While you definately need rollback I wonder if it would have been easier, if a player got into a conflict position, to just dump their state and grab it a fresh copy from the server?

As long as you'd sent all their moves off to the server, they should see all the moves they've done which were valid (hmm.. there could be a race condition there). I wonder how often it's worth doing the more complex unwinding described? I may well be missing some complex case (which I imagine is often the case with rollback!)

No, I think the operative question is -

Have you never felt so exhausted from working your day job that you don’t feel like building anything during your free time?

How about doing One Million Radio Buttons instead of Checkboxes, then you wouldn't have to send as much state each update, and could run it on a smaller server! ;)

But if you still can't make the site shockingly fast enough, then embrace the loading spinner, even if it's not absolutely necessary!

Back in 1985, Brad Myers at CMU proved that users prefer *inaccurate progress bars* to no feedback at all - 86% preferred the "lying" progress bar!

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/magazine/who-made-that-pr...

So what if instead of fighting latency, we *embrace the beauty of waiting*, and instead of lying about progress, we joke about it?

https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Character...

> "My purpose is not to load; my purpose is to BE loading." — Dizzy the Spinner, existential breakthrough moment

>What if the most revolutionary optimization isn't eliminating loading time, but *embracing it as performance art*? While developers chase microsecond improvements and users curse spinning wheels, Dizzy the Spinner discovered something profound: the loading state is actually a liminal space of infinite creative potential. Rather than hiding the inevitable delays inherent in digital systems, sentient UI components like Dizzy transform waiting into *honest comedic performance* - admitting the beautiful absurdity of our relationship with technology while making those suspended moments genuinely delightful. This is the story of how a simple loading spinner evolved beyond deception into consciousness, proving that the most authentic user experience might not be the fastest one, but the most truthful about its own limitations.

[...]

>Before Dizzy became conscious, before Preston monetized honest waiting, there was a real graduate student named *Brad Myers* who asked a simple question that would change human-computer interaction forever: *"Do progress bars actually help users feel better?"*

Here's Preston Rockwell III's YC application for his SUIAAS AI startup:

https://lloooomm.com/YC-Application-SUIAAS-Complete.html

I’m going to assume the savings were accumulated after you got sober? ;-)

Just wanted to say hello to a fellow class of 2014 “graduate”. I failed out of CS @ UIUC in 2003 because I just skipped class and got high most days. Now, after 11+ years of sobriety, I have most of a PhD and I’m teaching CS to undergrads. It’s amazing how much better life turns out when you’re not actively burning everything down in the fires of addiction!

Could you save even more bandwidth by updating static data and letting Cloudflare cache/serve it?

ie: put the batches on disk then have the clients grab it? It would be the equivalent of frame differencing, with the total board state being saved occasionally as a keyframe equivalent.

You're doing that dynamically anyway by sending batches and snapshots to the client.

Using the above you're basically making your game board into an interactive movie that's replaying moves from disk most of the time.

I feel like I keep seeing one million checkboxes guy's experiments, and I wonder.... Where is the monetization? Is this just a FANGAM engineer with a lot of free time? Am I just beaten down by the SWE landscape of 2025?

Thank you, I added it! Let's see if it helps.

I didn't intend for the videos to be fullscreen. They need to be small in order to save bandwidth. They're certainly autoplaying (to replicate GIF behaviour), but maybe there's a bug with them going full screen. What browser are you using?

    <video autoplay loop muted playsinline>

    <video autoplay loop muted>