A Castle Built From Random Rooms is a work in progress/early access/demo version of a full game that’ll probably never exist. But if it does exist, it will be
basically the same as this, but on a grander scale, and include the following features:
– over a hundred random rooms instead of about ten
– character jobs and descriptions that actually add individualised effects/skills/starting equipment and so on
– special pre-chosen characters with particulalrly challenging stats levels for extra difficult challenges
– more stats! more items! more use of the stats and items within different rooms to create different outcomes!
– high scores and loot rankings and possibly even achievements of some kind
– less bugs (aspiration)
– decent endings (stretch goal)
What the game almost certainly won’t ever have:
– any semblance of quality or coherence
– sound and/or music
– monetary success
It’s a Twine-like choose-your-own-adventure, but with the rooms randomly shuffled each time, in sort-of a semi-rougelite way. Some imaginative work in this. And the art style is
wonderful!
The recent death of Tom Lehrer has resulted in all manner of interesting facts and anecdotes about the man being published
around the Internet, but perhaps my favourite was the tale about how, while working for the NSA in 1957, he snuck an Easter Egg into a research paper… that went undetected for nearly 60
years:
…
I worked as a mathematician at the NSA during the second Obama administration and the first half of the first Trump administration. I had long enjoyed Tom Lehrer’s music, and I knew
he had worked for the NSA during the Korean War era.
The NSA’s research directorate has an electronic library, so I eventually figured, what the heck, let’s see if we can find anything he published internally!And I found a few articles
I can’t comment on. But there was one unclassified article– “Gambler’s Ruin With Soft-Hearted Adversary”.
The paper was co-written by Lehrer and R. E. Fagen, published in January, 1957. The mathematical content is pretty interesting, but that’s not what stuck out to me when I read it.
See, the paper cites FIVE sources throughout its body. But the bibliography lists SIX sources. What’s the leftover?
…
So I sent an email to the NSA historians. And I asked them: hey, when was this first noticed, and how much of a gas did people think it was? Did he get in trouble for it? That sort
of stuff.
The answer came back: “We’ve never heard of this before. It’s news to us.”
In November of 2016, nearly 60 years after the paper was published internally, I had discovered the joke.
…
Bozhe moi!
Very Tom Lehrer to hide a joke so well that nobody would even notice it for most of six decades, while undermining and subverting bureaucratic government processes.
ArtificialCast is a lightweight, type-safe casting and transformation utility powered by large language models. It allows seamless conversion between strongly typed objects using
only type metadata, JSON schema inference, and prompt-driven reasoning.
Imagine a world where Convert.ChangeType() could transform entire object graphs, infer missing values, and adapt between unrelated types – without manual mapping or
boilerplate.
ArtificialCast makes that possible.
Features
Zero config – Just define your types.
Bidirectional casting – Cast any type to any other.
Schema-aware inference – Auto-generates JSON Schema for the target type.
LLM-powered transformation – Uses AI to “fill in the blanks” between input and output.
Testable & deterministic-ish – Works beautifully until it doesn’t.
…
As beautiful as it is disgusting, this C# is fully-functional and works exactly as described… and yet you really, really should never use it (which its author will tell you, too).
Casting is the process of transforming a variable of one type into one of another. So for example you might cast the number 3 into a string and get
"3" (though of course this isn’t the only possible result: "00000011" might also be a valid representation, depending on the circumstances1).
Casting between complex types defined by developers is harder and requires some work. Suppose you have a User model with attributes like “username”, “full name”, “hashed password”,
“email address” etc., and you want to convert your users into instances of a new model called Customer. Some of the attributes will be the same, some will be absent, and some will be…
different (e.g. perhaps a Customer has a “first name” and “last name” instead of a “full name”, and it’s probably implemented wrong to boot).
The correct approach is to implement a way to cast one as the other.
The very-definitely incorrect approach is to have an LLM convert the data for you. And that’s what this library provides.
…
ArtificialCast is a demonstration of what happens when overhyped AI ideas are implemented exactly as proposed – with no shortcuts, no mocking, and no jokes.
It is fully functional. It passes tests. It integrates into modern .NET workflows. And it is fundamentally unsafe.
