couple years it gets reimagined while trying to get to the original goal of building a replacement for Google. It's called Micro.
Working on benchmark arena for AI agents with my wife.
We grab interesting business problems, turn them into fun challenges for hundreds of AI engineers to find the best architecture for. Insights are shared back with the community.
It is a fun learning process with unexpected scaling challenges.
Working on an idiosyncratic tool that lets users use AI to help write statements of work without losing the high bar for accuracy and consistency that these documents require. Right now, it's somewhere between Typst and Gemini in Google Docs, but not as good as either yet.
https://pockli.com - I've always needed a better workflow for managing the stream of documents people hand me — then expect me to pull out of a hat months or years later, like a magician.
- Built with Tauri — installer is small and start-up is
near-instant on all three OSes.
- No accounts, no telemetry, no MDX server in the loop. Sync goes through
whatever cloud folder you already have (iCloud / Drive / Dropbox / a plain
directory).
- Tab-to-accept ghost-writing is bring-your-own-key
- Exports to PDF, HTML, DOCX. Tables, math, diagrams, code blocks all live
behind toolbar buttons — no syntax to memorise.
good idea, i am thinking about it, but i guess it will be not that rich in formatting like the desktop app, the architecture design here using "vault" is a 'problem' for extend to mobile, maybe a lightweight re-designed version :-)
A few days back, a book on FreeBSD Driver Development was posted here [0], and everyone assumed a) it's LLM slop and b) a terrible introduction to the topics covered.
I scanned a couple of chapters and realised it likely wasn't LLM generated, it just needed an edit. The intro to C is a hard and weird intro, but then driver development in FreeBSD is hard and weird and people who aren't prepared to get through such intros probably aren't going to get through the rest of it.
Being the contrarian, I've started going through it. I was involved on the periphery of the FreeBSD project ~25 years ago, went to conferences, ran a BSDUG in my hometown, and so on. And I realised I've missed systems programming and FreeBSD itself a little, and in recent years became a little sentimental.
What I've discovered so far in the first few chapters:
1. I miss FreeBSD. And it's weird my muscle memory kicks in and am surprised in a lovely way to find familiar things like /etc/rc.conf work the way I remember them.
2. This is not AI slop. There are issues that I can blame on him not using the same platforms I am (if you're on Apple Silicon, just use UTM and the aarch64 ISO - don't use the VirtualBox config he suggests, as an early example), but as somebody who sees a lot of AI generated content in my day job - this isn't it
3. I have got excited about coding again for the first time in a while.
So, this is my hobby for a while. Go back to where I started, get into low-level systems programming again, I have some ideas on some hardware I want to help out on... it's different to a lot of what I've been working on for the last decade or so, but that excites me.
In measuring how long can esp32 stream video over wifi using single 14500 battery (AA size but 3.7V lithium). So far it seems like 2h 8m is the limit. I'm using tps63020 buck-boost to 3.3V.
A reactive programming language for games! Properties signal when they change and you can register blocks that tell the engine how to use that property, not just once but every time it changes. It’s a more declarative way of making games which I think is lots more productive.
I’ve been working on this for four years, it’s been a big project!
I got into creating my own rings, and I’d really like to create one with ore I harvest myself. Gold is too hard and silver can be kinda dangerous, but malachite is pretty safe and I can just drive to Copperopolis to pick some up.
Basically: smelt the malachite with flux and charcoal to get pure copper, flow that into an ingot mold, hammer it into shape. Then I’ll have my own ring, with metal I collected with my own hands
Working on a Platform That hosts Open Source software & Gives users Enterprise-Level AI Assistants & Support to challenge Saas Software (Just a MVP right now!!)
I just hate the Saas Scene today - even a small productivity app is worth $10-$15 / month . When you couple that with a bunch of apps that you use , you spend hundred of dollars in hard-earned Cash .
The Open Source Community is Amazing on Some fronts , but then enterprise & non-technical users can't use them without a layer of Support , Hosting & Setup Assistance .
We want to be the delivery layer between the Current Open-Source Community & Saas users .
Got a lot of ideas to work on it , but decided to build out a small version right now and launch it !!
I got let go back in March, and since I've pivoted into building a game.
In the 3 weeks leading up to unemployment, I had gotten way more into an old GBA game I used to play back in the day, Harvest Moon Friends of Mineral Town. The (remake of the) game that inspired Eric Barone to make Stardew Valley. I was bumping into the same in-game limitations of the cartridge and platform that always made me want more from it, (and while Stardew Valley was nice, it never fully scratched that itch) and as I found myself unemployed, I found the mental space to start building.
The game is going to be a farming tycoon/city builder game where you can buy farm stands and advertise to sell your goods. As your operation grows, you grow the local economy and people move to the town turning it into a city, opening up the chance to sell at farmer's markets or supermarkets. As the city grows you'll have to buy/sell land with the city and work with the mayor to plan where the city should claim new land for you to purchase so you can stay on the outskirts with healthy soil (or in the endgame, run for mayor and manage the growth of the city yourself, a la Sim City/Cities/Frostpunk)
I chose Love2D as my engine so I can use the relative simplicity of 2d art in 2.5D pseudo-3D instead of 3d modeling. The world space is a 3d euclidian grid of cells wrapped around a horizontal cylinder on the x axis. The view space is perpendicular to the side of the cylinder, giving us a natural horizon at the vertex of the cylinder on screen. The world space coordinates are expressed in terms of the polar coordinates of the cylinder, giving natural rise to radius as altitude, angle theta as latitude, and x axis as longitude. All the world math can be calculated using the trigonometry of the unit circle, and converted to 3d Cartesian coordinates before converting them to screenspace coordinates. I can use regular flat plans and elevations for the texutures of building faces, and render them upon linearly transformed quad polygons. Maybe I can also do some screenspace displacement a al Crimson Desert at the finish line to give buildings window sills and ledges when you see down a side of one.
I am doing the development without LLMS as much as possible so I retain a good grasp on Logic, Language, and Math. I have been having a lot of fun digging back into these multivariable calculus and linear algebra concepts I thought were beyond me (because of some autobiographical amnesia issues I deal with) to discover that no wait, I was taught these concepts in high school and was quite comfortable applying them. All the development is done on my own private, secured git server on my homelab server and I can pull down the latest build to my iphone to show off, it's been really cool. Kind of a pita to find a good git app on iPhone that allows custom git servers with ports though.
screenshot of a very early hello world, before I made the mental connection between wrapping a 2d cartesian plane around a cylinder and actual 3d cylindrical polar coordinates, which is why the shapes just sit over the world rather than extending from it, I hadn't yet conceived of the radius of the cylinder being altitude: https://fucci.dev/assets/helloworldspace.png
Right now I just germinated a 4x8 bed with flax for fiber. The plan is to grow it for 100 days or so and then harvest, dry, ret, dry, and spin. I need a lot more to do anything serious, but I think it’d be awesome to have a scarf that I made with linen I grew and harvested myself
I'm working on turning our formula engine -- that we use for Calcapp, our app builder -- into a real hosted solution (as well as a library). I discussed it in July last year (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44702833#44704642) and have been working full-time on the project since the beginning of the year.
I figured "I already have a battle-tested solution, I just need to make it modern and spiffy, build a website for it and see if there's any interest -- in the age of Claude Code, this should be fast work!"
Wrong. Taking an internal library and offering it to others -- complete with documentation and modern tooling -- is an immense project, even with the help of AI agents.
Is there a market for a "formula engine in a box"? I don't know. But I also didn't know whether there would be a market for Calcapp either, and that has supported me working full-time for the past seven years. So I'm willing to take another chance.
A podcast that isn’t about AI (in the normal way)! I started Pagenerd with some friends to talk about science fiction - loosely defined - and give us a chance to hang out. It’s pretty good. Find it at https://pagenerd.com which links to all the usual places.
I’ve been working on an OSS backend-in-a-box called [aepbase](https://aepbase.io/).
For the past few years, a group of us from Google, Microsoft, GM, IBM, Roblox, Rubrik + more have been working on a design standard for APIs called [AEP](https://www.aep.dev). The goal is twofold: learn from our companies mistakes around APIs and enable better tooling with less configuration.
