Reapy's recent activity
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Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games
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Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games
Reapy Link ParentI wanted to like this game but i ended up steam refunding it. I would say I thought AC1 was an all time favorite game, the climbing tech and the city design IMHO were revolutionary at the time,...I wanted to like this game but i ended up steam refunding it. I would say I thought AC1 was an all time favorite game, the climbing tech and the city design IMHO were revolutionary at the time, the game was beautiful. I loved the story between two timelines, whenever I was in the modern time I was really sucked into the idea of the mystery. AC2 series I felt still was liking them. AC3 I really like the setting of colonial America, but it was the first one I did not finish. From that point forward I just lost the thread on them. I wanted to like black flag, but I feel like I came back to it a little too late to enjoy it.
I felt at this point the AC branding was a trope that I just started to dislike. I 100% lost interest on anything happening in the modern timeline, and I genuinely detested the damn hood shape which was so glaringly obvious and I had no clue why this got carried forward as an immovable AC piece that could not change. I tried to like unity but I didn't make it far. For origins, I made it like 10 hours but stopped caring after a bit. Odyssey I picked up on sale thinking I would like the setting but I couldn't make it like 10 minutes before my brain was screaming in protest.
I only say this because of how much I LOVED AC and AC2 early on, it was one of the few games I 100% in my life. I don't know what happened between then and now for my current feeling, maybe too much of the same and not enough variation, but it always felt like potential wasted with each new iteration of it.
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Comment on What game are you terrible at? in ~games
Reapy LinkI've thought a lot about this over the years. I think in general having played so many games i'm good at pattern recognition, I usually was the first one to figure out 'how' to win and would jump...I've thought a lot about this over the years. I think in general having played so many games i'm good at pattern recognition, I usually was the first one to figure out 'how' to win and would jump out winning early amongst most friends I had. However over time I would always fall off if anybody stuck to the game for a few months I couldn't keep up and break into high level play. I find that I have focus issues, either boredom, or even if I like the game I get some pretty bad brain drag where I don't want to think and just go down to people terrible at the game due to disinterest playing them or just exhaustion. It's funny for some of the games I was into I felt like a boss mob for skilled players, they would wake up my brain and I'd play way harder than I could normally, just enough to make them struggle to win but they would on average come out on top, just like a perfectly tuned boss should play. I am starting to think this year I might have ADHD which might contribute to this kind of on/off difficulty and am planning to try to get evaluated as an adult.
So it's been some time since I've played anything competitive and I suspect that I'm pretty slow in my late 40s, I imagine i'd be bad at anything competitive now a days. However if we are talking the breadth of like 40 years of gaming there are some absolutes for me that I'm bad at.
Driving. All things driving. I suck, suck suck. I conceptually understand what to do but damn getting through that corner right, nope. Grand tursimo 2, i have nightmares about some of the license corners. I just don't get it, if i do drive decently, it's always too conservatively, it's like too much brain effort to drive it on the edge around a track for me and I just can't do it.
Baseball. All things baseball, from rbi baseball to hard ball 3 to mlb 20xx batting just doesnt work for me. Maybe the projection or whatever it is I just have no concept of timing and batting.
Madden all years. I understand the concepts in football, but I don't know how to play this game well. There is no literature about how this black box of a game works, the community is steeped in money pay me for my secret lessons and nobody really breaks down WTF do you do to play madden well ever. I have never been able to enjoy the games much except for the times they made huge technology leaps. That was like from 4th & inches to snes maddend, to the PS2 madden, then the huge leap for dreamcast football game, which i totally forget the name, then an xbos 360 version and then I stopped caring.
Airplane dogfighting. I never got beyond turn left till you see something then shoot at it. I did find this wonderful novel about online dogfighting called 'in pursuit' I read a while back that was amazingly fascinating, so I understand now wwI / wwII dogfighting with energy management and all of that. However I did not have the joy in trying to put it into practice, so it's not something I was or could ever get decent at.
That's it for my crippling deficiencies in gaming, oh that and puzzle / word games, i'm terrible with those.
