This is awesome. I've been working on a similar concept based on the Escape Velocity series and love the space trader genre in general. I'm curious how you've thought about the faction organization structures as well as information flows in the sim? Are agents omniscient about prices and postings? I ended up making in-sim information a commodity that agents could choose to sell to each other, but I didn't follow through fully baking that dynamic.
Not omniscient but I do let them update the system information from one station just because it caused me issues with goal weighing since their information was so limited they almost always chose to stay within a known route versus exploring, this helped giving them more information.
But I did think, one station info per station probably also did not make sense, technology-wise, so I thought expanding it worked.
The faction system was my answer to what makes ships or planets' goals go beyond their immediate needs, and factions came naturally next. They want to make money and shift priorities to do it through incentives. Like subsidies almost.
I was hoping/thinking they (factions) could escalate to blockades, monopolies or just more supply control, skyrocket prices and events combat to hold choke points, blockades or sanctions. That way that agents FSM is focused on those goal oriented actions and ships can focus on their well being plus their factions incentives, and the crews needs handle immediate needs.
This analogy makes no sense to me and honestly skews pretty elitist in vibe. iPhone is regularly used in professional videography now. Like, 28 Years Later was shot on iPhone. Indie filmmakers have been using iPhone to break into the industry for years.
the analogy would be that your LLM/agent has a pass at a Spielberg script and peppers his inbox with inane production notes. A system like that would be untenable for all involved.
I think the attitude frequently adopted by open source maintainers - comparing themselves to Spielberg - has been a major roadblock to anyone looking to contribute to open source projects for years.
Why are you looking to contribute to open source projects? If you have a fix or a new feature, you can share the diff in variety of ways. The maintainers are not obligated to review, discuss, and accept your changes.
I’m not entirely following you. I generally don’t contribute anymore, but in the past I’ve found a lot of maintainers are not actually looking for collaboration, rather free labor.
I certainly understand things are different nowadays, I’m talking pre-LLM proliferation.
> I’ve found a lot of maintainers are not actually looking for collaboration, rather free labor.
Do you think that maintainers lack domain expertise? A nice bug report is way more helpful than a random pull request. A patch, even when correct, can be counterproductive, if it conflicts with the roadmap and goal of the project.
The goal of open source is to give you freedom in maintaining your own version and extending it. Collaboration is not a requirement.
Agree that even prior to LLMs those projects weren't terribly welcoming as per Linus' famous email comments (chalk it up to cultural communication differences :) )
I don’t know if it’s just me, and these days I do understand it given the widespread adoption of LLMs, but I’ve always detested the idea that I need to reach out and have a conversation with the maintainer before opening a PR. Especially (mainly) when the PR is simply addressing an approved GH issue.
I’ve had so many perfectly acceptable PRs rejected over the years simply because they didn’t “fit the vision” of the maintainer, despite being +1’d by many members of the community or even other contributors. I don’t even mean to imply they were rude or anything, just uninterested in actually merging anything where they didn’t architect the changes themselves upfront.
On one hand I get it, you’ve spent so much time building something it’s fair to want to hold on tightly to that level of control, but to me it's just always felt antithetical to the entire idea of open source.
Makes me feel like I’m not contributing to a true open source project, just doing free labor for someone.
If you think filming is the only skill needed to make a film, may I suggest looking at the very long list of names that appears at the end of the film of which only a few actually do filming? Takes a lot to know what to film, and how to be good at using the tools you have.
Similar is true for a lot of software. Credit list on video games… I don't want to say it "mostly" isn't coders, but only because I've not done an exhaustive study. My guess is the top will either be QA or art.
Artists of all stripes (including audio, animation, cinematographers, lighting, environment, textures, etc,) including tech artists, designers, writers, musicians… the ratio of functionality to look-and-feel is dramatically different than in non-entertainment products, and the labor involved reflects that. It’s a real shame that some of the people that contribute most to what makes a game great are often the first to get dropped when people talk about how the game is made, (but most are perfectly happy to fly under the radar when a bunch of entitled kids start raging about the “lazy devs.” ;)
Exactly - it's just a tool. So, trying to make the argument that someone's work is less-than because they used a cheaper/more amateur tool versus the tool the well-funded professionals are using _is_ elitist. You recognize that, but the comment I replied to centered on the tool, not the finer points of professionalism.
