gustav

"what a beautiful dream that could flash on a screen in a blink of an eye and be gone from me"

currently working on a minimal lo-fi game engine, among other things

(recently moved here from gamedev.place)

web: http://gustavolsson.com

Public Key

npub1zr3eag207lafy7d43at9s8amt73kur7spz4fdndpfx0xzlp9cp6qrkpq5g

NIP-05 Address

gustav_at_merveilles.town@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsppcu7598l075j0x6c74jcr7a4lgmwplgq325keks5n8np0sjuqaqprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0d4hhxarj9ecxjmntrduzmm

Publishing to

relay.momostr.pink

Author Public Key

npub1zr3eag207lafy7d43at9s8amt73kur7spz4fdndpfx0xzlp9cp6qrkpq5g

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Last Notes

2026-09-07 08:43:13 UTC

For the 2 months I have before my parental leave starts, I'm leaning more and more towards distilling my game experiments over the last couple of years into a small 3d game engine and release it as a paid product. The timeline is probably too tight, but it would be fun to try!
* Somewhere between pico-8, bitsy, picocad2 and old unity
* A software-based renderer will force developers to be mindful about their resource-use, but will keep the games working for a very long time and allow porting the runtime to many platforms. Being able to easily make a 3d game for the Playdate is very cool.
* I dislike engines that *force* you to use an editor (unity, godot, etc), but at the same time I love the productivity the editor brings to some tasks. I want to find the perfect balance here.
* Financially, it's either a very good idea or a very bad idea..(?) It'll be paid product simply because I need an income. pico-8 seems to do well, but it's also probably the only such project doing well..
#gamedev #unity3d #pico8 #theWorkshop

2026-05-22 22:38:53 UTC

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Very cool! I can’t figure out how the characters are filled? Ie how do you get thick lines?

2026-04-28 17:21:37 UTC

Today I encountered this Volvo Amazon (from the 50s) and the hero who converted it to electric WAY BACK IN THE 90s! After getting a new battery pack from a crashed EV and solar panels in recent years it has a range of 400km and charges a few 10s of km on sunny days. Basically an infinity car!
So inspiring, I’m doing this some day! Imagine the future we could have had.. and maybe still can.
#electricvehicles #solarpunk

2026-04-17 19:51:39 UTC

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Thanks! Going to request some of these for pickup for the next time the book bus comes by. (The book bus is such a great thing, do you have it as well? Part of the libraries in town)

2026-04-17 17:36:50 UTC

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Thanks for the recommendation! Any others in this vein you recommend @npub1z8r…mrq6 ?

2026-04-12 20:31:33 UTC

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Will ask some questions when I’ve had some time to read through the material, been a busy week :)

2026-04-12 19:38:25 UTC

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I love following this even though I don’t quite understand it!

2026-04-03 21:56:53 UTC

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That’s a very nice bonfire!

2026-03-27 09:59:18 UTC

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Nice! I'm a big fan of the Brightin Star 28mm f2.8 pancake lens for Leica M. It's metal, all manual but very sharp (except for the corners on full frame) and less than 1cm thick!

2026-03-24 08:58:36 UTC

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That looks so good!!

2026-03-16 22:36:10 UTC

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*How* did you notice that when it was up?!

2026-03-16 22:29:59 UTC

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That screenshot looks so good!!

2026-03-15 23:08:12 UTC

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I do agree with you jak that it feels wrong to ban a topic of discussion. However, I see the rule as a way to keep (only) the local feed free of AI in a time when it’s practically impossible to avoid the topic elsewhere, which I like. At the same time, I can’t really say that e.g. my operating system endeavors are more interesting/thoughtful and worthy of the local feed than a well thought out post on AI.

2026-03-14 19:43:57 UTC

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Grattis! Jag är taggad på releasen i veckan!