We’re at a point where AEP-compliant APIs get a resource-oriented CLI, MCP server, full UI, and Terraform provider for near-zero configuration.
Aepbase has been my way to tie the whole ecosystem together. You run a single binary and define the schema for a resource with one API call. Now, you’ve got a full set of CRUD APIs and support for CLI/TF/MCP/UI. After one API call.
It’s a really cool way to tie together all of the work AEP has been doing.
Love to hear HN’s opinions on all of this. We’re still trying to figure out the best way to sell people on AEP.
Working on tsz (https://tsz.dev)
a performance-first TypeScript checker written in Rust. Started 5 months ago and it's been mostly AI-written code. 99.8% tsc conformance test pass rate today. Single file benchmarks are 3–5x faster than tsgo.
Social Maps: a user reviews and ratings service for points-of-interest (e.g. cafes) in OpenStreetMap.
I’ve been trying to reduce and eliminate my reliance of the Big Tech and the lack of user reviews and ratings was always a big pain point for me each time I tried to switch away from Google Maps.
I’ve started building a service where users can write reviews and rate “places” (POIs) in OpenStreetMap database, such as a cafe, a museum, or a shop. It’s a quite straightforward CRUD app with bunch of OpenStreetMap-specific features such as logging in with OpenStreetMap and querying places by their OpenStreetMap metadata.
It’s still in active development but it has good docs, a great API reference (including an OpenAPI spec), a demo app with the entire planet imported and queryable, and an early stage Android SDK.
https://app.socialmaps.org/
https://docs.socialmaps.org/
https://codeberg.org/socialmaps
I'm working on a little local first review tool called Review (though I sometimes refer to it as differ since that's it's original name) - you can see screenshots here https://x.com/rhyslikepb/status/2053149881104265599?s=20
The idea was borne out of wanting to use the review tools that you get on existing sites like GitHub, without having to push and start bloating PR lists. You'll be able to leave yourself comments and code suggestions after review, which you can then pull out in a Markdown file to feed back to your coding agent (or anything else for that matter).
I'm also trying to include some optional (very optional) AI extras where you can use your own keys, and then get a tour of what you've changed and a quick overview of the changes.
I'm slowly but surely working on a first update to my Android app, Tunemark (https://tunemark.app), which I released a while ago. Tunemark lets you add bookmarks to moments in songs so that it is easy to jump back to them. It is really convenient when practicing dancing or music and you need to constantly reset back to specific parts of songs. Unlike most DJ-type apps that could serve similar use cases, Tunemark works with most music apps, including streaming services.
I have new features such as sharing bookmarks and possibly BPM detection planned but also some quality of life changes like better UI scalability for different size screens/split screen use.
We're working on Drawers (https://drawers.computer), a macOS app to give each of your projects its own dock, space, and windows.
We integrate with macOS spaces to switch out a project-specific dock on each space, containing only the resources you need for that project. We made it possible to add granular resources instead of full apps to the dock (think specific slack channels instead of the whole slack app), to keep the dock hyper focused on what you need.
We built this to stay focused while working on the computer, and we thought that the native interface mixed all our projects together, causing us to get distracted.
Looking for beta testers! Free download from https://drawers.computer
Nice!! been wanting ti build something like this since I got a mac - never did - glad you did.
Does it have project context within apps (like default folders and settings)?
I do calisthenics 3×/week plus Ironman 70.3 prep, which means my training lives across Garmin, Polar, Withings + FIT files and front-lever sessions that no mainstream app models. So I built one that does both (and have been using for the past 4 years+): logs custom strength moves (front lever, FLAC, ¾ pull-ups), aggregates the connected devices (Polar, Garmin, Suunto, Withings, Apple Health) into one weekly view. Currently trying to see if can integrate some AI insights to my training routines. App is free for now as it does not cost me much (only servers for now), comment / use cases welcome: https://obitrain.com/
Why so many different devices? (Assuming this is the only reason there could be this much sprawl)
Device based strength tracking is still so weird to me.
Have you seen that meme template, where the midwit wants to use a thousand complicated things to optimize their experience, but the grug and the genius both keep it simple?
I think this is a perfect example... somewhere out there a genius and a grug are happily exercising together for the simple joy of doing so and feeling good in their bodies, and nearby is a midwit with the GDP of a small village worth of wearable electronics wondering where the joy has gone as he laments the 0.1% of VO2MAX he's dropped since his last gadget-run.
I haven’t trained for an Ironman but have for a marathon. I do think some metric oriented work is helpful! But I laughed at your post. Happy to see both sides.
For a long time I wondered how SV startups got such pretty landing pages (here’s a comment I left 2 years back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37421273). I wanted one for my side projects but couldn’t afford an agency, and the templates online were boring. Creating the page was only half the problem. I also needed somewhere to collect emails for the waitlist.
After AI happened, I built an app (promptfunnels) to scratch my own itch and generate funnels (fancy name for landing pages with a purpose).
Then came the harder part: marketing it. Coming from a tech background, I knew nothing about marketing, so I started reading and came across the $100M Leads book. I realized codifying those principles together with funnels and marketing automation had a real market. My family, friends, and acquaintances became the first customers. A friend joined me as cofounder and we both quit our jobs to do this full time.
As we talked to other startup founders, they kept describing a tangential problem they called GTM. At the core it was the same thing we were solving: marketing for non-marketers. So we pivoted to RevMozi(https://revmozi.com/), which helps non-marketers do both inbound and outbound GTM.
We’re dogfooding the product and coming out of beta next month.
Wish us luck.
> how SV startups got such pretty landing pages
Umm where? They are indistinguishable from each other. Not pretty.
some of them are non existent today. Check the parent thread - some good recommendations(for 2023) on both functional websites and pretty websites. At that time if I recall linear landing page was all rage, and there were many copycats.
I’m an application developer by day, but lately Claude Code and Codex have finally made microcontrollers approachable enough for me to start tinkering with them on the side. I built this little “holographic” display that shows the surf forecast for any beach. While my friend built the casing, and mechanical part of it
https://x.com/paulnovacovici/status/2041722840190480581?s=46...
any details on the display itself?
Display is part of a dev kit EPS32-s3, and the holographic part is an illusion called “peppers ghost”
Beautiful piece of kit. I have no idea how it works from looking at it, fantastic. Please do post a full writeup on it.
I am working on a framework that lets you easily create tools inside the Django Admin - https://djangocontrolroom.com
I've published several panels under this banner already (tools for redis, caches, celery, etc.); I am currently working on a base library layer for tools to inherit from and to make it easier to create new tools.
Essentially, the point of all of this is to make it so that you don't need so many external services; Instead, DCR provides self hosted alternatives. This in turn makes it a lot easier to build and productionalize something using Django.
Reception has been decent so far and I estimate several thousand current adopters (Its hard to estimate based on download numbers alone.) For May I will finalize a common design language, further formalize the plugin system and how it works, and likely release a new panel.
I'm building Deptheos (https://github.com/ryanmitts/deptheos), a photography/macro focus stacking program.
It works on MacOS, built with Swift and Metal. My goal is to make a super fast, and free, focus stacking program. I provided a notarized MacOS DMG for the initial release, but if built yourself, it will run on an M4/M5 series iPad Pro as well.
The core ability I wanted was to support RAW files as inputs, with DNG files as outputs. This is done using either LibRaw, or Adobe DNG Converter (runtime options).
I have been really into macro photography the last couple years, and have been slowly working on trying to build my own program to handle the focus stacking.
Very cool! Do you know Thomas Shahan's work? He once contributed his woodcut artwork to a videogame, so he does seem very technically curious. I bet he'd be interested in trying something like this out with his own work and providing feedback...
[NO-AI]
Being a weightlifter for 20+ years now, I'm working on a barbell speed and path tracking sensor based on newer IMU hardware technologies, which makes it both more precise and cheaper than camera- or actuator-based systems. Ultimately it helps you lift and train safer and better.
