Category: Uncategorized

It seems the visual calorie estimator project I proposed is more or less being done.

Gotta act fast in this business.

They’re charging quite a bit – might still be worth entry.

We’re now beating the random baseline on a 10×10 board, with a greedy algorithm trained only on self-play data:

Evaluating umpire AIs:

r wins: 459

./ai/agz/6.agz wins: 541

Draws: 0

The model is a basic convolutional neural network based on the context surrounding the city or unit taking the next action. The weights serialize to 166KB, so easy to deploy with the game.

The key to training was to up the number of training instances – “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data”, after all. With purely-random algorithms doing the self-play, this can run extremely fast.

The next obstacle will be the transport mechanic: the need for land units in Umpire to board a transport ship to transfer continents. The inability of air and sea units to capture cities means this mechanic must be understood at some level for an AI to operate on the full 180×90 map, where large stretches of ocean divide multiple land masses.

With purely-random players, the likelihood of this mechanic getting triggered and thus entering the training data seems fairly low. But if we throw enough training episodes at it, we’ll see it eventually. This may necessitate multithreading the self-play code to run multiple games simultaneously, and optimizing the game engine for throughput.

Impressionistically it’s like git and rsync had a baby, oh, but it’s a fileystem. That’s how it feels with the lightweight snapshots (like branches/tags/commits in git) and the send/receive (like straight up rsync).

If there were a “merge” or “rebase” concept in this world, I think I’d have uses for it.

I’ve been using Duplicity for my off-site backup for a while now. It’s almost obsoleted by btrfs send/receive. (As are most backup tools, at least from the thousand foot view.) All it needs is encryption and compression, with the filesystem already providing the deltas.

A REPL snippet’s worth a thousand words:

> [9,10,11].sort()
[ 10, 11, 9 ]

The thousand-and-first word is: unconscionable!

(Updates Concept: Cross-platform music playback daemon)

Motivation: I’m trying to move away from Spotify, tired of renting my own playlists back month after month. So I’m paying for music downloads online (MP3s and FLACs) and ripping CDs, and generally moving to an old-is-new-again post-Spotify music workflow.

As Linux is my primary desktop environment, I’m reacquainting myself with the Linux music playback ecosystem for the first time in a decade, more or less. While many of the projects I once relied on (hello, Amarok!) are still around, on the whole the field feels neglected. Even Spotify’s crappy client does get some things right, and usability standards have generally risen since my last outing. But open source offerings haven’t entirely kept up.

I’m also struck by the lack of common infrastructure between projects. While low-level libraries are shared (e.g. libogg, libpulseaudio), the core file discovery, indexing, tag editing, playback, and playlist management functionality that music players rely on are cobbled together afresh by each project. (As well as transcoding, another common feature.)

The duplication applies not only to desktop music players (Amarok, Rhythmbox, Clementine, cmus) but also to music servers such as Navidrome or mpd.

Proposal: define an abstract music playback and management interface, the Music Server Protocol, and implement it definitively in musicd, a comprehensive music server, integrating with existing or newly-built clients.

musicd could run incidentally (like a language server in the LSP world) or as a persistent daemon, and optionally expose a public network interface.

The latter point, network transparency, allows such a system to be a true Spotify replacement, serving music to mobile apps from VPS or other servers.

Multiuser support would be a useful feature, allowing friends and family to integrate their music collections; a lock-based rights management scheme could ensure that music licenses are treated as finite in the shared environment.

Implementation: I would implement musicd in Rust, interfacing with the same libraries as the existing apps. If there’s a sufficiently-mature Rust codebase that already does what I need, I’d happily fork it. I’m insisting on Rust because I’m more familiar with it than with C++ these days, and because I’d prefer Rust’s rigors in what I hope would become a building-block for many projects.

On the petty side—gets frowny cat, rather than horror cat. After a decade of Python, it’s surprising to me that Javascript doesn’t allow arr[-1] and such. Maybe negative indices returning undefined is widely relied upon, leading to compatibility issues? Not sure why it’s not a thing—arr[arr.length - 1] is just no fun.

In Javascript, Set treats objects only by reference, not by value, requiring weird contortions to maintain unique sets of non-primitive values.

In every other modern language I’ve worked with, the standard library set allows custom comparisons. But not Javascript.

In Java / Kotlin, HashSet defers to an object’s hashCode method, which can be overridden to control comparisons. With TreeSet it’s even easier: just pass a Comparator of your own into the constructor.

Python’s set will handle any hashable value, so overriding __hash__ and __eq__ should do the trick.

Rust’s HashSet relies on the Eq, Hash, and PartialEq traits—conceptually somewhat similar to Python’s approach, with Rust’s trait implementations and Python’s special methods being two ways to accomplish much the same thing.

But in Javascript, and by extension Typescript, the standard library provides no facility for useful sets of custom types.

https://medium.com/coding-at-dawn/how-to-use-set-to-filter-unique-items-in-javascript-es6-196c55ce924b

No Array.prototype.remove (a la Array.prototype.filter) 😿

You have to use splice based on an index instead. Would be much simpler to provide an item to be removed. The equivalent of arr.splice(arr.indexOf(item), 1).

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5767325/how-can-i-remove-a-specific-item-from-an-array

A contact manager on steroids. Real social networks. A person or group view that shows all known interactions, notes/diary entries, etc.

Desktop application, I hope.

Set a weekly / monthly / annual donation level.

Daemon monitors app usage, and distributes donations proportionally, possibly through a third party service.