I actually built a fairly unique edutainment app for the opposite skill set - learning to play by ear. It works with piano, guitar, and other instruments. I always tell my students there’s no reason to choose between sight reading and ear training as they complement each other really well. Link is in my bio if you’re interested.
I’d be curious to know what the existing apps were missing that made you decide to roll your own. Things like Sight Reading Factory, Read Ahead, Synthesia, Piano Maestro, etc.
One small bit of feedback: never ever ever use a metronome sound that has a defined pitch. In your app, it sounded like C and G respectively. That kind of pitched click can interfere with a player’s ability to internalize the music and can disrupt auditory processing. Instead, use woodblocks or other purely percussive sounds that don’t have a defined pitch.
Nice job - but it's definitely not abandonware having been re-released on Steam [1] (along with a sequel) back in 2015.
Regarding the verifier that plays against the live engine, I’ve approached the problem from a similar angle by having LLM agents effectively borrow a page from the speedrunning community in the form of tool-assisted speedruns, allowing the LLM access only to a virtualized game controller.
Even if you do pull the game itself I would still definitely leave all the post mortem stuff up. I think it's just as interesting and worth keeping around - especially the YT vids demonstrating the harness.
I don't have a GH repo up for the TAS system yet - it's a bespoke mess right now since it was built with the old game "Castle of the Winds" in mind but I'll definitely consider it in the future!
Yup – I think that Chrome’s Manifest V3 has severely limited the capabilities of ad blockers like uBlock Origin as well. I switched to Librewolf a while ago.
First thing I thought of when I tried a Vision Pro was why they never provided a way to attach the battery pack as a pouch on the back so that it sits horizontally across the rear of the head. You have to carry that external battery anyway, so why not use it as a natural counterweight?
I had the exact same thought. To me, it feels like they just took the fairly common “sentient video game character” trope and bolted it onto a very conventional snake game.
I will say, the act of eating creates a "bulge distortion" that flows down the length of the snake is a nice touch though.
Taking the time to actively recall throughout literary material is another reason I believe reading has much more potential for long-term recall than watching an equivalent YouTube video. Even if a video is educational, most people aren’t inclined to pause it. The pace of information is set by the "director", not the viewer.
With a book there's much less friction with taking a brief repose to ruminate, make connections and let your mind wander where it will.
Anecdotal but the way I’ve always made sure I can recall something is by pausing after anything I consider particularly salient and then trying to connect it to other things I already know. I deliberately use a kind of guided free association + mindfulness to weave a stronger web.
For example, I remember when I first read about the cake zuppa inglese, an Italian dessert that’s basically a soppy liqueur cake whose name translates to “English soup,” I immediately thought of the Coffee Talk SNL sketch: “The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire. Discuss.” which itself borrowed from Voltaire’s famous remark.
I don't know about millions of lines of code, but Google Translate existed WELL BEFORE transformer architectures and relied on more traditional statistical machine translation techniques. They later moved to a neural machine translation technique, and then only after that in ~2019/2020 swapped to transformers.
Honestly a lot of us who worked in the translation sector remember NMT as being a huge step up and in some language-pairs even surpassing DeepL at the time.
These are all good exercises that help you build a solid foundation, but they can sometimes cause motivation to dip being somewhat clinical in nature.
So what I usually do is compile a list of melodic hooks from popular songs my students enjoy. Every so often, we’ll play them and let the student try to pick them out on the piano or their instrument of choice. I find that the satisfaction they get from being able to recreate a familiar pop‑culture melody really helps spark their interest in getting better at playing by ear, which in turn motivates them to stick with the exercises.
Shameless plug but I built a unique game specifically to help some of my more classically trained friends get better at playing piano by ear.
It's a free piano game in the style of the old "Simon" toy which presents players with increasingly longer sequences of musical notes and challenges them to reproduce the sequence using either an on-screen piano or connected MIDI keyboard. It also works with acoustic instruments through the mic.
Haha yeah that's a pretty stupid price. You can get it on eBay for $12 but you'd better bid fast because I'm sure it's going to be a very competitive auction. :)
Honestly? Probably all the way back to when Nick Walton used the computers at his university to train a custom version of GPT-2 that let players experience a completely open-ended text adventure game in 2019.
As somebody who as a kid had tried feeding IF transcripts into a markov model to generate random rooms for an amateur MUD, this was mind-blowing. It felt like I was playing a version of the “Mind Game” from Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card.
I actually built a fairly unique edutainment app for the opposite skill set - learning to play by ear. It works with piano, guitar, and other instruments. I always tell my students there’s no reason to choose between sight reading and ear training as they complement each other really well. Link is in my bio if you’re interested.
I’d be curious to know what the existing apps were missing that made you decide to roll your own. Things like Sight Reading Factory, Read Ahead, Synthesia, Piano Maestro, etc.
One small bit of feedback: never ever ever use a metronome sound that has a defined pitch. In your app, it sounded like C and G respectively. That kind of pitched click can interfere with a player’s ability to internalize the music and can disrupt auditory processing. Instead, use woodblocks or other purely percussive sounds that don’t have a defined pitch.
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