https://bauble.studio/ is a lisp-based procedural 3D art playground that I hacked together a while ago. It's fun to play with, but it's a very limiting tool: you can do a lot to compose signed distance functions, but there's no way to control the rendering or do anything "custom" that the tool doesn't explicitly allow.
So lately I've been working on a "v2" that exposes a full superset of GLSL, so you can write arbitrary shaders -- even foregoing SDFs altogether -- in a high-level lisp language. The core "default" raymarcher is still there, but you can choose to ignore it and implement, say, volumetric rendering, while still using the provided SDF combinators if you want.
The new implementation is much more general and flexible, and it now supports things like 2D extrusions, mesh export for 3D printing, user-defined procedural noise functions... anything you can do in Shadertoy, you can now do in Bauble. One upcoming feature that I'm very excited about is custom uniforms and embedding in other webpages -- so you can write a blog post with interactive 3D visualizations, for example.
Am I right that the output of the lisp code is ultimately a plain GLSL shader (like one might find on shadertoy.com)?
I built a SDF-based rendering system (2D) for my game, and one of the big hurdles was how to have them be data-driven, rather than needing a new shader for each scene or object.
Would be curious if/how you tackled that problem (:
Yep! It just outputs GLSL. It doesn't do anything smart -- it's a single giant shader that gets recompiled whenever you change anything, so it wouldn't really work for something like a game. I mean, it could handle like basic instancing of the form "union these N models, where N<256" but there's no way to change the scene graph dynamically.
I've done this for a project where the SDF functions are basically instructions, and you can build up instrictions on the CPU to send to the shader. and then the fragment shader runs them like a mini bytecode interpreter. You can tile up the screen to avoid having too many instructions per fragment. Kinda wild idea and performance may vary depend on what you're doing
I’m a tech nerd rare coin & currency dealer! I took my two hobbies and combined them into a real business and I’m having the time of my life. Just launched a proper retail site here:
About 50% of my days are spend doing the coin dealer stuff - hunting for inventory, buying collections/doing appraisals, going to coin shows and buying and selling in person, etc.
The other 50% I’m writing code and building out the tech stack for this business. I’ve written the whole backend for the retail site myself, which includes my own inventory management system, sync with eBay and other marketplaces, etc.
I’ve also built out a research tool which includes an ML price prediction engine engine (which sounds fancy but is really just a tabular regression model).
Backend is written in Crystal because I love the language and there’s nobody stopping me from using it :) Frontend is all Svelte and they’re glued together using a mini framework I wrote:
I probably have 5 years worth of ideas I still want to build and I wish I could spend even more time building it all, but it’s super fun actually using it in the real live marketplace so I’d never give that up.
Happy to chat about this stuff with anyone who’s interested or vaguely interested in numismatics.
I have a question - I've seen TikToks of people who buy rolls of coins from the bank and sort through them for rare imperfections then sell them on eBay. I've always wondered whether it would be possible to develop an automated system where a camera takes high res photos of the coins on a conveyor belt, compares to a DB of known imperfections and sets them aside?
Is anyone doing this? It's an interesting business model as the product is money so you'd only stand to make a profit never a loss.
Nobody that I know of is doing this, and see no reason why it wouldn't be possible from a technical standpoint. I think the only reason I can imagine NOT to do is that the ROI probably isn't that high in reality. Now, granted, I don't watch the coin TikToks because 95% of it is clickbait, exaggerate, etc. But my actual impression is that there simply isn't that much actually-valuable material out there hiding in bank rolls (despite what TikTok says).
Most of the people I know who do bank roll hunting and doing it because it's just kinda fun and there's a thrill when you find a silver quarter from 1964 (worth about $5) hiding in a roll of otherwise-normal quarters. But so much of the good stuff has already been plucked from circulation.
Having said that, nothing should stop a good hacker from doing something just for the hell of it :)
do you know why vendors take credit cards, square and applepay, even though those services charge several percent fees? part of it is for convenience for the customer, but another part is that shuttling cash around to the bank and back is time consuming, risky, and takes you away from running your business (let's say you are a breakfast place, you don't make your own cups and napkins or farm your own eggs and coffee either)
>product is money so you'd only stand to make a profit never a loss
you're grabbing the expense part of the business that everybody else is trying to shed. Let's talk also about time value of money. All the money that you've invested in cash is not making money passively as other investments do. Compared to putting the money in the stock market, you're losing 7% a year on this scheme, plus the expenses of running your business, and opportunity cost of not doing something else that generates income.
I did this for personal collections a while back and went through a lot of Canadian quarters to get one from each year and never even found the 1991 I was looking for which is somewhat rare. I guess if you do it full time or automate a bunch maybe you could make money, seems hard though.
One of my favorite design elements is the Guilloche patterning on currency, along with the history behind the use of Guilloche as a form of anti-counterfeiting.
Your site is very simply visually appealing.
Also - I like to order $2 bills from the bank. You can order then, mine delivers them on tuesdays - and they give you a stack of brand new $2 sequentially serialized bills. They are great for tips and gifts.
100% agree! I often get folks asking if their $2 are valuable, and tell them exactly what you do -- no, alas, they're not worth more than $2, but they are super fun to leave as tips because people still get a kick out of 'em.
Infra: I was hosted on Google Cloud for a while -- literally a single VM running Docker Compose, but I decided I wanted something a bit more flexible and interesting, so last month I switched everything over to Fly.io and I am incredibly happy with them. It's just so easy and fun to manage.