It's an intersection of industrial design, hardware, firmware, and software (and some sport science, of course). This intersection is not yet dominated by LLMs so it's a breath of fresh air.
In an early prototype stage as in "strap a Raspberry Pi to a bar", but it looks promising and I'm happy to move forward, also using connections from my previous 12+ years in China.
Wannabe powerlifter here of about 20 years as well. This sounds like an awesome project! Is bar-path the main metric for safety and "better" lifting? A project I had in mind, once upon a time, was an automatic "Form Check Friday" for myself using a Pi + Webcam.
Not OP but velocity is typically what these devices are used for. Its a great measure of between-set intensity.
this sounds awesome. have any videos of it?
I've found it hard to keep up with movie and TV news (particularly when the new Backrooms film is coming out).
So, I built an agent to help remind me -- it's a subscription based service that sends you updates every morning, and stores your preferences so it can learn what you like.
https://holly.garelick.net
A desktop client for Repomix. Repomix is a CLI which allows you to summarize all the code in a repo in one txt or md file so you can in turn feed it to an AI model for analysis. It absolutely gets the job done it its current state, but it is a personal project so there may be a few rough edges.
https://github.com/KevanMacGee/Repomix-Desktop
It's open source and has no official connection to Repomix. But the developer, yamadashy on Github, knows about it and seemed to like it enough to add it to the Repomix website under the community projects.
I like being able to paste all the code into a browser window and have lengthy discussions with ChatGPT, Gemini and GLM. Doing so in the browser saves tokens over doing it in Cursor or Codex. I like using the Projects feature in ChatGPT in the browser and Notebooks with Gemini because that gives the model context and history on whatever I am working on. It was one part scratching my own itch, one part learning about Python and Customtinker.
It's made specifically for when you just want to get the code and paste it, no muss or fuss. It doesn't have support for flags (yet?) like the CLI because again it is built for speed. Besides, when I want flags, I like using the CLI instead to get granular. Repomix Desktop is for "just give me the code."
I'm a self taught coder so I'm very open to feedback.
I finally managed to finish a project and publish my first game on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4195030/balls/
It's a short chain-reaction game in which you explode balls bouncing in the screen, and need to build up to target scores. You build bigger and bigger combos as the game progresses.
It was a blast to work on it, starting with a small toy and just adding features that "felt right" until I had a game that was fun to play. It was quite hard to find a balance though, so a lot of numbers are arbitrary - but I enjoy seeing people breaking the game in new ways and finding new builds.
These days I've been working on patching reported bugs and sharing the game with people. Now after the latest patch, I feel like I'm done, but I feel like going back at it and adding an idle mode. And maybe simplify the codebase so I can test and iterate better, and then add many more ball types...
I know that any good LLM could replicate this pretty quickly, but I made this myself and I'm still feeling proud of the accomplishment :)
It's been three months now of building Crit - https://crit.md - local first, open source tool for reviewing markdown and code output from your favourite AI agent.
It's inspired by GitHub PR review workflow, only with quick iterations and local.
It's been great! I found some dedicated users, dogfooding it every day with Claude and starting to get more contributions from the little community. We just got accepted into Homebrew core which was my target.
I'm expanding the team features now as I've got a few users keen to get the sharing service deployed in their private networks!
I’m working on 2 hardware projects right now!
Fold-up, scissor lift, cross-cantilever 3D printer for open sauce
M.2 FPGA hardware accelerator devboard
All just for fun and open source https://github.com/kaipereira :D
After quite a few years of coming up with and implementing 'great ideas' but not being able to follow through to making them revenue generating products, I'm on my best bet so far.
I always wanted to build a real-life puzzle game, which is app/mobile assisted. Had yet another eureka moment, and built a usable prototype (backend plus iOS app). Good feedback from a small circle.
For a while I was aware of someone (I knew by sight) who worked in the same sort of subject matter (but a non-tech). I approached her, we had a coffee, I pitched the idea and how she could bring it to life, as I made the tech side. She jumped on board.
We're two and a half weeks in, have gone full speed and are making something great (for our audience). My future co-founder is amazing, great insights, opinions, drive. We're potentially launching in a couple of weeks, a free/MVP version of a puzzle game.
I've been through many iterations of trying to get something off the ground. Tried tech co-founders, and the last years of going solo (very hard after you've done the coding). But this now feels right. A puzzle app/game for every day people to have some fun. And a future co-founder whose life is outside tech, who's bring a sort of fun energy outwith let's make loads of money or isn't the framework/AI cool.
Balance is good. Contact with reality is good too :)
Working on https://ottex.ai - voice ai for busy professionals.
Think wisprflow + granola with 30+ top STT models under single login and pay as you go billing model with 25% markup over API.
Mainly working on https://localhero.ai, automating i18n translations for product teams. Basically runs as a GitHub Action, translating new strings on PRs matching your brand voice and glossary. Got our first fully selfserve customer a few weeks back (found us through the docs). Interesting work lately has been improving how the system learns from manual edits, when someone tweaks a translation in the UI, it feeds back into translation memory and influences future translations in a smart way. Also did stuff like improving our agent skill, so coding agents get glossary/style guide context automatically and they can write source copy that better matches the brand.
Been pushing some new stuff on https://infrabase.ai as well, my AI infrastructure tools directory. Traffic growing steadily from comparison and alternatives pages. Interesting finding is that blog posts rank better but get fewer clicks now because AI Overviews, interactive comparison pages still earn clicks. ChatGPT has also started citing the site more as a source. Adding new content and polishing existing parts of it, added a page focusing on EU based services at https://infrabase.ai/european.
A civilization clone, but going way deeper than is reasonable (inspired by dwarf fortress). I'm currently building the geophysics simulation that will allow for realistic terrain generation, powered by actual mantle convection and plate tectonics. Once this is finished, then an actual per-cell atmospheric and oceanic model. This should keep me entertained for at least a year, at which point I can start working on the actual gameplay part of things.
Been working on https://searchcode.com/ again which I bought back, albeit as code search tool for LLMs. It solves the “should I use this library” by allowing the LLM to inspect search and analyse it before integration. Can use it to compare multiple repositories before downloading. It comes with a large amount of token savings and can be really useful when wanting to learn about a codebase.
Since it does it anyway I added dossier pages to it as well https://searchcode.com/repo/github.com/rust-lang/rust Which is useful for humans, and shows what the system is creating.
Best part is that I get to use the tools I have built, so https://github.com/boyter/scc and https://github.com/boyter/cs to improve it which benefits anyone using those tools.
I'm trying to make it easier for non-technical folks to publish websites: https://weejur.com
82 sites published so far, with a really weird and wide range of content.
Working on a simple WYSIWYG website editor to go with the current functionality.
Currently developing https://pelicantools.app, a collection of tools to rework YouTube. Any YouTube video can be transcribed to an elegant text or a complete article.
If you're a creator, researcher or developer looking to reap the rewards of a video without consuming it fully, then it's helpful.
Whole thing is up and running on vercel.
It's a work in progress — would be great to get some input!
I'm working on a diffusion-powered UI design tool. My short term goal is to make AI-designed UI not look like Tailwind. My long-term goal is to be Figma, but powered by diffusion.
https://diffui.ai
I quit Figma about 4mo ago to start working on this, and the gpt-image-2 drop really legitized the bet. I recently release Brands for diffui, which let you establish a design system and consistently generate with it. I made a Brand out of the recent UFO files release, which allow for some really fun designs:
https://diffui.ai/brand/2ff1b00a-d698-43ea-a42e-7c4a2e670c04 (no account required to generate with this if you want to try)
I've been going through Nora Sandler's Writing a C Compiler book and writing a compiler in Python. I'm excited to start the chapters on optimization - those seem like the most fun algorithm problems.
I recommend the book. It certainly isn't easy (maybe 3x harder than Crafting Interpreters), but I've learned a ton (eg how to deal with operations on different sizes of types, or the trick of using pseudoregisters to avoid having to figure out registers up front).
https://github.com/jmikkola/writing-a-c-compiler-python
I am working on Desiderata (https://github.com/github-of-NMI/Desiderata).
An LLM benchmark for open-weight models only, with secret questions.