This project exists because:
AI-generated “logic” is rapidly being treated as production-ready.
Investors are funding AI frameworks that operate entirely on structure and prompts.
Developers deserve to see what happens when you follow that philosophy to its logical conclusion.
ArtificialCast is the result.
It works. Until it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, it fails in ways that look like success. That’s the danger.
…
I’ve played with AI in code a few times. There are some tasks it’s very good at, like summarising and explaining (when the developer before you didn’t leave a sufficiency of quality
comments). There are some tasks it can be okay at, with appropriate framing and support: like knowing its way around unfamiliar-to-you but well-documented APIs2.
But if you ask an AI to implement an entire product or even just a significant feature from scratch, unsupervised, you’re at risk of rapidly hitting the realm of Heisenbugs, security
vulnerabilities, and enormous redundancies.
This facetious example – of using AI as a universal typecasting engine – helps hammer that point home, and I love it.
Footnotes
1How to cast basic types isn’t entirely standardised: PHP infamously casts the string "0" as false when it’s coerced into a
boolean, which virtually no other programming language does, for example.
2 The other week, I had a GenAI help me write some code that writes to a Google Sheets
document, because I was fuzzy on the API and knew the AI would pick it up faster than me while I wrote the code “around” it.
Blender Studio’s official game project is a short casual interactive story. Play a big, adorable dog traversing through winter woods and help out a little kid decorate a snowman
with colorful items hidden in the environment.
…
…
DOGWALK is a free, open-source Godot game for Windows, MacOS and Linux, produced and given to the world by Blender Studio as a way of
showcasing some of their video lessons. The beautiful, playful “papercraft” models were made by making actual hand-painted paper models of the assets, unfolding them,
scanning them, and then re-folding the maps back into in-game assets, which is an amazing and imaginative approach.
It was released a little over a week ago, and it’s a short but adorable little game.
Our scanning system wasn’t intended to support this style of notation. Why, then, were we being bombarded with so many ASCII tab ChatGPT screenshots? I was mystified for weeks —
until I messed around with ChatGPT myself and got this:
Turns out ChatGPT is telling people to go to Soundslice, create an account and import ASCII tab in order to hear the audio playback. So that explains it!
…
With ChatGPT’s inclination to lie about the features of a piece of technology, it was
only a matter of time before a frustrated developer actually added a feature that ChatGPT had imagined, just to stop users from becoming dissatisfied when they tried to
use nonexistent tools that ChatGPT told them existed.
And this might be it! This could be the very first time that somebody’s added functionality based on an LLM telling people the feature existed already.
This was an enjoyable video. Nothing cutting-edge, but a description of an imaginative use of an everyday algorithm – DEFLATE, which
is what powers most of the things you consider “ZIP files” – to do pattern-matching and comparison between two files. The tl;dr is pretty simple:
Lossless compression works by looking for repetition, and replacing the longest/most-repeated content with references to a lookup table.
Therefore, the reduction-in-size from compressing a file is an indicator of the amount of repetition within it.
Therefore, the difference in reduction-in-size of compressing a single file to the reduction-in-size of compressing a pair of files is indicative of
their similarity, because the greatest compression gains come from repetition of data that is shared across both files.
This can be used, for example, to compare the same document written in two languages as an indication of the similarity of the languages to one another, or to compare the genomes of
two organisms as an indication of their genetic similarity (and therefore how closely-related they are).
I love it when somebody finds a clever and novel use for an everyday tool.
This wonderful project, released six weeks ago, attempts the impossible challenge of building a Civilization-style tech tree but chronicling the development and interplay
of all of the actual technological innovations humanity has ever made. Even in its inevitably-incomplete state, it’s inspiring and informative. Or, as Open Culture put it:
Our civilization has made its way from stone tools to robotaxis, mRNA vaccines, and LLM chatbots; we’d all be better able to inhabit it with even a slightly clearer idea of how it
did so.