The retail site (rarity7.com) is just a small VM running a Crystal server process to handle web requests. Image hosting is all done on Cloudinary. My backend / inventory management / trading + research engine is a separate Crystal process in a separate VM. Both connect to a Fly Postgres DB. There's one other service which is a small python process on another VM which is doing inference on my regression model. That's super lightweight and I don't need any GPUs to do the inference (tabular data is nice like that).
Overall it's really nothing fancy and it works quite well. A few web-serving VMs and an inference service for my pricing model. I train/retrain the model a few times a year on a local box (my repurposed gaming rig running a 2080Ti).
I did it all in about 2-3 years. I was a big collector as a kid but didn't get back into it in a serious way until 2021. Becoming an authorized dealer is basically, fundamentally about building trust. The whole coin industry operates in a very old-school relationship-based trusted way. To become a member of most professional orgs or become an authorized dealer, you need to have 5-10 VERY solid references from other members or authorized dealers, and the only way to get those references is to be a part of the community, build trust, and build relationships by doing business with others (which means honoring your commitments and your word and writing good checks, etc.). In the end, you need to ask 5-10 people to personally vouch for you, so they'd better know you and actually trust you.
This is great, my brother is a history buff and a few years ago I bought him a Hadrian coin for his birthday. I'll look through this and see if I can find something else he'd be interested in, holidays are coming up and I'm always looking for nice gifts.
EDIT: is there any way I could set up an alert for when you add some non-US currency into stock?
That's awesome and a very thoughtful gift for him! Yes I'm planning on building alerting - BUT - I'm probably not going to expand beyond US-based stuff for the foreseeable future. It's just the niche I know and even though there's a big wide world out there, I haven't spun up my brain to learn about it all yet.
If there's any country in particular you're looking for, shoot me an email. I know a ton of other dealers in the business and I'd be happy to point you to someone who might have something he'd enjoy.
Awesome -- thanks! Tell your son to join the Instagram coin community if he hasn't done it already - there are tons of kids & adults on there and it's a real community that meets up regularly at coin shows, etc. Send me an email and I can give you a heads-up on some starter accounts to follow and get involved.
So let's say I have a few hundred silver dollars. Is this a tool to help me sort them, or does such a tool exist? Like take a picture and it identifies it, looks for common errors, and provides a base price estimate?
There really should be, but the fact is there isn't a tool that does this yet. It would not be deeply hard to build, but it would mean training a model which means getting good enough training data which means taking the time to actually do it. It hasn't been done because it requires someone who is deeply knowledgable about coins AND someone who knows how to train a model and build an app, and the fact is that intersection is pretty small (it's me and probably 20 other people? Give or take). This is very much on my long-term roadmap.
In the short term, the easiest way is to find someone who does this (eg me) and just email me some pictures. I'd be happy to tell you if you've got anything good. The old school neural net between my ears can assist.
Great question. Authenticity is easy - I mostly deal with certified coins, which means they’ve all been authenticated and guaranteed by a 3rd party service which stands behind their mark (they will pay you for the coin if they make a mistake, which does happen).
For shipping, that’s just pretty standard across most industries - I have shipping insurance and if USPS fails, they’ll pay for it. But losses happen and it’s just a matter of business (thankfully they’re rare).
Yes! Very much so. And in fact, the grading services are owned by the same parent companies. NGC and PCGS are the big coin graders and I think their card graders are CGC and PSA respectively?
I’m working on a collaborative ebook reading app. The idea is that you can create a reading group, invite people and then share comments and highlights and see each other’s reading progress.
It’s something I’ve been wanting for a while, for example to read a book with a group of friends or with a work team, but there’s lots of other possibilities including author reading parties, proofing and education. Got the basics of it working now, need to polish the UI and add the commenting and highlighting features.
I’m using Next.js and Supabase, neither of which I’ve used before so it’s been a fun but often frustrating process. Claude has been an amazing assistance, fixing my mistakes and countless type errors.
Ooooo.... Idea! One thing I've always wanted is an "asynchronous" book group. Basically, some way to tie the questions and conversation to a page or chapter, and then you can follow along at your own speed. Just passing the idea along since I'll never do anything with it.
Storygraph[1] does this with their Buddy Read feature. My wife and I use it to read books together and leave messages about different happenings, which only get unlocked when you mark that you've read up to that page in the book. It's a great feature, and we really enjoy it.
I wish there were discussion websites for media like this. If I've finally watched a tv show, everyone is already talking about another season. I want some sort of "season one insulated forum" or something. For all those that are in the same "temporal" spot.
That’s a cool idea, thank you for sharing. Yes, I want to tie conversations to specific locations in the text, but I love the idea of being able to set discussion questions as well. Will look into that.
Hey man, it is an amazing idea. I have been thinking to build something similar.
I am building reading clubs for my custom library - on top of crypto tech, and in the process, I have experimented with several book reader tech. pdf.js, muPDF and some other tools, which one did you settle on?
That’s a fascinating project, thanks for sharing. I’m using epub.js as it already has things like annotations and highlighting and it’s fairly easy to override the book styles.
From the research I’ve done, it seems that most ebook reader libraries are old and not very well supported. Haven’t considered PDF readers yet.
