That was fun, but the AI and the balance need some work.

It's too easy to win as the small boat. You just stay ahead of your opponent and then turn back and strafe periodically.

It would be much more challenging if you added wind and realistic sailing dynamics. If wind direction vs sail orientation mattered to your speed and boat characteristics weren't as simple as smaller = faster then I think it would be much better balanced and way more fun/challenging!

On further play, really the only match up where I had any trouble was large vs large. (As a side request, it would be nice to be able to choose your opponent!)

With both small and medium, you can just strafe back and forth in front of your opponent if you're faster than them. With medium and large, you can just circle them and absorb more punishment than them when you're larger than them.

Multi-player would solve the AI problem -- especially if it was more than 1v1 -- and then it would be more challenging.

But I would still request realistic wind and sailing dynamics. That strafing maneuver isn't really possible with real wind dynamics, because you slow down as you swing around and that allows the opponent to catch up to you and return fire. You could have a little arrow in a corner of the screen that shows the wind direction. You don't even have to make the sails movable, you could just have your speed be proportional to how orthongal your sails are to the wind direction in the simplest implementation.

It would add a whole new element to it that would make it much more challenging! :)

Thanks for playing and the feedback. I plan on adding wind dynamics very soon. Letting you choose opponent instead of random should be easy. Multiplayer with more than 1 would be interesting, I like that idea!

Highlighting that game mechanics are hard - I struggled with your strategy but found it too easy to be the tank. Turn in a circle and shoot and rely on the higher HP + cannon loading.

Fair!

I just went into a circle and shot, won every time for every boat

If I remember correctly, the original was like this too. I always used the sloop and would often beat much larger ships.

Yeah so the other factor missing is gun calibre and ship hull reinforcement/design. The reason sloops didn’t dominate against ships of the line came down to these factors, as well as sheer number of guns.

A sloop’s guns were generally so light the balls would bounce off the hull of a ship of the line. The sheer weight of firepower in return would shred a sloop to pieces. Add on to that the fact that heavier guns can achieve longer range when trained at the right angle, and a sloop can’t really get anywhere near a ship of the line and live to tell the tale.

I plan on adding wind dynamics. The largest ship has 1 more cannon, do you think I should add more? or perhaps longer range on the larger ship cannons?

Longer range would help! I should also note that ships had forward- and aft-firing guns in addition to the main batteries on the gun decks firing to the sides. A smaller ship merely trying to run away could be fired upon until it got out of range.

yes, i also always chose the Sloop and would usually win.

The cannonballs should have randomized elevation as well so that "raking" the bow and stern is more likely to get hits than hitting the side. Hits on the bow and stern should also do more damage. Cross the T!

That's interesting, because I found it trivial to win with the largest boat. Tank one hit, lead your target, blast away. I remain undefeated with the largest boat.

By contrast I found winning with the medium boat required the most skill, and lost the first few times I tried.

This tracks. In spite of the hype it seems pretty clear the model gains are now in a very strong logarithmic fall off. The curve is flattening and flattening fast.

And we're still not to a point where you can fully delegate coding tasks to a model like you would a human. I'm just using Claude for code review so far and while it's definitely valuable as a reviewer and catching real issues, it's still making pretty critical mistakes. Mistakes a junior might make, but a mid probably wouldn't.

Which makes me feel like I can't fully delegate to it. Whenever I try, I end up spending more time reviewing (and rewriting) its code and testing it than I would have spent writing the code myself and asking Claude to review it.

Given that we're starting to see the real costs of AI, and that the economics of it do not actually work, and those costs are still increasing substantially (the cost increase of Fable over Opus is no joke), this makes me feel all the more that we're headed for a bubble pop.

Yes, that is objectively a lot of money. The only people who wouldn't consider that a lot of money are the small percentage of people with incomes high enough to recover that very quickly -- the top roughly 10% or 20% of income earners in the US. For more or less everyone else, that is a lot of money.

And by a lot of money, I mean that being forced to unexpectedly spend that would be anywhere from stressful to very stressful to blowing away savings and impacting health, housing, and safety. (Remember, half the US has no savings and/or no ability to absorb an unexpected expense greater than $500.)