Fellow geek, Nightline veteran, and general volunteering hero James Buller wrote a wonderful retrospective on his experience with Surrey Nightline, National Nightline, and the Nightline
Association over most of the last three decades:
…
In 1997 I left a note in the Surrey Nightline pigeon-hole to volunteer and eventually become the Coordinator
In 1998 I emailed the leaders of National Nightline with a plea for support.
In 2000 I launched the first National Nightline website and email list
In 2003 I added the bulletin board online forum
In 2006 I led governance reform and the registration project that led to the Nightline Association charity
In 2007 I set up Google Apps for the recently established nightline.ac.uk domain
In 2008 We sent news via an email broadcast system for the first time
In 2025 All the user accounts and the charity were shut down.
So here’s my last post on volunteering with the confidential mental health helplines run ‘by students for students’ at universities, then the overarching association body.
…
I began volunteering with Aberystwyth Nightline in 1999, and I remember the 2000 launch of the National Nightline mailing list and website. It felt like a moment of coalescence and
unity. We Nightline volunteers at the turn of the millennium were young, and tech-savvy, and in that window between the gradual decline of Usenet and the 2004-onwards explosion in
centralised social networking, mailing lists and forums were The Hotness.
Nightlines (and Nightliners) disagreed with one another on almost everything, but the Internet-based connectivity that James put into place for National Nightline was enormously
impactful. It made Nightline feel bigger than it had been before: it was an accessible and persistent reminder that you were part of a wider movement. It facilitated year-round
discussions that might previously have been seen only at annual conferences. It brought communities together.
(Individuals too: when my friends Kit and Fiona met and got
together back in 2003 (and, later, married), it probably wouldn’t have happened without
the National Nightline forum.)
Gosh, I spent an inordinate amount of time on this site, back in the day.
But while I praise James’ work in community-building and technology provision, his experience with Nightlines doesn’t stop there: he was an important force in the establishment of the
Nightline Association, the registered charity that took over National Nightline’s work and promised to advance it even further with moves towards accreditation and representation.
As his story continues, James talks about one of his final roles for the Association: spreading the word about the party to “see it off”. Sadly, the Nightline Association folded last
month, leaving a gap that today’s Nightlines, I fear, will struggle to fill, but this was at least the excuse for one last get-together (actually, three, but owing to schedule conflicts
I was only able to travel up to the one in Manchester):
…
I had done a lot of the leg work to track down and invite former volunteers to the farewell celebrations. I’d gotten a real buzz from it, which despite a lot of other volunteering
I’ve not felt since I was immersed in the Nightline world in the 2000’s. I felt all warm and fuzzy with nostalgia for the culture, comradeship and perhaps dolefully sense of youth
too!
I was delighted that so many people answered the call (should have expected nothing less of great Nightliners!). Their reminiscing felt like a wave of love for the movement we’d
all been a part of and had consumed such a huge part of our lives for so long. It clearly left an indelible mark on us all and has positively affected so many others through us.
…
Many people played their part in the story of the Nightline Association.
I got to hang out with some current and former Nightline volunteers in Manchester, the smallest of the ‘Goodbye NLA’ parties.
Volunteering in charity technical work is a force multiplier: instead of working on the front lines, you get to facilitate many times your individual impact for the people who
do! Volunteering with Three Rings for the last 23 years has helped me experience that, and James’ experience of this kind of
volunteering goes even further than mine. And yet he feels his impact most-strongly in a close and interpersonal story that’s humbling and beautiful:
…
I was recently asked by a researcher, ‘What is the best thing you have done as a volunteer in terms of impact?’. I was proud to reply that I’d been told someone had not killed
themselves because of a call with me at Surrey Nightline.
…
I’d recommend going and reading the full post by James, right up to the final inspiring words.
(Incidentally: if you’re looking for a volunteering opportunity that continues to help Nightlines, in the absence of the Nightline Association, Three Rings can make use of you…)
Step out of your head
and into your senses
and into the world
that’s where life happens
…
This week, my friend Boro shared a poem that he’d written. It’s simple, and energising, and insightful, and I really enjoyed it. Go read
the whole thing; it’s not long.
Whether we’re riding high or low, there’s wisdom in being gentle with oneself. The rhythm of the piece feels a bit like breathing, to me, and from that is reminiscent of a breathing
exercise I was shown, once, in which the inhalations were accompanied by a focus on self-awareness and the exhalations with one on situational awareness.