Is it going to be P2P? It would be much more easier to handle book versions and other such technocalities if it is, allowing people to share the EPUB via the platform and stay in sync
This is a hierarchical representation of any given piece of knowledge.
It starts with a tree root node that you specify (let's say Kung fu), then it branches out into multiples subcategories (techniques, styles, philosophy, weaponry, ect...) and then you can click on these subcategories to branch out even more into the graphical tree.
This is all generated on-the-fly with Claude 3.5. There is no limit to what knowledge you might explore.
The killer feature is that it is totally free and does not require to login.
Just click the link and have fun. I'll keep it free like that, as long as I can.
I hope you like it guys because it is the best project that I have up my sleeve.
As a marketing spin for this - consider packaging it into Nvidia NIM format and make it generate 3D graph as 3D OpenUSD scene. From where I'm standing this route has a lot of potential.
Also if you never looked into it there is a project called wikidata. There each object contains a unique ID and hierarchy, which helps build semantic web. Exploring their data using your interface might be effective. (please check similar projects though as an idea seems straightforward and someone might have already done that for them)
You're a legend mate I know nothing of what you say, but it is very interesting. It is time I brush up my skills and I thank you very much for the clues! I'll look it up.
Making a note to try this when it's not slashdotted (hackernewsed?).
This sort of thing is _very_ interesting to me, and I rather desperately want something like to this tied to listings of books.
I would like to read more diversely --- at one time I was trying to read one book from each LoC division, starting at the top/broadest (so A--Z), then iterating down, but this got to be exhausting because it was difficult to determine which book to read.
A later effort was to read biographies of famous people to my children in chronological order as they were growing up --- dry run was the very simple set of U.S. Presidents --- but again researching and ordering was a big problem.
So, my hopes for this are that it includes footnotes/references/links to supporting material (perhaps affiliate links on Amazon would be one way to fund things?) and that it is possible to click through to find information on specific technical topics as well as general explanations.
Thanks. I had tried that but the AI keeps inventing false books or providing fake URLs. When the AI will be proper I will include that feature, for sure!
A message to everyone: Thank you for your interest and comments and mails and votes and feedbacks. I am sorry the service was interrupted & down & I had to makeshift with ugly donation links in a ugly sidebar for hours, ect (I got 5€ donation! not crazy but it was actually useful)...
Anyway I managed to get it back running, and running strong! Mail me if you have nice words to say or if you think we can do partnerships. I received nice proposals already, which should improve the service significantly in the coming days. The goal is to entertain and educate, and as free as we can! haha, modestly. Thank you again for everything!
This seems really cool and I'm excited to play around with it once it's up and running properly again. These type of things are my favorite applications of LLMs.
A while back I made something similar in the form of an incremental "clicker" game where you split things ad infinitum: https://lantto.github.io/hypersplit/
It is back and running, and running strong! Enjoy. Your game is nifty maybe it'll give me ideas. There could be an option to hold Ctrl to split branches vertically without branching down, ect... cool
Nice work. An AI populated mind map. I like it.
Just missed a way to go from a node to more textual content if I want to know more than just a bullet list. E.g. an abstract-style paragraph, or even just a web search for the string.
Good idea mate I'll probably include a Amazon "search list" for books, and a video "search list" for Youtube, ect... Might be cool. If I try to provide direct links I get a lot of false results but I didn't think of adding web searches themselves.
(There was a feature to generate dissertations on whatever topic but I had to turn it off because I believe it was abused and that cost a lot of credits. I'll try to add it more securely very soon.)
Love this! Such an interesting UI choice. Would almost prefer new branches to appear further out to the right instead of overlapping existing words, and then auto-scroll me to the new spot to reduce clutter when browsing several tiers in.
The context sidebar is great! Maybe the first good "AI search engine" UX I've seen (most attempts copy Google look/feel which is more suited for web page results).
This is a very fun idea and I’ve had similar thoughts, without yet turning my mind to execution. Bravo. Is there somewhere I can follow more of your work in the future?
Hi cyrillite. Send me an email with "subbing" as object: pierre.treeofknowledge@gmail.com
Then I will gladly send you what I got, whenever I get it.
I will not forget. Thank you, friend!
I'll probably make a full blog soon for added convenience. (it'll be about AI products & production)
If you want a bite of some of my other work here is a AI game I made & which got totally ignored:
https://lywald.itch.io/the-fall-of-mankind
I tried to monetize it, that was a bit lame, but in the next few days I'll release it as free.
Well, since you said Kung fu, I started at martial arts and 5 clicks in it's telling me about the self defense applications of swinging from chandeliers. This is yet another pile of LLM word vomit.
> One innovative approach involves using ceiling fixtures to gain leverage and mobility. This concept can be particularly beneficial in scenarios where traditional movement options are restricted.
...
> Utilizing ceiling fixtures for movement in self-defense is an innovative method that capitalizes on environmental elements to enhance escape techniques. By integrating body mechanics with strategic use of surroundings, individuals can increase their chances of successfully evading threats in confined spaces. Always prioritize safety and practice these techniques to ensure readiness in critical situations.
I like this project but I don't think I agree on the 3 branches that I see when I open the website.
Science is not a standalone category. In fact science is directly connected to mathematics which is directly connected to philosophy (through logic for example)
We might argue that also art is an extension of philosophy (e.g. finding objective or subjective beauty).
Probably Claude doesn't agree with this definition.
