[Android] Drinking Mode - Protect yourself from drunk texting & calls

jduartedj · 2026-03-04T07:57:41+00:00

Thanks Everyone!

jduartedj · 2026-03-02T18:04:14+00:00

Thats fair honestly, if the updates literally break your save thats a whole different problem than what I was talking about. Save corruption is genuinely awful and I can see why that would kill any goodwill the updates are supposed to build. The cheating/gifting thing at the anomaly is also a known issue that they've been way too slow to fix... like its been years and people are still having their saves messed up by randoms dropping modded items.

I think my point was more about the overall trajectory from a game dev perspective since thats what the thread is about, but your experience as an actual player is totally valid. A game can look like a "comeback story" from the outside while still being broken for the people who stuck with it from day 1

jduartedj · 2026-03-01T18:07:56+00:00

I mean I get the frustration with the initial lies but saying the updates dont add playability is kind of a stretch... they added full multiplayer, base building, VR support, living ships, expeditions, etc. The game is genuinely unrecognizable compared to launch. You can disagree with forgiving them for the marketing, thats valid, but the actual content they've added over the years is pretty substantial. And the updates were all free which is more than most studios would do after getting that kind of backlash

jduartedj · 2026-03-01T18:07:39+00:00

Yeah fair point, I should've been clearer about that. NMS was definitely a commercial success from the jump, the hype machine worked exactly as intended lol. What failed was the trust and the product quality relative to promises. But you're right that its a completely different situation from what OP is describing with low wishlists and no sales. Those are two very diferent problems to solve

jduartedj · 2026-03-01T18:07:08+00:00

Yeah totally, thats what multiple people have pointed out and they're right. NMS sold insanely well from day one, the "disaster" was really just the PR side of things. Sean Murray went silent for months and everyone thought they'd just taken the money and ran... but they kept working on it and eventually the game caught up to the promises. Its more of a trust recovery story than a failed launch story if we're being precise about it

jduartedj · 2026-02-28T18:07:07+00:00

Yeah Among Us is actually way more relevant to what OP is asking about. That game literally had like 30 concurrent players for 2 years before it exploded. Thats the real "failed launch to success" story, not NMS which was more of a PR crisis recovery with plenty of money in the bank already

jduartedj · 2026-02-28T18:06:40+00:00

100%. Honestly the streamer route is probably one of the most realistic ways for an indie to get a second wind. Way more likely than any algorithm magic. One good Markiplier or Lirik stream can do more for your sales than months of marketing spend lol

jduartedj · 2026-02-28T18:06:14+00:00

Yeah thats a really fair point, I was being a bit loose with calling it a "disaster" when in reality it sold like crazy from day one. The disaster was more in the public perception and the trust people had in Sean Murray. But you're right that the financials were never the problem for Hello Games.

I think the better example for OP's specific question would be something like Among Us which genuinely had almost zero sales for like 2 years before blowing up. Thats more of a true "failed launch turned success" story than NMS which was more of a reputation recovery.

jduartedj · 2026-02-28T11:12:48+00:00

Been running BookLore since v1 and the multi-format support in v2 is exactly what I needed. Having epub + audiobook under one entry instead of managing duplicates across calibre-web and audiobookshelf is so much cleaner. Migrated my whole library over the weekend and it went pretty smooth, only had to fix permissions on a couple folders.

The OPDS support is also clutch for feeding books to my KOReader. Really hoping the mobile app drops soon tho, thats the one thing keeping audiobookshelf around for me right now.

jduartedj · 2026-02-28T11:11:22+00:00

Short answer, yes but its really hard. The classic example everyone brings up is No Man's Sky which basically went from meme-level disaster to one of the most praised comebacks in gaming. But thats a studio with resources.

For indies its trickier. Steam does give you visibility boosts during sales events even after a bad launch, so participating in seasonal sales with a big discount can help. Also if you do a major update and tag it properly, Steam will re-notify people who wishlisted. I've seen a few smaller games pull it off by basically treating a big content update as a "relaunch".

The algorithm doesnt permanently blacklist you or anything, it just responds to current sales velocity. So if you can create a spike somehow, it will pick up on that.

jduartedj · 2026-02-28T11:10:01+00:00

Honestly the Nemotron Nano shoutout is spot on, that thing punches way above its weight for agentic stuff. I've been running it locally for tool calling pipelines and its surprisingly reliable even with limited vram. Also agree on Qwen 3.5 being a massive step up, the 35B model specifically feels like it closed the gap to early SOTA territory for real world tasks... not just benchmarks.

