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Tinker Tuesday for September 1st, 2026

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service.

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This last week has been mostly AI work, setting up shell mechanics for my tank project.

  • Safety classifiers are exceedingly frustrating, and combined with the AI's verbosity in commenting code resulted in a situation where the AI effectively poisoned itself, writing a bunch of files individually which, when loaded into context simultaneously, dropped the safety locks like a guillotine. I think I've cleaned up most of it, but it's still a pain. Projectile and armor mechanics look good, and I've got a start on internal component damage; still need fires and ammo rack explosions.

  • I've upgraded my bespoke-GURPS-Vehicles-2nd-Edition weapons and ammo pipeline, and I'm working on implementing various weapons and turrets; the next goal is a loadout menu where you pick weapons, equipment and components to take into battle. AI enemies, improved gun/explosion effects, and a light-baking/environment pass are in the hopper.

  • The social situation is dire. I'm making vastly better progress than I have in years, with a level of effort that feels entirely sustainable... But discussing classifier woes and the HE shell breakthrough with one friend led to him deploying snark, quitting the group chat, and a 24-hour communications blackout. Another friend was like "hey, cool stuff, but maybe don't show this to anyone in the (other) groupchat, they hate AI and anyone that uses it." The latter reaction is hardly unexpected, since I've lurked long enough to know that this was the firm group consensus and there's zero point challenging it, but... At some point, it would be nice to have some form of human connection outside my immediate family not rigorously policed for conformity to alien dogma. The general Artist position on AI is a skin of intellectually-bankrupt blather on top of an ocean of naked self-interest, but goddamn will they crucify you if you cross them on it in any way.

The general Artist position on AI is a skin of intellectually-bankrupt blather on top of an ocean of naked self-interest

I actually thought they'd be a fair bit more self-interested, and suddenly find it fine and dandy when it's the code monkeys that are getting replaced, so kudos for consistency, I guess.

Safety classifiers are exceedingly frustrating

Can you post (or DM, if you prefer) some of the text that's been tripping it up? It started as a gimmick, but I have a system prompt that gives me feedback on how much thought-crime I'm committing, and why it's considered a thought crime. It doesn't have much use other than making me giggle, but I thought it might actually be useful for getting around the safeties, and wanted to put it to a test.

Also a general thought: if you can actually get working code, I think you could solo-dev a pretty kickass game. I really liked the writing you did for HighSpace, and since you're an artist, there's not much more you'd need.

Can you post (or DM, if you prefer) some of the text that's been tripping it up?

DM sent with a link for a bunch of the scripts!

And yeah, I love making this stuff. Did the guy who was going to do writing for HighSpace ever get any writing done? Because I started writing up my own ideas for a version of it based on setting stuff you'd mentioned, plus some stellar megastructure ideas. Come to think of it, I'm wasting Midjourney credits at the moment, I should try burning some to illustrate that idea...