I agree with you. Truth is this was the first branching generation which I generated, and so I kept it for the sake of history. If you manage to create a better "starting branching tree" which looks nice and feels nice then I might take you up on this.
I'm sorry guys but my API key is out of funds until tomorrow's or maybe tuesday's paycheck. I'm only a student and so my money is very limited. I'm sorry this is pathetic. I didn't expect to have so much trafic these last few days, and then with this thread. Come back soon!
What do you think that I implement BYOK (bring your own key), does that interest anyone so that it is never down for them but they have to pay Claude on the side? Is anyone interested?
Thanks, fastneutron! I might give you the code if you send me an email and you explain your intentions. No problem. For now, it is not full blown open source because I don't want the added headache of managing that (double checking security & quality... I have no time for this is a sideproject).
I have this creative writing website where writing friends can write branching fiction novels together. Sorta like choose-your-own-adventure, but more literary - third person past tense, actual characters and narrative arcs. Configurable number of choices at the bottom of every chapter, and as you're reading, if the choice label doesn't link to a chapter yet, you can write it. It's been floating around since 1996 or so, so my big project lately has been upgrading it. v1 was perl and gdmb files. v2 was php and codeigniter, and it's been limping along there for several years. When ChatGPT came out, I rewrote the whole thing for scala/play and that was super fun. Moved from ubuntu14 to ubuntu20, mysql5.5 to 8.0, etc. I'm done with the rewrite now but am still messing around with launching it, upgrading to ubuntu22 (done today), figuring out if I want to update jvm/scala/play before launching, etc. All this for only a group of six writers (so far)! But collectively we've written more than 425 chapters across a handful of stories, 450,000 words, and had a lot of laughs. I even wrote a snazzy graph visualization thing that animates the structure of the story maps. After I finish launching the thing on hardware/software that actually isn't EOL, I might open up membership to others.
Funny story, I had it released in the mid-90s. There are versions of it still on the wayback machine. You younger folks might not realize this but there was a time where there were a lot of fun internet happenings, and there was no spam. People hadn't figured out how to spam yet. There were also no T&C's or laws governing membership accounts. The first version of my site had no membership accounts. People would just create a chapter and assign a password for that chapter so no one else could edit it. And it was on GDBM, which could only handle one simultaneous connection.
Eventually, two things happened: the site got busy enough that people started experiencing errors when trying to submit/edit to the same story at the same time, and, spammers started realizing they could write chapters about certain erectile dysfunction medications. :) They also guessed some chapter passwords and overwrote them.
I didn't have a quick fix for this, plus I had ignored the site for a while, so by the time I realized, the site was overrun with spam and all my authors (who I had no way of contacting, remember: no user accounts) had disappeared.
So I took it offline for twenty years. I had copious backups, and over time I would reconstruct the story history. I had learned php by then from my career, and so I started rewriting the whole thing, which was honestly a huge project, especially because now every chapter has revision history. I had tried relaunching the site a couple of times without attracting any writers.
Then Covid happened and I was able to relaunch it and find writers. It's been fun since then. I have approximately zero commercial intent for this; I can't bear to turn on ads in the middle of an immersive reading/writing experience. Maybe someday paid accounts for extra features or a share of the copyright. My most fun idea for any sort of revenue is printed books for completed stories, or a mobile app "reader" with more features than ebook software. I think a wide release could be counterproductive since all the members currently kind of know each other, chat on Discord, and have writing nights. So it'll probably be a slow invite sort of thing.
I like this too! Kind of like those picture drawing games we used to play as kids, someone draws the head and neck and folds it over, someone else continues the lines... it always ends up in something crazy but entertaining.
I noticed my 2.5 year old niece likes zooming into photos of bugs on her mom's phone. I'm making her a little "game" where she can flip over rocks and find different bugs and other weird surprises.
A few months back, I posted an essay here about how I think we are entering an age where the personal library will become an asset class unto itself [1]. This is due to a combination of the advent of semantic search and the revival of personal knowledge management in the deluge of our age.
As such, I’ve been working on the software to bring this vision to life, which is called Your Commonbase (a portmanteau of Commonplace Book and Vector Database).
In short, the purpose of the work is to create a data structure that works the way humans store, retrieve, and share information. By making these three elements as close to zero stress as possible, you catalyze creativity through remixing and augmentation of memories. My hypothesis is a lifetime building a Commonbase creates an idiosyncratic system, filled with the interpretations of an individual or a group. This individualized structure then creates demand that others want. I.e, a curation of all of the books you have read, organized by the marginalia you have added to them. This is a system people would pay for, and also a system that becomes more valuable over time.
I’ve been “working in public” by posting updates on my site [2], and am just beginning a small waitlist alpha testing phase (email me if you want in!)
I've read a ton of your writing on this topic. There is still much more, but I'm tired. You described the problem well, and if your software alleviates it, then I see the value.
I'd like to try the software if it'd available please. But I'm not sure where it is or if it's out yet. Is it the Obsidian template you linked here, or is it a separate software called Your Commonbase? Because the Obsidian vault has a different name.
I have to say that the irony is hilarious that I can't find this information in the (well written) sea of information you posted. But then of course I'm not using your solution yet!
The problem with existing knowledge management systems is that they all eventually become victim to scale the operator can no longer manage.
