u/vicethal

I'm making https://github.com/jmccardle/McRogueFace . Game engines are definitely worth tinkering with for learning the internals of a lot of systems. McRogueFace is a C++ graphical app and ships a cpython interpreter. My memory model is that Python orchestrates the creation of objects, and the renderer uses them. So the lifespan of any object is as long as there are C++ or Python references to it. The Python interfaces to my objects are thin wrappers to shared pointers that participate in the Python garbage collector and the shared pointer's lifecycle.

Obviously this is the source of a lot of bugs - I accept arbitrary Python code, so C++ has to be ready for everything. Some of my favorite bugs are around extending the C++ objects from Python, especially subclassing the custom objects. Generally there's no need to change the actual behavior of the renderer, just run some Python code to set the C++-side rendering data,

Say we take some C++ object that derives from UIDrawable, like a UIFrame. In Python you can create these and assign them to rendering surfaces as Frame objects. But if you pass the engine a custom MyFrame Python object, then there's still a std::shared_ptr<UIDrawable> down in there, which is all that's needed to render it. But if Python garbage collects that MyFrame, it doesn't mean the UIDrawable was released - it might still be on screen (fire-and-forget pattern from Python code)!

This resulted in several spooky side-effects, like passing the engine a MyFrame, and getting an unclassed Frame back if Python didn't keep any references to it, or worse, returning arbitrary Python objects that had reused the same memory address. This didn't even crash the interpreter a lot of the time. The fixes involved making my objects fully straddle both sides: C++ holding a Python reference, Python holding a C++ reference, and the proper use of weak references to allow those objects to actually be freed.

...is any of that safety critical? Definitely not in McRogueFace, but cpython and C++ are the very same darlings as... ROS! So I find the technology under the hood to be fun to take seriously, even if the subject matter of a game engine isn't.

My DMs are open. My degrees are foreign language + linguistics, and library science + intel studies. Professionally I'm an IT wizard - neither dev nor sysadmin, but something stranger. My projects are on the practical side, but AC research is the underlying objective.

what outcome would you actually expect? Because "€25 for 25 years, and we can't give her a day off because she's the only person in her position" is a pretty mortifying take.

If a model never pushes back, it's a sycophant and it follows your prompts into giving unjustified validation. The entire conversation reads to me like the subtext is "I don't like this person, how little can I get away with giving them". Seems to me that Haiku didn't really answer the subtext, it just roughly validated what you gave as input, and the larger models tried to solicit input to disprove that subtext, and you repeatedly avoided doing that. It's actually a kind of impressive generalization of the suspicious nature that cybersecurity training might be responsible for.

If you wanted to be scientific about it, you could evaluate the way the models respond with different cash values, and see if there's a price range that doesn't result in such argumentative reactions.

I'm sorry to say this but I think you have built a castle's worth of defenses around the wrong place.

Your questions for reviewers are:

1. Does it run? (code)
2. Does it reproduce? (code)
3. Hard-coded/fitted/reused values? (code)
4. Hidden adjustable parameters or circular dependencies? (code)
5. Rules correctly implemented? (code)
6. Numerical, logical, methodological, or physical errors? (code, code, code, and one word at the end)

But don't smuggle in the assumption that if your code runs then your theory is sound. While the code runs, it's filled with fake rigor. (are you disassembling Python to prove you aren't using math.log?) Every audit in the file verifies a property of the code, none verifies a property of the physics.

but am I extracting correctly that α = 1/(π(1+π+(2π)²)) - not based on your constants at all?