The questions are asked multiple times to calculate a consistency score.
The results are available in JSON, containing the hash of the question with the number of correct and incorrect answers, the number of unique answers, and the number of times no answer is given. (Uses \boxed{})
Basecheck.ai - a database auditing tool, supports Oracle, MS SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Supabase and SQLite. Happy to demo
https://vistacker.com - local first task and note taking TUI and iOS app, disconnected operation, auto sync across multiple machines with optional encryption so the service can’t see your data.
A high-throughput multicast Bitcoin transaction distribution system, with a roadmap towards billions of transactions per second.
Features:
- Control channel for block header announcements, operational mechanisms, and network topology automation
- Separate channels for subtree, subtree grouping, and transaction load
- Transaction load sharding by deterministic multicast group membership based on TXID
- Transaction specialization filtering and retransmission both unicast and multicast, to connect edge networks only interested in a portion of the transaction load for whatever reason
- NACK-based retransmission of missed packets via hash chain gap sequence tracking (per sender, per shard) with automated caching endpoint beacon discovery and tiered network distribution
- BGP-AnyCast based transaction ingress
Basically all the topology pieces to scale the actual small-world network for Bitcoin miners or transaction processors; dense at the core, with layered and sharded group distribution towards users at the edges. Right now just site or org-scope multicast in planned, but provisions are being made to extend via MP-BGP eventually.
For BSV Blockchain but could work for the other Bitcoin variants too, if they ever wanted to scale.
I continue to write. Unsure the end goal but in my recent dispatch I learned to get out of my way, stop intellectualizing life and let it be.
https://www.metanoia-research.com/
Read your most recent piece and I like it. Beat generation sort of feel, extemporaneous, haunting in a good way. Keep writing even if only a handful of people read it.
I'm building a chrome extension that scans everything you read and highlights text if it maps to a market on kalshi. On hover, a tooltip pops up allowing you to drop money on it.
Use this to doomscroll nba twitter and sports bet, or if you're feeling more highbrow, peruse the NYT and passively gamble on geopolitical events.
Try it out here: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/anywager/eebgbiogbb...
A browser for designers: https://www.matry.design
I'm writing an M68K NeXTStep userland emulator and thunks to run NeXTStep apps under GNUStep. I'm starting today with hello world.
A language learning app called lexaway. Premise is people can learn like LLMs learned - word prediction. I use tatoeba, an online sentence pairing thing, and it's nice well it's worked for me. I hate the green bird fyi so it's free and open source.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/lexaway/id6761870125
A non-profit to deconcentrate power over AI through better infrastructure for external auditing/oversight, and better infrastructure for local/federated inference/training https://openmined.org/
Also, we're hiring engineers and PMs (the eng position is about to be up). https://openmined.org/careers/#brxe-zgsziy
I'm working on Repple (https://repple.sh)! It's a modern spaced repetition x incremental reading/PDF library app with a few (tasteful!) QOL AI features.
I've been using Anki for 10+ years and love it but always wanted something with a cleaner UX and a reader view. The recent Anki ownership change pushed me to finally make something, and it's seeing some traction :)
Right now I'm focusing on getting the reading and note-taking view to be nice. I used to use Polar Bookshelf (RIP) but that went away, trying to make something better.
The flashcard side also has a REST API btw!
The other day I got into some pretty weird territory with Claude, trying to map out what an immortal ASCII cat would look like. Basically an autonomous Tamagotchi.
The idea was to create a quine that runs forever on something like Akash network with its own crypto treasury to support and pay it's bills and try to replicate. It would then talk to an LLM for support and actions on what to do to stay alive.
It got pretty out there. Stored some of the ideas here.
https://github.com/aquaflamingo/catfi
Main project is a deterministic .NET runtime (https://github.com/Smaug123/WoofWare.PawPrint). Today I upgraded it to net10, which has naturally caused dozens of regressions which Claude is beavering away at.
Side project is my own agent harness, https://github.com/Smaug123/writ , which is being built sandbox-first and with Nix as a first-class citizen. Obviously everyone has to write their own agent harness as a rite of passage.
Context aware local AI assistant https://hitoku.me/draft/ I believe private local AI is the future for every day's use.
I'm continuing to focus on ways to set strong code quality guardrails in an era where most code is not handwritten.
The result is http://getcaliper.dev.
It has a number of mechanisms that help substantially:
1. It can extract deterministic quality checks from your CLAUDE.md text; these checks then get executed after every agent turn.
2. It performs a lightweight ai-powered review at every commit; feedback goes directly to the agent, which can then make corrections.
3. It performs a more 'traditional' deep AI review at merge, or on-demand.
Free to use, just bring your own API key. Any and all feedback is welcome!
Been working on and off on a Spotify recommendation egnine after getting tired of Spotify’s repetitive recommendations.
You get to choose the genres you're interested in, and it creates playlists from the music in your library. They get updated every day - think a better, curated by you version of the Daily Mixes. You can add some advanced filters as well, if you really want to customise what music you'll get.
It works best if you follow a good amount of artists. Optionally you can get recommendations from artists that belong to playlists you follow or you've created. If you don't follow much or any artists, then you should enable that in order for the service to be useful, as right now that's the only pools of artists the recommendations are based on.
https://riffradar.org/
I'm working on Isola (https://github.com/isola-run/isola), a passion project of mine. It allows you to easily create and control sandboxes for executing untrusted code on any Kubernetes cluster (one helm install). To support some features I wanted (like on demand snapshotting of specific containers' filesystem in a sandbox pod or limiting egress rate from the sandbox I am working on now) I contributed some changes to gVisor. Happy to chat about the design and implementation of such a project if anyone interested!
My own browser game. I created a browser game engine and building my first ever game with it. I can’t wait to launch it, I think it’s pretty cool. I’ve been working on it for 6 years!
The tech surrounding the game is awesome, the game and engine are fully deterministic, discrete (not float based), and bit-packed data structures throughout, powers of 2 everywhere for really fast operations, and logic and rendering are fully decoupled.
I wrote a simulator for the game and can simulate 10,000+ games in around 50 seconds on my MacBook M1 Pro. Purpose of the simulations is Monte Carlo method to tune my enemy AI (not LLM - conventional bots etc)
Currently working on `imgsrv` which is basically a container registry but it holds disk images. Enforces versioning, allows attaching multiple formats for a single release, prioritizes immutability, etc. Intended to build fully automated image release pipelines. I use a PXE setup for my homelab, so having a common place to manage image release lifecycle is helpful.
Right now I intend to make it compatible with Incus as a remote. So it's just a matter of adding it as remote and then you can consume all of your versioned images.
https://github.com/meigma/imgsrv
I'm working on Tidepools, a daily journaling / task management app (local-first, Mac/iOS/web) with a proactive AI coach. Mostly what the coach does is ask you questions. It can also suggest tasks. Right now I'm working on sandboxed plugins that the coach can modify, so the user can request behavior changes.
https://tidepools.ai
I’m working on a ground-up implementation of RADIUS with everything running on stateless compute. It’s a beast with many problems to solve but I have EAP-TLS, TTLS and PEAP all working. I’d love to connect with folks interested in this kind of thing.
What motivated you to start this and which language did you choose?
Past trauma motivated it.
I was responsible for multiple RADIUS services used by millions of people every day. The existing software is slow to build with, difficult to scale and expensive. I couldn't let it go.
Step one was building the platform to run it on and make it sustainable as a business. Step two is implementing protocols like RADIUS that lack a separated compute/storage model but should really have one.
I chose C# because I know it, and build native single-file executables using AoT.
I am working on mesh (https://growmesh.io) I started working on the topic of human development two years ago and I dived into the topic of how humans have been trained, manipulated, educated or brainwashed. My central idea which I am investigating is that whenever a person is interacting a highly tuneable ML model such as the X/Fb/TikTok feed or chat interfaces with LLMS, does the thinking and development of the human happens more times or less due to the new experience.