Consider two scenarios:
Scenario 1:
You have a chaotic system of notes, dispersed throughout random pieces of paper and digital notes on your phone and computer. You have a relatively easy go of it when saving new notes (its as simple as pressing "New Note" or pulling out a new sheet of paper), but as you add more notes to your system it becomes harder and harder to find a particular piece of information. The cost of adding stays the same, but searching goes up and up. Scenario 1 causes us to eventually succumb to chaos.
Scenario 2:
You have an extremely rigid system of tag management, headings, sub-headings, sub-subheadings and sub-sub-subheadings. This taxonomy makes it easier to find information...at first. The problem with these systems is that they require a ton of manual maintenance, and they also make it easy to find certain "classes" of information, but fail at geo locating others. Much more perniciously, this scenario eventually stifles creativity as it falls prey to too much order. The cost of searching stays roughly the same, but the cost of insertion goes up and up.
(I am personally guilty of creating a system like this btw [1][2]).
Both of these systems eventually begin to become inert holders of information, as the processor (us), begin to fear them and stop working with them.
IMO, the closest technology to managing human information well in my opinion is well over two thousand years old, the commonplace book [3]. Simply put, a commonplace book is extremely resilient to chaos due to its centrality of information, but even people like John Locke had to create indexes to fully utilize them [4].
This changed recently with the advent of vector databases[5]. It turns out that commonplace book entries are the perfect form factor to benefit from an address in vector space, since entries are atomic. In simpler terms, the vector processing layer handles the order, allowing our system to "live" and assign headings/tags/etc. as it evolves. Vector databases love commonplace books as well, because many vector solutions have way too much noise as they chunk and store useless information at quite a disappointing ratio.
My system differs from current offerings because it makes no attempt to automize parts that are meant for the human, and makes no attempt at making humans do the work computers should be doing. Ergo, creating a type of symbiotic relationship.
Finally, a note on why I use the term "asset". An asset should become more valuable over time, and particularly, each individual component of the overall asset class should be worth more (e.g. $1 in a bank account of $20 is inherently less valuable than $1 in a $20MM bank account, because it grows slower). So in our scenarios above, the transmutation of information to knowledge peaks out at a logarithmic curve, subject to the scale issues I mentioned before. Old entries appear less frequently in even the most ordered systems, and when they do, it is only in one particular context. My system stores time of entry in the metadata, but since I use vector addresses, the information is accessible in many different ways (dog can be found when query == canine, fido, perro, mans best friend, etc...). An informational asset should scale linearly, and each action of create/read/update/delete should improve the health of the overall system.
There's much, much, much more I could say here, but I'll stop for now :)
I've been working on a kind of strategy game called Fall of an Empire (https://fallofanempiregame.com), it's a bit like a mix between Crusader Kings, Total War, Mount and Blade type games (just the overworld, not the battles), but rather than expanding you're trying to prevent an empire from collapsing.
It's a ton of work, especially with the number of systems - you've got combat, resource management, settlement development, food managment, espionage, diplomacy etc - these all need to play together well. And then you've got to add in the storyline, graphics, marketing -but I think I'm making pretty good progress.
I'm still using Unreal Engine 4 because I started work on that version and I haven't needed to upgrade to 5 since it's been released.
I've got a free prologue that I'm releasing on October 1, so now until then is a lot of polishing to make it work well.
Steam recently made some changes that are pushing game studios away from prologues. Instead, demos can have their own steam pages. Plus all hyperlinks will soon be banned.
I also noticed your game has been up on Steam since January 2022 and by the looks of it, you've done about zero marketing (steamdb.info). Hope that's on the horizon, it's a pretty darn important part of game development now!
Thank you! If you replace a prologue (as standalone game) with a demo, can you transfer the wishlists?
Marketing isn’t my strong point, if I ever had the money to make another the first person I’d hire would be marketing. My boss owns a PR agency and she said she can help in getting it out to journalists but that’s about it. I tried CPC and it came in at about $1/wishlist.
This looks fantastic! Love the premise & well done for what looks like an incredible solo effort. I was tech lead on Ozymandias & have another minified 4X in the works at the mo & putting out feelers with publishers etc. Sounds like you plan to self publish this one but I’d love to chat & see if there’s any way I can help with your launch, whether just through advice or via introductions etc. You can reach me at biggles (at) bravobravo.games though I may end up finding a way to contact you directly first :-)
In all seriousness, there’s a constant nagging in TW community for more historical games. Pharaoh didn’t cut it for the wast majority of players. You could capitalize on that, the genre would benefit from that.
If this one does alright my next would be a crusades game with similar-ish mechanics, feudalism, the pop system from Victoria 2, multiple-settlement provinces and realtime movement.
They recently released Pharaoh: Dynasties which is pretty much a complete overhaul of the base Pharaoh game, and is pretty much what the game should have been.
They gave everyone half their money back, this free upgrade, new factions, bigger map and a ton of changes. Overall its been a big push from their side to keep the player base happy.
But yeah, there's obviously a big market for historical games, from city builders, combat, etc. and I'm here for them all.
This looks great! It seems to solve the issue I always had with civilisation where the game becomes progressively easier as you advance ahead of the AI, leading to a late game which involves lots of management but little risk.
I wondered this myself and found some. I've played: When Rivers Were Trails, Thunderbird Strike, Dialect, Zulu Dawn, This Land Is My Land. There are a lot of options in boardgames (maybe more than with video games?), such as Burn the Fort.