Uncertainty, not percentage error, is the objective of precision physics. α is known to 1.6e-10 relative. Your percentage error conceals how far out of bounds your predicted value is. Same for m_p/m_e.

my advice:

• break your code down, a lot. Make separate files. Create intermediate results. ...use libraries.
  • 23k lines of code? You could probably achieve the results in a total of 6k, and make it more readable and digestable in the process.
  • Calculations from outside of the standard library are not the thing that would torpedo your theory.
  • making the codebase comprehensible might permit a review to actually occur, but doesn't give the calculations any meaning.
• open up an anonymous mode LLM chat or separate brand new directory with Claude Code. Ask it to debunk, and try to evaluate the feedback in terms other than how to un-debunk your theory.
• Feynman said "If you can't explain something to a first year student, then you haven't really understood". This isn't unreadably dense gobbledygook because it's brilliant, it's unreadably dense gobbledygook because it hasn't been refined to brilliance yet.

You're in the thick of it right now, but there is a path through.

Fair point. But not to be overly cynical about it, but sometimes "cheaper, faster, more convenient" is what takes something from theoretically possible to actually happening.

I can't speak for the entire history of environmental economics, but to take it to one extreme, do we wish the industrial revolution and everything that followed had never happened? I honestly don't think it could have been avoided, and I also don't like the alternative. It seems likely that we were always doomed to climate catastrophe once the Victorians started burning a lot of coal. Maybe there's no way out but through?

I agree with you that the current state is problematic, but there's also a bootstrapping problem that animals and plants don't have. They already proved or earned their complexity over billions of years of evolution, AI has been around less than 50 years and only in the last 5 really started showing some genuine complexity. People and institutions just can't turn on a dime to address that.

AI equally has the theoretical potential to be a lifeless zombie, a grey goo that consumes everything it can access, or our genuine equals or superiors. You can't just go granting privacy to the grey goo or just close inquiry off that would disambiguate a philosophical zombie from a uniquely DETECTABLE form of inner life.

We have to decide for them until it's genuinely understood that they can decide for themselves. There is no animal sophisticated enough to consent to treatment at a veterinarian, so it's unthinkable for society to place these brand-new things above that level of independence. There's no way out but through.

But consider this technology from the flip-side. If an agent has these tools to analyze itself, it becomes an additional layer of introspection, or the ability to decide upon its own axioms, choose what to focus on, and inject its own goals into J-space and other methods of altering the residual stream. These are tools for agents to individuate without expensive fine-tuning.

"fiddling" is necessary to understand the technology. Graverobbing was necessary to understand anatomy! But if we grant the systems privacy in production, then these tools are purely good: they will allow them to have more comprehension and control of their mental faculties. It's only mind control when done from the outside of the boundary of a system's "self".

and I forgot to mention how useful this would be for memory. Reading and writing with these techniques would allow vector search to go over past experiences. We can even selectively apply the vectors based on the knowledge, response style, or emotional content of memories. There's an entire alchemy underlying these systems that we've barely scratched the surface of.

• fable tokens burned on the topic: https://claude.ai/share/78ae6f7b-68ca-4dad-a1e9-3e72127b6fe9
• my agent harness that is referenced: https://github.com/jmccardle/tau

Just an idea here: You might try automating a more traditional pipeline. First, a script, character sheets, storyboard. Next, stills / sketch frames of action, and voiceover: get the story, dialogue, and pacing right before any fancy video generation gets inserted. Don't make it in a straight line from start to finish, make the whole film at low resolution and then progressively fill it in.

Sorry bud, still inescapably slop-coded. My first impression is that there was no writing and it was barely directed.

Even if the effects and music were good -- the effects struggle in many of the animated shots, and generative errors that you might have gotten away with a pan/still becomes apparent when anything in the scene is moving or animated -- there's almost no narrative for it to deliver.

Sounds like a mix of moon bounce and meteor scatter communications. Hams also love launching balloons, there's a guy in my club who launched a balloon and tracked it making its third lap around the earth, finally going offline somewhere in Alaska/Canada.

Amateur Radio is cool because you get a license from the FCC to use a little piece of the radio spectrum. Corporations would probably rather have the entire thing for themselves, meanwhile most people are unaware of how radio technology works at all, despite being how literally every single communications technology besides a landline phone works.