Boro’s poem makes me wonder if he’s come across the same exercise: that through my appreciation of his post I’m sharing in his experience of the same exercise, in another time and
place.
When I posted to LinkedIn about my recent redundancy, I saw
a tidal wave of reposts and well-wishes. But there’s one that I’ve come back to whenever I need a pick-me-up before I, y’know, trawl the job boards: a comment-repost by my big-hearted,
sharp-minded former co-worker Kyle. I’m posting it here because I want to keep a copy forever1:
Bad news: I’m among the sixth of Automattic that’s been laid-off this week.
Good news: I’m #OpenToWork, and excited about the opportunity to bring my unique skillset to a new role. Could I be the Senior Software Engineer, Full-Stack Web Developer, or
Technical Lead that you’re looking for?
Here’s what makes me special:
🕸️ 26+ years experience of backend and frontend development, with a focus on standards, accessibility, performance, security, and the open Web
🌎 20+ years experience of working in and leading remote/distributed teams in a diversity of sectors
👨💻 Professional experience of many of the technologies you’ve heard of (PHP, Ruby, Java, Perl, SQL, Go, DevOps, JS, jamstacks, headless…), and probably some you haven’t…
👨🎓 Degrees and other qualifications spanning computer science and software engineering, psychotherapy, ethical hacking, and digital forensics (I don’t believe there’s a career in
the world that makes use of all of these, but if you know differently, tell me!)
If this man isn’t hired immediately, it’s a huge loss. Dan is easily one of the most talented engineers I’ve ever met. His skills are endless, his personal culture is delightful,
and I don’t think I went a day working with him where I didn’t learn something. Let him build you beautiful things. I dare you.
Incidentally, Kyle’s looking for a new role too. If you’re in need of a WordPress/PHP/React pro with a focus on delivering the MVP fast and keeping the customer’s needs
front-and-centre, you should look him up. He’s based in Cape Town but he’s a remote/distributed veteran that you could slot into
your Web team anywhere.
Footnotes
1 My blog was already 5 years old when LinkedIn was founded: my general thinking is that I
can’t trust any free service younger than my blog to retain information for perpetuity longer than my blog, which is why so much of my content from around the web gets
PESOS‘d or POSSE‘d here.
It’s so emblematic of the moment we’re in, the Who Cares Era, where completely disposable things are shoddily produced for people to mostly ignore.
…
In the Who Cares Era, the most radical thing you can do is care.
In a moment where machines churn out mediocrity, make something yourself. Make it imperfect. Make it rough. Just make it.
At a time where the government’s uncaring boot is pressing down on all of our necks, the best way to fight back is to care. Care loudly. Tell others. Get going.
…
Smart words, well-written by Dan Sinker.
I like the fact that he correctly identifies that the “Who Cares Era” – illustrated by the bulk creation of low-effort, low-quality media, for a disheartened audience that no longer has
a reason to give a damn – isn’t about AI.
I mean… AI’s certainly not helping! AI slop dominates social media (especially in right-wing
spaces, for retrospectively-obvious reasons) and bleeds out into the mainstream. LLM-generated content, lacking even the slightest human input, is becoming painfully ubiquitous.
It’s pretty sad out there.
So while the “Who Cares Era” might be exemplified by the proliferation of AI slop… it’s much bigger than that. It’s a sociological change, tied perhaps to a growing dissatisfaction with
our governments and the increasing feeling of powerlessness to change the unjust social systems we’re locked into?
I don’t know how to fix it. I don’t even know if it’s fixable. But I agree with Dan’s argument that a great starting point is to care.
And I, for one, am going to continue to create things I care about, giving them the time and attention they deserve. And maybe if enough of us can do that, just that, then
maybe that’ll make the difference.
This video, which I saw on Nebula but which is also available on YouTube, explores a hypothetical alternate history in which the Schuman Plan/European Coal & Steel Community never happened, and the knock-on effects lead to no EU, a more fragmented Europe,
and an ultimately more-fractured and more-complicated Europe of the late 20th/early 21st century.