Most paradox games enable this to some degree. It's pretty limited in terms of imagining what this could look like outside of the european conceptualization of civilization progress but it's there.
A feedback: the art and assets feel like they are AI generated but an interesting game idea, not sure if it makes sense as most the need to defend an empire that took me days to build greater than a procedurally generated one.
Readit News
So lately I've been working on a "v2" that exposes a full superset of GLSL, so you can write arbitrary shaders -- even foregoing SDFs altogether -- in a high-level lisp language. The core "default" raymarcher is still there, but you can choose to ignore it and implement, say, volumetric rendering, while still using the provided SDF combinators if you want.
The new implementation is much more general and flexible, and it now supports things like 2D extrusions, mesh export for 3D printing, user-defined procedural noise functions... anything you can do in Shadertoy, you can now do in Bauble. One upcoming feature that I'm very excited about is custom uniforms and embedding in other webpages -- so you can write a blog post with interactive 3D visualizations, for example.
(Also as a fun coincidence: my first cast bronze Bauble arrived today! https://x.com/ianthehenry/status/1827461714524434883)
I built a SDF-based rendering system (2D) for my game, and one of the big hurdles was how to have them be data-driven, rather than needing a new shader for each scene or object.
Would be curious if/how you tackled that problem (:
@ian Adding this to your help page would be helpful.
https://www.youtube.com/@ianthehenry/search?query=livecoding
That site needs to be seen. Thats great.
https://www.rarity7.com/
About 50% of my days are spend doing the coin dealer stuff - hunting for inventory, buying collections/doing appraisals, going to coin shows and buying and selling in person, etc.
The other 50% I’m writing code and building out the tech stack for this business. I’ve written the whole backend for the retail site myself, which includes my own inventory management system, sync with eBay and other marketplaces, etc.
I’ve also built out a research tool which includes an ML price prediction engine engine (which sounds fancy but is really just a tabular regression model).
Backend is written in Crystal because I love the language and there’s nobody stopping me from using it :) Frontend is all Svelte and they’re glued together using a mini framework I wrote:
https://github.com/noahlh/celestite
I probably have 5 years worth of ideas I still want to build and I wish I could spend even more time building it all, but it’s super fun actually using it in the real live marketplace so I’d never give that up.
Happy to chat about this stuff with anyone who’s interested or vaguely interested in numismatics.
Is anyone doing this? It's an interesting business model as the product is money so you'd only stand to make a profit never a loss.
Most of the people I know who do bank roll hunting and doing it because it's just kinda fun and there's a thrill when you find a silver quarter from 1964 (worth about $5) hiding in a roll of otherwise-normal quarters. But so much of the good stuff has already been plucked from circulation.
Having said that, nothing should stop a good hacker from doing something just for the hell of it :)
>product is money so you'd only stand to make a profit never a loss
you're grabbing the expense part of the business that everybody else is trying to shed. Let's talk also about time value of money. All the money that you've invested in cash is not making money passively as other investments do. Compared to putting the money in the stock market, you're losing 7% a year on this scheme, plus the expenses of running your business, and opportunity cost of not doing something else that generates income.
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One of my favorite design elements is the Guilloche patterning on currency, along with the history behind the use of Guilloche as a form of anti-counterfeiting.
Your site is very simply visually appealing.
Also - I like to order $2 bills from the bank. You can order then, mine delivers them on tuesdays - and they give you a stack of brand new $2 sequentially serialized bills. They are great for tips and gifts.
Infra: I was hosted on Google Cloud for a while -- literally a single VM running Docker Compose, but I decided I wanted something a bit more flexible and interesting, so last month I switched everything over to Fly.io and I am incredibly happy with them. It's just so easy and fun to manage.
The retail site (rarity7.com) is just a small VM running a Crystal server process to handle web requests. Image hosting is all done on Cloudinary. My backend / inventory management / trading + research engine is a separate Crystal process in a separate VM. Both connect to a Fly Postgres DB. There's one other service which is a small python process on another VM which is doing inference on my regression model. That's super lightweight and I don't need any GPUs to do the inference (tabular data is nice like that).
Overall it's really nothing fancy and it works quite well. A few web-serving VMs and an inference service for my pricing model. I train/retrain the model a few times a year on a local box (my repurposed gaming rig running a 2080Ti).
EDIT: is there any way I could set up an alert for when you add some non-US currency into stock?
If there's any country in particular you're looking for, shoot me an email. I know a ton of other dealers in the business and I'd be happy to point you to someone who might have something he'd enjoy.
In the short term, the easiest way is to find someone who does this (eg me) and just email me some pictures. I'd be happy to tell you if you've got anything good. The old school neural net between my ears can assist.
(See profile for email).
E.g. someone says the delivery didn't come through. Or that the coin is not authentic.
Those are some expensive coins! So was curious.
For shipping, that’s just pretty standard across most industries - I have shipping insurance and if USPS fails, they’ll pay for it. But losses happen and it’s just a matter of business (thankfully they’re rare).
seems like you guys also have grading services
It’s something I’ve been wanting for a while, for example to read a book with a group of friends or with a work team, but there’s lots of other possibilities including author reading parties, proofing and education. Got the basics of it working now, need to polish the UI and add the commenting and highlighting features.
I’m using Next.js and Supabase, neither of which I’ve used before so it’s been a fun but often frustrating process. Claude has been an amazing assistance, fixing my mistakes and countless type errors.