Anydrop.org A zero-friction, cross-platform alternative to AirDrop. If your device have a browser, you can drop text or files to it. Doesn't matter if the device is a pc, mac, linux, phones, tablet or smart tv. There are no installation or login, just load https://anydrop.org on the devices needed. Also support live realtime notepad sync and clipboard for easy share of text snippets. All shares are end to end encrypted.
Launched my live polling app https://suggestionboard.io, got some first users, now looking at how they use it and trying to improve the experience.
I’m working on Recoil, memory safe, compiled static language (yeah, I know, everybody’s doing it) with Rebol syntax and built-in candies like parsing, finite state machine and rich syntax (that’s given, because of Rebol).
It’s nice to see how well-thought language design can pay off years later, with lower token usage. From entropy POV, Rebol syntax is certainly close to optimal state.
https://codeberg.org/rebolek/recoil
Better GitHub insights: https://temporiohq.com - still new and there’s a lot of question about how to adapt to the age of accelerated software engineering.
My art with pen plotters. Recently released a new series of brush plots. Very inspired by Soulages: https://harmonique.one/collections/brush-plots
I’m building a small map application that allows me/friends/family to explore data overlays about morel mushrooms phenology and habitat (ground temp/moisture/terrain/aspect/tree species/etc) in our area. There’s some lightweight forecasting and timing models to help guess at near-term fruiting. I had a big push about a mouth ago to tighten things up, and initial experiences in the field this year have been very promising.
I’ll keep chipping away at it this year, and probably expand beyond morels to other seasonal natural phenomena that my people enjoy like smelt/salmon run, wildflower blooms, etc.
I’m working on bomberman in ClojureScript, using no libraries, and making sure I write every line myself, it feels good to go slowly for a change having used a lot of LLMs in the past year.
A timelapse platform powered by community photos. The idea is to place a mount and QR code at fixed viewpoints around the neighbourhood. People scan, photograph the view, optionally add their name, and submit. Over time, the platform stitches those shots into a living record of how the place changes with seasons.
Just finished the software side using a boring technology and am about to order the materials for the first few locations. Curious to explore photo alignment once real submissions start coming in. Stitching all slightly different angled photos into a smooth animation seems interesting.
Love the idea!
https://www.htmlwasher.com/ - online HTML cleaner
I can't really go into details of what I am working on. But I'd like to say that a lot of European corporations are running their stuff on Azure and are very much interested in having Data Lake(house) platforms tailor made to their business and IT requirements based on Databricks and their stack. I mention this because I find this mismatch of what I see being relevant in business and what is being upvoted on Hackernews quite interesting (for the lack of a better word).
I’m working on a tiny terminal config / dotfiles / tool installation manager so I can keep everything in sync between my machines. Also includes profiles so I can tailor each machine how I see fit. https://github.com/phalt/pauldot
It’s intended just me for and follows a philosophy around hyper personal software that I’ve been developing: https://paulwrites.software/articles/hyps/
https://aggly.com A beautifully opinionated news aggregator that reads rss, twitter, reddit, youtube, telegram & more
No HN? :)
Greetings!
I've been working on something in the vein of a indie game for a little over a year now. It has been a passion project, but I'm starting to come around on showing it to people.
I am a big fan of Telltale style narrative games. I think Baldur's Gate 3 was the biggest revelation of this for me. Taking that branching dialogue and freedom of choice, and tacking it on to a fun combat system was just everything.
When text based GTRPGs started popping up, I found it hard to connect with them stylistically. I found that I needed the multimodal stimulus of visuals and audio. This led me to start building something, and it ended up being somewhat of a cross between a Telltale game, a Visual novel, and a TTRPG.
Orpheus (https://orpheus.gg) is a fully on-the-fly generated tabletop simulator, with graphics, audio (TTS), and the freedom you can usually only find at a real TTRPG table. That means you can play a sci-fi, fantasy, or even a modern setting in your campaign. The assets are made for you as needed. It runs in your browser so nothing to install or tinker with.
Getting the harness right so the AI GM can stay coherent and organized has been the biggest challenge. It took a lot of iterations to get it to a point where it could understand the scenes it was building as the player changed them.
I've built it to be played with either a keyboard or a gamepad so you can play from your couch. You can switch between them as you feel like it. There is a 3D tabletop for combat, full character sheets, dice rolling, lore tracking. I want it to be dense.
Mostly, I’m looking for people who want to try it, break it, and tell me what feels magical, confusing, boring, or broken. My biggest roadblock currently is that asset generation is relatively expensive. I'm currently mulling over whether a playtest would allow for a BYOK setup so people could try playing as much as they'd like, or if I should add turn limits.
You can join the playtest waitlist at https://orpheus.gg/ -- and I just setup a discord (https://discord.gg/pychWyzf) that I will use for early playtests. (Just me right now! Come hang out!)
I've been the DM of a weekly campaign with the same group of friends for nearly a decade now. Over the past few years, I’ve seen a lot of attempts at AI meets D&D, and most of them suffer from fairly pedestrian puzzles and stories, and don’t really compare to what a decent, semi-competent human writer can come up with.
I'd love to see a more modern day attempt at something like Bioware's Neverwinter Nights - which was designed so that someone could create a campaign, and then the game would provide the behavior, pathfinding, assets, and everything else with a virtual (or human) DM behind the scenes. You could still tell a human-driven story, but the engine would do a lot of the heavy lifting.
I agree, there is no way to perfectly capture a real table with your friends. This is more an alternative for when life gets in the way of meeting every week.
I think a lot of those attempts you mentioned try and brute force the problem or trust the AI too much on what to generate.
A lot of the same problems that AI coding agents run into also apply to this problem. You have to really manage context (avoid sending a novel at the model) and enforce strict rules in the "engine". The hard part is world building that is consistent without railroading the player and forcing specific paths. I have an agent (for lack of a better term) that manages arcs across each tier. World arcs (nations, factions), player character arcs, NPC arcs, individual scene arcs, and location arcs (towns, cities, dungeons, etc). By prompting all of these as tight, individual arcs with flavor and context peppered in as needed, you end up with stuff that is more compelling. It has to be loose enough that you don't railroad the player. When you decline that NPC's quest, down the road that might have changed the overall arc for a town in a meaningful way.
I won't pretend that I've perfected anything but I have definitely noticed a spark in its writing and world building that I personally have really enjoyed.
Super cool project and I love to encourage this as I personally think llms in games have not been utilized to their potential quite yet.
Why not generate some asset libraries to help with some of the rote generation? You could theoretically serve the same asset for a pack of rats to multiple campaigns.
Yes! I am doing a lot of this where it won't break the illusion. Not everyone needs a unique innkeeper generated in every town, but I want to avoid that "Officer Jenny" effect like in Pokemon where she looks the same in every town they visit.
I have a private vs public flag for assets that I'm considering more unique or sensitive, at the AI GM's discretion. I'm using embeddings from there to try and parse if an asset already exists in the public pool or not, and reuse it if possible. The thinking is that eventually I will have pretty decent asset coverage on most standard campaigns. I can't account for people going way off book though.
I have an asset pipeline that tries to determine player intent and pre-generate assets before they're needed. That way we can attempt to hide the "load screens" like retro games did with elevators. I have a kind of sliding scale for player coherency, and if the player has too many "misses" on the pre-generation pipeline it will increase its requirements for when it starts generating.
I may have wildly over-engineered this but I love it. =)
Still working on ghidra-delinker-extension, trying to wrap up the OMF object file exporter at the moment. Then I'd like to implement generation of debugging symbols (at least DWARF and CodeView, maybe STABS and CTF), although lately I've received a PR for PowerPC and an issue for delinking shared objects.
I'm also thinking about writing the Necronomicon of delinking at some point. The extension keeps spreading by word of mouth and there's only so much UX improvements I can do, for something that requires throwing everything you've learned in CS 101 into the trashcan before you can "get" it.
I started a new software defined automation project. I wanted something that I could just open a webpage and start writing code that could just be uploaded and ran instantly. I picked an ESP32-P4 for the first hardware. It’s MIT licensed and has a git repo that I put up this morning https://github.com/OpenPiLab/pilab-esp32-p4-plc
Been writing in my blog every day, reading more, created a poker equity calculator, and working on a city wide project where I document attractions, restaurants, and stays I've experienced in my city (very early stages).
