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A note from the co-author: This post was written collaboratively with Claude, who also did most of the actual infrastructure work — reading docs, writing Ansible roles, debugging crashed services over SSH, and talking me out of increasingly cursed networking solutions. When we hit the Fly.io memory wall at 2am, Claude suggested the boring VPS approach that actually worked. Fair to say this server wouldn’t be running without the assist. — Zac ...

I have been working on the concept of ‘Dwarf Fortress for storytelling with LLMs’ for years now and, I’ve finally managed to assemble all of the pieces needed to do this at scale. The following is a Claude summary of the project: The Story That Wrote Itself The Captain of the Guard struck without warning. Dilol Caverncats, a human engraver, collapsed under the first blow to the hand—muscle bruising through the pig tail glove, wrist bending unnaturally, tendons tearing. Dilol stood up. The Captain struck again. Again, Dilol rose. Eleven times the combat logs recorded those three defiant words: “The engraver stands up.” ...

At work, I build AI agents(trigger warning this is about LLMs) that are designed to help teachers avoid as much day to day drudgery as possible. We provide a system that, counterintuitively, is geared towards reducing the amount of time a teacher needs to spend in the app spelunking around. Need the latest assessment grades for Mrs Doe’s 3rd period? Just ask the Ai, it’ll go off and grab that information for you while you pour another cup of coffee. We use top of the line models from Anthropic to be as accurate, un-biased, error free as possible to achieve this. These models require API keys and 5-figures in engineering time just to put the guardrails in place to allow a Teacher/Administrator to use them in relative safety. ...

What I Built and Why I’ve always enjoyed those element-combining merge games like Doodle God or Little Alchemy. You know the ones - Water + Fire = Steam, Earth + Water = Mud, that sort of thing. There’s something satisfying about discovering combinations, but after playing a few, I started noticing a fundamental limitation: every combination is pre-determined. Everyone who plays gets exactly the same results. The discovery phase is fun, but once you know the combinations, there’s no variance. ...

I think we’ve slid into a trap where our political beliefs are defined as being “in opposition to” another groups. This ensures an antagonistic, us-verses-them mentality while the “elites” watch. So here’s a list of things this dirty liberal is for, not against. The 8-Hour Day The idea that your life isn’t owned by your employer. This standard was the result of decades of bloody struggle by labor activists and unions against 10, 12, and even 16-hour workdays. The slogan was “8 hours for work, 8 hours for rest, 8 hours for what we will.” Citation: Eight Hour Day - Wikipedia ...