But on that- whether folks have knowledge and taste, demonstrate responsibility for their impact, pay attention to their work quality, show up to the work environment with respect, etc. are all elements at the domain of human relations. This discussion is conflating how people use tools with how people work with each other. The tools don't matter here. I think we're sayin' the same thing.
> So, trying to make the argument that someone's work is less-than because they used a cheaper/more amateur tool versus the tool the well-funded professionals are using
No. Just the fact that they have a tool does not automatically make them a professional, doesn't automatically make them skillful, and doesn't automatically make their output worth something.
This is the meaning of "When they shoot a little artistic clip with their nice modern iPhone camera, it does not mean they get to insert it into a Hollywood movie."
Using Apple’s preferred practice of using no article before iPhone (ie. never “an iPhone” or “the iPhone” or even “iPhones”) makes you come off as a shill, by the way. It’s like if you unironically put a trademark symbol after it.
I found this archive while researching a book titled Six Hundred Receipts Worth Their Weight in Gold [0]. My first thought was that the book itself could be a great resource for anyone working on a crafting mechanic for a video game - it covers cocktail recipes, but it also has recipes for varnishes, dyes, medicines, etc. Enjoy!
Huh, I wonder if anyone's tried to validate this approach again now that we have LIGO (and presumably more precise equipment?). I know very little about the physics involved here, but the articles I found about Weber bars don't cite disagreement about the theory underpinning the experiment, so I'm curious if we expect a detectable effect with our current understanding?
I also know very little about manufacturing Weber bars, but I could imagine it's cheaper to build 100s or 1000s of these and perform signal processing on them than building another LIGO. Or Weber bars in space?
If you look at the lengths LIGO had to go to in order to eliminate background noise to even be able to theoretically detect gravitational waves, it seems very unlikely that a comparatively crude technology from the 80s could have achieved the same things. Like modern lasers or squeezed light states, which were mostly theoretical back then. If I remember correctly, Weber's device was claimed to show a huge amount of events per year, which would indicate tons of GW sources in our neighbourhood. LIGO and the rest of modern astronomy have since disproved that.
Sometimes noise turns out to be signal (see developments leading to Cosmic Microwave Background [0]). At this stage in gravitational wave detection is it well founded to consider noise as noise instead of information we cannot yet understand?
Noise always has different sources, and when you eliminate noise you should always be conscious of the source. There should be a gravitational wave background analogous to the CMVB. Detecting it would be a sensation.
The creator of this app, Nick Kallen, has a nice YouTube channel where he talks about some of the behind-the-scenes work on the project. I think his video comparing geometry kernels [0] was posted to HN a while back, but it's worth a watch if you're curious!
I learned about WebTV while writing essays for my college applications more than ten years ago. I had stumbled on this memorial site[0] for an engineer at WebTV named Jos who passed well before his time. The site includes some of his college essays[1] as well as some other bits of writing like his guide to OOP programming[2] (complete with Spanish and Portuguese translations !). His writing style and sense of humor have stuck with me for years and years now, and I still visit the site to have a laugh. Seemed like a very dynamic individual, and I'm grateful to his family for keeping his memory alive.
I came here curious if anyone would point this out. I was surprised to see the post describing UTC + lat/lng as a common practice in APIs without discussing this quirk. E.g. to your point, China's border with Bhutan is politically "fuzzy". Bhutan uses UTC+6, and Beijing Time is UTC+8. Weird that the post acknowledges timezones are a political construct but misses the fact that borders are too.
I’ve been using shadcn’s UI library lately and have been loving it. It’s distributed as a CLI that you use to vendor in pre-baked implementations of Radix UI components using Tailwind. Once they’re in your repo, you customize them as you want. Great for scaffolding a branded component library. React-only right now.
