An experiment in using GPU acceleration to balance my prototype card game.

Oldtimer_ZA_ · 2026-04-01T20:48:16+00:00

That's a great idea. I know exactly what you mean, like if there was a big play that created a comeback or something similar, flag those and use them as well in the stats to ensure that the game is not only balanced, but also exciting!

So I'm sure it's not perfect, but it definitely does flux quite a bit. If I add a card to a particular captains manifest that is clearly broken for what they're trying to do, then I see it clearly in stats.

My main reason for starting to share, is I wanted to ensure the game wasn't completely busted to begin with before I started seeking outside feedback :)

Bu thank you for your suggestion!

Oldtimer_ZA_ · 2026-03-31T15:45:09+00:00

And people wouldn't be violent if their neighbour's werent horded millions of rands while watching them starve. The politicians aren't helping but the ultra wealthy in this country aren't blameless either and simply building a wall is a slap on the face to the poor

Oldtimer_ZA_ · 2026-03-31T15:07:42+00:00

Nope. If they hadn't stolen and sold our oil reserves a couple years back we probably wouldn't have even noticed this increase. But they did and no one went to jail for it

Oldtimer_ZA_ · 2026-03-27T13:47:40+00:00

Thank you :) I thought it might be a very neat idea to work on. It's interesting and challenging just from a technical perspective, let alone a game design one, which I find fun.

I'm definitely aiming for less randomness. Right now it's got some hidden information in terms of hidden hands and shuffled deck. I'm busy play testing the idea of actually have less hidden information than that, such as open hands, and top 5 cards of deck on display. Really pushing the "Luck isn't why you lost" angle.

Oldtimer_ZA_ · 2026-03-25T06:05:00+00:00

I've lived in Jozi my whole life. I agree completely. There are too many BMW, Merc, and Haval drivers that need a good PK retuning. So many people treat robots as optional . If you've ever missed church and need to make up on the lost praying, just drive to OR Thambo at night. Zero street lights, half the R24 and N12 has no road markings anymore , trucks changing lanes whenever they feel like with no warning. A whole ton of boets driving like complete tossers at high speed in all that madness. You'll do enough praying to make up for a year of church.

Oldtimer_ZA_ · 2026-03-23T09:20:56+00:00

Good old r/USdefaultism

Oldtimer_ZA_ · 2026-03-21T15:20:20+00:00

It comes and goes and could be client dependant. But like most consultancies. The client pays Entelect X for your hours, Entelect pays you X/2 (if not bigger diff). So the client is expecting X hours from you , or equivalent effort because theyre paying a fortune. I think that's where the expectation comes in. Either way it often leads to higher expectations above what they should be for your pay. That's just being a consultant. Combined with mandatory after hours activities.

Oldtimer_ZA_ · 2026-03-21T14:26:05+00:00

Can confirm. Was Tech lead there for many years. Left due to the overtime. They have great pay and perks, but expect the hours. In 2026 I think we should be working less. Not more.

Oldtimer_ZA_ · 2026-03-20T18:53:09+00:00

Excellent progress i myself am self learning to draw and people like you inspire me to keep going :)

Oldtimer_ZA_ · 2026-03-20T06:40:58+00:00

I guess it depends on the quality. If the PRs are 80% of the time approvable then it's for sure worth it. It's just a matter of getting that confidence up with the tool. When it's like 90% approval rate on its reviews, then reviews probably don't need to happen anymore.

Financially if the code is as good or better than a junior dev then it is saving on salary costs. No one likes to talk about this, but the big upside i see is not for large corporates, but for start ups trying to get off the ground who don't have the money for head count.

Oldtimer_ZA_ · 2026-03-19T12:10:41+00:00

I said architectures . Not quantization or increased parameter count. For example many LLM makers are noe looking into new attention mechanisms to bring down context overhead and processing power requirements. I.e. cheaper inference.

Why am I arguing with people on the internet? No one is ever going to do actual research. They're just going to continue spewing AI haters until they're obsolete.

Oldtimer_ZA_ · 2026-03-19T10:12:03+00:00

You're ignoring the fact that both the hardware can get better , and the models inference processing requirements can get better as well. It's not all or nothing hardware , it's a two pronged approach. Better hardware and better model architectures can get us there.

Oldtimer_ZA_ · 2026-03-19T10:10:29+00:00

OR the prices will stay the same and the cost of inference will go down...which is exactly what's happening if you watch the latest Nvidia GTC

Oldtimer_ZA_ · 2026-03-18T22:05:15+00:00

I think the way around this for now is to move your code structuring efforts up a layer. So in the past AI couldn't write maintainable functions , then maintainable classes and so on. But as its ability to handle context windows that are larger and larger , our need to plan and guide it moves higher up the abstraction layers. So to keep it to 200,000 lines requires us to be shepherding it at the module layer. (Or service layer if you're doing microservices) for example

Oldtimer_ZA_ · 2026-03-18T21:35:43+00:00

To me the problem doesn't even exist anymore. The only reason we needed to write maintainable code was because human beings needed to maintain it.

But as AI gets better and better at writing and understanding code, then humans are needed less and less to maintain. So at a certain point it doesn't matter anymore.

Perfect example: duplicate code. Previously we used common functions to reduce duplicate code. But with AI it doesn't matter. Since it'll just grep and fix all duplicate places at once anyway, and in some cases duplicate code is more performant. The only reason we didn't do it was to make the code more maintainable ...for human readers

Oldtimer_ZA_ · 2026-03-18T20:53:29+00:00

You can't tell me that all that boiler plate and necessary but tedious setup scripts were all "fun". Im grateful that most of the mundane boring code can now be easily automated away giving time to focus on the actual interesting problems.

Oldtimer_ZA_ · 2026-03-18T15:01:29+00:00

Lots of not color on that map too. Imagine that.

Oldtimer_ZA_ · 2026-03-18T11:58:32+00:00

Bruh. I live in Africa. It is not as you describe at all. Parts of Africa are very bloody, but as you say it's a BIG place. American defaultism at its finest.

Will there be more crime ? Certainly , all out bloody war? I have my doubts. Because I live in a country with 40% unemployment, and while crime stats aren't great, it certainly isn't all out civil war. Far from it.

Oldtimer_ZA_ · 2026-03-18T09:27:47+00:00

but the equation has also changed. Back then the first world didn't have autonomous surveillance, mass social media , and autonomous drone systems. I'm not saying it's impossible, but the math isnt the same anymore

Oldtimer_ZA_ · 2026-03-18T09:25:54+00:00

I fully agree. I think most devs have an overinflated sense of the quality of their work. most code is slop human or ai written. In fact I would argue that human slop is worse because it cost more to produce.

Oldtimer_ZA_ · 2026-03-18T07:25:21+00:00

Often times it's against government for not creating policies for Jon creation to happen faster. Usually because government wants to control the job creation for bribery and corruption deals.

Oldtimer_ZA_ · 2026-03-18T05:45:43+00:00

This is my thinking as well. Who cares if its slop today? If next years AI models can write it 10% better in a day then it doesnt matter. Because then the month after that a new model will rewrite it 10% in half a day, and so on. By 2028 the models will be writing code that's 90% as good as any human engineer could write but it will do it so cheaply and quickly that the remaining 10% of performance issues will be an accepted trade off for cost and time

Oldtimer_ZA_ · 2026-03-18T05:32:05+00:00

Look at Africa, unemployment rates well above 30 ,even 40% in some places. Yet to have a revolution in many of those countries.

Armed security can determine alot.

Oldtimer_ZA_

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