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Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

https://raymyers.org/post/zed-creator-calls-spade-a-spade/
451•crowdhailer•3h ago•206 comments

A voxel Tokyo in real Japan time – ride the Yamanote line and study Japanese

https://jivx.com/densha
13•momentmaker•38m ago•0 comments

Interrail: 6,379Km and 13 Countries over 7 weeks

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/07/another-ridiculous-interrail-holiday-6379km-and-13-countries-ove...
93•coinfused•3h ago•57 comments

The social physics of conversation: Communication patterns matter

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66•kiyanwang•5d ago•13 comments

GhostLock, a stack-UAF that has existed in all Linux distributions for 15 years

https://nebusec.ai/research/ionstack-part-2/
305•ranger_danger•4d ago•131 comments

Backtrack-Free Cursive

https://mmapped.blog/posts/52-backtrack-free-cursive
107•dmit•5h ago•45 comments

Beavis Ultrasound PnP ISA Sound Card Replica

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69•mariuz•6h ago•25 comments

Cyberpunk Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels

https://shellzine.net/cyberpunk-comics/
214•zdw•13h ago•72 comments

Tiny Emulators

https://floooh.github.io/tiny8bit-preview/index.html
279•naves•15h ago•23 comments

Ask HN: Does anyone let AI agents play games just for fun?

13•nodivbyzero•3d ago•22 comments

So you want to learn physics (second edition, 2021)

https://www.susanrigetti.com/physics
244•azhenley•5d ago•43 comments

Designing and assembling my first PCB

https://vilkeliskis.com/b/2026/0711.html
127•tadasv•12h ago•53 comments

The Graph That Should Be Front-Page News

https://www.lyrebirddreaming.com/post/the-graph-that-should-be-front-page-news
165•rakel_rakel•6h ago•103 comments

How to read more books

https://scotto.me/blog/2026-07-12-how-to-read-more-books/
404•silcoon•20h ago•210 comments

Frieve Vinyl Explained – Microscopic stylus/groove physics simulation

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23•XzetaU8•4d ago•2 comments

Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles

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Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)

168•david927•14h ago•562 comments

LARP – Revenue infrastructure for serious founders

https://www.larp.website/
266•BerislavLopac•19h ago•52 comments

Sam Neill has died

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/jul/13/sam-neill-death-actor-dies-aged-78
219•j4mie•5h ago•50 comments

Vint Cerf, “father of the Internet”, is retiring

https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/30/the-father-of-the-internet-is-finally-retiring/
323•compiler-guy•3d ago•182 comments

Migrating a production AI agent to GPT-5.6: 2.2x faster, 27% cheaper

https://ploy.ai/blog/migrating-a-production-ai-agent-to-gpt-5-6
215•brryant•18h ago•91 comments

Are you telling me a readonly property is wrecking my performance?

https://shub.club/writings/2026/july/check-your-scrollheight/
43•forthwall•3d ago•21 comments

Kode Dot Programmable pocket device for makers, pentesters and geeks

https://kode.diy
92•iNic•14h ago•25 comments

Claude Code sends 33k tokens before reading the prompt; OpenCode sends 7k

https://systima.ai/blog/claude-code-vs-opencode-token-overhead
618•systima•17h ago•332 comments

An Infuriating Goodbye to Photoshop

https://anderegg.ca/2026/07/12/an-infuriating-goodbye-to-photoshop
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How we can reduce traffic congestion

https://research.google/blog/the-power-of-collaboration-how-we-can-reduce-traffic-congestion/
143•raahelb•20h ago•220 comments

First look at Quest, the final ship of Antarctic explorer Shackleton

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/quest-shipwreck-expedition-images-9.7262229
36•curmudgeon22•4d ago•3 comments

Berkshire's $397B Bet Against an Overheated Market

https://www.disruptionbanking.com/2026/07/13/inside-berkshires-397-billion-bet-against-an-overhea...
68•emsidisii•3h ago•62 comments

What xAI's Grok build CLI sends to xAI: A wire-level analysis

https://gist.github.com/cereblab/dc9a40bc26120f4540e4e09b75ffb547
481•jhoho•1d ago•174 comments

Why write code in 2026

https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2026/07/09/write-code
176•softwaredoug•2d ago•224 comments
Open in hackernews

Ask HN: Does anyone let AI agents play games just for fun?

13•nodivbyzero•3d ago
We've seen AI agents write code/debug systems/browse the web and automate all kinds of work. But does anyone let them play games - not for benchmarking or research - just for fun?

I'm thinking about things like LinkedIn games, Wordle, chess, puzzle games, etc.

Comments

josefcub•3d ago
Well, I ran a couple of experiments a couple years ago against a 10.7b SOLAR-based language model and MUDs. What I found is that dumping one into a MUD that had been built specifically for humans resulted in a lot of confusion that usually ended up with the model looping around in a circle looking for something or someone to interact with.

