Mark Vasilkov
Hey hey people, I wrote a game recently for a certain coding competition, and thought I'd share the thought process behind it. Let's start with the Design King Thirteen is by far the most deliberately designed game I've made. It all began with a very...
An open mind is like a fortress with its gates unbarred and unguarded. This is the story of the Super Castle Game, a js13k game jam entry. Naturally, it begins with the theme of the 2023 edition of the compo: 13th Century. When it dropped, I was com...
An application talking to a language model API has control over the following parameters. Only the Vertex AI PaLM API allows setting Top-K and Top-P at the time of writing. Temperature The temperature (a floating-point number in the range 0.0–1.0) is...
So I was working on something very simple involving a CSV file: import csv with open('file.csv', 'r') as f: reader = csv.reader(f) lines = [ln for ln in reader] And as one would expect, the result of running this code was Error: field large...
Old computer fonts are fascinating. Making a consistent-looking font is a remarkable achievement in its own right, but designing a monospaced font that is readable on a very low-resolution screen, is aesthetically pleasing, and has a distinct persona...
This is the second post in the series. See the previous post, ECMAScript Embedded Bitmap Encoding for context. My friend Roman pointed out that I was, in fact, doing things suboptimally in the EEBE post: The array of scanlines can be replaced with ...
I propose the following bitmap format, suitable for embedding small images in TypeScript or JavaScript source code: // ECMAScript Embedded Bitmap Encoding (EEBE) // Required fields: export const lines = [ 0b0001000, 0b0111000, 0b1101000, 0b10...
This is how you define the PositiveInteger dependent type in TypeScript without using type predicate functions or branded (tagged) types: type PositiveInteger = `${T}` extends '0' | `-${any}` | `${any}.${any}` ? never : T It can ...
My preferred system font stacks are as follows: html, button, input { font-family: -apple-system, 'Segoe UI', 'DejaVu Sans', system-ui, sans-serif; } code, kbd, pre, samp { font-family: 'SF Mono', SFMono-Regular, ui-monospace, 'DejaVu Sa...
Before version 0.1, natlib had examples in the main repo, and they were built together with the library. (This is no longer the case, as the examples and tests moved to a separate repo.) To produce a node_modules folder as if natlib was installed as ...
Recently I began using Obsidian (1.0), it's a great little offline wiki application. What it sorely lacks, however, is an option to turn off caret blinking. Thankfully there's the following macOS hidden setting: defaults write -g NSTextInsertionPoint...
This is the story of The Neatness. It all started when I began playing The Looker, a brilliant game by Bradley Lovell. Line-based puzzles in The Looker are mostly satire, the player being able to bypass many of those by scribbling madly. I was instan...