The "500 lines or less" book that this is a chapter from was published in 2016 (according to OpenLibrary [1], and the commit dates in the source repo [2])
In this case, I think VC investment was essentially required because the idea for Val Town originally came from a VC (Dan Levine), rather than a founder - see 9.04ish onwards from the interview with Steve Krouse: https://puckacademy.substack.com/p/steve-krouse-on-val-towns...
I only saw pangram being mentioned on HN. How good is it in general ? And what do they use to check if a text is AI Generated, the text watermarks from big models ?
it is very good, but keep in mind it'll also flag text edited with grammarly. Maybe not the same as copy and dumping a claude response, but still normalizes the authors voice with AI.
In my experience, it can have significant false positive. It's pretty good at telling you when something is NOT written by an LLM, but when it says something is, I take it with a big grain of salt.
That's how the earlier image generation models worked. You had one ai to generate images, and one to understand if it's a fake generated image or a real one (like, you have a real image of a dog, use the ai to generate an image of a dog, and pass both to the ai trying to see if it knows which is which). They both start out bad, but evolve together.
Models are trained on ridiculous amounts of human-written text, but their outputs are pretty easy to recognize as not human written. Pangram explains some of the reasons for this in a blog post.[1]
The problem with using Pangram in a feedback loop is that Pangram only reports whether it thinks the text is written by AI or not. It doesn't report whether the text makes sense, or whether it contains errors in spelling or grammar. So when people try to pair AIs with Pangram, the quality of the output tends to degrade to the point where it's not useful.
Basically, it's a harder problem to get an AI to accomplish some goal (such as writing a blog post) while also having its output mimic human text. To use an analogy, it's like building a stealth aircraft with the same speed, maneuverability, range, and payload as a non-stealthy aircraft. Even with a much larger budget, it's not always feasible.
Good. Too bad they're not in Ireland. The country might lack woodland for them to breed in. Artificial nests perhaps? (I think many countries should invest in biodiversity also, on a strategic level, for multitude of reasons, but resilience to pests is one.)
There's no units attached to those first examples so in effect there's nothing to render in the behavior over time graph. The system can still be rendered however.
In the later examples they start introducing numbers to the stock/flow nodes which then populates both graphs.
Another lighthouse map [1] was discussed on HN in 2022 [2]. It also has some data-quality/completeness issues due to being based on OpenStreetMap data, but avoids the AI slop aesthetic of this one.
I actually have been in contact with Ashe just appreciating the idea of her work, and that was definitely a part of what inspired me, I just wanted to make extensive work that focused rather on a specific part of the body. Thank you for pointing it out.
I think that tool is actually great, and nice that someone deployed it again.
But it is too much if that makes sense, it's hard to fit in so much stuff in one little web app, so it ends up just being a cool visualizer but not so good educating tool.
We had the Roamer, British school, very early 90's.
I remember programming a logo/turtle type thing on the BBC Micro, and then I think there was a way to copy the program on to the Roamer directly from the BBC. Or maybe we did it manually. But it was amazing to me, and I always felt sad we didnt use it more!
For context, this article has probably been posted as it is linked to by the "Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?" blog post [1] currently being discussed [2].
The official PMTiles viewer [1, 2, 3] is also pretty good.
[1]: https://pmtiles.io/
[2]: https://github.com/protomaps/PMTiles/tree/main/app
[3]: https://protomaps.com/blog/new-pmtiles-io/
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