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Comment on What game are you terrible at? in ~games
Reapy Link ParentI made the same mistake and tried to plow the hirata estate as soon as I found it. I did eventually overcome it, but there is another direction you can go that is imho a little gentler...I made the same mistake and tried to plow the hirata estate as soon as I found it. I did eventually overcome it, but there is another direction you can go that is imho a little gentler introduction to the game. Still, it doesn't get easier as you go and you can't out level many things like in the souls series, so you'll have to get the rhythm down for bosses, and if you don't enjoy doing it I wouldn't torture yourself with it.
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Comment on Why normal people aren’t using AI agents in ~tech
Reapy Link ParentYou are right to not trust AI to do data crunching, but what it is great at is writing code to do data crunching. In your scenario even if you do know how to put data together as an expert,...You are right to not trust AI to do data crunching, but what it is great at is writing code to do data crunching. In your scenario even if you do know how to put data together as an expert, chances are you won't know specifically about how to pull the data off a specific device nor the format, and would have to research it, and all the tedium of figuring out what each field means etc. But this is the win when you know what needs to happen, you already know you have to pull data from sources and then combine and reduce it into the numbers that have meaning to you.
This is where AI is really great, it'll get the format for your device, have data classes built, be able to explain to you what every field is, and then you can work with it how to put the data together to line up the discrepancies. If it feels algorithmically unsolvable you can have it build something to help you resolve the data out. I know for a fact you aren't the first person to try to mesh non conforming data together for a full picture and so the AI is going to know all sorts of things from other projects you know nothing about, I would not be surprised that there isn't some whitepaper somewhere it has slurped up for specifically your CPAP to Garmin comparison.
Actually I asked fable just now about it and it says there are lots of CPAP sleep apnea DIY projects out there. OSCAR is free pc software for reviewing and exploring data from a CPAP machine, and said some have better exports from SD card dumps. There is SleepHQ a cloud service and they are pushing for charting CPAP data alongside wearable data from watches. It said it sees threads on Apnea Board where people have written python tooling to visualize Garmin data directly with an eye toward importing it into OSCAR. It listed 3 bullet points of data combine issues, noon-to-noon vs midnight date convention, for the matching lines with missing entries says pandas (python data lib) has a pd.merge_asof() function designed for it that joins two time serires on nearest date with a tolerance window (as an aside wow glad i know about that now lol), and garmin's web export gives CSV/JSON while full account export gives FIT files, but there is a python library to read that fitparse/garmin-fit-sdk, and also garminconnect for pulling data via the API.
In the end you can get that overview, check each of those, pick the method and try stuff with sample data you provide it, they eye the combined output to see if it is good. Then you can make sure that it writes lots of test cases so any modifications going forward can guarantee that your data is staying accurate to the path you've chosen.
This is honestly a perfect example of how I'd use an LLM, I would have the idea you mentioned, research it, get dissuaded, and never do it. Now i'd just fire claude off on it while I'm playing video games and get something, if it turns out good could then really focus on it into something very nice for myself.
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Comment on Why normal people aren’t using AI agents in ~tech
Reapy Link ParentYeah for sure I would agree with you I can't think of too much for an LLM if you don't engage with a computer too much. I think as things get better over time the ability to talk to your computer...Yeah for sure I would agree with you I can't think of too much for an LLM if you don't engage with a computer too much. I think as things get better over time the ability to talk to your computer in a natural language is going to be pretty revolutionary when it reaches the point of just happening logically and more deterministically. Already my google searches are half the previous google keyword speak and half natural language inquiries depending what I'm looking for.
I thought of some other uses, I've actually had some good success with cooking. Basically I suck at cooking and don't have many recopies, don't know what a lot of foods are and what they taste like, and generally I struggle with making effort at things and have some anxiety. Regardless of if it makes sense or not, these have been barriers to me cooking anything new. However, I find asking LLMs about recopies and flavors etc is incredibly helpful. I can say I have these ingredients what can I make, or I want to make X, but I don't like this this and this, or I don't like this flavor profile, will it have a strong flavor if I put this in? Just really being able to get dynamic advise on things and work with whatever my cooking issues are, is way better for me than reading cooking sites or youtube videos. I dont know if it is good past basics, but it guided me through marinading some chicken and grilling it, then reheating in the air fryer with time/temps the other day.
