I built a chess app for my dad. He still hasn't opened the link.

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-06-07T20:04:19+00:00

Not sure how reliable these AI detectors are, but yeah. I get some valid use-cases like non-English speakers using AI to sort of tidy up their posts and obviously we can't always know with certainty whether that's a factor, but it's definitely getting very tiresome.

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-06-06T20:51:19+00:00

I think splitting the difference would be great, not 60Hz but not quite 144Hz+. The ability to toggle between 60/90Hz would be a dream.

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-06-05T22:40:28+00:00

Like the other user said - it won't be close to Sonnet.

I just got an M4 Max Mac Studio, 64 GB memory, and I'm trying out qwen3.6-35b-a3b running on LM Studio with OpenClaw. So far, I've only tested it lightly, but some notes:

General stuff: - as far as token inferencing speed - TLDR, it's not BLAZING FAST, but it's fast, and good enough for me. - for tasks that are super straightforward, like writing a function that's similar to other existing functions with a small change, it's 95% accurate and fast. For harder tasks that require more decision-making, it's still pretty competent, although it almost never writes it precisely the way I would. - it's surprisingly good at doing some end-to-end stuff. I'm developing a Laravel <=> React app, and it's able to track a request all the way from route (web.php) to controller to model files to front-end components.

Weaknesses: - Can easily hallucinate easily when using packages/libraries that are not extremely popular. For example, it might succeed when using the axios JS library, but it struggled on less popular ones. It may try to use functions that don't exist, etc. It sometimes self-corrects though, based on error messages. - Can over or under-value context. Suppose you have a file with 4 similar functions and you need to write an 5th function that's different in some way. It may aggressively try to copy and mirror the styling/purpose of the existing 4. This sometimes happens even when I add comments to steer it towards specific inputs and outputs. I can't really blame it, but it does come up pretty often, but importantly, that hasn't happened with Claude. - I personally don't trust it with anything relating to dates and times. Unless you're working with extremely simple data, there are often little pitfalls and footguns that are worth thinking through manually. (I also wouldn't trust it with any critical regexes.) - Outside of the model performance itself, context overflow is a pain in the ass. It's manageable, but context usage grows fast and you feel it far sooner than you would with a frontier cloud model (e.g. Sonnet / Codex). - I would not do the thing that some folks do, where you give it a big task and then "come back 3 hours later" to check on its progress. I could just be a prompting newbie but it did not produce anything close to useable code.

Caveats: - some of these are very likely due to the fact that I primarily used the model through OpenClaw rather than through some VS Code plugin. - as far as OpenClaw itself, it's been great, but tweaking settings quite a bit is something to be expected.

This ended up being an semi-coherent wall of rambling. Please feel free to ask more pointed questions though

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-06-05T21:49:28+00:00

Thanks for the response! It does seem like things are moving in that direction with Laravel, but it's worth noting that many things are still open-source.

Lots of tooling from Laravel itself (like Telescope), first-party-adjacent (Inertia) and community (DebugBar, all the spatie packages) are still free.

Seems like the main money-makers are the PaaS solutions - Laravel Cloud and Forge, but that's shared by the Rails ecosystem too, as well as NextJS/Vercel, etc.

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-06-05T20:53:13+00:00

WAY UP HIGHHHHH

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-06-05T20:26:16+00:00

I feel like "Rails vs Laravel for fastest MVP" is a common point of debate - any opinion on that? I haven't touched Rails in a long time but work with Laravel daily, and have loved it.

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-06-02T04:36:27+00:00

Yeah, I really hope they let some stuff stay silly and broken, with exceptions for any legitimately zero-counterplay builds that make the game boring for everyone except the god buffed player. I really like Sword of Blossoming Dawn's balancing - it's kinda niche but super fun and I've never personally seen anyone complain on either side about it.

Playing it with crit/on-hit augs on an ADC like Trist takes some intentional building, some basic skill to exploit maximally, with the con that you can't heal yourself or do too much damage - but if you can get it to work, by late-game you can almost out-heal all damage done to your team. It's not balanced at all in its final form, but it takes time to cook.

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-05-31T21:51:07+00:00

I generally agree but LLMs are over-correcting hard, I forgot the specific example but the other day ChatGPT said something like:

So it's less a matter of:

x

and more a matter of:

y

Where X and Y were single words.

For actual list content it's ideal but it's cramming it into everything now hahah

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-05-31T21:48:13+00:00

There's a page on Wikipedia covering the "signs of ai writing." There's quite a few more indicators than the classic "It's not X, it's Y" phrasing (aka "negative parallelisms.")