Eric, it's interesting the companies you've picked that "structurally resist gravity" and the ones you've left out. Costco, Patagonia, and Nova Nordisk are all interesting cases. But you're missing Mondragon, Equal Exchange, King Arthur Flour, and many others.

Basically, you appear to be focusing on investor owned companies and missing the entire class of worker cooperatives where the financial gravity you're talking about isn't merely resisted -- it doesn't exist. These companies have other challenges, to be sure, but if you're going to write a book called "Incorruptible" talking about businesses, not including these seems a significant oversight (at the least).

Do you address these in the book and just fail to highlight them here or is this really something you missed entirely?

Both Mondragon and King Arthur Flour are in the book. I'm not familiar with Equal Exchange, but now that you've mentioned it, I'm going to go learn more.

Cheers! Glad to hear you covered them. I'll check out the book when I have some reading bandwidth. I'm working on applying the lessons of these companies to tech, basically hoping to start a tech Mondragon.

It's extremely hard, because there's (almost) no infrastructure for it and funding is all but impossible to come by. The evidence is pretty strong that once cooperatives get going they are more resilient and far more pro-social than capital funded businesses. They are that structure your book seems to be alluding to that resists corruption.

There are two main reasons there aren't more of them: lack of awareness and lack of capital to fund them. If we want a truly pro-social economy, we should really work on fixing those two problems!

The problem is that people keep saying this, but the code keeps being bad. Every time I commit myself to trying to build something with AI, I end up wasting a ton of time and backing it out or completely rewriting it without the AI. The code it generates just isn't where it needs to be.

And people have been saying this exact thing for years now. Someone said this very thing two years ago. And we're still at the "maintenance dead end" stage. So let me flip it back on you: how many years are we going to pour an obscene amount of resources into this thing that is always going to be able to clean up its own messes "in a year or two" before we realize its a dead end (at best) and we need to be using those resources elsewhere? And, similarly, what happens to you when the SOTA AI in two years can't clean up the code it wrote for you two years ago, but people are depending on it and your still on the hook for maintaining it?

> If you don't agree, how many years into the future do we need until you would agree?

Respectfully, I asked first. ;)

> before we realize its a dead end (at best)

You've declared the future, which doesn't leave much room for a conversation. So, cheers!

> You've declared the future, which doesn't leave much room for a conversation. So, cheers!

I just flipped your own rhetorical devices back on you. If you don't think they left much room for conversation, then that's a chance for you to look at yourself in the mirror and examine your own behavior ;)

To honestly answer your question in good faith, it's not about years, it's about results. I don't see AI improving exponentially or even linearly. I see it's capability gains logarithmically flattening out. And it's still a ways out from actually writing maintainable code.

I honestly don't believe we are going to reach this point you are saying is "a few years out" with the current architecture. We're throwing an obscene amount of resources at it and we're just not getting there.

And all of this is just about the practical "does it work?" question. We're not even touching on the ethical, environmental, resource use, or societal impact questions at work here.

Github's two biggest selling points were its feature set (Pull Requests, Actions) and its reliability.

With the latter no longer a thing, and with so many other people building on Github's innovations, I'm starting to seriously consider alternatives. Not something I would have said in the past, but when Github's outages start to seriously affect my ability to do my own work, I can no longer justify continuing to use them.

Github needs to get its shit together. You can draw a pretty clear line between Microsoft deciding it was all in on AI and the decline in Github's service quality. So I would argue that for Github to gets its shit back together, it needs to ditch the AI and focus on high quality engineering.

> We can incorporate, but can we indemocrate?

I'm working on this right now. I'm building a Facebook alternative that will be a nonprofit, multistakeholder cooperative if I can get it off the ground. It won't be owned by anyone, instead it will be governed by its workers and users in collaboration.

It's called Communities (https://communities.social) and it's in open beta now. We got the apps in the app stores last month.

How do you ensure "one user, one vote?"

This seems impossible without intrusive government ID verification, and not immune to government meddling in any case.

To be determined. It's not a problem we have yet, since we're going to ease into the cooperative governance.

