Attention-seeking is indeed the original genetic algorithm.

I'm in a terrible situation right now where I promised a client a fairly simple web-based game, to be delivered in pixijs. Pixi is great for what it does, and as an old time Flash game coder, I find it mostly does enough for procedural stuff, although it's got its share of quirks, gotchas, bugs and memory leaks. What I didn't think about was how to get prefab vector animations into this game - not sprite sheets, but cut scenes that I wanted to be essentially animated SVGs. So I started to go the Adobe Animate route and found to my horror that it's basically Flash stripped of all its useful tools and riddled with bugs; there's no good way to import those animations as vectors or even as bitmaps into Pixi. Animate's exporter still runs on EaselJS code from 2015 and just spits out badly formed json files that misrepresent the tweens. Worse still, it can't even pack textures correctly or consistently. It appears to size them at random based on what size they are in some random frame. And it crashes anytime it tries to pack a texture large enough to be useful. It's not an understatement to say that Flash 7 or 8, in the early 2000s, was far more advanced and powerful.

So what would have taken a day or two back when Flash was available is now taking a week of hand-writing tweens and animations in raw Typescript, one layer at a time.

Since I happened to write the first canvas-based interactive screen graph code that Grant Skinner partially ripped off to create EaselJS, and since I'm sure he's making a fine living from Adobe licensing it, it's especially galling that I'm still paying for a CC license and this is what I get when I want to use a GUI to make some animations to drop into a game.

It's the first time I've done a 2D game since 2017, and I had over a decade of experience building games in Flash/AIR before that. It's just mind-blowing how stupid and regressed Adobe's tooling has become in the past few years, and how much harder it is to do simple things that we took for granted in the heyday of Flash authoring. There really is still no equivalent workflow or even anything close. I guess that post-Flash, there aren't enough people making this kind of web game content for there to be a solid route without using Unity or something.

Yes, I know what you mean. I gave up on Adobe Animate.

Pixi is great for anything that is a texture, then it is really fast. Otherwise it is not a flash replacement.

I do not use it for vector animations, but spritesheets or a webm video overlay is what I would use in your case.

yeah, I really didn't want to use video. The vectors are around 64kb per cut scene. I don't want to create several Mb worth of mp4s for each one.

Did you give it a try? If the scenes are quite short, I found webm to have a reasonable small size.

But .. it bothers me of course as well, having a full video of rastergraphic what could be just some vector and animation data.

I haven't tried with webm. But they need to play full screen on desktop and also stream well on mobile.

I might try Spine, I've heard some positive things. They'll still end up as textures in pixi but maybe at least they can pack well.

This is a misconception. AS3 actually had great garbage collection, and solidly written AS3 code did not leak.

Flex player leaked memory like a sieve. After one day or so it would hang the computer. Maybe it was wrongly written, but leak it did. I have experienced it first hand.

Maybe it was the standalone flex player instead of the web Flash player?

>> Arabia, UAE or Israel's internet

You mean the internet?

How there is a marriage of convenience between western progressivism and ultra-conservative theocracy is still confusing and mysterious to me.

Let me get this straight: If 60,000 people are killed in a war in 3 years, it's a genocide, but if 30,000 protesters are killed in 2 days, it's not? Not that either one is a genocide, but you're saying the difference is what percentage of the population died? Therefore, 10 people in Luxembourg are equal to 200 people in China?

My GF and I rarely discuss news or politics, but she's a frequent NPR listener who gets most of her (ahem) "news" from there and Reddit. So the other night something came up about Israel and she casually said "well, but everyone hates Israel now". In that context, I said what do they think about the masses of unarmed people shot in the streets of Tehran. So imagine my total surprise when she said she had no idea there were any protests in Iran. None at all. Somehow, for a couple years of the war in Gaza, she was attuned to every video - real or fake - that was attributed to that war zone. Yet this completely passed without her noticing.

She said, "well, how would I know about it if it's not on the news?"

I said, "well, it was on the news." And then I went looking for articles about it. And y'know, I realized that unless you actually went looking, you probably wouldn't find those articles, even though they're only a few weeks old.

What is super disappointing about this is that when the US does take action against the Iranian regime again, the reasoning is not going to be legible to most Americans. I don't really understand how this was erased so quickly. That meme about Columbia's campus being totally protest-free was pretty much on point. It's startling to see a large portion of the population being manipulated so thoroughly into being rabid about one thing and totally blind to another at the same time. Is having consistent values no longer a value?

Might have to do with the funding cuts to public broadcasting?

I don't think so. We still have public broadcasting, and it's apparently not doing a wonderful job of giving an evenhanded, facts-first picture of world events. If anything, this has actually changed my mind and made me think that defunding it isn't a terrible idea.

The choice of Braille is very clever. I once failed a typography class for using Braille in a final design project that was supposed to create a sequence of images representing a visual story out of pure typography. This followed a 30 minute long argument with the professor during critique in which he asserted that Braille was not type. I countered that it was. It's charming to see it employed in this way.

The Braille trick has been used for ASCII art for awhile. In this case, I was more interested in it for subcharacter rendering of balls.

I didn't realize that, haven't thought about ASCII/ANSI art since the 90s, but the concept of using it for subcharacter animation is clever. Cheers.

[edit] Odd question. I have relatives in the Bay Area who I think spelled their name Wolfe. Their patriarch was named Eliot and survived Auschwitz. Any relation?

I'm from the East Coast.

>It does lend itself better to "tokenization" of a sort - if you want to construct operations from lots of smaller operations [...]

That's an educated assumption to make. But therein lies the issue with every LLM "optimized" language, including those recent ones posted here oriented toward minimizing tokens. Assumptions, that are unvalidatable and unfalsifiable, about the kind of output LLMs synthesize/emit when that output is code (or any output to be real).

Kinda yeah, kinda no. Big-thinking drastic UI experiences are usually shit. But small, thoughtful touches made with care can still make a big difference between a website that just delivers the data you need and one that's pleasant to interact with.

There's a similar amateurs-do-too-much effect with typography and design. I studied typography for four semesters in college, as well as creative writing. The best lessons I learned were:

In writing, show, don't tell.

In typography, use the type to clarify the text - the typography itself should be transparent and only lead to greater immersion, never take the reader out of the text.

Good UI follows those same principles. Good UX is the UI you don't notice.