archevel's recent activity

  1. Comment on I made a tool to generate AI powered recaps of TTRPG sessions in ~games.tabletop

    archevel
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    This is kind of neat! As an aside, at work we use slack and they have a feature to summarize meetings which we tested out. Unfortunately it is set up to work only on English so our meeting in...

    This is kind of neat! As an aside, at work we use slack and they have a feature to summarize meetings which we tested out. Unfortunately it is set up to work only on English so our meeting in swedish.

    XXX makes several unclear statements about "multibo", "Cape", "South Africa", and other locations/entities.

    XXX makes references to "the boy", "the dog", and other unspecified entities, but the meaning is unclear.

    We found it hilarious. Feels like Slack at least could have detected that this probably isn't English and just given up on summarizing!

    6 votes

  2. Comment on Coffee fortified with iron—new microparticles can be added to food and beverages to fight malnutrition in ~science

    archevel
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    Nice! I missed that part in the article. Then I look forward to my iron rich coffee brew :)

    Nice! I missed that part in the article. Then I look forward to my iron rich coffee brew :)

    2 votes

  3. Comment on Coffee fortified with iron—new microparticles can be added to food and beverages to fight malnutrition in ~science

    archevel
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    When donating blood I've been told by the nurses to avoid coffee when taking iron supplements(?) since it inhibits the body's uptake of the iron. So infusing coffe with iron seems a bit...

    When donating blood I've been told by the nurses to avoid coffee when taking iron supplements(?) since it inhibits the body's uptake of the iron. So infusing coffe with iron seems a bit ineffective. But nice if I am wrong or if it gets added to other staples.

    4 votes

  4. Comment on I had an idea for a Crusader Kings, but about rich families in Victoria-Modern Era. What could go wrong? in ~games

    archevel
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    @PendingKetcup's suggestion of having a simple array for all the characters is where I'd start. Fairly simple to just lookup a character's data when you actually need to display them in some way....

    @PendingKetcup's suggestion of having a simple array for all the characters is where I'd start. Fairly simple to just lookup a character's data when you actually need to display them in some way. You could get into some weird concurrency bugs if the game is running on multiple threads, but to start out I'd just ignore that and make a fun game :) good luck!

    2 votes

  5. Comment on I had an idea for a Crusader Kings, but about rich families in Victoria-Modern Era. What could go wrong? in ~games

    archevel
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    With regards to performance I'd wager your choice of data structures and algorithms will be what has a noticable impact on performance (e.g if you are looking up entities in a list vs looking them...

    My main worry here is if GDScript is good enough to handle "intensive" algorithms. If not, I can always use C#, or C++ if I really have to, and adapt the problematic algorithms.

    Another is what would be the best database manager for this, but I'll cross that bridge when I get there.

    With regards to performance I'd wager your choice of data structures and algorithms will be what has a noticable impact on performance (e.g if you are looking up entities in a list vs looking them up by id in a dictionary). If you notice performance issues and you're sure it is due to using GDscript, then you can always drop down to a more performant language with less overhead. But, to me that seems like something to postpone as long as possible.

    As for using a database; do you really need one? If all game entities are loaded into memory operating on them directly can often be more efficient than db queries (especially if you have a small amount of "rows" eg 10s of thousands).

    6 votes

  6. Comment on MIT report: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing in ~tech

    archevel
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    I think it is common for companies to prioritize increasing revenue rather than decreasing costs. Decreasing costs can be deferred to when it becomes necessary; bringing in new revenue is likelier...

    I think it is common for companies to prioritize increasing revenue rather than decreasing costs. Decreasing costs can be deferred to when it becomes necessary; bringing in new revenue is likelier to have a larger impact on the business. As a real example I had a system running in AWS using SQL Server at a client. That database was the main cost of the entire tech stack. We did a PoC for migrating it to PostgreSQL which would have reduced the cost by 90% IIRC. It would have taken, realistically, a few weeks to prep, test and deploy and then monitor for hiccups. That cost reduction would have payed for itself in maybe a quarter. Still haven't been done. Priority is given to things that is perceived to increase potential revenue, i.e. features.

