I've been a word game fan for a long time and always wanted to try my hand at building a unique take on the genre since so many fall into a Wordle type clone these days. I came up with the concept for SpellRush a few months ago and finally got it to what I think is a pretty fun concept over the past few weeks. Would love feedback from anyone that is up for giving it a try! https://spellrush.com/
As someone who has been launching personal projects through the years it's so frustrating to constantly lose the battle against these sites. First mover advantage has been so true in the web that is it is so hard to gain any traction against these behemoths that keep degrading the user experience.
I'm still hopeful that we'll find a way to surface sites that do not succumb to this type of hostile user behavior but that may be naive on my part.
Hopefully this is an ok place to plug my own word game, https://spellrush.com/. It's very different from Wordle but that was a conscious decision since there are so many clones out there these days. Really wanted to put a fresh spin on word games.
As someone that only has sporadic pockets of deep time in my free time the thing that has been immensely helpful from an LLM coding point of view is mental model building. I can now much more easily get "into the flow" after being away from a codebase for a period of time by asking questions. For example, remind me where all the integration points for that API route is located. Or give me a rundown on this file. Etc.. It gets me back up to speed so much more quickly and makes me productive with limited amounts of time. It also means I don't have to try to carry this context around with me or I'll forget it.
You just described my experience exactly. Especially the personal side project time as a parent. Now after bed I can tinker and have fun again because I can move so much more quickly and see real progress even with only an hour or two to spend every few days.
Yes! I feel like so many people really fail to appreciate this side of things.
Heck, Suno has gotten me to the point where I play so much more piano (the recording -> polished track loop is very rewarding) that not only did I publish an album to Spotify in my favorite genre, of music that I’m really happy with, I’ve also started to produce some polished acoustic recordings with NO AI involvement. That’s just because I’ve been spending so much more time at the piano, because of that reward loop.
As someone who is very much in this boat, though with guitar and bass rather than piano, I have really been wanting to get into this. I'm even willing to spend some money on tokens or subscription, but I have no idea how to really get started with it.
Are you willing to go into some more detail about what you do with Suno and how you use it?
I use it very simply. I pay for the monthly subscription that gives you 2k credits a month. I record a few song ideas every day, usually 2-3min recordings, using my phone and Apple Voice Memos. I export them as mp3 files and upload those to the Suno app with a very short prompt (my album is made of songs generated via the very simple but slightly weird “house string quartet” prompt that I discovered by accident).
I generate a bunch, pick the ones that sound good, extend them if necessary, and save. Eventually once I have 30ish I can just pick the top winners and assemble an album. It’s drop dead simple.
The only reason I published them is because my family started to get worried that the songs would get “lost,” and at the request of friends also. Not doing it for profit or anything.
The recording is the real prompt: the longer of a recording you create, the more Suno adheres to the structure and tone/rhythm/voicings you choose.
I use the v5 model. Way better than the v4/4.5 models.
By far the most disappointing for me has been the Roomba x2. I love the concept and when the first one didn't live up to the hype I somehow convinced myself the newer version surely had the bugs worked out. Neither lasted working in my house for longer than a few weeks. Not because they were broken but I spent more time dealing with them than I did just vacuuming. Haven't tried another robot cleaning device since.
Roomba i9. Its predecessor (can't remember the model) lasted for 12 years and its random cleaning algorithm was great. I only bought the i9 because the old ones battery stopped charging and there were no more replacements. It was not smart and worked perfectly via infrared remote. The i9 tho, let me tell you: you can't place it farther than 2m from the router because otherwise it loses WiFi permanently. 2nd battery within 5 years. IRobot demands an account login for every use of the app. I ask you, why would I login to an app? This is a robot, I press button and machine goes brrr - anything more and I get irritated. When it's done, it beeps. Sometimes directly after, sometimes 2 hours after, sometimes in the middle of the night. The cleaning is nowhere near as complete as the old, random algorithm. I will never buy IRobot again.
Roomba as well. Awesome at first when we bought our first home.
But then we filled it with stuff and got a doggo. Those hairs fast-track the process of jamming the wheels and sweeper. Why do we need a robot vacuum when we still have to vacuum by hand?
As a parent of identical twins watching them develop and grow is fascinating. I do wonder at times how much of it is due to going through every single life stage together but then again there are times where that bond seems to go beyond environment. There was a sobering but very interesting documentary on identical twins called Three Identical Strangers, if you are interested in this type of stuff it's a good watch.
The other side to this is non-identical twins, especially when still very young and have had basically the same experiences (doing everything together), they can be very different.
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