Obviously it’s highly-speculative and you could easily come up with your own alternative alternative history! But the Twilight Struggle player in me as well as the alternate
history lover (and, of course, European Union fan) especially loves the way this story is told.
It’s worth remembering that for the last half-millenium or more, the default state of Europe has been to be fighting one another: if not outright war then at least agressive
economic and political rivals. Post-WWII gave Europe perhaps its longest ever period of relative peace, and that’s great enough that all of the other benefits of a harmonised
and cooperative union are just icing on the cake.
EU Made Simple is a fantastic channel in general, and I’d recommend you give it a look. It ties news and history in with its creators
outlook, but it’s always clear which bits are opinion and it’s delightfully bitesized. For Europeans-in-exile in this post-Brexit age, it’s hopeful and happy, and I like it.
It was a bit… gallows humour… for a friend to share this website with me, but it’s pretty funny.
And also: a robot that “schedules a chat” to eject you from your job and then “delivers the news with the emotional depth of a toaster” might still have been preferable to an
after-hours email to my personal address to let me know that I’d just had my last day! Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but there’s some news that
email isn’t the medium for, right?
A master class in how not to lead through crisis is continuing at Automattic and it’s rough to
watch.
After Matt Mullenweg sets off a firestorm by going “scorched earth” on WP Engine in September 2024 (if you don’t know the story) there’s been one dodgy decision after another but through it all Mullenweg and his
executive leadership team continue to blame the lack of success and growth on staffers.
October 2024: Make two “alignment offers” to root out anyone willing to speak sense to the madness of all the
#wpdrama. 159 walk in the first and 25-30 in the second. Allege that the people who chose to leave were low performers and now that everyone left is
aligned things should be better.
January 10: Matt Mullenweg states “There are no layoffs plans at Automattic, in fact
we’re hiring fairly aggressively and have done a number of acquisitions since this whole thing started, and have several more in the pipeline.”
April 2: Automattic decimates its engineering staff in a 280 person layoff with a paltry severance compared to
alignment offers. Leaving many feeling like suckers for showing loyalty.
April 8: The engineering lead admits that just this week they are beginning to see the gaps in engineering
due to the layoffs.
April 9: CFO accidentally sends a Slack message to the entire company that not only do engineers need to, but all of
Automattic needs to “Get aligned, get productive, deliver or move on”.
The call is coming from inside the house. The C-suite is failing to get real alignment because “leadership” at
WordPress.com, Automattic, et al. is not, and have not, been leading. They haven’t come up with an executable commercial plan for the company in nearly a decade. Any time they get
close to doing so a shiny object appears and **poof** on to something else.
I’m not sure whether I agree with everything Kellie asserts, but I’ve certainly been concerned about the direction of management for the last year or more. Obviously I’d be biased,
speaking as one of the “suckers” who showed loyalty in October only to get axed in April…
But for a while now it had felt like my reasons for staying were entirely about my love for (a) my team, a full half of whom got laid off at the same time as me anyway, and (b)
WordPress and the open source space it represents, which of course Automattic’s
been distancing itself from.
(Incidentally – and speaking of open source – I’m quite enjoying the freedom to contribute to ClassicPress, which previously might have been
frowned-upon by my employers. I’ve not got a first PR out yet, but I’m hoping to soon.)
So yeah… while I might not agree with all of Kellie’s sentiments (here and elsewhere)… I increasingly find I have the clarity to agree with many of them. Automattic seems to be a ship
on fire, right now, and I really feel for my friends and former colleagues still aboard what must be an increasingly polarised environment, seemingly steering hard towards profits over
principles.
There’s a small house ( ⌂ ) in the middle of IBM’s infamous character set Code Page 437. “Small house”—that’s the official IBM
name given to the glyph at code position 0x7F, where a control character for “Delete” (DEL) should logically exist. It’s cute, but a little strange. I wonder, how did it get there?
Why did IBM represent DEL as a house, of all things?
It’s highly accessible, so even if you’ve only got a passing interest in, I don’t know, text encoding or typography or the history of computing, it’s a great read.