Right now it's an LLC. If we can hit basic financial stability, then we'll convert the LLC to a nonprofit and start with an appointed board with a two year term who's job is to draft the permanent bylaws and define the electoral system. Basically, I'm bootstrapping it and we need to raise the money to pay the legal fees and fund the legal research needed to get the cooperative structure right. And part of that is going to be designing the electoral systems.

It's definitely going to be hard and it may end up coming down to "ID verification required to vote". Not to use the platform, just to vote in board elections. I'd love to find a way to avoid that, but we can always do it if we have to.

The plan is to moderate the platform pretty heavily using a two layered moderation system: community moderation as the first layer and official moderation as a second layer that moderates the community moderation. That moderation will be very much aimed at keeping the platform as free of bots, spammers, and propagandists as possible.

So if we're successful in that, we may be able to avoid the intrusive verification by saying "It's an honor system and all active users in good standing are trusted to be honorable." But it remains to be seen whether we're successful enough in the moderation to even attempt that.

Or we may be able to come up with some other system to ensure it.

The other piece is that it's a multi-stakeholder cooperative. Users elect half the board, but the workers elect the other half. And with workers, it will be easy to restrict it to one worker one vote. So the workers can and will provide a safety backstop against user elections that go off the rails in one way or another.

Do you have a plan for dealing with the clickbait problem?

I'm exploring various systems of community moderation.

Right now experimenting with a "demote" button that people are encouraged to use on: disinformation, misinformation, propaganda, spam, and slop.

Communities' default feed is just chronological, but it also has "Most Active" and "Most Recent Activity". Right now, Demote knocks things down the "Most Active" feed.

Eventually, a high enough percentage of demotes would result in posts being removed from public feeds. A second, higher threshold, would result in it being removed from all feeds.

Demote usage would be moderated, and removal thresholds could be appealed to the official moderation team. Users who abuse or misuse demote would lose the privilege.

It's an experiment and we'll see if it works. It's also really early. But the thing that Communities is doing differently is that the users will ultimately be in control through democratic elections of the board. And I expect moderation to be a frequent and recurring issue in elections. (You know, if the whole thing gets off the ground at all.)

When driving a car, I often wish I could tag other cars with arrows that mark them as bad drivers. These are the ones who weave in and out over 4 lanes on an interstate highway. When enough tags get the car, they have to pull over and take a break or something.

One immediate problem is malicious or over zealous taggers. But it seems easy to build a system that if you are too enthusiastic, then you have to pull over and take a break.

But accumulated reputation seems a thing. And if it is universal read and write it seems beneficial. It is somewhat like reputation in real life.

This depends somewhat on identities with some degree of stickiness. If you can just change who you are then bad reputation is not a big deal. But if there is some cost to establishing and maintaining an identity ...

interesting. I have the theory that most networks, and most social networks, are doomed to tolerate too much or too little deviance - sailing between 4chan Scylla or reddit Charybdis. I hope you manage to thread the needle!

See, now this is an excellent use of LLMs (if we're going to be using them at all). Low stakes if it gets shit wrong, but can provide some really useful and surprising answers!

One request, it would be nice to not have to add Goodreads, since I don't use it. I've love to be able to enter a couple of book titles or an author and just get recommendations!

You don't have to import your Goodreads profile. You can type titles and authors in the box and find books to add to the list that way.

This all comes down to "We can't have nice things in America because of our toxic mix of individualism and capitalism."

Because we insist on trying to privatize everything, refuse to provide a safe floor for people, and make poverty and mental health challenges moral issues (meaning we degrade people who experience them and leave them to fend for themselves) we create an environment where true community is impossible.

Unless, of course, we apply authoritarian and abusive policing controls against those we've left behind, rounding them up and sending them somewhere else. Which of course achieves a temporary "peace" at the cost of a deep insecurity and fear, because we all know the moment we slip or step out of line, we're gone.

It really is toxic and has led directly to society breaking down to the point where we're now falling into full scale fascism.

You can have nice things also. Eg the inner city of Park City, Utah is also car free, and busses are running for free in the winter season.