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Years ago, I made one of these at an hackathon style event for developing HTML5 gamedev tools. I didn't know much about audio programming at the time, so I read descriptions of what parameters were and then wrote code that I thought would work similarly. I got enough wrong where the end results sound a bit different than other tools, occasionally in a good way.

This predates the WebAudio API, and so it builds data URLs as WAVs instead. Every sound can be represented as a short string, and the tool can be used as a library that procedurally generates the sounds from the strings. It also has a "song mode" where notes can be provided to guide the sound, which makes certain types of more complicated sounds possible to make, including jingles and short songs.

It's definitely dated now, but if anyone is interested, you can find it here

https://www.leshylabs.com/apps/sfMaker/

See the "Example Sounds" at the bottom of the page to hear what it can do.


I did some experimenting with this a little while back and was disappointed in how poorly LLMs played games.

I made some AI tools (https://github.com/DougHaber/lair) and added in a tmux tool so that LLMs could interact with terminals. First, I tried Nethack. As expected, it's not good at understanding text "screenshots" and failed miserably.

https://x.com/LeshyLabs/status/1895842345376944454

After that I tried a bunch of the "bsdgames" text games.

Here is a video of it playing a few minutes of Colossal Cave Adventure:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BMxkWUON70

With this, it could play, but not very well. It gets confused a lot. I was using gpt-4o-mini. Smaller models I could run at home work much worse. It would be interesting to try one of the bigger state of the art models to see how much it helps.

To give it an easier one I also had it hunt the Wumpus:

https://x.com/LeshyLabs/status/1896443294005317701

I didn't try improving this much, so there might be some low hanging fruit even in providing better instructions and tuning what is sent to the LLM. For these, I was hoping I could just hand it a terminal with a game in it and have it play decently. We'll probably get there, but so far it's not that simple.


Try the game 9:05 by Adam Cadre [0]. It's one of the easiest (and best) non-trivial text adventures. Some models are able to reach the first or even second ending.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9:05


What do you suppose would happen if you tried it on a game that doesn't have 25 years of walkthroughs written for it?


That’s a good point. For 9:05, I expect it would work just as well, since the game helps the user in many ways. The puzzles are of the type “The door is closed”, and you solve them with “open door.”

My suggestion concerns the poor performance DougHaber mentioned: if 9:05 can’t be solved, something else must be wrong with his experiments.

I’ve tried three dozen games, and it’s still hard to find ones suitable for LLM benchmarks. With non-linear complex text-adventure games, my guess is, that they get stuck in an endless loop at some point. Hence, I just test the progress in the first hundred steps.


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Sadly, most of the replies you've gotten are terribly biased or uniformed. It is a good question. I'm not connected to any of this, so this answer is solely from my own understanding.

For those that don't know, the Brave browser has Tor tabs, which route through Tor. It also has the standard private tabs. Tor support currently exists only on the desktop Brave browser.

Here is the announcement: https://brave.com/tor-tabs-beta

Brave has been supporting Tor, and running Tor relays to improve the network.

Brave is newer at the game. They have had Tor tabs less than a year. They can do fingerprinting protection and no-script, but it's still a full featured web browser, with a lot of risks. The fingerprinting protection isn't as good as the Tor Browser, and unless they changed something, Javascript wasn't disabled by default in Tor tabs.

The Tor Browser has been around for a while and is meant to be a secure web browser from top to bottom. It has had a lot of development looking to find and fix possible leaks and to ensure security. That is its primary focus, and it is pretty good at it.

If you want to use Tor casually, maybe access an onion site, or just get a big boost in your level of privacy, the Tor tabs in Brave are a nice option. They are really easy to use and give great privacy. It is good for casual Tor use.

If you want (or need) serious privacy, the Tor Browser is a better choice. That is its purpose. It is developed to be hardened for protecting the user and it will provide better protection.


It is also based on Firefox, and when possible improvements it makes to Firefox feed back into regular Firefox, strengthening their position in an ever-less competitive browser market. Not something everyone cares about, but it could be relevant.


