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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  11d ago (text post)   364 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for September 29th, 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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Starting from next week, I want to try shopping my novel around to literary agents one more time, but if I haven't heard anything by the new year I'm just going to post it online, one chapter a week.

One reason I think I'm not getting any takers is that, even after changing it quite significantly, I still don't think the opening is compelling or attention-grabbing enough. The other day I had an idea for an alternate opening, which I quickly bashed out. I'm curious if I'm on the right track, so if you fine people can spare five minutes to read two passages of text I'd really appreciate it.

Are you taller than 5′9″, or shorter than 5′9″?

You forgot about the people who are exactly 5′9″.

the opening

Last time you did this, didn't somebody point out that whether someone is interested in a book's opening paragraphs is related to whether that person is interested in the book's summary? It doesn't make sense to solicit opinions on the opening paragraphs from people who never would have picked up the book in the first place.

You forgot about the people who are exactly 5′9″.

Fair point, amended.

The player now has health which he loses on contact with the monsters, and dies when he runs out of it. I was also working on distinct ammo bars for each ammo type, but so far the slop generator has been failing me. Let's see how it goes this week.

How have you been doing @Southkraut?

I'm new, so maybe I'm missing some context, but that seems like a fairly small step for an LLM-generated game. It seems unintuitive to me that a frontier model would struggle with it.

A few days back, I had Claude Opus 5.5 one-shot a pretty well-polished shmup game with a bunch of weird mechanics. Are you using a simpler local model as an artistic statement, or is there something else at play?

I just created the new thread (still needs to be approved by mods), you might want to repost there.

Been working on designs for spatial bucketing and simulated perception, which go together. It helps that I've done both before, long ago. Also started implementing both, but it's heavily WIP. The spatial bucketing is structurally there, but does not yet subdivide the single starting bucket. The simulated perception still requires more structural work. In both cases I've sidestepped the hard algorithmic questions for the time being so as to get to a prototype faster, which I deem advisable.

Working with sublimation, toner transfer, vinyl transfer+acid etch for various knickknacks for some FIRST teams and a local festival. I don't do enough with this stuff to justify UV DTF, which is the 'right' answer for nine out of ten use cases, but holy shit every time I have to get a heat press working right do I reconsider either that, or just getting gang sheets.

What are you using for toner transfer? A clothes iron or a modded laminator?

Clamshell-style heat press for flat pieces. Trying a tumbler press for rounded pieces (mostly glass steins, since one of the shops that's asked for help at the local festival is a brewery), but it's an awkward fit and haven't been happy with the pressure yet. Might end up modifying it or kitbashing something else to work instead.

I've tried the clothes iron route back when I was just running PCBs, but it was not a good experience. Never tried the laminator version; heard good things, at least compared to a clothes iron, but by the time they were cheap I needed too many vias or too many small traces for self-manufacture to be a good option. Don't know how either hold up for arts-and-crafts style use.

I installed Omarchy on a spare laptop the other day after hearing some chatter about it and watching the producer DHH's intro on Youtube: https://youtube.com/watch?v=F7fe9pa8OeE&t=1025s

I can say it's definitely one of the most compelling Linux distros I've installed as a daily driver for some time, mostly because of how different but also how well-thought-out it is. It's designed to be used almost entirely with the keyboard, with a minimalist but very good-looking CLI-inspired interface. It's the first time I've been inspired to really made a solid effort of becoming proficient with using a tiling window interface, and while it's still not entirely intuitive, there's something about it that seems so much less...stressful, or distracting maybe, compared to having a huge stack of floating windows laying around. It more-or-less forces you to do keep things tidy as you work, which adds a little bit of friction but feels really satisfying to work in.

It's also completely unapologetic about being AI-forward, being developed with AI assistance and having a ton of AI tools built-in. The OS itself is designed to be easy to modify by AI agents, so that if you do want to make changes to the system, you don't need to be a hacker to do so. As a result I have finally broken down and opened my wallet for a Supergrok subscription, which has been another interesting experience.

ETA: The community is interesting as well - it seems disproportionately filled with people who are just generally interested in new software possibilities and less interested in politics or bureaucracy.

ETA: The flat design and tiling system make me recall Windows 8 with a little more sympathy for its design decisions, but this may not be a paradigm that would ever be popular with the masses.

I swear to Odin I posted my thanks for your report of your experiences in here earlier, but it seems that it was eaten by a glitch in the matrix. Anyway, appreciate the report, Omarchy was my alternate distro choice to try out Real Soon Now and I may replace my aging Pop! install with it because Cosmic desktop is teh suXX0rz and I'm tired of dealing with its dumpster fires.

I've been going with hyprland/HyDE, but Omarchy has some nice benefits.

The entire hypr ecosystem is weird, but in a good way. I've called it catgirl thigh-high, and I've got a lot of sympathy for that tribe, but it's nicer still to just see the mission as the mission rather than a rallying cry for the politics.

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