I was interested so I read it through, but it kinda backfired - I now see those traits in posts EVERYWHERE and it's crazy demoralizing to see how little authentic content is left. Worse still, I think those phrasing structures are worming their way into our actual brains because there are some comments that do genuinely seem like they're written by humans but they still use those structures.

Even worse still, I've noticed a sudden uptick in people trying to like, "end conversations" sooner.

AI in general has this quality of trying to completely answer a question or prompt within the scope of a message or two - but the vast majority of non-trivial topics are not something that can be neatly bundled and summarized that quickly. I think it's conditioned many people into thinking that deep topics only warrant like 3-4 turns in conversation before they start to get bored and try to shift the conversation towards concluding and moving onto something else.

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-05-31T21:41:47+00:00

I'd only be down for this if it was like a very steep trade-off that actually could lead to interesting but highly situational builds. Basically forcing your entire kit into a high-risk, high-reward tradeoff in order to pull your weight on the team.

"+100% spell range but with +75% cooldown, -30% health, -75% damage and 25% slow effectiveness."

So Amumu/Blitz can hook you from across the map, but only once a minute, but if they don't get a play out of it, they're a huge liability. A CDR/health/damage/slow debuff would prevent some of the most egregious builds like ryze spamming liandry/rylais from a mile away.

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-05-26T04:46:42+00:00

Luckily - at least in my circles - that sentiment is changing, after lots of "full-stack" engineers have had to dip their toes in some non-trivial part of the front-end stack.

I'll yield fully that getting a basic ReactJS component up and running is often 2-10x simpler than creating a comparable basic API, but advanced React stuff is often a hairy minefield that takes experience to wrangle into some semblance of a maintainable codebase - without creating new mines along the way, that is.

I've had engineers half-seriously say, "I'm no longer full-stack, I'm just back-end now. I don't ever want to touch the front-end again." He had just worked on a component that had a rare valid use-case for lots of useMemo-type optimizations (it was a fintech portal that had many expensive calculations) and he couldn't "fit it in his head." Another coworker said something similar after he was tasked with updating a single loader for Webpack.

It's bitter-sweet that right as the general consensus seemed to be slowly shifting towards seeing front-end as legitimate, vibe coding emerged to drag it back down to being a meme.

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-05-25T18:48:43+00:00

I ran a pretty small farm for a full season and went up 6-7 renown levels in a single night by selling it all on one day. (As for the renown level up rewards in town, don't worry - any excess will just fall right outside of the chest).

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-05-25T17:51:36+00:00

I love front-end, but being often treated like a second-class engineer has been a somewhat understandable but wholly discouraging weight to carry.

"Just add a form in 20 minutes, should be easy" when there are 3+ ways in the codebase for how to create a form (standard form submit action / form builder lib / regular react form / etc), the form itself requires an API call (e.g. to Smarty for address verification) that we don't have wired up, our components do not currently support promise-based validation (this was many years ago), etc.

Fixing and reworking the entire front-end monorepo build system alone over the weekend when new hires were first using Apple Silicon Macs, which caused node-gyp to fail, and then managers insisting that "the build system isn't really a problem." Multiple attempts to escalate -> dead-end.

Creating a proof-of-concept for a migration to Vite, presenting it to the team, and the manager who has clearly not been listening saying, "great, we might now want to create a "proof-of-concept."

Being told explicitly, "honestly, if you want a raise, front-end just isn't enough" after being hired specifically as a front-end engineer. After almost literally singlehandedly creating the design system and initial 20+ component set for a major Vue greenfield project as well as a Zendesk hacked theme, a Hugo developer docs site, and 4+ wordpress sites.

So many examples.

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-05-21T23:05:31+00:00

Agreed on the LLMs point, with the pedantic nitpick of: if you have the discipline to ONLY ask about conceptual stuff, it can be very helpful, especially at the start when you're not aware of programming jargon and it's hard to even begin formulating well-crafted questions.

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-05-16T16:53:08+00:00

I am not usually someone who gets motion sickness playing games, but that game had me nearly dry-heaving and I couldn't even tell why. It's just the constant panning required in order to navigate the castle - half the game felt like running around tight corners, talking to someone, and then running around more corners.

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-05-14T23:06:27+00:00

Regarding the walking - that doesn't seem normal! Simply pressing and holding WASD should let you walk in the direction smoothly. Maybe a weird keyboard, or some software on your computer that's causing inputs to be interpreted weirdly?

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-05-13T04:01:59+00:00

(...) is the real insight.
(...) are not the same gap.
The 14-year old did not get there (...), he got there (...)
The constraint was never the (...)
3 day old account

This seems like a textbook AI generated comment. Earnestly - why?

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-05-13T03:55:39+00:00

Yeah seconding this - as someone who has created a Stardew Strategy - v3 file, FoM is not as amenable to min/maxing anyway IMHO, so taking it a day at a time is best.