    6 votes

  7. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    archevel
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    I started using NixOS as my daily driver a bit over a year ago. It has been fairly solid though I had to go with the unstable branch to get support for my webcam originally and haven't moved off...

    I started using NixOS as my daily driver a bit over a year ago. It has been fairly solid though I had to go with the unstable branch to get support for my webcam originally and haven't moved off it yet. Any updates that break I can just rollback and keep on truckin'!

    I do feel like I haven't gotten a good grasp on how to work with it though. Any tips on something to read in order to move beyond newbie levels?

  8. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    archevel
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    I posted about it in ~games.tabletop, but I figured I'd elaborate here a bit. I wanted to try building a non-trivial piece of software using only prompting and for a while I've had an idea for a...

    I posted about it in ~games.tabletop, but I figured I'd elaborate here a bit. I wanted to try building a non-trivial piece of software using only prompting and for a while I've had an idea for a VTT. So I started out using Google Code Assist as a plugin to VS Code. I've managed to prompt coax it into something that works ok. Part of the clunkiness in the current version is due to not having a server component at all (besides the hosting of the static webpage and scripts). It relies on WebRTC to connect the players. The GM sends out invites (url with base64 encoded "offer") and the player must then copy and send the response (an base64 encoded "answer") back to the GM. That must all happen out of band, e.g. via separat chat or email. Once the connection to the GM is established that person acts as a signaling server for all the players so all peers can establish connections without the whole invite dance. I might rework this whole thing at some point, but I want to build some other features first.

    It is a bit of a hassle to test it out on my own properly since I ideally need a whole group of players to connect and test it out. But before I do that I want to make sure that it can handle reestablishing a connection e.g. on page reload and I'm a bit unsure if that is possible to do without a new invite.

    I am both impressed with the Llama ability to produce code and a bit dismayed that for some simple operations can take quite a while to figure out what it should do. Smaller refactorings and shifting the code around is much faster if I do myself, larger requests can sometimes cause the agent to end up in a never ending loop. Sometimes the context isn't big enough to handle the output causing it to crash. So you often have to instruct it to first make a step by step plan, then start on step 1... then ask it to do step 2 and so on. All that said I don't think a non-web developer would be able to prompt it to do this properly. I have a big advantage from understanding the underlying technologies and can steer the LLM/agent to a solutions I want.

    The whole code base is up on GitHub under an AGPLv3 license. If you want to try it out the application is available at:
    https://vtt.lindqvist.dev

    Edit: Just wanted to mention my favourite feature so far; the distance based volume when players claim tokens. The audio for peers is adjusted based on the distance the other peers token is from my token. It is there to encourage more roleplay (and perhaps shouting hehe).

    1 vote

  9. Comment on A mysterious LLC is using antique law to go after sports betting in Washington DC in ~sports

    archevel
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    I think we should aim to minimize gambling in general. There are people who enjoy gambling occasionally and completely banning gambling will not make it go away (just drive it underground). The...

    I think we should aim to minimize gambling in general. There are people who enjoy gambling occasionally and completely banning gambling will not make it go away (just drive it underground). The trick I think is to make the industry pay for the externalities it produces. I.e. calculate the rough cost of gambling addiction on a societal basis then charge that to the companies engaged in gambling. Use the money to finance gambling prevention and addiction therapy. Re-evaluate the cost occasionally. Hopefully this would lead to the industry finding some sweetspot where they balance the harm and financial gains. A lot of tweaks could be done to ensure different types of gambling are charged appropriately.

    1 vote

  10. Comment on Made a free VTT prototype in ~games.tabletop

    archevel
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    Yeah, that was one of the reasons to do this. I have it in the back of my head to add walls that hinder sound, but we'll see if I get around to it. I want to improve the UI a lot before that. Of...

    Yeah, that was one of the reasons to do this. I have it in the back of my head to add walls that hinder sound, but we'll see if I get around to it. I want to improve the UI a lot before that. Of note is that anyone can move any token. I didn't want to limit it to just the GM and controlling player since I often find I want to illustrate something eg. "Can I push that character here if I stand there?"

    2 votes

  11. Comment on Made a free VTT prototype in ~games.tabletop

    archevel
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    Being on vacation I wanted to try out coding solely using an LLM. I've mostly been disappointed with the results when using it on existing projects, but I've seen that it is quite capable when...