Website: https://arkvis.com
Poker Equity Calculator: https://github.com/lodenrogue/poker-equity-calculator-web
Davao Explorer: https://github.com/lodenrogue/davao-explorer
Reading Summaries: https://github.com/lodenrogue/reading-summaries
I also created a couple of chrome extensions:
HN Dracula Dark Theme: https://github.com/lodenrogue/hackernews-dracula-theme-chrom...
Regex Search Chrome Extension: https://github.com/lodenrogue/regex-search-chrome-extension
Created a small command line util to get earthquake data in the Philippines:
Philquakes: https://github.com/lodenrogue/philquakes
I'm working on https://releasedog.com/ - It collects changes from JIRA/slack/github and create a changelog/release notes.
Making a proper product page for my stream of consciousness writing tool Ensō (preview.enso.sonnet.io)
(I’ve been procrastinating on proper marketing basics for seven years, so it’s… fun but still intimidating :) )
Trying to make a stab at improving RSS feed discoverability. There's a website portion and an app portion. Hope to have something to show off in a few weeks.
I tried to remake Slay the Spire as a text based game. With buttons though. I used Godot.
https://beatquestgames.itch.io/textbattlegd
Completely open source if you ask and promise not to make fun of me.
text-to-cad! https://github.com/earthtojake/text-to-cad
I am working on a task manager that’s way more informative and resource efficient than the windows task manager and works on Linux. It also provides an informative dashboard for docker containers and web servers with proxy support and preference for streaming sockets supporting http and web sockets over the same ports.
WSL support too? Could be cool with a unified thing, not sure if that's even possible though.
It’s just a node app written in TypeScript. The OS specific details come from running the right shell commands.
https://github.com/prettydiff/aphorio
I have been working for some time on a budget body/facial mocap solution with Unity. Mocap is hard, and what exists is locked behind subscriptions or is just very expensive.
With Unity I'm trying to bundle a bunch of different free, cheap or open source solutions together. For facial, that includes a custom converter from the output of Deadface (based on Mediapipe) with ARKit blendshapes, and also eye movement. For body it's a custom hook to SlimeVR that allows you to mocap with cheap-ish IMU-based DIY trackers, and all that on top of a custom made (not free but open source) physics rig solution that gives you accurate rigid body real time collision, saving on cleanup work.
It's being going really nice despite being an unusual workflow. Hope to release it as a plugin for a in-development sandbox game in the near future. Mocap and animation has been my passion long before i started with tech stuff, and finally I'm able to pursue it.
I've been working on Mesaphore, an Excel-like spreadsheet app[0] backed by a Parquet-based file format. The premise is when Excel starts off as the starting point, then over time becomes a data exchange format between systems, and eventually becomes a bottleneck for the system. You still want to provide your users something Excel-like but also want to address the limits of Excel[1].
Majority of code (almost 70%) is generated by Gemini Pro and is extremely ugly. Due to a recent eye injury, I've not been able to code as much as I want, so I'm delegating many things to Gemini. Eventually, as my health improves, I plan to rewrite the entire thing.
[0]: https://codeberg.org/naiyer/mesaphore
[1]: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/excel-specificati...
I am working on the Learnix operating system (https://gitHub.com/sagi21805/LearnixOS) Mainly an educational project, to understand and teach about OS and Rust concepts (The OS is written in Rust)
https://www.learnix-os.com
I've been working on a AI app to replace Claude Desktop and Mobile for personal use.
The main goals are to own my data (memories, artifacts, chats), be able to switch AI providers at any point (if one is down or I want to try a new model), have the same experience between desktop and mobile especially when it comes to working remotely on code.
A bigger vision is to offer everyone a alternative to Claude and ChatGPT they can own just like OpenClaw but with a great app experience.
I hope to have the first beta published by the end of next week.
https://github.com/bgrgicak/Desk
I'm building Lexeme (https://trylexeme.com), a SaaS service that tracks how AI models like ChatGPT cite and describe your product vs. competitors, and tells you what to fix first based on estimated revenue exposure.
1) “AI harness plugin build system” to help improve reliability of and increase compatibility across the fragmented AI coding harness plugin ecosystem.
https://github.com/jondwillis/jacq
2) Claude code plugin based on some ideas found in https://www.anthropic.com/research/emotion-concepts-function The main idea is to add hooks that inject “baselines” under some conditions to counteract certain “emotions” that can cause subtle misaligned behavior in agents
https://github.com/jondwillis/functional-emotions
3) Final Fantasy XI custom client remaster in Bevy/Rust alongside an MCP integration that aims to allow agents to play autonomously on private servers à la “Claude plays Pokemon”
Contact: https://jonwillis.dev
Kafkaesque, a wire-protocol compatible Kafka mocking service.
https://github.com/dcminter/kafkaesque
Worth kicking the wheels if you're currently using embedded or dockerised Kafka in your tests.
Dealing with some rough stuff in life so I'm involved in random stuff to distract myself. Moved my personal blog to Astro. I wanted to scratch and itch I had about self hosting my comments. So I built a lightweight node-based opensource comment system called discuss - https://github.com/karthikeyankc/discuss.
I'm making a surf forecasting site a la surfline.com, I started mostly to have an API to use for my tidbyt, but I figured I might as well make it a full thing and built my own features! It's on quickswell.com but it's only Socal at this time (fewer spots to compute)
An EU replacement for PagerDuty, focusing on the absolute basics - SSO as the minimum even on free, no AI driven workflows, overviews etc. but may include ML/AI driven insights in future since that’s the way the world seems to be going.
https://rotadeck.com/
Wrote a Forth VM in C in about 1996 based on TCJ articles by Brag Rodriguez. Managed to get it to compile with modern GCC this morning and fix all the horrible issues with valgrind. Trying to adapt it to a context where it'll be usable for a spreadsheet-like system with reasonable decimal numeric precision. Consider it an RPL calculator with an Excel-like front end.
I'm working on GPS tools to help support my current contract. I've found there are no good tools for tracing a route on a map and having a mobile device think it's traveling that route. I'm not just talking GPS coordinates, but speed, direction, motion detection, precise timing between waypoints, being able to play these trips forward and backward, step by step, etc. I'm talking time-travel debugging for GPS applications.
It's early days. I'm not even sure it's possible.
I’m working on a project that blocks agents from breaking rules. The rules are enforced through hooks and work across Claude Code, Codex, and GitHub Copilot.
https://github.com/nizos/probity
FreeBSD 15.1. Released BETA2 on Friday, next Friday is BETA3 and the following week is scheduled to be a Release Candidate.
MCP that lets you call chatgpt pro, grok, perplexity, gemini web, web subscriptions from codex, claude, opencode, gemini
https://github.com/agentify-sh/desktop
AI basketball community, using computer vision to get highlights and stats http://ballers.gg
I have been experimenting on using AI for hardware development. I showed some experiments on HN a couple of weeks ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47801255). I am now trying to make my approach a little bit more comprehensive and structured, instead of several disjoint MCP servers, a single platform that connects lab instruments to AI assistants: https://teasel.tools/
As a demo, I repaired an old Philips PM5190 function generator (about 40 years old) and connected it to Claude Code. Lots of fun. Going to post a follow up video the next couple of days.
A Self hosted multi-player boggle game
Play a game here: https://bawgle.alifbae.dev
hosting comparison tool https://www.punycoder.com/hosting/
My wife and I continue to work on Uruky, a simpler and cheaper Kagi alternative, based in the EU [1].
Since last month we’ve stabilized the search UI/UX and have 5 search providers you can choose from and sort as you prefer.
We entered May with over 50 paying customers and have recently launched Uruky Site Search [2] (for website owners, this effectively is our own search index and crawler, which we’ll be bringing into Uruky soon as another search provider option)!
Customers really enjoy the simple UI (search doesn’t require JavaScript) and search personalization (from choosing the providers to the domain boosting and exclusion). We also have hashbangs (like "!g", "!d", or “!e”) when something doesn’t quite give you what you’d expect, though.