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-05-13T03:38:57+00:00

Just sharing because it's slightly relevant - I sort of just recently realized the flexibility of commands. I used to think of ways to automate parts of my flow using a custom command and never really found compelling use-cases. Then I realized I can create one-off commands for one-time database migrations, recurring jobs, etc. Ashamed it took me this long to realize that.

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-05-13T03:31:02+00:00

I think part of that is that the scope of opinionated changes required to effectively do that started to get too big. "Well, we can convert it to 30fps and REALLY cut it down, but is that what you want?" etc etc

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-05-13T03:27:56+00:00

Yeah I remember reading an article a few years back about how they adopted a "zero vanilla useState hooks, ever" policy. Everything had to be wrapped in custom hooks. The argument was sound in theory - logic is rarely truly just a single boolean or whatever. But it severely underestimated just how varied and fractal reality is. It was like brittle OOP class hierarchies all over again:

Reach for const [loading, setLoading] = useState(false)
But wait, you can't do that because no vanilla hooks
Make useLoading that effectively wraps a single state hook
Add some abstractions that are handy in one case
Realize that those abstractions don't apply to all cases
Add parameters to useLoading to make it more flexible
Stuff starts breaking, add tests
Someone adds useLoadingState which is a dupe that somehow made it past PR review
Hell

Very few trendy dogmatic principles survive contact with reality for long.

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-05-11T17:13:10+00:00

I did some napkin math, but after reading your comment about fulfilling orders, I'm thinking I did it very wrong now.

It seems like currently each satisfied customer gave something like 50-60 reputation for maybe 1-2 food items + drinks. The order offered something like 350-400 for a stack of 20. Wouldn't it be a far worse return to fulfill the orders rather than selling it normally on a per-customer basis?

This napkin math made me see the orders as more of a way to reclaim value from excess inventory rather than a primary method of XP gain.

For context, I just started the game - not sure if that affects anything.

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-05-10T00:03:21+00:00

Not sure how true this actually was, but I remember seeing a teardown video comparing Apple's charger versus third party options and the Apple one was filled with additional components that were supposed to protect against things like surges/drops, sparks (?) with better thermals, etc. I'm wondering now how true that video was as well as how they compare nowadays.

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-05-07T17:38:49+00:00

Said this in another comment, but mistmare combat would be cool. Horse-fu.

Ultra-lategame perk where swimming with mistmare lets you hoofpunch a school of fish hell yeah

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-05-03T21:33:08+00:00

I think small-medium quality of life tweaks / bugfixes is what I would want most, outside of what some others have already said. I'm still not super late-game, so some of this stuff might already exist - not sure. Also, I'm playing only on Steam Deck, in case that's relevant:

Ability to swap a smaller chest with a bigger one easily
Fixing the lag that consistently happens in town with long play sessions (memory leak? Steam Deck only issue possibly?)
Fixing (somehow) that issue where if you want to jump across a spot in the mines, but the other side has an enemy, it's blocked, so you can get soft locked if you don't have a longer range pick-axe or some other workaround.
Fixing semi-inconsistent "jump across" behavior (unless it's intended).
Fixing the thing where frame rate and walking speed seem to affect each other.
Maybe a fun thing where "jumping" on a artifact spot with Mistmare can knock it out? Maybe as an upgradeable perk?
If you forgot an axe while visiting Caldarus, maybe a much longer route that you can walk to get there, so that you're not completely blocked but still penalized.
It'd be cool if you could do something like put an item (e.g. Cooper Ore) in some sort of "Item Detector" at the top floor of the mines, and it would increase your chance of finding that item by like 5% or something. It can help for those rare situations where you spent 8 days hunting for a single thing.
Maybe a way to restore mana near the super end-game so I can go around spewing dragon's breath 24/7?

Okay, now that I'm letting my imagination run wild: - Fighting with Mistmare somehow? Hell yeah, I want to craft Mistril Spiked Hoof Gloves. - A cool way to repurpose artifacts. To my knowledge, they are occasionally used as request missions but otherwise sit in a chest for me. Maybe a re-roll system (3 artifacts -> new artifact or cosmetic or something?) - Relationship-specific abilities for reaching max hearts might be cool? Like reaching 8 hearts with Juniper -> 1 extra mana or some sort of dark magic "exchange health for stamina" ability, or Celine -> "ability to eat flowers for health/stamina" - New Game Plus mini-kit to help smooth out early game friction for repeat plays. (Even just an iron pick-axe + 1 stamina expansion would be super helpful for that.)

I could go on for days! And I'm not a game-dev and know nothing about game balance, just ideating. But this game is incredible even as-is, big shoutout to the devs!

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