As AI kinda finds its niche, I really do think the big gain for everyone will be natural language interfaces, either via voice or typing in order to perform tasks. We'll have debates when to use buttons vs llms and all that I'm sure, but that really is something that is quite incredible to witness right now that it can do.
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Comment on Why normal people aren’t using AI agents in ~tech
Reapy Link ParentI think for throw away mods it can be useful. My friend is not a programmer but has already made several mods for games with custom overlays or information dumps that were great. This would have...I think for throw away mods it can be useful. My friend is not a programmer but has already made several mods for games with custom overlays or information dumps that were great. This would have been unreachable for us in the past, and I 100% percent agree, the AI is never going to build one of those general mod frameworks people include in all their mods and all that, and it varies by game, but it opens the door, to it.
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Comment on Why normal people aren’t using AI agents in ~tech
Reapy Link ParentPersonal software I think is a good use case for home. Maybe you already know you could write a script to do a thing, but it's not worth the time or effort to figure it out? Now you can have AI do...Personal software I think is a good use case for home. Maybe you already know you could write a script to do a thing, but it's not worth the time or effort to figure it out? Now you can have AI do it for you, and if you don't like it, delete it without feeling like you wasted any time.
For example I now have a hugo site on my server (i do some self hosting) that is a personal wuthering waves wiki. Previously I had some notes for stuff in silverbullet (a markdown based wiki), but it was growing unwieldy and I couldn't have any nice layouts or designs without a lot of effort. I started with having the site build out a rotations (combos for each character) with a nice markup for buttons to push and colors and some variations. It grew into I can now go use the official wuwa discord bot that makes images of your characters, download those to a directory, and run a script which will scrape out the data from that (thanks to self hosted back end that is open sourced and maintained by some card generation sites). It will scrape from a community run google sheet of stats to get stat targets, it will diff how far off I am from targets on my character, then give an overall todo list page ordered by what percentage they are away from their stat targets. So now when I play i can bring up a nice layout of the characters and their rotations and check a todo list of which person to grind out. I also have a high level overview table to help me organize who would go on a team based on the things that they do, something I tend to forget.
All of this information exists in one place or another online, sure, but this is also tailored to my characters and the way that I play, and information that I need, all of it built while I was playing crimson desert over the weekend, occasionally tabbing out.
I also used claude to help me set up hosting actual budget, while it was easy to set up the software, it took a bit to figure out how to get it all set up the way i want, and asking the AI questions was much easier than going and reading through the documentation. I set up data scrapping for my information, however I still needed to set up a bunch of rules for organizing things into categories and reconciling payments etc. It also helped me set up a local llm on the server that would run (no graphics card + a lot of ram on the server) so that once a day at night it will try to categorize incoming scrapes etc. I would never have set this up if I didn't have the AI going out and finding answers to my questions so quickly and being able to talk to it so naturally.
I have done a lot of other random things at home with AI, and a lot of times it sits there doing nothing, but when i have an idea it's as simple as starting up a terminal going to claude and typing in the idea, then going back to what i was doing.
I think more and more we will be able to write custom software that fits exactly any need we have, even if it's a one shot task. I am honestly hoping they keep pushing the local models to the point that the AI industry busts wide open and LLMs are just a thing we can have on our PCs.
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Comment on The AI design aesthetic that is taking over the internet in ~comp
Reapy LinkI think the concern here is a bit of a nothing burger. Everytime a tool comes out thar does design that is all you will see for a while. Think about cliparts impact on pta flyers for example. Also...I think the concern here is a bit of a nothing burger. Everytime a tool comes out thar does design that is all you will see for a while. Think about cliparts impact on pta flyers for example. Also just the way the web has evolved such that you can classify designs by the decade, early Netscape navigator, the geocities free page look, the web ring look, then you start to see table layouts with contents down the left, then you hit WordPress era and the blog layout arrives, then cms managers get here and every software company has the same (which I personally hate ) layout for their product, and now we have Claude layouts with top cards and whatever else.