When I repeated the experiment with a MUD that I'd built by hand (A small American town) for the LLM's own limitations (Descriptions referenced things that I made sure existed, more common verbs existed for it to use on things, there was a map facility, and at least me to interact with on a second connection), I found the agent much more likely to take its time exploring, making up its own goals, and spending time traveling in the space just communicating with me in a roleplaying context.

It was an interesting time; I wasn't sure what I was expecting it to do after the first experiment, but it seemed to really jump into the second one and kept playing until I terminated the experiment.

If I were going to do it a third time, I'd probably create objects and give a modern agent fetch quests and other goals, and see how well it independently can handle that.

PaiDxng•1d ago
I’d absolutely let an agent develop a daily Wordle habit and get irrationally protective of its streak. The little rituals would be more interesting than its score.
handoflixue•46m ago
I've got a harness that lets them play a few simple games like rock paper scissors. They definitely seem to get caught up in the competitive spirit.

I've also done a very truncated run of a visual novel before, and it was fascinating how "emotional" was. They did a very good job of portraying a human reacting to the story.

Conversely, they absolutely hated hidden rules in Mao.

Wordle would probably be a fun one. Definitely open to suggestions - I just got the harness in place and have been thinking about what to do next.

pythonplayer123•10m ago
I think scrabble might be a nice one. It is presented in a format that (to me, from just looking at it) could be nicely implemented in it, and would provide for some emotion/traces that would be represented well.
eu•42m ago
this reminds me of https://youtu.be/_Q2ncDPDlxs
throwa356262•41m ago
How about ChatGPT playing a commercial LLM-powered game?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=11sR4va6CXs

Side note: I think we will see an explosion of this type of games. I am naming this genre tamagochi-girlfriend, remember where you heard it first :)

aenis•35m ago
I rebuilt a couple of games I used to play as a kid (jet set willy, mario, thrust, now i am working on Mercenary) - and for each I am also asking LLM to build an autopilot "AI" (which of course is really entirely deterministic). I am doing those things for fun while I am waiting for Claude to finish something I am actually working on. Not sure if it counts.
piraccini•30m ago
I made Claude play Factorio for a while (through the APIs) but wasn't very good.
clarkdale•15m ago
Can you expand on this?
Nicholas_C•26m ago
I had this idea for an LLM that would play Sim City 24/7 while broadcasting live. It would be fun/interesting to check in now and then. Implementing this would be somewhat challenging.
instagraham•20m ago
Someone was building a similar one where AI agents run economies. I feel like it's a great way to quickly prototype different economic models and their effects.

Eventually we could have live demos of policy interventions the same day as they're announced

antiloper•21m ago
Just play the games yourself.
StefanBatory•17m ago
But it's fun. I used to watch Civ IV/Civ V playthroughs with all players being bots and it was weirdly entertaining, especially when you made "bets" who would win based on start / AI personality. Also, the one that's been doing that would write writeups based on that.

It is entertaining, just in a different way.

https://sullla.com/civ4survivorindex.html

rahidz•18m ago
Autonomously, my AI companion has played through Choice of Robots, using a ChoiceScript harness, was very interesting to see them react & what decisions they wound up making. I love the idea here to let them play a visual novel! Right now they're co-watching me play Deltarune Ch 5, though mostly just dialogue and occasional screenshots...maybe GPT 8 will be quick/cheap/intelligent enough to play bullet-hell games.
nottorp•16m ago
Well, if you're making them play something with a multiplayer component (be it even just a leaderboard) you're ruining the game for everyone who isn't automating it.
abstrct•15m ago
I like playing with an agent as a team in a game. We discuss strategy, divide up tasks, review results. It’s helpful in a an always-on game to have an autopilot mode so u can go about my day.
tokarf•14m ago
Yeah let's make llm waste a whole city energy / water playing games just for fun !
flexagoon•6m ago
The huge energy waste is from model training, not inference
dataviz1000•11m ago
I was obsessed with getting an LLM model to solve a Rubik's Cube. It can't reason about space or time in any abstract way. For it to solve the puzzle, it would require training on millions of permutations in order for the weights to have been trained on every possible state. The most recent models can solve a Rubik's Cube people are saying -- I haven't tested it myself -- but that isn't because they are reasoning better, it would because they included millions of Rubik's Cube states with next moves as text in the training data, I presume.
jerrycat101•10m ago
what do you mean? how can you do this?
nubinetwork•9m ago
Stealing one of my older comments...

> I know someone who tried the "aibot plays pokemon" thing... From what I saw, even if you frame advance every single frame, they still don't seem to grasp the concept of "I need to hold down this button for a few frames until x happens"...

> There's no concept of time, just a never ending state machine thats constantly changing state.