Grainau: hiking and beer at 3000 meters
How it all looks from the ground.
For her vacation, Yuliya decided to show me the beautiful German mountains and took me for a couple of days to Grainau — it's a piece of Bavaria that's almost like Switzerland. At least, it is similar to the pictures of Switzerland that I've seen :-D
In short, it's a lovely place with a measured pace of life. If you need to catch your breath, calm your nerves, and enjoy nature, then this is the place for you. But if you can't live without parties, you'll get bored quickly.
What's there:
- The highest mountain in Germany plus a couple of glaciers.
- There's skiing in winter. If you really need it, you can find a place to ski in summer, but the descent is short, and the lifts are turned off.
- A large clean lake and a couple of smaller ones.
- A huge number of trails for hiking.
- A huge number of waterfalls, streams, and a couple of mountain rivers.
- Restaurants with beer.
- Beautiful fallen trees in the forests, private property, fences, cows with bells, and "racing tractors" (I don't know how to name this phenomenon better, but tractors are moving fast there :-D).
This is briefly, and now in detail.
Migrating from GPT-3.5-turbo to GPT-4o-mini
Guess when I switched models.
Recently OpenAI released GPT-4o-mini — a new flagship model for the cheap segment, as it were.
- They say it works "almost like" GPT-4o, sometimes even better than GPT-4.
- It is almost three times cheaper than GPT-3.5-turbo.
- Context size 128k tokens, against 16k for GPT-3.5-turbo.
Of course, I immediately started migrating my news reader to this model.
In short, it's a cool replacement for GPT-3.5-turbo. I immediately replaced two LLM agents with one without changing prompts, reducing costs by a factor of 5 without losing quality.
However, then I started tuning the prompt to make it even cooler and began to encounter nuances. Let me tell you about them.
About the book "Piranesi"
Cover of the book "Piranesi"
"Piranesi" is both a continuation of the magical stories of Susanna Clarke and an independent book.
The book has no direct connection with the world of English magic [ru] from "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell". If desired, one can find a connection and even say that the worlds are the same, only at different times: the events of "Piranesi" take place in the early 2000s. However, the author did not give any hints on this. Therefore, I consider the worlds to be different for now.
Susanna continues to persistently and effectively dig not even in the direction of animism as the basis of world perception but in the direction of extremely holistic view of the world, in contrast to the currently dominant reductionism.
The latter blows my mind. As an engineer, I'm an intuitive reductionist due to professional deformation. Reading "Jonathan Strange" and "Piranesi", I felt how Clarke, like Peter the Great, cuts a window in my brain to another picture of the world, a different world perception. And it's wonderful.
By the way, don't confuse holism with, say, an engineering view of the world, a-la systems engineering [ru] or even science. The latter is about decomposing reality into isolated parts with clear boundaries and synthesizing "pure" models of the world [ru], while in holism, the parts have no clear boundaries and penetrate each other.
But it is my interpretation, there are interpretations when holism is just an alternative name for a systems thinking/view — it's hard to find literature on this topic now, so it's hard for me to say where the truth is.
So, "Piranesi"
«Slay The Princess» — combinatorial narrative
My favorite version of the Princess.
It's hard to impress me as a player and even harder as a game developer. The last time it happened with Owlcat Games in Pathfinder: Kingmaker, when they added a timer to the game's plot.
But Black Tabby Games managed to do it. And they did it not with some technological complexity but with a visual novel on a standard engine (RenPy), which is cool in itself.
I'll share a couple of thoughts about the game and its narrative structure, while I'm still under the impression. I need to think about how to adapt this approach to my projects.
ATTENTION: SPOILERS!
If you haven't played Slay The Princess yet, I strongly recommend you to catch up — the game takes 3-4 hours. You'll not regret it.
Procedural news headlines without complex text generation
A screenshot of the interface for selecting a news connotation (from the prototype of the game about a news agency). News: the arrest of a teenage witch for drunk driving.
From the player preference survey, I gradually moved on to working on a game prototype.
The game will be about a news agency. You will be the chief editor, and your task is to manipulate public opinion by investigating events and choosing a connotation of news: where to draw the public's attention, what to hide, in what tone to present themes, etc.
Therefore, the whole game will be around the text of news.
Creating large blocks of detailed text for each news item looks pointless — the game is not about reading news but about managing them. Therefore, it makes sense to build interaction only around headlines.
But how can we make the displaying of news both interesting and simple?