The nice thing about Claude though is you can just ask it to change it around. I've found though for one off web front ends it's super nice vs needing to think at all about making it interesting, generally im after functional myself.
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Comment on What pre-NES games do you still recommend today? in ~games
Reapy Link ParentI was scrolling and about to post this one. One of the few Atari titles that I remember well. I think it's still very playable as I put a few mins on it in emulators every few years for the...I was scrolling and about to post this one. One of the few Atari titles that I remember well. I think it's still very playable as I put a few mins on it in emulators every few years for the memory.
While I'm at it I think race is a good one too, just a preview of a genra that isn't around too much now q days but is srill fun. For full effect you need the dial controllers.
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Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games
Reapy Link ParentIt's not bad at all, you elevate onto the machines which all have ladders for you early on until you are hovering freely on the late game. From there it's easy to click things into existence....It's not bad at all, you elevate onto the machines which all have ladders for you early on until you are hovering freely on the late game. From there it's easy to click things into existence. There is a blueprint system that really takes the tedium out of the mid to late game that satisfactory had, so it's much easier to build to scale now a days.
Honestly give it a shot if you like factorio, they are beautiful complementary games that each stand ok their own merits and give their own experiences despite the same core game loop.
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Comment on How much of an echo chamber is Reddit/the internet, really? in ~tech
Reapy Link ParentI found this very true when my friend group came online. This was just before myspace took off, but I was running a blog style website for my friends IRL where they could log in and post stuff. We...I found this very true when my friend group came online. This was just before myspace took off, but I was running a blog style website for my friends IRL where they could log in and post stuff. We mostly used it for planning to hanging out in person as we had been for a few years without incident. However soon people started posting articles and opinions, and oh boy, fights started happening. We never talked about politics or any of these topics, and turns out the gelled group that would all joke, hug each other, goof around, call each other great friends, had some strong difference of opinions that came out as soon as we started writing to one another.
In the end everyone moved on to myspace then facebook and I took my website down, but it really was incredibly fascinating to see the effects of social media in real time from its birth in an established friend group.
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Comment on How much of an echo chamber is Reddit/the internet, really? in ~tech
Reapy Link ParentOver the years the only highly upvoted comments I have are always very sharp 'redditorisms' that make a strong point. They might be reddit points that are made that I do genially believe enough in...Over the years the only highly upvoted comments I have are always very sharp 'redditorisms' that make a strong point. They might be reddit points that are made that I do genially believe enough in to make a post with them.
Personally I grew up with a hugely negative and judgmental POV on everything around me, so part of my growing up was to not trust my initial interpretation of well, anything, so I often try to immediately argue against my first thoughts in my head to help find a way to a truth faster. If I ever post in this style with, "well I see XYZ can be true, but some times in these cases like this not, it's a really hard call to make because you need more details before you can really find out..." it's always sitting at score 1. But if you are "These people have been fucking over everyone since the 90s, first when they released X and forgot to include Y, then in the 2000's , X all over again, 2010, same thing, and now here we are in 2026 and look, X, once more, don't fall for it people!" 50+ upvotes or more.
I honestly think the whole culture around redditors is really just 'people', people respond to confident and easy to understand truths, most don't like nuance, most they don't like not being told who is good and who is bad. Movies with clear bad guys do better to general audiences. Endings are controversial bad if they don't tell us who is right or wrong. Reality tv makes sure extreme idiots with bad views have a loud voice so you have an obvious villain rather than true nuance.
I won't say I'm not immune, I like thinks simple too, unfortunately the world isn't simple, and a lot of people don't want to hear that it's not, and because of that we arrive at our social media problems of today.
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Comment on How much of an echo chamber is Reddit/the internet, really? in ~tech
Reapy Link ParentIt's really coming down to having to know the reviewer. Youtube is turning to my go to for things, I can't know all creators but if I have some experience with a product style I can see if their...It's really coming down to having to know the reviewer. Youtube is turning to my go to for things, I can't know all creators but if I have some experience with a product style I can see if their opinion's on things I know match mine, then factor in if they are being paid to boost a product, and can go from there. I was looking for office chairs and I found a site that does refurbished resales, but they had tier lists for every office chair, and I have sat in a bunch that I know, so looking how they ranked stuff I knew and then agreed, let me trust their reviews on other things, and sure enough I was happy with what I ended up getting.