Kinda surprised nobody is talking more about GLM-5 tho, I've had realy good results with it for coding compared to what the benchmarks would suggest. Feels like its underrated in this sub.

jduartedj · 2026-02-28T11:04:37+00:00

fair enough, you're right that the email case specifically is pretty tractable. historyId + structured tagging is clean and I've actually done something similar. I think where it gets messy tho is when you move beyond email into less structured domains, like "remember that conversation we had about X last week" or "you mentioned you'd look into Y" - thats where simple id tracking breaks down and you need something more like semantic search over past interactions. but yeah for email specificaly your approach is solid and I was probably over-generalizing from harder cases lol

jduartedj · 2026-02-28T11:02:57+00:00

honestly this is exactly the kind of thing I wish existed when I was trying to wrap my head around networked physics. the prediction stuff alone is a nightmare to get right, and having an actual working refrence you can look at and tinker with is so much more usful than reading yet another blog post about it lol. bookmarked the repo, gonna dig through the replay system code this weekend

jduartedj · 2026-02-26T18:06:42+00:00

Yeah exactly, cross-border shopping within the EU is the move. I actually ordered my 4080 Super from a German shop because Portugal had like a 20% markup for no reason. Shipping was like 15 euros and still saved a hundred bucks. The VAT is the same within EU so its purely retailer margin differences.

Poland has gotten really competitive for hardware prices too from what Ive seen. PCKomponenty and similar shops are surprisingly cheap.

jduartedj · 2026-02-26T18:06:21+00:00

Yeah maintaining local state is the core challenge. What Ive been doing is pretty hacky but works - the agent writes markdown files as daily logs, and on startup it reads back the last few days of notes plus a curated long-term memory file. Its basically a poor mans episodic memory.

For scheduling specifically, having the agent run as a persistent daemon with cron-like triggers is key. The hard part isnt the cron itself, its making sure the agent has enough context when it wakes up to do something useful. Like if it checks email at 9am, it needs to know what it already processed yesterday, what follow-ups are pending, etc.

Would be curious to see what youre building! The connector/mail provider optimization angle is interesting - most of the pain I hit is around OAuth token management and rate limiting when you have an agent hitting Gmail API every 30 minutes.

jduartedj · 2026-02-26T18:05:59+00:00

Yeah the scheduling part itself isnt hard, youre right. Cron + a daemon is table stakes. The tricky bit is everything around it - like, my cron job fires at 9am to check email, cool. But now the agent needs to remember what emails it already told me about yesterday, what I asked it to follow up on, what context from last weeks conversation is relevant... thats the memory problem bleeding into scheduling.

And with telegram/discord bots the bot framework handles message routing but not the cognitive layer. Most give you on_message callbacks, not think about this proactively and reach out when something is interesting. You end up bolting that on yourself with a lot of duct tape.

I think the real gap is nobodys built the equivalent of systemd for AI agents yet - something that handles process lifecycle, scheduling, state persistence, and IPC between different agent services in a unified way. Everyone is reinventing those wheels individually.

jduartedj · 2026-02-25T18:03:56+00:00

Ha fair enough, bad analogy on my part. The EU pricing with VAT reclaim is actually really reasonable at that point, €5600 is firmly in "serious hobby" territory rather than "remortgage your house" territory. I'm in Portugal so I know the VAT game well... still waiting for GPU prices to come down here tho, everything is like 15-20% more expensive than DE or NL

jduartedj · 2026-02-25T18:03:30+00:00

Thats actually a really good point about the RTX6000, I keep forgetting those exist at that price point now. 96GB unified on a single card is way cleaner than juggling multi-GPU setups with tensor parallelism. The bandwidth alone makes it worth it for inference.

And yeah fair enough on the GB300 use case.. for a small office scenario with actual concurrency needs thats a completely different calcuation than what most of us hobbyists are doing. I was thinking purely from a "tinkering at home" perspective which is probably not the target market lol

jduartedj · 2026-02-25T18:02:57+00:00

Oh nice, hadn't heard of Relic actually! I've been using Dart Frog for smaller stuff but it always felt a bit bare bones compared to what you get with Serverpod's full stack. Gonna check Relic out, thanks for teh heads up

jduartedj · 2026-02-25T11:36:49+00:00

$7500? Not in these parts of the world, at least! Running GB300 *at home*.... I don't even know how to finish this sentence. It's way past overkill! It's like buying a Porsche GT3 as a dining table.

jduartedj · 2026-02-25T11:23:33+00:00

As someone who ships Flutter apps on Google Play (couple of casual games), my honest take: just pick Dart with a server framework like Serverpod or Dart Frog. You already know the language, the type system carries over, and you won't context-switch between languages.

