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Open Chaos: A self-evolving open-source project

https://www.openchaos.dev/
201•stefanvdw1•4h ago•32 comments

A Eulogy for Dark Sky, a Data Visualization Masterpiece (2023)

https://nightingaledvs.com/dark-sky-weather-data-viz/
298•skadamat•8h ago•132 comments

Rats caught on camera hunting flying bats

https://scienceclock.com/rats-caught-on-camera-hunting-flying-bats-for-the-first-time/
24•akg130522•2h ago•5 comments

Show HN: I used Claude Code to discover connections between 100 books

https://trails.pieterma.es/
13•pmaze•3h ago•1 comments

Drones that recharge directly on transmission lines

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/voltair
100•alphabetatango•4h ago•75 comments

ASCII-Driven Development

https://medium.com/@calufa/ascii-driven-development-850f66661351
39•_hfqa•2d ago•21 comments

Side-by-side comparison of how AI models answer moral dilemmas

https://civai.org/p/ai-values
31•jesenator•1d ago•15 comments

New information extracted from Snowden PDFs through metadata version analysis

https://libroot.org/posts/going-through-snowden-documents-part-4/
227•libroot•9h ago•101 comments

Bichon: A lightweight, high-performance Rust email archiver with WebUI

https://github.com/rustmailer/bichon
23•rendx•1h ago•5 comments

Bindless Oriented Graphics Programming

https://alextardif.com/BindlessProgramming.html
9•ibobev•3d ago•0 comments

UK government exempting itself from cyber law inspires little confidence

https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/10/csr_bill_analysis/
247•DyslexicAtheist•6h ago•50 comments

Distributed Denial of Secrets

https://ddosecrets.com/
30•sabakhoj•2d ago•1 comments

UpCodes (YC S17) is hiring PMs, SWEs to automate construction compliance

https://up.codes/careers?utm_source=HN
1•Old_Thrashbarg•3h ago

“Erdos problem #728 was solved more or less autonomously by AI”

https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/115855840223258103
586•cod1r•22h ago•326 comments

Httpz – Zero-Allocation HTTP/1.1 Parser for OxCaml

https://github.com/avsm/httpz
61•noelwelsh•3d ago•16 comments

GPU memory snapshots: sub-second startup (2025)

https://modal.com/blog/gpu-mem-snapshots
10•jxmorris12•2d ago•3 comments

How we made v0 an effective coding agent

https://vercel.com/blog/how-we-made-v0-an-effective-coding-agent
18•MaxLeiter•2d ago•7 comments

Good Judgment Open

https://www.gjopen.com
9•kaycebasques•2d ago•1 comments

Reverse Engineering the Epson FilmScan 200 for Classic Mac

https://ronangaillard.github.io/posts/reverse-engineering-epson-filmscan-200/
81•j_leboulanger•1w ago•6 comments

Creating Embroidered Charts with R and ImageMagick

https://aman.bh/blog/2025/creating-embroidered-charts-with-r-and-imagemagick
68•speckx•4d ago•4 comments

I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great

https://www.theverge.com/tech/858910/linux-diary-gaming-desktop
336•rorylawless•5h ago•273 comments

Sinclair C5

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_C5
5•jszymborski•16m ago•0 comments

Time Travelling and Fixing Bugs with Property-Based Testing (2019)

https://wickstrom.tech/2019-11-17-time-travelling-and-fixing-bugs-with-property-based-testing.html
17•todsacerdoti•4d ago•0 comments

Greenland sharks maintain vision for centuries through DNA repair mechanism

https://phys.org/news/2026-01-eye-greenland-sharks-vision-centuries.html
238•pseudolus•4d ago•103 comments

JavaScript Demos in 140 Characters

https://beta.dwitter.net
325•themanmaran•1d ago•59 comments

Changes to Android Open Source Project

https://source.android.com/
268•TechTechTech•3d ago•173 comments

Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

https://philipotoole.com/start-your-meetings-at-5-minutes-past/
252•otoolep•22h ago•211 comments

Org Mode Syntax Is One of the Most Reasonable Markup Languages to Use for Text

https://karl-voit.at/2017/09/23/orgmode-as-markup-only/
182•adityaathalye•11h ago•146 comments

How Markdown took over the world

https://www.anildash.com/2026/01/09/how-markdown-took-over-the-world/
391•zdw•1d ago•292 comments

Allow me to introduce, the Citroen C15

https://eupolicy.social/@jmaris/115860595238097654
622•colinprince•9h ago•408 comments
Open in hackernews

Robotopia: A 3D, first-person, talking simulator

https://elbowgreasegames.substack.com/p/introducing-robotopia-a-3d-first
62•psawaya•2d ago

Comments

4b11b4•17h ago
I'm imagining a version of this where you have to use various prompt- or data-centric attacks to navigate scenarios
tom_0•16h ago
We want to gamify prompt hacking and give people an UI to add/remove chunks of the system prompt. It'll be unlocked by collecting widgets around the place.
fosterfriends•17h ago
I’m so excited to see LLMs used more creatively in video games. So many new mechanics can be unlocked with LLMs as judges
psawaya•16h ago
Agreed!

