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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  18d ago (text post)   441 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for September 22nd, 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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So the new models (Astra and Claude 5.5) have dramatically improved 3d reasoning.

Naturally this has big implications for my Minecraft project.

The results I'm getting are a lot better now.

https://rumble.com/v7f416s-playing-gpt-6-astra-and-minecraft-mcp.html

https://imgur.com/a/uzJBZoY

The downside is that I'm stuck on how to move forward with it.

So the new models (Astra and Claude 5.5) have dramatically improved 3d reasoning.

How come? What changed?

I know with Astra it was an announced feature. People have been using it to make things with Blender.

https://developers.openai.com/blog/architectural-visualization-with-astra

https://x.com/walterzhu8/status/2100255999365964113

https://x.com/tomkrcha/status/2095756085890310311

They both just do functional interiors for buildings now. Previously I had to do a lot of hand holding because they would generate ladders that end at the celling, staircases without holes in the floor, that sort of thing.

The results I get now are impressive. Previously they were interesting but kind of garbage. I really didn't fix anything, so it's the models.

One of the examples is a waterfront city and it decided to put legs going down to the seafloor beneath the platform. Older models would just have a floating platform. The terrain height map function was always there, they just didn't do much with it.

Interesting stuff. How expensive is it to let Astra do 3d modelling, though?

I have no idea. People on X are giving me the impression that it's pretty quick which suggests it doesn't burn too many tokens.

Spent most of the week tweaking the intro story board. There's some things about it I'd still like to change, but at the moment the fixes that come to mind will bring their own issues. In the mean time I'd appreciate any feedback, if any of you guys want to take a look (link expires in 24 hours, DM me if you want a fresh one).

How have you been doing @Southkraut.

Spent the whole weekend doing HEMA, then slept for a day.

But I did manage to fix my tooltips. Then I disliked them for being messy, so I reworked them to have some internal layouting, and now they look nice enough.

intro story board

Alright, let me confess - I am so distracted by the AI art that I can't concentrate on the story. My bad.

Recently somebody here, I think @RandomRanger, talked about using AI-as-in-LLM to build AI-as-in-game-opponent.

There is an old simple turn-based game that I've been playing for years, but I have to treat it more as a solitaire, because the computer enemies are frustratingly weak even on the highest difficulty, and it's very uncommon to struggle with a map. Except there is one infuriating quirk, where the enemies gang up on the weaker of the leading sides instead of the strongest, despite the game mechanics being very snowbally, and so the hyenas never even prosper themselves, only make a player's stumble almost never recoverable. (The recoveries are the most memorable matches, though.)

Claude Fable graciously one-shotted a clone of the game for me (and I wasted an embarrassing amount of time playing all the sides by myself) with a prompt that stipulated it should be decoupled enough to support both a human UI and a connection for artificial opponents.

How would I go about producing strong, motivated to personally win opponents? Ideally it would be something like AlphaGo self-playing training, but I'm not sure if that would be feasible on a consumer desktop with a middling GPU.

Well you can use evolutionary weights (CPU-based), just running the game for many generations and having it become more adept via self-play, evolving a series of parameters that affect its decisionmaking. But this then results in various causal issues, like the AI not understanding that X needs to be made before Y. Or you can try for search, where the AI scans all possible (ideally pruned) paths and aims for the best. Or a combination of the two. Some parts of the game may be more amenable to search than others, search is by definition the strongest approach but gamestate branching makes it impractically expensive unless cleverly managed.

AlphaGo does more complex things with neural networks that might be hard for a consumer GPU. That approach wasn't suitable for my game due to a certain level of complexity (and that I'm adding more content and rules over time) but maybe it would be for yours since the rules are unchanging.

Fable would know more than me. Ask Fable for a detailed plan.

And also work out a good statistical base to do A/B tests so you can see if the AI is improving much. I'm watching these tests happen right now on my other monitor. It's an interesting process but once you start you begin to appreciate why strategy games have such poor AI, it's like dipping into an ocean of limitless depth.

I failed to hold myself accountable.

I built out my training/data pipeline and set about building my first pass at a model last week. I hate what I came up with, went back to the drawing board. I read the PINO paper, realized it was too mathy for me to grok at a first pass and promptly lost interest in doing anything last week. However the competition is coming to a close and I never really submitted anything, I might try to train and validate one of their baseline models just for the hell of it.

I talked with the co-worker who suggested it to me, looks like the same thing happened to him. Which is unfortunate. Sometimes it feels like work can really drain the motivation to do similar stuff outside of work. I used to love doing engineering ideas on ML models at home, now it just feels like work. I want to start fucking around with a 3D printed drone idea I have but now I'm afraid I'm just going to repeat this experience again with added money waste as well.

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