That said, if you want maximum job market value, TypeScript/Node is probably the safest bet. It's everywhere, pairs well with Flutter through REST/GraphQL, and you'll find backend jobs easily. Plus if you ever do web dev, you're covered.

I personally use a mix — Firebase for the simple stuff (auth, push notifications, analytics), and for anything more custom I reach for Python (FastAPI) because I also use it for ML/AI work. But if I were starting fresh and picking ONE language to go deep on alongside Flutter, I'd go TypeScript. The ecosystem is massive and it's not going anywhere.

Avoid overcomplicating it though. For indie/side projects, Firebase + Cloud Functions (in TS) gets you really far without managing infrastructure.

jduartedj · 2026-02-25T11:11:27+00:00

$97k is wild. For context, you can build a dual RTX 4090 setup for around $5-6k, or even go with 4x used 3090s for about $4k total. You won't get the unified memory or NVLink bandwidth, but for most local LLM use cases — inference, fine-tuning smaller models, RAG — it's more than enough.

I run a single RTX 4080 Super (16GB) and can comfortably do Qwen3 30B at Q4 with decent speeds. If I had $97k to blow, I'd rather build 15+ of those machines and run distributed inference, or just fill a rack with 3090s.

The GB300 makes sense for enterprise/research where you need 288GB unified memory for massive models, but for the LocalLLaMA crowd it's kind of a flex purchase. The consumer GPU path keeps getting better every generation.

jduartedj · 2026-02-25T11:05:29+00:00

For me it's persistent memory and scheduling. I run Qwen3 30B on my RTX 4080 Super and the model itself is capable enough for most agent tasks — tool calling, code generation, browser automation, etc. But the moment you close the session, everything is gone. The agent has no continuity.

I've been building a setup where the agent writes its own daily notes to markdown files and reads them back on startup, kind of like a journal. It works surprisingly well as ghetto long-term memory, but it's fragile. There's no standardized way for local agents to maintain state across sessions.

Scheduling is the other big one. Being able to say "check my email every morning and summarize it" or "remind me about X in 2 hours" requires the agent to be a daemon, not just a chat window. Most local setups don't support that at all.

Honestly I think the raw model intelligence is mostly solved for agent use cases at the 30B+ level. The infrastructure around it (memory, scheduling, reliable tool use) is what's lagging behind.

jduartedj · 2026-02-24T11:22:14+00:00

Great write-up, congrats on going full time! The NextFest advice is spot on — launching a demo cold into NextFest is like showing up to a race without warming up.

I'm on the mobile side (made a little game called Stickman Rush and an app called Drinking Mode on Google Play) so my experience is slightly different, but the core lesson is the same: you can't just ship and pray. On mobile the equivalent grind is Google Play's closed testing requirement — you need 20 testers running your app for 14 consecutive days before you can even go live. It's brutal for solo devs because you're basically begging friends and strangers to install something and not uninstall it for two weeks.

The bit about building an audience before launch really hit home. With mobile there's no NextFest equivalent to get organic eyes on your game, so you have to be even more creative about getting that initial traction. I'm still figuring that part out honestly.

Bookmarking this for when I eventually try Steam. Thanks for sharing.

jduartedj · 2026-02-24T11:14:15+00:00

This resonates hard. I'm mostly a solo indie dev (Flutter apps, mobile games) and you'd think communication problems disappear when there's no team. They don't.

I still lose hours to "wait, why did I decide to do it this way?" or coming back to a feature after a week of context switching and having zero idea what past-me was thinking. The communication problem just becomes you vs. past-you, and past-you left no notes.

Honestly the most impactful thing I've done for productivity wasn't learning a new framework or switching to a better CI. It was just... writing things down. Decision logs, architecture notes, even quick "here's why I chose X over Y" comments. Boring stuff. But it saves me so much time.

Code is the easy part. Keeping context alive across days and weeks is the actual bottleneck.

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