[1] https://www.thestorygraph.com/
I am building reading clubs for my custom library - on top of crypto tech, and in the process, I have experimented with several book reader tech. pdf.js, muPDF and some other tools, which one did you settle on?
My lib: https://datapond.earth
From the research I’ve done, it seems that most ebook reader libraries are old and not very well supported. Haven’t considered PDF readers yet.
feature idea- you can see the reading progress of everyone in the group to sort of apply some passive social pressure to catch up if you're behind
then again, not everyone might be willing to do this since the book club might not all be about actually reading the book for them
This is a hierarchical representation of any given piece of knowledge.
It starts with a tree root node that you specify (let's say Kung fu), then it branches out into multiples subcategories (techniques, styles, philosophy, weaponry, ect...) and then you can click on these subcategories to branch out even more into the graphical tree.
This is all generated on-the-fly with Claude 3.5. There is no limit to what knowledge you might explore.
The killer feature is that it is totally free and does not require to login. Just click the link and have fun. I'll keep it free like that, as long as I can.
I hope you like it guys because it is the best project that I have up my sleeve.
Enjoy!,
Pierre
As a marketing spin for this - consider packaging it into Nvidia NIM format and make it generate 3D graph as 3D OpenUSD scene. From where I'm standing this route has a lot of potential.
Also if you never looked into it there is a project called wikidata. There each object contains a unique ID and hierarchy, which helps build semantic web. Exploring their data using your interface might be effective. (please check similar projects though as an idea seems straightforward and someone might have already done that for them)
This sort of thing is _very_ interesting to me, and I rather desperately want something like to this tied to listings of books.
I would like to read more diversely --- at one time I was trying to read one book from each LoC division, starting at the top/broadest (so A--Z), then iterating down, but this got to be exhausting because it was difficult to determine which book to read.
A later effort was to read biographies of famous people to my children in chronological order as they were growing up --- dry run was the very simple set of U.S. Presidents --- but again researching and ordering was a big problem.
So, my hopes for this are that it includes footnotes/references/links to supporting material (perhaps affiliate links on Amazon would be one way to fund things?) and that it is possible to click through to find information on specific technical topics as well as general explanations.
Anyway I managed to get it back running, and running strong! Mail me if you have nice words to say or if you think we can do partnerships. I received nice proposals already, which should improve the service significantly in the coming days. The goal is to entertain and educate, and as free as we can! haha, modestly. Thank you again for everything!
A while back I made something similar in the form of an incremental "clicker" game where you split things ad infinitum: https://lantto.github.io/hypersplit/
(There was a feature to generate dissertations on whatever topic but I had to turn it off because I believe it was abused and that cost a lot of credits. I'll try to add it more securely very soon.)
The context sidebar is great! Maybe the first good "AI search engine" UX I've seen (most attempts copy Google look/feel which is more suited for web page results).
I'll probably make a full blog soon for added convenience. (it'll be about AI products & production)
If you want a bite of some of my other work here is a AI game I made & which got totally ignored: https://lywald.itch.io/the-fall-of-mankind I tried to monetize it, that was a bit lame, but in the next few days I'll release it as free.
> One innovative approach involves using ceiling fixtures to gain leverage and mobility. This concept can be particularly beneficial in scenarios where traditional movement options are restricted.
...
> Utilizing ceiling fixtures for movement in self-defense is an innovative method that capitalizes on environmental elements to enhance escape techniques. By integrating body mechanics with strategic use of surroundings, individuals can increase their chances of successfully evading threats in confined spaces. Always prioritize safety and practice these techniques to ensure readiness in critical situations.
Science is not a standalone category. In fact science is directly connected to mathematics which is directly connected to philosophy (through logic for example)
We might argue that also art is an extension of philosophy (e.g. finding objective or subjective beauty).
Probably Claude doesn't agree with this definition.
What do you think that I implement BYOK (bring your own key), does that interest anyone so that it is never down for them but they have to pay Claude on the side? Is anyone interested?
Thanks for making it authentication-free and free of charge.
Eventually, two things happened: the site got busy enough that people started experiencing errors when trying to submit/edit to the same story at the same time, and, spammers started realizing they could write chapters about certain erectile dysfunction medications. :) They also guessed some chapter passwords and overwrote them.
I didn't have a quick fix for this, plus I had ignored the site for a while, so by the time I realized, the site was overrun with spam and all my authors (who I had no way of contacting, remember: no user accounts) had disappeared.
So I took it offline for twenty years. I had copious backups, and over time I would reconstruct the story history. I had learned php by then from my career, and so I started rewriting the whole thing, which was honestly a huge project, especially because now every chapter has revision history. I had tried relaunching the site a couple of times without attracting any writers.
Then Covid happened and I was able to relaunch it and find writers. It's been fun since then. I have approximately zero commercial intent for this; I can't bear to turn on ads in the middle of an immersive reading/writing experience. Maybe someday paid accounts for extra features or a share of the copyright. My most fun idea for any sort of revenue is printed books for completed stories, or a mobile app "reader" with more features than ebook software. I think a wide release could be counterproductive since all the members currently kind of know each other, chat on Discord, and have writing nights. So it'll probably be a slow invite sort of thing.
As such, I’ve been working on the software to bring this vision to life, which is called Your Commonbase (a portmanteau of Commonplace Book and Vector Database).