2026-03-03 22:25:20 UTC

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Cool, uxnfloppy runs great on this one! The 640x480 VGA resolution looks good on the 4:3 screen.
The rom is potato.tal by @npub1z8r…mrq6
I really want to try a 90s era computer some day (and add all the missing varvara devices)..
#uxn #thinkpad
https://assets.merveilles.town/media_attachments/files/116/167/558/431/574/303/original/b6b199f38011e952.mp4

2026-03-02 22:34:12 UTC

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I know this is whack-a-mole, but maybe worth adding a text file with the ”test refusal string” to the repo to avoid lazy PRs https://hackingthe.cloud/ai-llm/exploitation/claude_magic_string_denial_of_service/

2026-03-02 21:48:33 UTC

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This is snappier than my MacBook Pro 16” on Sequoia

2026-03-02 20:49:23 UTC

An elegant weapon, for a more.. civilized age
#enshitification #windowsxp
https://assets.merveilles.town/media_attachments/files/116/161/531/230/818/054/original/d0adc9f186382545.jpeg

2026-02-13 15:44:28 UTC

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Nope

2026-02-13 14:55:00 UTC

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The idea of an AI-free zone on the Internet is growing on me. I think people, and artists in particular, are craving this.
Do you know of any existing initiatives?
I have a few ideas I want to explore in the coming weeks!
Currently: humans only+no AI tools allowed, approachable for ordinary people (sorry Mastodon), directed towards artists/creators, invite-only (and you're partly responsible for the ones you invite), quick feed+long form discussions, maybe playful custom captcha?, maybe auto-poisoning of media uploads by default? (with e.g. https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/whatis.html)

2026-02-11 10:24:11 UTC

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A (maybe obvious) realization: Anything we do to help humans determine whether some work is made by humans or not will eventually be used against us to train the next AI. If we include a history of changes in each file as I outlined above, that data is extremely valuable as training data for *how humans actually* draw / write / code and the next AI will produce even more human-like output. (However, if we are able to enforce the time-component, the benefit of using AI would significantly be reduced)
So, the conclusion is that we can't rely on checking that someone is human or that a work was created by a human. I think we only have 2 options left:
1) Create an invite-only community in which AI is forbidden, and have tools that help moderators kick people that break the rules. I think artist's are craving such a platform to replace e.g. Instagram. Imagine an invite only Instagram where AI is prohibited, would it work?
2) Examine if it's possible to create a computing space that starts with a clean slate and input/output is very restricted, allowing only new work to be created within the confines of the system, where the system could have 2000s era computing power. Not sure, but maybe this requires proof-of-work, which has huge environmental impacts if done on a large scale. Personal computing does not need to be large scale however. :moomin_hmm:

2026-02-10 12:42:46 UTC

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After a night of thinking, I've not gotten far, but here is an idea:
In this computing space, all file types record how they were created, containing a history of edits and authors. (Authors could just be private/public key pairs, no sensitive information)
So a text file would record how each character entered the document, and who wrote what.
A bitmap would record what pixels were touched, in what order and by whom.
(This kind of CRDT-like data structure could have benefits when collaborating as well?)
Any procedurally generated content would be recognized as such, and a generated document's history would look very different to a document that was crafted over several months. One could even show a "generated" tag on files deemed to be generated.
If this was it, it would obviously be easy to fool the system by generating a plausable history. But maybe there are ways to protect against this? "Oracles" with unique random number generators that keep track of time, and edits being signed by those, somehow? If each "private garden zone" had its own oracle, and you had friends, your friends could sign the work you're doing over time, ensuring that the history is correct?
I'm probably reinventing a lot of bad cryptography concepts here, hehe. I know very little of security/privacy.

2026-02-10 00:28:55 UTC

Given the state of things, I sort of want to create a computing space in which it’s impossible to use AI. I want the artifacts in this space to feel like plants in a garden, something a person can work on little by little.
Not sure how this could be accomplished, I just want there to exist such a space.

2026-01-30 22:20:40 UTC

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An adventure!

2026-01-22 17:52:13 UTC

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I’ve been pondering the idea of a dedicated uxn handheld. would be cool, especially if it had a keyboard with instructions to allow programming!

2026-01-22 09:18:34 UTC

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As you saw in the repo I'm slowly working towards a little #uxn 3d engine, stay tuned :)
The benchmark draws a lot of very large triangles, and those are particularly slow. In a game I expect only the environment to be made up of so big triangles (and even then, one can subdivide as in PS1), so hopefully we can have more triangles than 32 per frame.
Also, it's going to be interesting to see if the improved sprite-based drawing routine improves performance!

