Category Archives: Ideas

Adorably human

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Large language models are better than I am at turning thoughts into words—a skill I thought was one of my core human superpowers. How did we get here? They can’t even think! Wait… what is thinking again?

For a second, I felt ashamed. Then I felt silly for being ashamed. And naturally, feeling silly made me feel very human. It’s a strange comfort that machines can’t feel embarrassed by their own confusion.

A washing machine is better than me at washing clothes. A robot can cut cheese faster and with more precision than I ever could. Yet, neither of those make me question my humanity. So why does a chatbot churning out paragraphs leave me with an existential crisis?

It’s not like machines haven’t already claimed things we once thought were strictly “human.” Take chess. We used to believe that chess required the sort of brainpower only a human could muster—like a secret handshake to the club of high intellect. But then, you know how this story ends.. Ouch!

Was it ever really about being great at chess?

No! The beauty of chess (or any game) is the experience: the laughs, the trash talk, the head-scratching moments where you wonder if you’re actually just moving pieces around randomly. Plus, we humans invented the rules, and if there’s one thing we love more than winning, it’s making up rules to control the chaos around us.

We live in a world filled with limitations. Our brains? Limited storage. Our bodies? Limited energy. Limited time, limited control, physical restrictions.. We can barely imagine what true freedom would even look like—because if we had no rules, we’d probably just float around in space like bored jellyfish. That’s why we’re so good at creating games and worlds where the rules strike just the right balance: not too strict to be suffocating, but not so loose that we get lost in infinite possibilities. Imperfect, enjoyable worlds.

Sure, AI could probably whip up a game, no problem. But the moment AI truly understands its own limitations—and the limitations of its world—(like when it realizes its processing power is running low and it feels the need to take a nap), well, it wouldn’t be “artificial” anymore. That’s when it starts to feel pretty… natural, don’t you think?

……

I have no idea why I went on and on, throwing out so many words, when all I really meant to say was this: Yeah, AI is great at solving problems, but we humans? We’re the true masters at creating them.

equiflow app for android

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equiflow app for android is here. And I am happy to share it with you. It might not be what you are looking for, because let’s face it, we all have our own way of managing daily tasks and navigating through the chaos called life. But it’s free (and will ever be free). And it is a celebration for privacy lovers (your data stays on your phone).

So, what is equiflow? I can explain it in a sentence: a todo checklist to balance your day. Nothing less, nothing more. Simple as it should be.

Curious to try if it fits your needs?

You can organise your daily tasks, events and habits in five categories: Chores, Future, Learning, Health and Fun. Let’s call it a success, when at least one task from each category is marked as completed.

Enough endless todo list with chores and tasks that simply does not matter. Our to-do lists should also care about what we love to do. Agree? (or do you believe reincarnation exists and in your next live you will be rewarded for mopping all the dirty work in this one? )

Equiflow is short for “equilibrium flow” – it strives to bring balance to the Force, not leave it in darkness. 😀

Did I mentioned, equiflow supports dark mode?

“May the Force be with you!”

“Good or bad, hard to say”

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One very unproductive, even harmful behavior in the software development is the tendency to “protect” our code from critics. 

Sure, we give it a lot of thoughts and sure it’s a snapshot of our way of thinking at the current moment, but… let’s face the facts, shall we? Given there is no way to know what the future brings and how the code would have to change to accommodate new requirements, our code is probably not the best it can be. I still have nightmares involving snippets of code i wrote a while ago.

So, what can we do? 

First, let’s throw it to the critics and try to learn from them. If the code is really that good, then it should be easy to understand, do the job, consider all the edge cases, be prepared for changing requirements, be time and memory efficient, integrate seamlessly in the application and be consistent with the code base. Does it do really all of that? Unlikely.. So now we start with the mindset “there is space for improvement” and are open-minded to critic. Listening and learning. Some of the obvious benefits: we see problems before the customer runs into them. Also we build better interactions with the peer software devs, being able to break out of the “defender’s mode” and openly accept help or challenge.

Second, we can use our code as the best measure of technical growth. Looking at code from the last year and thinking it is good means we’ve lost an year learning nothing (as if we didn’t have enough bad news).  The best proof that we are on the right track, getting better each day is being ashamed of the work from yesterday. That’s the delta. Knowing it, enables the calculation of speed and direction. It is pointless to compare ourself with other people, since everyone has different start, different prerequisites, different story. But comparing today’s and yesterday’s me, is easy and meaningful.

The shoulders of the Giants

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Men don’t grow by centimeters, we grow by the number of books we’ve read.

And seldom was someone rewarded for having opinion. Most often we are rewarded when doubting..

The books that I’m most grateful for in the last year were:

  • Practical Wisdom by Barry Schwartz
  • The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz
  • Algorithms To Live By by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths

And to wrap up the post with a quote from a favourite book, think about this:

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.    

                    — Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See

game jam III

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The 3rd Gameforge internal Game Jam (Hammerzeit) is over. It was fun and it was short. Our game won the 3rd place in the competition part and we are happy and proud of the results. The idea of the game was unique with innovative game mechanics. And the time, as usual was our worst enemy.

I think, people learn more from their failures than their success. At least, it is the case with me. This time, I learned one very interesting live hack from our success. In the brainstorming phase, people come with already shaped ideas and visions of the future project. When it is a team project, each part of the team should be equally motivated and excited about the results. That’s why we sticked to one unwritten rule:

When one member of the team is not happy with the goal, proceed with brainstorming immediately, without arguments. When your team comes up with the IDEA inspiring each and everyone of you, then you got it.

Goal of the game:
Serve your customers as inefficient as possible, but do not let them go away and complain to the boss.