In short, the purpose of the work is to create a data structure that works the way humans store, retrieve, and share information. By making these three elements as close to zero stress as possible, you catalyze creativity through remixing and augmentation of memories. My hypothesis is a lifetime building a Commonbase creates an idiosyncratic system, filled with the interpretations of an individual or a group. This individualized structure then creates demand that others want. I.e, a curation of all of the books you have read, organized by the marginalia you have added to them. This is a system people would pay for, and also a system that becomes more valuable over time.
I’ve been “working in public” by posting updates on my site [2], and am just beginning a small waitlist alpha testing phase (email me if you want in!)
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40192359
[2] - https://www.bramadams.dev/
I'd like to try the software if it'd available please. But I'm not sure where it is or if it's out yet. Is it the Obsidian template you linked here, or is it a separate software called Your Commonbase? Because the Obsidian vault has a different name.
I have to say that the irony is hilarious that I can't find this information in the (well written) sea of information you posted. But then of course I'm not using your solution yet!
The problem with existing knowledge management systems is that they all eventually become victim to scale the operator can no longer manage.
Consider two scenarios:
Scenario 1:
You have a chaotic system of notes, dispersed throughout random pieces of paper and digital notes on your phone and computer. You have a relatively easy go of it when saving new notes (its as simple as pressing "New Note" or pulling out a new sheet of paper), but as you add more notes to your system it becomes harder and harder to find a particular piece of information. The cost of adding stays the same, but searching goes up and up. Scenario 1 causes us to eventually succumb to chaos.
Scenario 2:
You have an extremely rigid system of tag management, headings, sub-headings, sub-subheadings and sub-sub-subheadings. This taxonomy makes it easier to find information...at first. The problem with these systems is that they require a ton of manual maintenance, and they also make it easy to find certain "classes" of information, but fail at geo locating others. Much more perniciously, this scenario eventually stifles creativity as it falls prey to too much order. The cost of searching stays roughly the same, but the cost of insertion goes up and up.
(I am personally guilty of creating a system like this btw [1][2]).
Both of these systems eventually begin to become inert holders of information, as the processor (us), begin to fear them and stop working with them.
IMO, the closest technology to managing human information well in my opinion is well over two thousand years old, the commonplace book [3]. Simply put, a commonplace book is extremely resilient to chaos due to its centrality of information, but even people like John Locke had to create indexes to fully utilize them [4].
This changed recently with the advent of vector databases[5]. It turns out that commonplace book entries are the perfect form factor to benefit from an address in vector space, since entries are atomic. In simpler terms, the vector processing layer handles the order, allowing our system to "live" and assign headings/tags/etc. as it evolves. Vector databases love commonplace books as well, because many vector solutions have way too much noise as they chunk and store useless information at quite a disappointing ratio.
My system differs from current offerings because it makes no attempt to automize parts that are meant for the human, and makes no attempt at making humans do the work computers should be doing. Ergo, creating a type of symbiotic relationship.
Finally, a note on why I use the term "asset". An asset should become more valuable over time, and particularly, each individual component of the overall asset class should be worth more (e.g. $1 in a bank account of $20 is inherently less valuable than $1 in a $20MM bank account, because it grows slower). So in our scenarios above, the transmutation of information to knowledge peaks out at a logarithmic curve, subject to the scale issues I mentioned before. Old entries appear less frequently in even the most ordered systems, and when they do, it is only in one particular context. My system stores time of entry in the metadata, but since I use vector addresses, the information is accessible in many different ways (dog can be found when query == canine, fido, perro, mans best friend, etc...). An informational asset should scale linearly, and each action of create/read/update/delete should improve the health of the overall system.
There's much, much, much more I could say here, but I'll stop for now :)
[1] - https://github.com/bramses/bramses-highly-opinionated-vault-...
[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34034414
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace_book
[4] - https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/john-lockes-method...
[5] - https://openai.com/index/introducing-text-and-code-embedding...
It's a ton of work, especially with the number of systems - you've got combat, resource management, settlement development, food managment, espionage, diplomacy etc - these all need to play together well. And then you've got to add in the storyline, graphics, marketing -but I think I'm making pretty good progress.
I'm still using Unreal Engine 4 because I started work on that version and I haven't needed to upgrade to 5 since it's been released. I've got a free prologue that I'm releasing on October 1, so now until then is a lot of polishing to make it work well.
I also noticed your game has been up on Steam since January 2022 and by the looks of it, you've done about zero marketing (steamdb.info). Hope that's on the horizon, it's a pretty darn important part of game development now!
Love the concept of your game. Reminds me of my favorite roman emperor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurelian
- Fellow game developer
Marketing isn’t my strong point, if I ever had the money to make another the first person I’d hire would be marketing. My boss owns a PR agency and she said she can help in getting it out to journalists but that’s about it. I tried CPC and it came in at about $1/wishlist.
Are there any methods of marketing you recommend?
In all seriousness, there’s a constant nagging in TW community for more historical games. Pharaoh didn’t cut it for the wast majority of players. You could capitalize on that, the genre would benefit from that.
They gave everyone half their money back, this free upgrade, new factions, bigger map and a ton of changes. Overall its been a big push from their side to keep the player base happy.
But yeah, there's obviously a big market for historical games, from city builders, combat, etc. and I'm here for them all.
All in all I’ve probably spent $5000 max on it.
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