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We are building a best-in-class advertising platform for brands and advertisers to take full advantage of the massive reach on television. This is an opportunity to join a team of amazing engineers and data scientists.

Our tech stack is written in Ruby, Python, and Javascript. We deploy microservices in Docker to AWS.

We are currently looking for:

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* Software Engineer, Applications / Full Stack

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We are building a best-in-class advertising platform for brands and advertisers to take full advantage of the massive reach on television. This is an opportunity to join a team of amazing engineers and data scientists.

Our tech stack is written in Ruby, Python, and Javascript. We deploy microservices in Docker to AWS.

We are currently looking for:

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* Software Engineer, Infrastructure (applications and tools development on an SRE / DevOps infrastructure team)

* Data Scientist (ML Pipeline / Operations Research)

Please apply directly through: https://www.simulmedia.com/careers/


As pointed out, 25 years later was in the 80s. I wonder if some of the delay in adoption was due to the relevant patents, which were filed around 1959. Maybe that gave a two decade monopoly to Texas Instruments making it hard for others to adopt or innovate around the technology?


TI definitely did not have a monopoly on ICs for those 25 years. Those first patents were on Kilby's process which was essentially abandoned. Fairchild and Intel did a tremendous amount of work getting ICs to be more useful over that timespan (see self-aligned gates).


This article misses a point as to why the community was outraged at the license change from LGPL to GPL. I was testing switching an application to EXT JS at the time, and I was really liking it. The prototype worked so well that we were preparing to get the commercial license, and then the license change happened.

After the change was announced, a number of people said they would fork and maintain the LGPL versions. One of the people behind EXT JS showed up in online discussions at the time and insisted that would be a violation.

The problem came from it not really being under LGPL. They tacked on this extra piece:

  Ext is also licensed under the terms of the Open Source LGPL 3.0 license. You may use our open source license if you:

   * Want to use Ext in an open source project that precludes using non-open source software

   * Plan to use Ext in a personal, educational or non-profit manner

   * Are using Ext in a commercial application that is not a software development library or toolkit, you will
     meet LGPL requirements and you do not wish to support the project
There was some debate over this, since the GPL prohibits further restrictions in some cases, and a lot of people believed they could ignore those extra restrictions and treat it as true LGPL.

The EXT JS company in online forums insisted they were wrong, and further outraged the community. A lot of people, myself included, decided to stop using EXT JS. We were planning on the commercial license, but the response of the company didn't feel right, and so like many others, we abandoned EXT JS.


According to Wikipedia:

  Udo of Aachen (c.1200–1270) is a fictional monk, a 
  creation of British technical writer
  Ray Girvan, who introduced him in an April Fool's hoax
  article in 1999. According to the article, Udo was an
  illustrator and theologian who discovered the Mandelbrot
  set some 700 years before Benoît Mandelbrot.

  Additional details of the hoax include the rediscovery of
  Udo's works by the also-fictional Bob Schipke, a Harvard
  mathematician, who supposedly saw a picture of the
  Mandelbrot set in an illumination for a 13th-century carol.
  Girvan also attributed Udo as a mystic and poet whose
  poetry was set to music by Carl Orff with the haunting O
  Fortuna in Carmina Burana.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udo_of_Aachen


I have to admit I am a little sad this was an April fools joke. It would have been so cool if some obscure medieval monk had discovered the Mandelbrot set centuries ago.

Then again, IIRC, complex numbers were not invented (discovered?) until the 1500s, so good old Udo would have had a hard time figuring out the math.


He "did" invent complex numbers! From TFA:

"Initially, Udo's aim was to devise a method for determining who would reach heaven. He assumed each person's soul was composed of independent parts he called "profanus" (profane) and "animi" (spiritual), and represented these parts by a pair of numbers. Then he devised rules for drawing and manipulating these number pairs. In effect, he devised the rules for complex arithmetic, the spiritual and profane parts corresponding to the real and imaginary numbers of modern mathematics."


Serves me right for not reading the "article" thoroughly. ;-)


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