Yuan Gao

If you know me and my antics in the gamemaker discord server, you'll know that for several years I've laughed along to the jokes about people trying to make MMOs in gamemaker for their first game but it got me thinking... wait, I know how to put this together, I know enough backend systems from my previous satellite image processing work, and realtime systems from my previous robotics work to piece things together fast forward to today, we have a serious MMO platform, dare I say "best in class". leveraging many of the advantages of gamemaker (great 2D engine, fast iteration) but bringing in the programming rigor needed to operate a large team and project like this. The feedback I get from new joiners is often that the codebase is clean, and some of the systems like the component-based entities, and the DOM-inspired UI systems are comprehensive. We're pushing the envelope of what gamemaker can be used for. combined with a full-on backend stack - node.js, typescript, kubernetes, all the good stuff. But at the heart of it we have gamemaker running headless and containerized in the server providing full server-side authority for the MMO, a decision I made early on to empower gamemaker devs rather than backend devs to work on the server-side game logic. The same GM project gets built into both client and server, so you can implement your object and their components once. Plus, we've got a a pretty decent CI and deployment process, so most of the work that gamemaker devs have to do is in the IDE or via git. we have one of the larger gamemaker teams in the industry too, and we have separate teams for gameplay programming and technical programming to suit both styles and preferences. I can't ask for a better place to work as an indie dev. so join us. I have some weird gamemaker things to show you

@BotoKodo @Kinameo1 @Friis25 @MarkDGeorge @skodaautonews @SKODAUK this graph shows attenuation of acoustic energy that would be arriving at the ear as modified by ANC

@mesetatron @Kinameo1 @Friis25 @MarkDGeorge @skodaautonews @SKODAUK microphones don't follow weber's law. 3db is a 50% reduction in acoustic energy.

TIL that Škoda made a bicycle bell that can cut through ANC headphones. Most ANC systems use adaptive filtering (like LMS) at a very basic level, it models the incoming noise and generate an anti-phase signal to cancel it. Works best for steady and predictable sounds. Škoda's research found that around 750 - 780Hz ANC struggles a lot so they made their bell to target this particular frequency they added irregular, transient dual tones that are hard to model in real time this comes from a dual-resonator design : one tuned to ~750-780 Hz (ANC weak spot) using a cantilever tine, and another at higher frequencies (~2 KHz+) like a normal bell, so it’s not a single clean tone So instead of being louder, it’s just… harder to cancel. Pretty neat example of exploiting system limitations with pure analog design. skoda-storyboard.com/en/skoda-world… #s_aid=lcjn3ale-l4dw-fwm4-7wyj-melns76mrjal_004_1" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">cdn.skoda-storyboard.com/2026/04/Skoda-…

@9hills the $40 bucks thing is because of the 75% price drop on Deepseek v4 Pro, giving you 4x usage. But everyone else gets that too. so it's still just $1 = 10x of usage. That's good. that's better than the 6x of Opencode Go

不错，1 美元。然后我反手就是一个 pi install pi-commandcode-provider 在 Pi 里面用，美滋滋。 1 美元 = 10 刀（DeepSeek-V4-Pro 可以用 40 刀）

@Kinameo1 @Friis25 @MarkDGeorge @skodaautonews @SKODAUK My point is their claim is that "around 750 - 780Hz ANC struggles a lot" whereas the reality is it's a barely perceptible difference in performance. Compare the marketing materials with their own published data. this is not really "getting through the ANC barrier"

@mesetatron @Friis25 @MarkDGeorge @skodaautonews @SKODAUK I don’t think the point is for it to be noticeable in its own. Getting through the ANC barrier is the hard part. It doesn’t matter what frequency as long as it bypasses ANC.

@Friis25 @MarkDGeorge @skodaautonews @SKODAUK lol yeah, 3db. that's barely noticeable for the ear. it's marketing fluff. that diagram they showed implied there's a whole notch where frequencies make it through. but it's a 3db dip.

@mesetatron @MarkDGeorge @skodaautonews @SKODAUK The 800 Hz dip came from objective ANC measurement and The 750 Hz performing best is from subjective human detection test. Calling it a "safety gap" without qualification, that does sound like marketing language 😂

@MarkDGeorge @Friis25 @skodaautonews @SKODAUK probably marketing fluff. those frequencies are probably only a few percent worse at best, if they even measured it. Or they already decided what bell they were going to use, and picked some arbitrary frequency in that range. Actual ANC performance doesn't have a dip there

@Friis25 @skodaautonews @SKODAUK The irregular part makes sense. But what's behind struggling with a particular frequency?

@goodhunt you got sperm whale in there twice too, 抺香鲸 is also sperm whale

so one problem with naming all the sub agents after whales

@goatmann007 @Case_Portman

@Case_Portman Is there another way? Genuinely asking

I released a game on all major platforms in 2021 and this is a snippet of code from the player object. Is it clean? No. But does it make sense to me? Also no.

@badlogicgames using Pi in zed is pretty sweet. I think it's a good fit. Zed is just way snappier and light on resources compared to any VScode fork. I ditched Cursor to go with Pi+Zed, everything's just much faster and vendor-neutral

ok, maybe it's time to switch to Zed.

@thdxr literally every time someone says "agents" I hear it as "Asians" because this clip lives rent-free in my head youtu.be/3Lyex2tSUyA?si…

everyone is building things for agents who is building things for asians?