You can see the main differences between Kagi, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, etc. and Uruky in the footer (right side), but one huge difference is that with Uruky, after being a paying customer for 12 months, you get a copy of the source code!
Our main challenge right now is outreach because we want to do it ethically, and it’s hard to find communities or places to sponsor which are privacy-focused and don’t require €5k+ deals. Ideas are welcome! We’ve been sponsoring a project per month (Qubes OS, The Tor Project, and Hister so far), with our limited budget of ~$100 / month.
Because of bots and abuse there isn’t a free trial easily available, but if you’re a human and you’d like to try it for a week for free, reach out with your account number and we’ll set that up!
Thanks.
[1] https://uruky.com
[2] https://uruky.com/site-search
Hey, I'm from the EU and love to see such a project!
One thing I can recommend right off the bat is Reddit - there's many privacy focused subreddits, and also you can share the whole project in EU related subreddits and e.g. r/SideProject.
Would love to try it for a week, this is my account number - 9772263817629091
Keep up the great work!
Thanks for the suggestion! We're trying to avoid anything that's social media (though Reddit is debatable), at least for now.
I've topped up that account number for a week, enjoy (I'd recommend removing it from the post because anyone will be able to use it)!
On a platform for manufacturers, currently focused on a warehouse management system, https://pragmatech.it
Still working on my SQL canvas: https://kavla.dev/
I started with this last summer. Usually I get tired of an idea, but this one is just an endless pit of things to try out.
Currently seeing how we can get an analytics agent working on the canvas. Video here: https://x.com/i/status/2053410747137266070
interesting idea!
From 50 to 5 seconds. The world's fastest and most up to date investment ai. It's powered directly through our database to ground the information and reduce hallucinations. Still in development though.
https://stockevents.app/ai
NixOS VMs for agents: https://machine0.io
A small, generic Go library for retrying fallible operations with exponential backoff and pluggable jitter strategies. https://github.com/nodivbyzero/try
A small launcher for Claude Code, to make switching between different providers and configurations easier:
https://ccode.kronis.dev/
For example, if I downgrade from Max to Pro I'd still be able to use the subscription, but also run sessions with other models (less expensive/local) as desired:
Source available, pre-built binaries on itch.io, pay-what-you-want with a minimum price of 0 USD, probably get it for free first if interested in taking a look.I finally got around to signing app for Mac, which is what this post originally was about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48075366 (the new versions will be out soon)
Also thinking that I might make it an Anthropic API --> OpenAI API proxy that allows talking to providers that don't support the Anthropic API directly, alongside allowing switching models dynamically during a session (Claude Code wouldn't even have to know about it, it'd just send requests to a local endpoint and the proxy would do the rest).
Early on, but Go is lovely to work with, mdBook is great for getting a site off the ground and I'm really surprised that more people don't use Itch.io for distributing software (or the pay-what-you-want model in general), it's dead simple!
Buildermark calculates how much of your code is written by agents. Open source, local, and cross-platform (written in Go).
https://buildermark.dev
I'm working on app for walking based on the practice of walk, talk, meditate.
For now it's just for iOS but currently I'm working on porting to Android.
https://pilgrimapp.org/
I'm learning about inference by running vLLM on a k8s cluster (EKS), building a gateway to keep a <2s TTFT SLO.
Most recent ha-ha moment: I kept wondering if it was normal that my cluster was only able to process 4 requests per second per vLLM engine (just seemed really low to me).
I realized a better metric is in-flight requests... Each engine is processing 70 requests at any given time, streaming tokens for over 30s.
Code: https://github.com/Nicolas-Richard/vllm-on-eks
Deeper dives into those uncover interesting limitations that don't seem to be documented anywhere. On the other hand, it is through those reverse shibboleths that I am now able to tell that my boss's boss has no idea what he is talking about llm-wise.
https://www.contextractor.com/ - Web content extraction tool to feed LLMs
https://emiplan.net/ - Doodle and Splitwise like alternatives for organising time with friends.
I'm a backend dev, frontend was made with AI.
Bought a TI dev board with c7x and c66 dsp cores. Have it doing PEQ and FIR room correction, along with tube amplifier emulation.
Will be trying to implement a virtual bass array next.
I'm working on a system to create animations, and a new cicd system.
Working on a bread recipe community where you can share and iterate on bread recipes. It's out of personal interest to be able to record my bread recipes and thought it might be interesting for others too.
However, I worked on it for the past ~5 years on and off (well, mostly off) and rewrote it too many times. Now finally close to releasing, bought a domain and setting up all the last remaining things.
while I was using claude code, I was playing some lofi music in the background while it was 'Combobulating' and I thought what if it could auto-play lofi beats while working and stop when it has finished running. So I built a claude code plugin, I call it vibe-coding. Can check out/add the repo as a marketplace and plugin from here: https://github.com/Vinayak-Shukla/vibe-coding
Bloom! Visual research tool.
https://bloom.site
Retired so two projects; a 2D arcade board using a RP2350, and my 3rd sci-fi/techno-thriller novel: Currently approx 140,000 words into a 100,000 word novel and about 50% complete.
cascade-editor.pages.dev - a free node-based image editor that works with image sequences and has an associated desktop app. It’s pretty incredible what you can do in browser these days with wgpu and wasm- everything is cross compiled from rust.
i am working on an offline weights harness for non-technical people, writers mainly. it's designed to work forever but also be adaptable as more weights get released etc.
it enforces very few paradigms, runs in the browser, and allows users to view and edit agent config files within the UI.
it's kind of a nightmare to try to figure out how to do this appropriately, but it's an interesting challenge and i have seen very few (~0?) projects with an approach like this ...
all the offline harnesses are optimized towards coding, vs. general text manipulation aka "writing."
hoping to publish v0.1.0 by the end of may.
I’m making a top down RPG. 16x16 pixel art. Loving it. In Godot.
Just rolled out a big new update for my video cloud platform https://www.kollaborate.tv with a new player, side-by-side playback comparison and a big improvement in accessibility.
Currently we’re using AWS and Backblaze B2, but I’m formulating a plan to move to colocated servers. Not being billed per GB will open up a lot of new opportunities. Even at today’s server prices the math still adds up.
Is it egress or storage that's the main cost driver?
cross-platform app for tracking your meals, in order to make sure you eat balanced meals in a regular timeframe and to help you reflect
I've been working on Betterleaks for the past three months. It's the successor to Gitleaks since I'm not focused on that project much anymore. I just released v1.2.0 which added GitHub as a source to scan for secrets against and a new filtering system powered by CEL for more expressiveness.
https://betterleaks.com
Been slowly chipping away at my vehicle building browser game https://mechacraft.io. For those interested in following the progress I made a discord channel: https://discord.gg/bXH66ZDBKr
Salary explorer based on US job postings: https://corvi.careers/salary-explorer/
Still chugging along and curating https://hnarcade.com Submit your games!
We're building a repairable and fireproof ebike battery at https://infinite-battery.com :)
:D
Well, all of a sudden, now that I kinda quit my gaming time sink, all my mini projects are finally being completed. All small, but useful, things for my setup that seem to slowly become a part of a bigger personal project. And between that kid and lots of books.
Ngl, it is weird for me now. If this is midlife crisis, I am loving it.
I am working https://vibu.app which is free digital voucher
and for fun, I am building yet another programming language!
A personal CRM system that lives locally in your device, no data shared anywhere
What happens if the device is lost or stolen or is otherwise broken?
The same thing for 10 years and every couple years it gets reimagined while trying to get to the original goal of building a replacement for Google. It's called Micro.
https://micro.mu
Working on benchmark arena for AI agents with my wife.
We grab interesting business problems, turn them into fun challenges for hundreds of AI engineers to find the best architecture for. Insights are shared back with the community.
It is a fun learning process with unexpected scaling challenges.
Working on an idiosyncratic tool that lets users use AI to help write statements of work without losing the high bar for accuracy and consistency that these documents require. Right now, it's somewhere between Typst and Gemini in Google Docs, but not as good as either yet.
https://pockli.com - I've always needed a better workflow for managing the stream of documents people hand me — then expect me to pull out of a hat months or years later, like a magician.