2026-01-13 14:45:23 UTC

I'm almost done with a tiled version of my #uxn triangle rasterizer! By tiled, I mean drawing sprites instead of pixels reducing amount of calls to varvara by a lot. The rasterizer will hopefully be the start a of a little 3d engine.
Uxn is such a good "let's unwind and solve this puzzle" language. I'm not productive at all, but I'm enjoying the time spent :)
#theWorkshop

2026-01-12 10:10:52 UTC

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I feel that the rift that AI is causing is similar to for example global warming and what to do about it. I feel that my opinion is niche and that my friends and family don't understand me.
My dad was the one who got me into computers and programming. He's not working with computers in his day job but has been tinkering with them for as long as I can remember. He says he's not a programmer but he can duck-tape something together to realize his ideas. I remember stories about how he ran his first computer throughout the night in the single room apartment where he and my mother lived, it computing an image of the Mandelbrot set or something like that and saving it to disk with a loud screeching noise in the middle of the night. He wrote programs that wrote poems using Markov chains in the early 90s. He has done all these cool things with computers throughout my childhood without AI, and now he's using LLMs to create little tools for himself to search for medical papers and the like. I feel that he would still be able to do this without an LLM and I'm arguing for it, but he just sees them as a skill multiplier. And for him it really is. He only cares about the end result, realizing the idea. I just can't shake the feeling that we see different realities.

2026-01-04 21:02:35 UTC

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I would love to read/watch a walkthrough of how you setup your uxn development environment, seems like you have lots of tools to help you write your programs!

2025-12-01 15:00:51 UTC

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I've seen @npub1z8r…mrq6 have it in their talks, and @npub1gd5…hdqa is drawing a stamp to put on personal sites as well!
Personally I feel that "no AI" should be the standard/assumption and "with AI" the exception forcing a disclaimer, but maybe that's idealistic thinking...

2025-09-01 20:15:13 UTC

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I love the name Sunflower Basic! This gives me uxn fomo… I will be back!

2025-08-01 19:11:57 UTC

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Haha, that segment with the ring was so fun

2025-07-25 05:51:55 UTC

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Will the talk be streamed/recorded? Would love to have a remote only conference like this. I remember Game Arts International Assembly had a great remote conference during the pandemic. It helped that we tried out all kinds of different ways to ”hang out” online.

2025-05-28 19:37:44 UTC

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I've also been looking for the job you describe, but I can't find it either. It feels like there is no meaningful, intentional, paying job within tech in our society. But this must be wrong, right!?

2025-05-28 19:35:12 UTC

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Along the same lines, I've thought of the (far out) idea of me finding people to work on an idea I have and that I would like the programmers NOT to use AI tools to code. Thinking of this potential recruitmemt page would say "No AI" and "We don't allow AI tools when writing the code for this project" and how that would alienate so many of my peers today and at the same time is such a no brainer thing, like of course we only want code from the people that work on the project in the project?!
It just feels like my peers have been slow boiled into a world where they now depend on AI being there in their editor and saying that is not allowed now feels somewhat offensive. It feels so widespread now that not using it is an exception, I'm the exception.

2025-04-29 08:25:25 UTC

Yesterday, after listening to someone talking over long distance radio waves using a 5 meter wire antenna it occured to me: All metal objects around us electrically vibrate to the invisible hymns of different waves from all around the world, we're just not listening most of the time.
Fences, lamp posts, bridges, the masts of sail boats. Constantly, silently.

2025-03-17 21:26:44 UTC

1) Build an application or game using basic html, javascript and WebGL (for example using three.js)
2) Publish on the web
Now comes the fun part:
3) Build a minimal browser in C that *only* knows how to lay out simple html and run javascript
4) Route the WebGL calls to OpenGL/ES
The original project can now be self-hosted on most hardware built in the last 15 years without bundling it with a gigantic existing browser!
I like this idea because it couples rapid prototyping and distribution in the short term with permanence in the long term. Having very little "free" time nowadays has me looking for smarter ways.

2025-02-19 19:36:24 UTC

#uxn triangle 👀
https://assets.merveilles.town/media_attachments/files/114/032/229/366/113/297/original/e7ceac66e01f78c7.png

2025-02-14 20:37:00 UTC

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Making your own Unity? :)

2024-09-30 10:56:23 UTC

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Looks great though :)
That city traffic looks fun to make! I did something similar in https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=2333

2024-09-30 10:55:09 UTC

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That resolution... and alpha blending... and hm, the palette... THIS ISN'T PICO-8 :moomin_mad:

2024-09-09 18:05:07 UTC

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That was a concise explanation, thanks!
In what order are rules picked when multiple match? Seems like it could happen a lot with wildcards.