    Being on vacation I wanted to try out coding solely using an LLM. I've mostly been disappointed with the results when using it on existing projects, but I've seen that it is quite capable when building frontends. So I figured I'd try it out from a blank slate and see if I could prompt it to create a custom VTT for me.

    There were a few of requirements that I wanted to solve.

    1. Voice communication between participants.
    2. Basic board controls for the GM (adding tokens, a map etc).
    3. Should be deployable as a static site. No backend required.

    To solve this I figured I'd use webrtc. It enables connecting multiple clients to each other sending data and audio streams. The tricky part is that in order to set up the communication channel a signaling server is commonly required. That is the peers need to exchange some data in order to agree on how they should communicate. Since I didn't want to set up a signaling server the initial connection need to be mediated in another way. Currently this is handled by the GM creating invites and sending them to the participants (outside the web app, e.g. in a text message). The participants then need to send back an answer containing their encoded signaling information to the GM. Once that is completed the GM acts as a signaling server for all the other peer connections. In short the initial setup is a bit clunky and currently if the GM looses the connection it's a bit of a hassel to set it up again.

    I also added a feature that I think can promote role-playing. A player (or the GM) can claim a token. If two participants claim some token then to each other the volume of their audio streams will depend on the distance between those tokens. So if two claimed tokens are far apart they will hear basically nothing, but if they move closer the volume will increase.

    The UI/UX is very basic and will needs a clean up and some more features (dice rolling probably being the main thing missing). Some features are a bit hidden, eg:

    • the GM can change the size of individual tokens by double clicking on them.
    • right clicking a token allows people to claim that token.
    • the GM can add, scale and move a background images for a layer and toggle visibility of layers
    • the GM can shift click to remove tokens

    That said, I think there is enough there to make it possible to run an session.

    The source code is on GitHub and all of it is licensed under AGPLv3 so feel free to poke around. Since 99% of the code is promoted it is a little bit messy with some shared state. The whole thing is deployed as a GitHub page so you could clone the repo and deploy it elsewhere on your own server by just hosting the files.

    Of note is that in some cases the communication between peers need a STUN server. Currently this uses Googles one. So if that is a concern you'd need to find an alternative. It also doesn't have a TURN server configured so some clients might not be able to connect.

    If you just want to test it for yourself you can open a second private window in eg Firefox and invite yourself in order to see what it looks like for players. Try it out and let me know what you think! I'm happy to answer any questions.

    4 votes

  13. Comment on Surface Pro 3 owners: Tell me your Linux experiences! (Please...) in ~comp

    archevel
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    A couple of years ago I bought a surface pro and installed Linux in it with this special kernel: https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface This enables multi touch and a few other features....

    A couple of years ago I bought a surface pro and installed Linux in it with this special kernel:

    https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface

    This enables multi touch and a few other features. In the end I didn't end up using it as much as I expected cause I got a contract working for a bank and they provided all the hardware with some MDM software installed so now the device is mostly collecting dust. I just ran it with a vanilla Gnome DE and configured it a bit to make the UI a bit bigger (mainly just theough scaling IIRC).

    I wanted to train a NN to recognize my handwriting (but I never really go around to it) so I could use a stylus as the main input device like a keyboard with some gestures for some input sequences... Would be a fun project to pick up again at some point.

    4 votes

  14. Comment on Question about REST APIS and encryption in ~tech

    archevel
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    Just as a fun fyi, in case you are unaware, homomorphic encryption allows for processing of encrypted data. I've never gotten around to doing anything with it, but I do find the concept super...

    which would mean that essentially 100% of the business logic needs to be done on the client

    Just as a fun fyi, in case you are unaware, homomorphic encryption allows for processing of encrypted data. I've never gotten around to doing anything with it, but I do find the concept super fascinating! In the case for the OP it is way beyond what is needed (simple approach of just hardening the server, encrypting the data at rest and using https should be good enough), but if I had all the time in the world I'd be keen to use it.