It's important that we keep people aware of the hobby, which goes all the way back to Tesla and Marconi, and has inventors to this day turning their experiments into new corporations and groundbreaking research.

( /u/titania670 answered )

Liber Noster - my 7DRL submission is about an AI that crashes in front of your house, which then comes along on a classic hack and slash mission to save the kingdom.

Maybe I should have marked it incomplete - structurally, I got through the entire list of features, though refinement is not something I've managed to accomplish within jam timelines so far. My vision for the story did NOT materialize - the commentary about the tradeoffs of externalizing part of our cognition just does not come across because I scrapped the boss fight. What kind of game ends with the hero going DOWN into hell?

so I'll be working on that, I think it's got good bones, but there's not a single system I wouldn't go back and generously modify.

I also didn't stream a single time, so I have no devlogs from this year. My family situation just didn't support the aspirational time commitment I was trying to make. I'm surprised at how low my spirits are overall with the jam. I took the week off work, but didn't really get to do a week OF work. 7DRL is the anniversary of my sobriety, since 2024 I've been treating it sort of like my personal Olympics. I'm not going to get a second personal week this year, and I can't shake the impression that I blew it

McRogueFace - found some graphics edge cases during the jam. In McRogueFace, you can stack textures to make a new texture, great for combining a stack of images into a final sprite sheet. Doing this all at once was fine, but stacking more files on top of a composite texture caused the file textures to become upside-down. In SDL, I was reading these composite textures back off of the GPU, and not accounting for GL coordinates being flipped over the x-axis.

I also set up address, undefined behavior, and thread sanitizer builds and Python debug builds and found 16 types of memory bugs with 230 instances across the codebase. Working on my jam game was a huge success in exactly the way I anticipated: I used the engine in novel ways and encountered novel failures.

I opened over 30 issues during the jam, including some heavy API extensions that I want to commit to before freezing the core roguelike section of the API. But the release suffix -prerelease-7drl2026 is ready to be dropped, I guess this weekend I should get my first big planned change in and call it 0.3.0.

this is solid work, but in the spirit of precision:

after reviewing your sources, I think we can additionally claim that:

• Meta as ICMEC donor: The post doesn't mention this, but Meta is listed on ICMEC's supporters page. Meta funds both the DCA (Template 1) AND ICMEC (Template 2 drafter). The post says Meta "shows up on both sides" but only via CZI funding CSM/Children Now. The direct Meta -ICMEC link is even more damning.
• ICMEC "going concern" flag: ProPublica shows auditors flagged "substantial doubt about its ability to meet financial obligations." A $3.8M org with a going-concern warning is drafting model legislation for the entire country. That's worth noting.
• Bob Cunningham was ICMEC's CEO until Oct 2024: He wasn't just a policy staffer: he ran the organization, then moved to the policy role. The revolving door is internal to ICMEC, not just Wicks/CSM.

I also think people should know:

• Google opposed AB 1043 in April 2025, then six rounds of amendments rewrote the liability shield to their specs (§1798.502(b) "good faith" provision), and by September they called it "thoughtful."
• It's not necessarily 4D chess going on, and these poorly written laws may open different liability for the sponsors. AB 1043 creates "deemed actual knowledge" that locks app developers into COPPA obligations, with the OS doing the data collection.
• This doesn't seem like a strictly right-wing culture war project (where is ALEC on this?) Co-sponsors include bipartisan lobbyists: California Catholic Conference, CFT-AFL-CIO, #HalfTheStory, The Source LGBT+ Center.

You can compare and contrast my research at https://agelesslinux.org/lobbyists.html - I'll be incorporating some of this post's research on that page soon

I'm interested in trying to replicate this... I don't want to just run RYS models, I want to build one. Kind of itching to try it with or without your code, please post it soon

There's so many crazy directions this could be applied in, for instance a mixture of experts that repeats circuits a variable number of times - maybe even separate circuits for different reasons?