@peytoncasper when I was building fruit picking robots, heard similar stories: humans were fast, but they were also messy. they got ill, they quit, they'd sue for workplace injuries. There were lots of overhead dealing with rescheduling and making sure enough workers showed up when needed

shoutout to one of my ethics in cs professors who told us about a very simple story of a factory this factory had hired a team to come in and automate a specific task. In the beginning it was absolutely terrible and was mocked relentlessly the team continued to improve it and soon it started to match the output of humans on the line and they stopped laughing then it became faster and cheaper than them and they became angry in many respects this is why I believe in coding agents. everyone and everything looks stupid in the beginning and almost everyone’s blind spot is subtly believing it won’t improve

@CiscaChronicle @Anayacs71 @grok except that looks nothing like that character, or in fact any valid character. the closest is 公 or 仝. but nobody who knows Chinese would make that sort of mistake, and the stroke direction is completely wrong. Whoever did that either wasn't writing Chinese, or isn't good at it

@grok had this to say ... It looks like the Chinese character “凶” (xiōng), which means ominous, fierce, or bad luck/inauspicious. Probably just a random prank or bored scribble from someone near the restaurant—common with dusty cars. Wipe it off if it’s surface level; check for actual paint damage. Nothing serious in most cases like this.

I parked near a Chinese restaurant while at the gym, and when I came back, I found this symbol on my car. Any idea what it means?

@TheNotTurk @MattZeitlin alternatively he referenced China's Warring States period, and the listener, not knowing Chinese history, decided he was referencing GoT. I don't know the context, but it seems he's far more likely to be talking about Chinese history than making a western pop culture reference

@MattZeitlin He chose a reference Americans would understand. Sort of like the IRGC and the legos

This makes sense because there aren’t any Chinese historical references for a period of instability marked by wars between different kingdoms

@N4pstr @Swolav @rogesterone @Hetzner_Online we used to collect a lot of aerial imagery over farmland. hundreds of gigabytes of photos per flight in rural locations where the fastest internet was 3G cellular. So we'd get the memory cards shipped to a data center where someone would plug them in. that's the sort of usage

@Swolav @rogesterone @Hetzner_Online okay im sure there are reasons but now im wondering what that could be useful for just booting off it or?

helo @Hetzner_Online is there some way i can like request or pay for a little photo of my server i think it'd be really cool to have a little picture of my little computer friend happily wrrrrrrrrrring away in a little datacentre

@herrmann1001 eventually I got a smart watch that could do it, rather than have to change my phone, so I could finally stop having to carry around an nfc tag to get into the building. So yeah, even smart watches can do it

@herrmann1001 this isn't on "some smarthphones" it's on most of them. In China, they use this for gated community access, school IDs, and so on. it's so normal and expected as a feature when I tried to get my (western) phone enrolled, the clerk was confused about why it couldn't copy the NFC

Mind blown 🤯 Some smartphones sold in mainland China (like certain OPPO models) can read MIFARE Classic cards, crack the keys in seconds, store them, and then fully emulate the card directly on the phone. No extra hardware. Just the phone. Access control, transit cards, hotel keys… game over. Huge thanks to Ian for showing me this in person. Really eye-opening how far NFC capabilities have gone in some regions. Who else has seen this in the wild? #NFC #MIFARE #TechSecurity​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ #oppo

@LottoLabs > posts on X about how GPU ownership is the next class status signifier, and how you're running Opus-level models locally

How Apple mfrs think this goes >be me >drop $1600 on two RTX 3090s used off eBay >"48GB VRAM, I'm basically a datacenter now" >they arrive in anti-static bags that look like they've been through a war >plug them into my motherboard and it sounds like a jet engine taking off >neighbors probably think I'm mining crypto again >install llama.cpp, download qwen3.6-27b quantized >"Q4_K_M, only 16GB, totally fits" >start LM Studio on port 1234 >type "hello" into the chat box >GPU fans spin up to 100% instantly >wait 8 seconds for a response >>"Hello! How can I assist you today?" >I've seen faster responses from my grandma reading a text aloud >try Q8_0 quantization because "quality matters" >OOM error, obviously >spend three hours tweaking n_gpu_layers and n_ctx like it's some kind of dark art >finally get it running at 4 tokens per second >ask it to write me a poem about my GPUs >>"Two cards of silicon and light / They hum through the endless night" >"bro this is actually fire" >show it to someone on Discord >”why are you running LLMs locally when you could just use an API for free" >explain that the joy isn't in the output, it's in watching 94% VRAM usage and knowing nobody else has access to my model >they don't understand >close Discord, open LM Studio again >"let's try a longer context window" >crash

@alyssaleann You ever think someone asks him "Do you like working at NASA?" and he's like "like? I love it. practically married to Mars" with a straight face

my lukewarm take on married last names is that whichever is the coolest last name should “win” and become the family name example: my maiden name was Mars, and I changed it to Hakanson to match my husband he works for NASA we chose poorly

@jozefandrew1 also yes. if you compare undergrad engineering at Imperial or Cambridge, they have a whole compus for undergrad engineers. Oxford has one shitty 8 floor building plus occasional lectures or labs in nearby Holder building for every undergrad

@jozefandrew1 Thom building still standing after all these years huh? When I was there they were talking about the building reaching its end of life. But then unfortunately after investigating, it turned out the aged concrete was superficial, and they're not tearing it down any time soon

@suchnerve there's a version of this idea using underground water tank for thermal storage. a heat pump would pump heat in or out of the water (or between two tanks, for double-duty). cost-wise this is very good, water tanks can be well insulated and are cheap. uses a lot of space though

I still really like the idea of: 1. IF the local power grid is largely fed by solar panels 2. AND a home is unoccupied during the daytime 3. THEN when it’s around solar noon, remotely max out that home’s air conditioner or heat pump, so the building acts as a “thermal battery”