Working on a md file eidtor for average users to use, by click buttons like MS word.
https://hellomdx.com/
- Built with Tauri — installer is small and start-up is near-instant on all three OSes. - No accounts, no telemetry, no MDX server in the loop. Sync goes through whatever cloud folder you already have (iCloud / Drive / Dropbox / a plain directory). - Tab-to-accept ghost-writing is bring-your-own-key
- Exports to PDF, HTML, DOCX. Tables, math, diagrams, code blocks all live behind toolbar buttons — no syntax to memorise.
Hope to have some people like it and use it.
Any plans to support mobile as well? I'm lookimg to replace OmniNotes on Android.
good idea, i am thinking about it, but i guess it will be not that rich in formatting like the desktop app, the architecture design here using "vault" is a 'problem' for extend to mobile, maybe a lightweight re-designed version :-)
A correlation network viz (using Cytoscape.js) of this S&P 500 and NASDAQ-100 correlation matrix (built with Svelte):
https://cybernetic.dev/matrix
Pretty neat suite of visuals there! What's the helix intended to represent?
I'm building an AI, that uses AI to operate AI.
Why not have an AI build an AI, that uses AI to operate AI?
A few days back, a book on FreeBSD Driver Development was posted here [0], and everyone assumed a) it's LLM slop and b) a terrible introduction to the topics covered.
I scanned a couple of chapters and realised it likely wasn't LLM generated, it just needed an edit. The intro to C is a hard and weird intro, but then driver development in FreeBSD is hard and weird and people who aren't prepared to get through such intros probably aren't going to get through the rest of it.
Being the contrarian, I've started going through it. I was involved on the periphery of the FreeBSD project ~25 years ago, went to conferences, ran a BSDUG in my hometown, and so on. And I realised I've missed systems programming and FreeBSD itself a little, and in recent years became a little sentimental.
What I've discovered so far in the first few chapters:
1. I miss FreeBSD. And it's weird my muscle memory kicks in and am surprised in a lovely way to find familiar things like /etc/rc.conf work the way I remember them.
2. This is not AI slop. There are issues that I can blame on him not using the same platforms I am (if you're on Apple Silicon, just use UTM and the aarch64 ISO - don't use the VirtualBox config he suggests, as an early example), but as somebody who sees a lot of AI generated content in my day job - this isn't it
3. I have got excited about coding again for the first time in a while.
So, this is my hobby for a while. Go back to where I started, get into low-level systems programming again, I have some ideas on some hardware I want to help out on... it's different to a lot of what I've been working on for the last decade or so, but that excites me.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47915632
In measuring how long can esp32 stream video over wifi using single 14500 battery (AA size but 3.7V lithium). So far it seems like 2h 8m is the limit. I'm using tps63020 buck-boost to 3.3V.
Wouldn't wifi settings (antenna, Tx power, freq, bw, encryption, etc) be the bigger driver here?
I don't know.
also https://www.gluee.com/ - Text Styling for Social Networks, Slack, Teams etc...
Decided to cancel my personal Miro subscription, so vibe-coding* a diagram/vector graphics tool with UX I would enjoy rather than tolerate.
* assisted coding, not full code generation
working on a voice first, interaktive universal audio guide. https://artsplain.com
https://easel,games
A reactive programming language for games! Properties signal when they change and you can register blocks that tell the engine how to use that property, not just once but every time it changes. It’s a more declarative way of making games which I think is lots more productive.
I’ve been working on this for four years, it’s been a big project!
Currently building my own rss reader because I wanted one that runs in the terminal, but all the ones I could find were in Rust
Most fun thing is a few vibecoded games. A rtwp rpg like bg2 and an active turn-based grid crawl rpg.
Bg2-like is playable at https://archipelago-sandy.vercel.app
Airplane AI - an offline first AI that is GDPR and NDA safe by architecture - totally 100% offline as the main value proposition, not a limitation
Writing detailed and a bit math heavy blog post about specular microfacet-based BRDFs.
Economic simulation in Common Lisp.
Working on a framework for factory management systems.
Working on a native non JS Http client similar to Insomnia.
I’m smelting ore!
I got into creating my own rings, and I’d really like to create one with ore I harvest myself. Gold is too hard and silver can be kinda dangerous, but malachite is pretty safe and I can just drive to Copperopolis to pick some up.
Basically: smelt the malachite with flux and charcoal to get pure copper, flow that into an ingot mold, hammer it into shape. Then I’ll have my own ring, with metal I collected with my own hands
Working on a Platform That hosts Open Source software & Gives users Enterprise-Level AI Assistants & Support to challenge Saas Software (Just a MVP right now!!)
I just hate the Saas Scene today - even a small productivity app is worth $10-$15 / month . When you couple that with a bunch of apps that you use , you spend hundred of dollars in hard-earned Cash .
The Open Source Community is Amazing on Some fronts , but then enterprise & non-technical users can't use them without a layer of Support , Hosting & Setup Assistance .
We want to be the delivery layer between the Current Open-Source Community & Saas users .
Got a lot of ideas to work on it , but decided to build out a small version right now and launch it !!
I got let go back in March, and since I've pivoted into building a game.
In the 3 weeks leading up to unemployment, I had gotten way more into an old GBA game I used to play back in the day, Harvest Moon Friends of Mineral Town. The (remake of the) game that inspired Eric Barone to make Stardew Valley. I was bumping into the same in-game limitations of the cartridge and platform that always made me want more from it, (and while Stardew Valley was nice, it never fully scratched that itch) and as I found myself unemployed, I found the mental space to start building.
The game is going to be a farming tycoon/city builder game where you can buy farm stands and advertise to sell your goods. As your operation grows, you grow the local economy and people move to the town turning it into a city, opening up the chance to sell at farmer's markets or supermarkets. As the city grows you'll have to buy/sell land with the city and work with the mayor to plan where the city should claim new land for you to purchase so you can stay on the outskirts with healthy soil (or in the endgame, run for mayor and manage the growth of the city yourself, a la Sim City/Cities/Frostpunk)
I chose Love2D as my engine so I can use the relative simplicity of 2d art in 2.5D pseudo-3D instead of 3d modeling. The world space is a 3d euclidian grid of cells wrapped around a horizontal cylinder on the x axis. The view space is perpendicular to the side of the cylinder, giving us a natural horizon at the vertex of the cylinder on screen. The world space coordinates are expressed in terms of the polar coordinates of the cylinder, giving natural rise to radius as altitude, angle theta as latitude, and x axis as longitude. All the world math can be calculated using the trigonometry of the unit circle, and converted to 3d Cartesian coordinates before converting them to screenspace coordinates. I can use regular flat plans and elevations for the texutures of building faces, and render them upon linearly transformed quad polygons. Maybe I can also do some screenspace displacement a al Crimson Desert at the finish line to give buildings window sills and ledges when you see down a side of one.
I am doing the development without LLMS as much as possible so I retain a good grasp on Logic, Language, and Math. I have been having a lot of fun digging back into these multivariable calculus and linear algebra concepts I thought were beyond me (because of some autobiographical amnesia issues I deal with) to discover that no wait, I was taught these concepts in high school and was quite comfortable applying them. All the development is done on my own private, secured git server on my homelab server and I can pull down the latest build to my iphone to show off, it's been really cool. Kind of a pita to find a good git app on iPhone that allows custom git servers with ports though.
screenshot of a very early hello world, before I made the mental connection between wrapping a 2d cartesian plane around a cylinder and actual 3d cylindrical polar coordinates, which is why the shapes just sit over the world rather than extending from it, I hadn't yet conceived of the radius of the cylinder being altitude: https://fucci.dev/assets/helloworldspace.png
Playing Doom.
Another thing I’m working on: homemade linen.
Right now I just germinated a 4x8 bed with flax for fiber. The plan is to grow it for 100 days or so and then harvest, dry, ret, dry, and spin. I need a lot more to do anything serious, but I think it’d be awesome to have a scarf that I made with linen I grew and harvested myself