What programming/technical projects have you been working on?

I've been building a Python AI for the game Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe over the last week.

The twist of the game is that almost every move you make constrains the next opponent move to a different one of the nine 3x3 sub-grids, so trying to read ahead is difficult for human players.
AI players using a traditional Minimax-style algorithm have a different problem in that there is no known-good heuristic to prune the tree, and contrary to normal Tic-Tac-Toe, you can't exhaustively search all variations. It is difficult to tell algorithmically who is ahead in a game until the last few moves (60 to 80 moves into the game).

One solution to the problem of evaluating a state is to run a bunch of random simulations under the assumption that whoever is ahead will win a larger percentage of such random simulations. This is the idea behind vanilla Monte Carlo Tree Search. Most existing programs I could find use this approach.

However, I was curious if I could use a neural network to learn the game, AlphaZero-style.
I found a paper that combines neural network learning with a Minimax algorithm; the whole thing is a good bit simpler than AlphaZero, and, looking at the paper results, it could potentially learn better and faster.

So now I have a program that plays against itself in order to learn a neural network score heuristic (that the search can then use to prune the game tree). Each iteration builds a tree of ~400 000 board positions and then trains the neural network on the GPU for a few minutes, mimicking the results of the tree search. In theory, as the neural network gets more accurate, it in turn improves the tree search, leading to a virtuous cycle of self-improvement.

I think I ironed out most of the bugs by now, but I'll probably need to continuously run this for at least a week or two before it gets anywhere; I hope I'll be patient enough to see this through instead of being drawn away by the next shiny thing...

I built https://mkws.sh, a simple static site generator.

You just download it and off you go, no package manager.

It uses shell scripting for templating and has only two dependencies, pp, a simple preprocessor and lmt, a utility to get last modified time for a file from lts.

Doesn't have any config files, you just customize the generating script.

Because it uses shell script as templating you can use any UNIX tool in the templates, jlj uses pyphoon to show an ASCII Art Phase of the Moon on https://nfld.uk/.

I've about finished with the conversion of my Maker Select v2 to an SKR 1.4 Turbo board. It basically works but I keep running into smallish issues that get me on to the upgrade train, though there's little enough stock on the printer left to upgrade. I've switched out the thermistor and heat block for the upgraded gulf coast models, installed the bltouch autolevelling mechanism, printed a replacement cooler to give it clearance (went from dii cooler to cii cooler), and I'm replacing the whole plastic extruder mechanism with an all metal dual gear one. Seems I can't click a link without finding something new to add, for the extruder I went from replacing the gear, to replacing the mechanism, to replacing the mechanism with a dual gear mechanism. And it's all so cheap I can hardly stop myself. At this rate, the TMC2226 drivers will be in before I've gotten it back together, I wasn't expecting them until October but they've already cleared customs stateside, so they might even be here this weekend.