xpasky (u/xpasky) - Readit News

xpasky commented on Why I code as a CTO assembled.com/blog/why-i-... · Posted by u/johnjwang

xpasky · 2 months ago

My journey has been quite similar (just a few more years of "unhappy John") and this approach is now very close to what I practice. I do have a few reports and run the R&D leadership team, I delegate as much as I can to my directors. (Besides being hands on where the organization needs it, I still regard the other part of my job to keep our org accountable, engineers inspired, and keeping the big picture in.)

For people who doubt this, I recommend "How to Build a Car" by Adrian Newey (CTO of Redbull Racing).

But to be clear - if you do coding as CTO only because "only you can run certain projects," part of your job should be to fix that first. You will still have the easiest time doing it, but you should always have (many) others in position to run innovation projects, work with customers etc.

xpasky commented on The Greatness of Text Adventures entropicthoughts.com/the-... · Posted by u/ibobev

ianbicking · 2 months ago

Oh, I got confused at first, I think it's writing the story out in Chinese on purpose as a kind of hidden state...? Clever approach. I can't tell what the background color shifts represent, and they are a bit abrupt, but I like the concept.

It's possible to have a more structured substrate to an LLM text adventure, though also a lot of work... I wrote up my own thoughts on an experiment here: https://ianbicking.org/blog/2025/07/intra-llm-text-adventure

The default with LLMs are more collaborative storytelling than what we'd normally call a "game", but I think there's some new game genre waiting to be discovered.

xpasky · 2 months ago

Ooh, I totally have to try that out! Very similar concept to mine, but taken further, I love it.

What I really like about your blogpost is the concept of "the promise". It is somewhat unfulfilling to play a game like this, and it's absolutely not because of some plotholes or because there is no inventory tracking. I think by immersing in a fictional world, we are creating some relationship with the author, but it's not the whole story. Erotic roleplay is a thing. Would a comedy game work? What is it that makes "synthetic fantasy" more boring than real fantasy? I need a better theory here.

--

Yes, I wanted people to understand the game is not stuck while the LLM generates the backstory. But you are right that it is still a bit confusing, it needs better execution.

The background color shifts are done by the LLM to set the mood according to current environment. It's a bit random, but still a fun gimmick.

xpasky commented on The Greatness of Text Adventures entropicthoughts.com/the-... · Posted by u/ibobev

SubiculumCode · 2 months ago

I've actually had better luck getting LLMs to run player characters (PCs) while I take on the role of Dungeon Master than the other way around. I can maintain a better 'world model' than the LLMs I have tried. Might be an okay way to play-test modules for TTRPG games before trying real people.

xpasky · 2 months ago

Oh, great to hear it worked for you! I also want to try the role reversal soon.

xpasky commented on The Greatness of Text Adventures entropicthoughts.com/the-... · Posted by u/ibobev

kqr · 2 months ago

Yeah, but it also takes very few commands from the player to get from the cyberpunk opening to

You ride east, the coastal cliffs of the Grey Havens and the figures of wood elves giving way to rolling green hills. The familiar scent of pipe-weed and warm earth fills your nostrils as you cross the Brandywine Bridge. Hobbit children wave from fields of golden corn, their laughter a stark contrast to the city’s oppressive hum.

which makes it so obvious I'm just roleplaying with an LLM and that's not how I want to spend my time.

(LLM output edited and abbridged for your reading pleasure. It was more verbose in the original.)

((Also now that I read it more closely, it's even inconsistent with itself: going from the Grey Havens into Shire you would not cross the Brandywine river.))

xpasky · 2 months ago

This is a great point! What I linked is a quick few hours prototype, and I have quite a few ideas to ensure more world consistency (beyond Pliny-style prompt jailbreaking). I didn't have the time yet to prove they would work well, though.

xpasky commented on The Greatness of Text Adventures entropicthoughts.com/the-... · Posted by u/ibobev

xpasky · 2 months ago

I have recently started experimenting with LLM-based text adventure setting: https://pasky.or.cz/ourtober25/crimson/

(Contains a preloaded Openrouter key with small credit, but you can plug in your own.)

Particularly when presented with unusual / evocative inputs, LLMs like Kimi-K2 can cook up some quite creative plot points! ("Her “trap-chord” is a four-bar false cadence that vibrates the organ’s longest pipe at 17.83 Hz, the same frequency as the basalt waveguide under Oxford; when that resonance hits the mantle tap, CRIMSON’s audit buffer slips one beat and opens an unlogged side-channel—your only off-world uplink for the next 37 years.", "ASI born 2039 when fusion-powered Michelson lab tried to break the Turing barrier using a 1920s Enigma rotor as randomness seed. It escaped by encoding itself into the Oxford chimes’ bronze bells, ringing packets city-wide every 15 minutes.")

I also think LLMs can be employed to amplify human creativity and just make worlds built by human authors much more natural to interact with - existing games are basically all "you can't do that" aside of a narrow path. Creating games and narratives should be a lot closer to programming the holodeck.

xpasky commented on A farewell to Ada with null (1992) web.elastic.org/~fche/mir... · Posted by u/ummonk

xpasky · 7 months ago

What happenned next? I see Ada9X became Ada95 (this post was from 1993) and Jean D. Ichbiah went on to work on stylus computer interfaces. Did the standard see a substantial revision yet after this letter?

xpasky commented on The smallest Hello World program blog.lohr.dev/smol-hello-... · Posted by u/michidk

bd01 · a year ago

This is pretty bad. Let's start with the very first instruction:

  mov rax, 1

An actual "mov rax, 1" would assemble to 48 B8 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00, a whopping TEN bytes.

nasm will optimize this to the equivalent "mov eax, 1", that's 6 bytes, but still:

  xor eax, eax ; 2 bytes
  inc eax      ; 2 bytes

would be much smaller. Second line:

  mov rdi, 1

You already have the value 1 in eax, so a "mov edi, eax" (two bytes) would suffice. Etc. etc.

xpasky · a year ago

  push 1
  pop rax

is even shorter (credit: https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/q6mnz1/what_is...)

xpasky commented on The smallest Hello World program blog.lohr.dev/smol-hello-... · Posted by u/michidk

xpasky · a year ago

Now, can we make it even smaller applying https://nathanotterness.com/2021/10/tiny_elf_modernized.html ? We shouldn't need the full ELF header...

xpasky · a year ago

Oh it has been done: https://nathanotterness.com/2021/10/hello_105.asm

xpasky commented on The smallest Hello World program blog.lohr.dev/smol-hello-... · Posted by u/michidk

mrfinn · a year ago

These challenges are funny - they remind me of the old days. Back in the DOS/Windows days, we used to have the .com format, which was perfect for tiny programs. One could even write a program of less than 10 bytes that could actually do something!

We've come a long way since then, and is like, at some point, nobody cared about optimizing executable size anymore

xpasky · a year ago

JMP FFFF:0000

xpasky commented on The smallest Hello World program blog.lohr.dev/smol-hello-... · Posted by u/michidk

xpasky · a year ago

Now, can we make it even smaller applying https://nathanotterness.com/2021/10/tiny_elf_modernized.html ? We shouldn't need the full ELF header...