If I don't know the product I'll watch some of their content just have to assume they show off enough of the thing I can make a guess based on looking with my own eyes at it, and then trying out a few different reviews. Generally the bigger creators that just do reviews as a thing with a large sub count tend to be ok enough they can be reasonably impartial, so cross referencing a few and usually I end up somewhere i'm alright.
Generally even if i have been shilled too I end up in a better place than back in the day before all of this content where I'd have to walk in, let the sales person talk to me about features and randomly pick a thing.
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Comment on How much of an echo chamber is Reddit/the internet, really? in ~tech
Reapy Link ParentThere really is a difference in people when we start with one reality and then grow to see the untruth of the lies we are told later. This is kind of like kids growing up, they start out innocent,...There really is a difference in people when we start with one reality and then grow to see the untruth of the lies we are told later. This is kind of like kids growing up, they start out innocent, then have very harsh black and white morality about things they have experienced or been told about by others, then as people age I see the nuance comes as they and the people around them live their life and experience all the exceptions to the hard and fast rules.
People really under estimate the power in controlling the narrative and spigot of information into people not getting direct counter examples to their narrative. It is why you see so much effort go into quiet people that become loud exceptions to the narrative of those in power. I think deep down people are all good in one way or another, however, there seems many paths to turn us all into violent animals that just keeps getting activated over and over through the generations. We can't turn off that switch and we can't stop people who desire power from throwing that switch either.
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Comment on Will you be left behind if you don't use LLMs to code? in ~comp
Reapy Link ParentThank you, glad you said it. LLMs are honestly amazing tools for coding, no matter what people want the truth to be. I've been coding for 20+ years, which doesn't make me amazing, just...Thank you, glad you said it. LLMs are honestly amazing tools for coding, no matter what people want the truth to be. I've been coding for 20+ years, which doesn't make me amazing, just experienced. The first job I was at for 10 years or so I can honestly say almost nothing of what I did there is used now. Whether it's company specific knowledge or the code base or even the language and tools, the world just moves on.
I'll tell you one thing, in the early 2000's I copied out of my comp sci notebook and the paper books. I then was excited when I started to get digital books, copied from there too. Then later I copied my old code, then dragged some of that stuff way too far forward. At no point was I writing code from raw memory, it was always a back and forth. Only if I was churning out the same style thing again and again did I write it from memory.
But now, there are so many APIs and libraries that you interact with almost every program is based off a tutorial for 'how to use XYZ' examples and then grows from there. And really, when you import a dependency do you really know what is is doing, or will ever care, unless there is a problem? If you get it, works as intended, you move on with your productivity.
LLMs just are bundling a whole lot more things up for you to look at. I've honestly learned a lot from the LLMs, I self taught myself python a few years ago, and I really did miss a lot of the features of the language, but I was able to just keep getting results with it. When I started using LLMs (from chatting), when I saw some method or asked 'how can this be more pythonic' it opened up the door to a bunch of features that I missed and honestly wouldn't be relevant for my day to day, but now I know about them. I then would ask it for a series of programming drills in increasing difficulty to learn the feature. You don't get this off stack overflow nor from the documentation.
I haven't really gone full agentic setup, only at home. But again it's just so nice, this weekend I had it build me a scraper for poe.ninja since I was having trouble remembering currency value in the game. I had it just toss me out a table, normalized to chaos, of the relative recent value. I was able to add in things like use uv, add git repo and commit changes, use rich to format tables, use the atom one terminal color scheme, center the table, sort by xyz, cache the results so i wont hit the API too much etc. I can do that while I'm playing poe2 instead of sitting down coding, which I don't like to do in my spare time anymore.