    4 votes

  15. Comment on Dune Awakening will get a big update in early July, and Funcom have a three-pronged plan to improve deep desert PvP in ~games

    archevel
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    I've been playing this game lately and I do enjoy it. I would recommend it to anyone who enjoy the gameplay loop of e.g. Valheim. In my opinion Dune is superior in polish and general gameplay with...

    I've been playing this game lately and I do enjoy it. I would recommend it to anyone who enjoy the gameplay loop of e.g. Valheim. In my opinion Dune is superior in polish and general gameplay with that game. I believe I'll be sticking with this game for the summer at least. Nice to see that they are working on issues and future dlc!

    2 votes

  16. Comment on I have now donated five full gallons of blood products! in ~health

    archevel
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    I started donating blod again after a hiatus due to traveling abroad and then not remembering to scheduling it in. Sadly last time I was scheduled my iron levels were below the cutoff for being...

    I started donating blod again after a hiatus due to traveling abroad and then not remembering to scheduling it in. Sadly last time I was scheduled my iron levels were below the cutoff for being allowed to donate so I've had to postpone it a few months. Anyway, the really nice thing that they've set up here in Sweden is that you get a short text message when they actually use your blood! They didn't do this before, so I was pleasantly surprised when I got the message that they'd used my blood to help someone. That really made my day and I felt super proud for being a donor. I think this one addition to the donation process probably increases multiple donations more than anything.

    3 votes

  17. Comment on Armand Duplantis broke the men's pole vault world record for a 12th time with a clearance of 6.28m at the Diamond League meeting in Stockholm in ~sports

    archevel
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    According to this article the reason is that he receives $100,000 when he breaks the record. So that seems to be the reason he bumps the record by 1 cm(?) at a time.

    According to this article the reason is that he receives $100,000 when he breaks the record. So that seems to be the reason he bumps the record by 1 cm(?) at a time.

    6 votes

  18. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    archevel
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    I started playing Dune: Awakening when it launched on June 10th. Managed to snag the character name "Ivermectin" which I believe makes me immune to the Sandworm. It seems like my kind of game...

    I started playing Dune: Awakening when it launched on June 10th. Managed to snag the character name "Ivermectin" which I believe makes me immune to the Sandworm.

    It seems like my kind of game though it is still early days. I'm running it on Linux through Proton without issues so far. It reminds me of Valheim play loop wise. You gather materials to build a base and tools, discover new materials to further upgrade base and tools.

    There's an in game story, but I haven't played super much attention to it since I am busy staying out of the sun and harvesting blood for water!

  19. Comment on Slay the Spire board game and other fun co-op board games in ~games.tabletop

    archevel
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    Me and my game group have enjoyed playing Townfolk Tussle lately. It is a co-op game, but have a (small) competitive element in that the players are all trying to become sheriff. There's an...

    Me and my game group have enjoyed playing Townfolk Tussle lately. It is a co-op game, but have a (small) competitive element in that the players are all trying to become sheriff. There's an expansion to it that adds some character option and a legacy like component of unlocking new cards and combining cards etc. It has a distinct aesthetic (reminds me of the videogame Cuphead), which I puts a wimsy air to the game.

    We've also played some Mechs vs Minions which is like a coop version of Robo Rally. It also has a story which unfolds with each mission becoming progressively harder. It takes a few tries to understand how to play, and I think it's hard to find a copy of it today. But, definitely worth a try if you get the chance!

  20. Comment on A fairly new channel with tutorials on basic game development with Godot in ~creative

    archevel
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    I started learning Godot recently and have decided as a first project to build Quadruple Dragon. I figured building a basic beat'em up game would be complicated enough, but not overwhelming. So...

    I started learning Godot recently and have decided as a first project to build Quadruple Dragon. I figured building a basic beat'em up game would be complicated enough, but not overwhelming. So getting started I found this YouTube channel where they build a beat'em up! This was great for me since it is basically holding my hand as I progress through building my first game. I diverge a bit from their setup (using other sprites for instance) so had to figure out some minor tweaks, but I think that's good for actually absorbing the material.

    The channel just hit 1k subscribers so it's still fairly fresh, but I generally like how they incrementally build each new feature in a methodical way at an approachable pace.

    PS. I figured this could go into ~games, ~tech or ~creative, but ~creative felt most appropriate to me. Feel free to move it!

    5 votes