seidleroni

I live in the Boston area and there is a candlepin bowling place called Needham Bowlaway where the owner has done something similar. He automated the scoring system since nobody from outside New England really knows how to score it and it works really well. I believe he used some basic java code to detect whether the pixels at certain areas are white (pin) or not (no pin). He's always working on developing a video game every time I'm there although he may have finished by now. Maybe there's more overlap between bowling centers and software engineers than OP thinks.

Curious who you ended up using and if you recommend them.

The tool I'm most proud of is "Hex Flex" (https://seidleroni.github.io/Hex-Flex-Web/). It is a tool to view and compare the contents of Intel Hex files. Should be useful to other people who work in the firmware field.

Not exactly a tool, but I also made pelohard.com which ranks the most recent Peloton classes by difficulty. Updated twice daily.

I am absolutely gobsmacked how good the game is! I didn't complete the level fully but I completed all but one of the tasks. This is both smooth and fun and I'm surprised that a modern LLM can do something this well, let alone in a single file. It makes me realize how much the goalposts have been moved. A few years ago (ChatGPT 2? 2.5?) wasn't even able to implement a small Python script I would expect a junior engineer to be capable of producing. Now we're getting the tools to do something like this. You should think about how to "rate" the outputs or at least provide your own rankings.

Also, I just listened to the latest Volts podcast and they make the claim that data centers will actually lower the cost of electricity fairly soon (~2030). Very counterintuitive but it does make sense. We'll find out soon enough.

https://www.volts.wtf/p/sooner-than-you-think-electricity

Noah Smith had a good article about this in 2024 for those interested in reading more: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/six-ideas-for-poland

I can't imagine doing something like this anytime soon, but I will probably follow the advice around having AI check the return against all my forms and previous years return before submitting.

I was explaining this to my elementary school aged kids just a few days ago. We were eating in a restaurant and I told them that when I was their age most restaurants had a smoking and non-smoking section. Of course the smoke did not respect the invisible barrier. The idea that people could just smoke indoors and it was normal really blew their minds.

I suspect they made this public because many customers will notice that they are no longer carrying Adafruit products. I respect both companies greatly and have purchased from them in the past. It will be interesting to see what happened, if that is made public.

This is really cool! As someone who has basically no piano training, this is fun! Perhaps there could be some super-easy mode where you actually highlight the keys while you're playing the sounds (in simon mode) to help the super noobs train their ears.

I think there is also some FOMO involved. Once people started saying how AI was helping them be more productive, a lot of folks felt that if they didn't do the same, they were lagging behind.

interesting... I'll give that a shot

Is there any way to do this with the frontier LLM's?

I don't believe that it just analyzes the transcription. I asked Gemini to look at the youtube video referenced on the site below and "build" something that duplicates that device. It did a pretty good approximation that it could not have done without going through the full video.

https://bitsnpieces.dev/posts/a-synth-for-my-daughter/

The author actually discusses the results of the paper. He's not some rando but a Wharton Professor and when he is comparing the results to a grad student, it is with some authority.

"So is this a PhD-level intelligence? In some ways, yes, if you define a PhD level intelligence as doing the work of a competent grad student at a research university. But it also had some of the weaknesses of a grad student. The idea was good, as were many elements of the execution, but there were also problems..."

100%. I have known a couple of people that did some form of "medical tourism", mostly for expensive dental work. In both cases they did some form of tech contract work as a sole proprietorship and bought their own health insurance (not through a partner). The overlap of people who can save up thousands of dollars for treatment abroad and have poor health insurance is probably not too large.

As someone who works with firmware, it is funny how different our definitions of "bare metal" is.

Having lost my mother to melanoma over 20 years ago, it is very encouraging to see the progress that has been made against this terrible disease. Very sorry for your loss.

I'm not sure if this applies to all carriers but with many carriers if you are on wifi you can send/receive text messages and sometimes even make calls. Certainly you could use WhatsApp or similar in that case.

That's a valid point. What I originally meant to convey is that when issues arise, people often assign blame and point fingers without any evidence, just based on their own feelings. It is important to gather objective evidence to support any claims. Sounds somewhat obvious but in my career I have found that people are very quick to blame issues on others when 15 minutes of testing would have gotten to the truth.

I work in embedded systems, and the best advice I can offer is: resist the urge to speculate when problems arise. Stay quiet, grab an oscilloscope, and start probing the problem area. Objective measurements beat conjecture every time. It's hard to argue with scope captures that clearly show what's happening. As Jack Ganssle says, "One test is worth a thousand opinions."

This is really great, well done! I have two young kids and was thinking about putting something like this together and I'm delighted that you beat me to it. Having a 6yo and 8yo, it would be great if there were some more basic games as well.

As much as I love AI/LLM's and use them on a daily basis, this does a great job revealing the gap between current capabilities and what the massive hype machine would have us believe the systems are already capable of.

I wonder how long it will take frontier LLM's to be able to handle something like this with ease without it using a lot of "scaffolding".

I'm not sure if this is just me, but with the "Starter Apps" I don't see how you can extend them using AI in aistudio. For example, there doesn't seem to be a way to add more code to the app with AI, even if you copy the Starter App. Am I missing something, or is this just a big miss from Google?

It would be great to give each of the NPC's their own character. For example, some of the NPC's could have a grudge against the hero for reasons of their own. They could be cheering against him for causing such a ruckus in their village, or maybe some "Monday morning quarterback" happening, thinking they could have handled the problem much better than he did. I think an LLM may be pretty good at coming up with some ideas. Or maybe even make it a bit tongue-in-cheek and have some of the NPC's be fans of the hero's enemies.

A website that sorts the recent Peloton bike rides by difficulty. https://pelohard.com/

I love my Peloton and it was really annoying finding a ride with a difficulty over a certain threshold that was recent. I'm an embedded developer by day and did this with a lot of help from ChatGPT and Claude. Hoping to add some more features to it as time goes on.

I keep wondering the same thing myself. I google it occasionally but never come up with anything.

Care to share how you're doing it? I'm a pretty terrible gardener but love potatoes and it looks like this may be an easy way to do it.

I'm very impressed! Using Gpt-4o and Gemini, I've rarely had success when asking the AI models to create a PlantUML flowchart or state machine representation of any moderate complexity. I think this is due to some confusing API docs for PlantUML. Claude 3.5 Sonnet totally knocked it out of the park when I asked for 4-5 different diagrams and did all of them flawlessly. I haven't gone through the output in great detail to see if its correct, but at first glance they are pretty close. The fact that all the diagrams were able to be rendered is an achievement.

As the article mentions, this is also used by authors. I went to a book signing for Mark Z. Danielewski, the author of House of Leaves and he mentioned that for his books, he always ends up throwing out the beginning of the book.