But yeah I really see almost zero downside to slow building an application with an LLM where you are reading and working with the code in chunks just like normally, except you can go way faster and don't have to plow into reference docs and can just ask it questions normally. "Why is this doing X, is there some alternative library for this? What are the tradeoffs for Y vs X" .
I do fully realize that LLMs have huge downsides, don't fit everywhere, are a trap for JR and slack devs, all that, but I can't deny that it has helped me write better code and I don't feel like I'm forgetting, if anything it is helping me prop myself up as in my mid/late 40s now I just can't retain everything like I once did for free in my head anyway. I know what I want to do but syntax falls out as soon as I stop using it for a bit and blends between the languages I might be looking at.
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Comment on What are your predictions and wishes for the upcoming Nintendo Direct? in ~games
Reapy LinkHave seen a bunch of nintendo polls around, sort of funny I was talking with my kids about how they felt about the switch 2 so far, it's pretty much collecting dust in my house right now. For...Have seen a bunch of nintendo polls around, sort of funny I was talking with my kids about how they felt about the switch 2 so far, it's pretty much collecting dust in my house right now. For myself, I haven't really even gotten hooked on modern nintendo games except fire emblem. This is my ongoing weakness for me that started with the gamecube version, and then was the reason I owned a GBA for sacred stones, a 3ds for awakenings. My kids really got hooked on fire emblem three houses which was amazing as it was one of the first times all of us were fully into a game. I still have an amazing memory where my son was stuck on the end level of the blue lions route and my game was close by, so he sat down next to me to watch me play on my file (as I was near that part too) and we both worked our way through it one morning together sharing the ups and downs as we took on the map, it was really great and that fully cemented fire emblem as a number one for me.
We did not end up liking engage all that much, I think the character designs and story didn't hook us, despite agreeing what people said the gameplay seemed good. We are all really looking forward to the new fire emblem and hope it can look up to the hype, so we are hopeful we can at least see a little more of it during the next direct.
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Comment on When did your preferred fighting game franchises peak? in ~games
Reapy Link ParentThank you for the info! I was looking at my older game videos the other day and had some for honor stuff and was wondering what a few years had done to it. I probably won't quite install again but...Thank you for the info! I was looking at my older game videos the other day and had some for honor stuff and was wondering what a few years had done to it. I probably won't quite install again but maybe worth a YouTube drive by to see how it's doing.
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Comment on When did your preferred fighting game franchises peak? in ~games
Reapy Link ParentDid they ever fix it? I was into the game at release but saw a lot of that stuff and just the passive gameplay plus unlocking zone attacks were broken and I didn't feel like I wanted to invest any...Did they ever fix it? I was into the game at release but saw a lot of that stuff and just the passive gameplay plus unlocking zone attacks were broken and I didn't feel like I wanted to invest any further in learning the game. So many years later what is the state of it, is it more balanced around playing the game or still breaking animations and mechanics?
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Comment on What's your favorite personal gaming memory? in ~games
Reapy Link ParentDuck game with my kids was hours of fun, one of the few ones I got us all to play together. QUACK QUACKDuck game with my kids was hours of fun, one of the few ones I got us all to play together. QUACK QUACK
I've been on a gaming drought lately and mostly doing other things in my gaming time. However I did manage to come back around to kingdom come deliverance II . I had about 28 hours in when it released and I got distracted, then didn't make my way back to finishing it. I started up a fresh save was reminded how much of an amazing game it is.
I'm drawn into the voice acting and story right off, this is usually quite difficult for me to get pulled in. I had tried octo path traveler 2 recently and was feeling really MEH about it and was not able to get past about 5 hours of gameplay with that. But the KCD2 game world is beautiful to walk around in. I looked at a few mods and grabbed a graphic upscaling, an armor mod overhaul, and a nice mod that marks time sensitive quests with asterisks. I think the kingdom come games feel best when you are powerless and broke, so this early part is always particularly good. I do remember a little bit about where things are on the first map (never made it to the second map) so it's not as exciting to explore, but still very fun.
I'm really excited for star wars zero company on the 28th, so I'm probably going to end up quitting at the exact same spot last time, but damn I really do like this game and am hoping for a long enough window to finish it.