What programming/technical projects have you been working on?

Continuing to work on LLM agents that aren't terrible/evil. The regulatory hammer dropped earlier this week by the US isn't helping... at least not for me personally. (The bioterrorism implications are 😱)

I've got competent agents running in 6GB of 1st gen GPU RAM. I've got so much work ahead of me; I have a planned model for long-lived "droid" intelligences, but very very little funding.

What keeps me interested is that the migration of medium-term memory to long-term memory is going to require that the "droids" sleep, and that while they sleep, they'll dream.

I've been doing some sound synthesis and procedurally generated music work for my game. I now have a template system (with an in-game editor) that can generate Roland TB-303 and TR-x0x style patterns on the fly for each wave. Waves are relatively short so it seems good enough™ for now to only have one set of patterns for each. Then there are sequencers with patterns that are generated based on the templates, and finally a synth engine (which has parameters that are controlled by the player character's position) and a drum machine (which plays one of several sampled drum kits, recorded from my TR-8). Instant acid techno! I'm happy with the results, and it took quite some work before I could even hear if my idea was good in the first place.

I also added automatic voice assignments for my sound effects. Previously, I have manually assigned voices for each effect to avoid interruptions, but even now at only 27 different sound effects, that was tedious and error prone, and I noticed that I was adding more voices haphazardly to avoid doing this, or spending too much time figuring out which voice to use to minimize interruption. With the new automatic assignments, I have a queue of audio channels. Every time I use an audio channel, it goes on the back of the queue. When I choose an audio voice for an effect, I peek in the queue to see if one of them played that sound effect last and use that. Otherwise, I pick the first item in the queue.

This way, sound effects of the same type will interrupt each other (which in my case is desirable, effectively what I had in mind with the manual assignments) but otherwise use voices in a round robin fashion. This simple scheme worked surprisingly well. Now I never notice any interruptions at all. Even with less voices than before it does a better job than my hand-picking.

Finally, I've identified some common behaviors between different objects in my game and have broken them out into mixins. This retains the flexibility of the system; each object is still based on simple callbacks that allow them to mutate the game state however they want in response to events, but there's less boilerplate code when for example creating a new enemy which shares some logic with other enemies (e.g. to determine whether they've been shot). This has no run-time cost in the language I use (Zig).

I've been trying to get Grafana+Prometheus+Node-Exporter+AlertManager running on my kubernetes cluster but it's been slow goings, terrible documentation (or none at all) and broken helm charts have made it far harder than it should take.

Continuing to work on gittuf. We’re now in the OpenSSF sandbox! We also had our first alpha release and someone posted the website on Hacker News. Exciting times overall!

Been working on GitHub Custom Global Navigation for a couple weeks after they forced the update on everyone. Been pretty interesting tinkering with GitHub's HTML data attributes to modify what's possible on the front-end. I know their codebase is a Ruby on Rails monolith, which is actually what I work on full-time, but never had to fight it from the other side before

I've been looking into the version 2 spec for pdfs. In order to wrap my head around the basics I've been handcrafting a pdf in vim. It is of course not very effcient to create pdfs like that, but it does give me a deeper understanding I feel. Saddly I've gotten stuck on how to output utf-8 encoded text. According to the spec it seems I just need to prepend the string with some special characters, but so far I've not been able to "print" utf-8 text (like åäö). Those I could output using some other encoding, but I'd rather figured out how to use pure utf-8 text strings. If anyone known I'd much appreciate some advice! I wrote up a question on stackoverflow if someone want some internet points!

I've been building custom debug UIs for various little programs. Here's one for a cute little algorithm called Poisson Disc Sampling.