I think I've always called this "Ontology is hard". It's genuinely useful when it's used as a tool for clarification. It's constraining when it's used as a tool for modeling.
You didn't need to say anything. Plenty of people would have stepped up to defend you. Now, the sarcasm looks defensive. This could be another blog post in a couple months.
Writing and sharing it is vulnerable, and it's always drove me crazy to see people treat those who choose to do that uncharitably. I try to check them when I can (on other people's posts). I should trust others in this context to do the same.
I should probably develop a thicker skin if I'm going to blog on the internet in 2026.
If this works with writing, it should also work with code. `git blame` should be enough training data to de-anonymize open source programmers. Maybe that'd be addition information to point out who Satoshi is.
Blow originally did Order of Sinking Star as a quick side project. He thought that by using these pre-existing games as a starting point, he'd get it done quicker. But then he decided to experiment with the combinatorics of these mechanics that the game blew up so much in scope that the original starting point didn't help at all.
It's a puzzle maker's puzzle game. The reason why it's so lauded is because the design is so tight. Kinda like how there's certain buildings the public thinks is ugly, but architects all like it because it tickles that part of the architect brain. It's a game that gives you that ah-ha moment. Kinda that moment where you walk from the forest into a clearing, but for your brain.
The game is hard. I only kinda got the hang of it, and I didn't quite get to that ah-ha moment. You have to be willing to sit with it and think. I think with sokoban games, you can often just almost random walk your way to a solution, because the state space and its transitions is easy enough to wander into. But I didn't find that to be the case with SSR. You have to be able to reason about the state space changes, I think because the state space isn't exactly euclidean, so it's harder to wander into the solution.
Sokoban is a common word within puzzle game fans and devs. That article wasn't written for people that didn't like those kinds of puzzles in the first place.
It's easy to talk yourself out of doing things when you know a little too much. Sometimes, it's good to get back into the mode where you knew nothing and do things for their own sake, just to get the engine started again.
Do you think LLMs make this process of starting the engine easier or harder? They make getting started much easier, but it might be harder to feel a sense of momentum since our expectations of speed have changed, and the learning moments have changed as well.
The bug is in the software in our heads, if anything. We learned a little too much, that we're thinking further ahead than we would have when we first started out. So you need to purposefully shut off that part of your eval, so that you get started on anything at all.
If you design with the LLM, then it can make this easier by prompting it to help you not talk yourself out of things.
I found that gstack's /office_hours to be good about encouraging, while being firm. I've only done one of the modes, but it didn't dismiss my pushback when it was just based on my intuition. It took it as a baseline, and tried to evaluate it by taking it seriously. If that's any indication, the other modes for side projects should be just as supportive.
I think LLMs can make it easier to be more ambitious. Non-techies are blown away by being able to build web pages? I'm blown away that I was able to root my 1st gen Kindle Fire to repurpose it as a remote terminal to ssh into my laptop to talk to claude code. I've been trying to root the thing for years and could never find the right instructions to make it work.
