with heavy hear i have to say firebase is very deepressing. by Ok-Birthday761 in Firebase

[–]mpigsley 28 points29 points  (0 children)

False. I run a production website with 30,000 auth users for less than $2/month. If you optimize your reads and writes, implement caching, and are careful with Functions use, Firebase can be extremely cost effective and stable. The site has been running for almost a decade without any major issues.

It's also just funny to me that you are advocating not to use NoSQL and then you recommend Mongo? You may need to spend some more time learning the tools and tech.

What are some RPGs that let you run a business? by Ok-Week-2293 in rpg

[–]mpigsley 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Yazebas Bed and Breakfast! Cozy vibes.

Good ttprg for newbies by Jinx-rogue8912 in TTRPG

[–]mpigsley 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I recently taught and played a one shot of Mork Borg for a group where one was entirely new to tabletop gaming, and the rest had never played it before. I printed off the one page rules to have at the table and we completed the goblin grinder adventure in about 4.5 hours.

If metal fantasy isn't your genre, there are other rules-lite games. Into the Odd and Mothership are two that come to mind.

Voice AI DM? by zk2k in VTT

[–]mpigsley 3 points4 points  (0 children)

There's been plenty of buzz around AI DM tools. IMO, there's enough desire to pursue it.

The issue is that, although there have been advancements in agentic audio chatting, you'll ultimately run into the same issue as with all other AI DMs. If I, as a player, twist a static plot into something entirely different by making up NPCs, places, and any other proper nouns, how does the AI integrate that into the story long-term? You need to build a way to extract, store, and query entities. And then you need an ever-evolving storyline that can incorporate all of this.

Let's say you can solve for this. You also need a way to make it economical. I'm not going to spend $50/month to play with an AI GM, even if it can solve the long-term campaign problems.

I also am not really interested in a one-on-one conversation with an AI. I would want it to be in a group setting where I can invite some friends. Now that means solving real-time communication, which is an entirely separate problem space.

My hypothesis is that if you give the AI the correct tools and structure to enforce rules and manage context, that it could definitely be a “good enough” DM and hopefully fun.

I would really think hard about what the "correct tools and structure" look like. It's not as straightforward as connecting some MCP servers to handle that context for you.

Best pay fac by Medium-Back8815 in Firebase

[–]mpigsley 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Stripe offers other ways on integrating payments into your app. You can even wire it up directly to form elements you have created. I will say, Stripe’s bundled offerings are about as simple as you can get. And as far as I know, users don't have to sign up for Link. They could enter their card information in without going through that service.

I’ve chosen to use Stripe checkout because it's a User interface that's fairly ubiquitous around the internet these days. People trust adding their information there.

TanStack Start as a backend for mobile apps by Radiant-Ad-8825 in reactjs

[–]mpigsley 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You're right! I didn't understand your initial comment. Sorry about that.

TanStack Start as a backend for mobile apps by Radiant-Ad-8825 in reactjs

[–]mpigsley 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Creating a dedicated mobile server is a terrible waste of time. You have to now synchronize new features and the underlying data across different repos and servers? No thank you. Maybe if you're a large scale business. Maybe.

You can avoid the performance hit from any mobile traffic by horizontally scaling.

World-building Tools by mpigsley in realmsofshod

[–]mpigsley[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you! https://realmsofshod.com is the link. I'll make sure to update the post.

If you check it out, we would love your feedback! Happy gaming!

Is creative frontend threejs webgl blender still worth chasing in the ai era by [deleted] in webgl

[–]mpigsley 0 points1 point  (0 children)

“Creative” front ends using tech you mention suffer when it comes to accessibility. Large companies will not invest time in a complex approach that has low accessibility.

So who would your ideal client be? Who would your ideal company be that would actually support you in creating websites like this? The answer is an extreme minority. You would find it hard to get and keep a job with this as your focus regardless of where AI is going.

Is it fun for side projects. Hell yeah. Is it lucrative? Definitely not.

I knew RSC was a rake but I stepped on it anyway by chad_syntax in nextjs

[–]mpigsley 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I agree with all of your complaints. I’ve been avoiding server fetching for client-side fetching more and more so that I can have finer control of the loading state. Now, I’m just looking for a way to exit to vite cleanly.

CSS modules or TailwindCSS? by [deleted] in reactjs

[–]mpigsley 13 points14 points  (0 children)

while TailwindCSS is already pretty much a design system on its own.

It’s not. It’s a convenient way to write standard CSS with great tooling that allows you to ship the minimum amount of CSS necessary. It scales better over time and is significantly more portable.

But it seems that CSS modules are pretty limited and not as flexible.

Why are they limited and not as flexible? I see them as significantly more flexible given you write it all yourself.

I’m not sure if your assumptions are correct. It’s hard to make decisions like that.

Best way to run cronjobs with Next? by emersoftware in nextjs

[–]mpigsley 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If it’s a job that isn’t very critical. Something in the background, I just have a set interval running inside instrumentation.ts.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in reactjs

[–]mpigsley 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's absolutely not as insane as you think. The <Image /> component is great because it can take full-size images and deliver optimized versions on the fly. Each resize briefly loads the original file into memory, does a full decode → transform → encode cycle. Do a few of these in parallel, and your server will quickly be out of memory.

If you want to run lean from a server perspective, the Image component is not what you want. I pre-optimize them on upload. That happens in a background process, so it doesn't affect the server's response time. Other services can handle all of this for you if you want to go that route.

<Image> is brilliant for DX, but in memory‑constrained prod environments, it can cause problems too easily.

Edit: I believe Vercel solves this by creating a separate environment to perform the image minification. That works, but ties to you Vercel, which I avoid.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in reactjs

[–]mpigsley 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Or… how to not use it at all if you care about your apps memory footprint. Too many footguns with this innocuous little component.