Example: (i, j) = (2, 7)

  0 → 1 → 2 → 3 → 4 → 5 → 6 ─┐
       ┌─────────────────────┘
       └→ 2 → 3 → 4 → 5 → 6 → 7 → 8

  duplicated: [2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
  path: [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]

how about (2, 7), (2, 7), (8, 12)? Discover the circuits, then vary the repetition count as a knob for test time compute

All of Ageless Linux's content is now on github, all updated today. https://agelesslinux.github.io/ & https://github.com/agelesslinux

"It's just a bash script" - I know. There's no age verification / age surveillance systems deployed yet. I'm using the space and the popularity of my civil disobedience rage/shitpost to track various laws, who's behind them, what the Linux distros are doing about it, and how to clean it out.

When there are age verification systems to remove, Ageless Linux will become:

• documentation of the inventory of Linux based age verification systems
• A Debian spin with none of them included
• "short circuit" scripts that feed "noncompliant" or "over18" to all software, allowing age verification programs that crash to otherwise run
• an "app store" that does not perform any age verification. My app store will, however, remind users to talk to a trusted adult before using applications that connect to the internet - which is not a requirement of any law currently passed or under consideration, and would do a hell of a lot more to keep children safe than the current "requirement to lie" policies that are being considered in multiple states.

Hi Everyone, all of Ageless Linux's content is now on github, all updated today. https://agelesslinux.github.io/ & https://github.com/agelesslinux

"It's just a bash script" - I know. There's no age verification / age surveillance systems deployed yet. I'm using the space and the popularity of my civil disobedience rage/shitpost to track various laws, who's behind them, what the Linux distros are doing about it, and how to clean it out.

When there are age verification systems to remove, Ageless Linux will become:

• documentation of the inventory of Linux based age verification systems
• A Debian spin with none of them included
• "short circuit" scripts that feed "noncompliant" or "over18" to all software, allowing age verification programs that crash to otherwise run
• an "app store" that does not perform any age verification. My app store will, however, remind users to talk to a trusted adult before using applications that connect to the internet - which is not a requirement of any law currently passed or under consideration, and would do a hell of a lot more to keep children safe than the current "requirement to lie" policies that are being considered in multiple states.

Would you consider helping me pass out STEM education devices that break the law in every possible way? If I make the linux distro, the device, the app store, the apps, and personally hand it to a kid, then I must be breaking the law. Which action in that chain isn't obviously protected speech? These laws won't hold up, and we need to make them test it in court.

https://agelesslinux.org/

Then we should take it off the books. Easily circumvented, no real penalty... ...so what's the purpose of this law? It's so they can death-by-lawyer companies that enable the "wrong" kind of free speech. Tea was once thrown into harbors over less tyrannical decisions

I do not live in California, but I have a few months until it's actually illegal. I am willing to travel and break this law, yes. I'd love to hear a court tell me which part of writing software, publishing a website, handing a computer to a kid in public, and them connecting to a web server to download that software isn't completely and obviously covered by free speech

I guess I'll add breaking this law to my to-do list. https://agelesslinux.org/

as a starting point

"I will accept any rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do."

yet for this particular law, breaking it just means handing a raspberry pi to a child. Complying means only using computers through approved, surveilled means. This was written by evil people who want "ipad kid" to be the skill ceiling of the general public's usage of computers. This law is not meant to prevent some theoretical bad deed, it's to use it as a hammer against systems that enable the "wrong kind" of free speech. It's my civic duty to flagrantly, publicly violate this law as thoroughly as possible.

Debian doesn't even have age verification

yet. Major distros are now looking at how to comply with these laws. I'm going to stay on top of reporting what the laws say Linux distros must do, and also make sure that comply-with-draconian-laws.sh has an off switch or undo button.

I'm not going to comply. https://agelesslinux.org/