Some other cool ones I've seen: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2542850/1001_Nights/ https://www.playsuckup.com/

shminkle•15h ago
Robotopia was very inspired by suck up. First LLM game that kinda cracked the 3d world
wavemode•17h ago
I like the concept. Though, they couldn't have found better text-to-speech voices? Or is it meant to be humorous how bad they are.
tom_0•16h ago
It's a stylistic choice for sure. A little better than that is straight in uncanny valley, and human-level is too high latency and too expensive for us. We found that this level of crappy works great, in practice, plus it runs on-device! We use Rhasspy Piper to generate them.
Hammershaft•11h ago
I would personally avoid voices that skew too close to common tiktok TTS ai. Currently the heavy robots with the lower bassier voices sell that clunky robot voice vibe much better, but some of the more generic voices immediately take me out.
tom_0•10h ago
Unfortunately, they are close because some of them ARE tiktok AI voices you heard! I'm working on hiring VAs to make custom datasets, though. We'll have our own unique voices by 1.0 for sure.
lifetimerubyist•16h ago
Another game that has LLM powered NPCs is the f2p action game from China called "Where Winds Meet" and players came up with all sorts of hilarious ways to cheat quests and other fun stuff via prompt injections.

https://www.dexerto.com/gaming/where-winds-meet-players-are-...

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/where-winds-meet-player-con...

shminkle•15h ago
I had no idea this game had LLM NPCs. Interesting
tom_0•16h ago
Hey, Tommaso here, I'm one of the founders of the Robotopia studio. I didn't expect to see this here! Ask me anything :)
Scaevolus•16h ago
Are the LLMs run on-device, or does this use cloud compute?

(Off-topic AMA question: Did you see my voxel grid visibility post?)

tom_0•16h ago
The "big" one is Llama3.3-70b on the cloud, right now. On GroqCloud in fact, but we have a cloud router that gives us several backups if Groq abandoned us.

We use a ton of smaller models (embeddings, vibe checks, TTS, ASR, etc) and if we had enough scale we'll try to run those locally for users that have big enough GPUs.

(You mean the voxel grid visibility from 2014?! I'm sure I did at the time... but I left MC in 2020 so don't even remember my own algorithm right now)

Scaevolus•15h ago
Shipping GPU-accelerated ML models in games looks difficult, are there any major examples other than vendor-locked upscaling like DLSS or FSR?

(Yep! https://cod.ifies.com/voxel-visibility/ )

tom_0•15h ago
Yeah it's extremely difficult right now, especially for a Windows game that can't have players install Pytorch and the Cuda Toolkit!

ONNX and DirectML seem sort of promising right now, but it's all super raw. Even if that worked, local models are bottlenecked by VRAM and that's never been more expensive. And we need to fit 6gb of game in there as well. Even if _that_ worked, we'd need to timeslice the compute inside the frame so that the game doesn't hang for 1 second. And then we'd get to fight every driver in existence :) Basically it's just not possible unless you have a full-time expert dedicated to this IMO. Maybe it'll change!

About the voxel visibility: yeah that was awesome, I remember :) Long story short MC is CPU-bound and the frustum clippings' CPU cost didn't get paid off by the reduced overdraw, so it wasn't worth it. Then a guy called Jonathan Hoof rewrote the entire thing to be separated in a 360° scan done on another thread when you changed chunk + a in-frustum walk that worked completely differently, and I don't remember the details but it did fix the ravine issue entirely!

Scaevolus•12h ago
GGML is another neat ML abstraction layer, but I don't think much work has been dedicated to the Windows port.
tom_0•10h ago
GGML still runs on llama.cpp, and that still requires CUDA to be installed, unfortunately. I saw a PR for DirectML, but I'm not really holding my breath.
Charmunk•15h ago
Hey! Robotopia looks awesome, I'm excited to try it out when it launches. How do you convert the LLM output to actions? Is there more broad actions available (ie like creating any object, moving anything anywhere) exposed to the LLM or is it more specific tools it can call?
tom_0•15h ago
Thanks :) It may sound insane but we convert actions to Python functions then ask the LLM to write a python script that actually runs in IronPython inside the game. Then we have a visual Behavior Tree system to let our designer define the actions. So yeah, they got a bunch of general actions like walk, talk, follow, interact etc.

PS: I think MCP/Tool Calls are a boondoggle and LLMs yearn to just run code. It's crazy how much better this works than JSON schema etc.

dandelionv1bes•10h ago
This is fantastic. I think it’s nailed in the substack what was missing from a lot of these LLM driven NPCs that did not feel authentic. I have a couple of follow-up questions on specifics relating to analysis of behaviour with LLMs (in game-dev myself). Would it be possible to speak to you directly on them?
tom_0•10h ago
Thanks :) If you want I'm on the discord linked on our landing page, it's fun stuff to talk about!
dandelionv1bes•9h ago
Amazing! Thanks will join.
Tossrock•1h ago
Do you have a budget per-player of cloud usage? What happens if people really like the game and play it so much it starts getting expensive to keep running? I guess at $0.79 / Mtok llama70B is pretty affordable, but a per-player opex seems hard to handle without a subscription model.