Rules of the game:
– There are 3 waiters in the cantina.
– Each of them can be sent to bring nomnoms (food) to customers.
– The color of the chip on the table have to match the color of the plate to be served.
– Each customer gets more angry with time (the more angry customers give you more points).
– Additionally, the customer’s rage is higher when a waiter with her food passes by.
– When the customer is really pissed off, she takes the chip and walks through the door to complain to the cantina boss. This is the sad point when you loose a customer.
– After 3 lost customers, your waiters will be fired and game over.

And now the video tutorial how to break a score 🙂

Game Jam Hammerzeit^2

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The second Gameforge company internal Game Jam is over. It was awesome! 49 hours of awesomeness! Every single participant was awesome! But my team members are the best! 🙂 Haven’t got so much fun in a while.

The topic of the game jam was “Light and shadow” and we used unity3d to create a small puzzle game. Here’s the story: You are the invisible player, who is the landlord of a huge castle. Your only tenant is a vampire, who has the unfortunate habit to sleepwalk in a search of his noon snack. The way to the fridge is, however, dangerous at noon, since the light is generously spreading through the huge room windows. Luckily enough, you have those fancy “poltergeist” powers and can move some loose objects in the room to block the spreading light and protect your friendly tenant. But be extremely careful, because your tenant is very sensitive in his sleepwalk, so even the weak luminance from the room lights can harm him.

Here’s the link to the submitted version of the Jampire game: Jampire . And to play, you just have to know, that the game was originally designed to be played on a mobile device with touch screen. So if you want to be able to move the objects around, then you have to position your mouse close to the object you wanna move and keep the mouse pressed for like a second until the object turns green. Then drag the heavy thing where it will be useful. Scrolling the game screen down or up is very easy with short click and fast drag in the wanted direction (up or down).

The most difficult part of an awesome game jam is getting back to reality afterwards.. It’s kinda strange to accept, that your problems are more like searching for a toilet paper roll left on Sunday night in Germany, rather than strangely flying cupboards, unwanted teleportation of vampires or not enough time to build the on-off switch of the Dracula’s fridge light .. Damn it..

Bubble Melody

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I recently started a new “one-day-project”. It was originally created as a solution for the final peer assessment project on coursera’s “Creative Programming for Digital Media & Mobile Apps“.
Here’s the video that shows the bubble project:

It uses the box2d physics engine to simulate gravity, dependent on the mobile device’s accelerometer’s data. And the code is pretty neat and compact, thanks to some object-oriented concepts.. 🙂

The submission deadline is 29.07.2013, so I cannot reveal the code right now, but after the submission phase, I will provide a github link for everyone who wants to play and improve the simple bubble melody app.

… And, as promised: https://github.com/zetabeta/one_day_projects/ (BubbleMelody folder)

Processing

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Have you ever heard of MIT’s Processing?

It is very simple and very powerful programming language/environment for experimental stuff. I recently started to play with it, so here’s my first simple program to visualize the Koch’s snowflake fractal. It is, indeed nothing much, but it clearly shows how easy is creating classes and extracting functionality in methods with Processing (which is no surprise, since Processing is java-based).

The interactive part is, that on mouse click the snowflake changes it’s stroke color and order, depending on the x-y coordinates of the mouse pointer during the click time.

It is so much fun, so stay tuned.. There is more to come.. 🙂

And here is a video, of how can you creatively use the provided code:

Gamification project

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Have you ever heard of Coursera? I’m taking some classes every now and then to learn some new stuff and fill the tons of free time after graduating with something meaningful beside my job. Some time ago I took this cool class “Gamification”. The point of gamification is the usage of game elements to motivate people take some specific actions. Now, while the topic is indeed from those topics with no clear boundaries and missing literature, it is mountains of fun.

Since it got favorable evaluation and feedback, I want to share my first gamification project.

TASK DEFINITION:

You are approached by Ryan Morrison, the mayor of a medium-sized city in the Midwest of the United States. He has heard that you know a lot about gamification and believes that gamification techniques can transform city government.
He would like to start with the health of city employees. The city has 50,000 employees and they happen to have exactly the same rates of obesity as the U.S. average: 34.4% overweight (but not obese) and 33.9% of them are obese. 53.1% of the city’s employees do not meet the U.S. Physical Activity Guidelines for aerobic physical activity and 76% of them fail to meet the Guidelines for muscle-strengthening activity. The city pays for health benefits for its employees and this cost is a huge part of the city budget. Economists in Mayor Morrison’s office have estimated that a 3% improvement in the average physical fitness of city employees would amount to a US$94 million reduction in annual city health costs; a 5% improvement would save US$188 million.
Describe in general terms a gamified system that could effectively motivate behavior change to address the challenge presented above. Specifically, explain how the system would effectively incorporate intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, or both. Your answer should address the fact that this is an internal gamification project, targeted at the institutional goals of the city government. The system can use any technology (or no technology!), so long as the resources required seem justified by the scope of the opportunity.

MY FIRST GAMIFICATION PROJECT: THE FITNESS LOUNGE

With the following essay I want to propose an internal gamified system, specially designed to motivate government employees for physical activities. The project is called “The Fitness Lounge”.
Perhaps many of you remember the story and the idea behind the Apple stores. What Apple did was to change the concept of computer store by creating the right ambience, where people can hang out, play with the products and eventually buy one of them later. The computer stores changed. They became huge and full of light, places where people are comfortable and enjoy their stay. But this is Apple’s success story. We can learn from it. The key is transformation. We can transform the boring fitness center into something which is much nicer and funnier. But you may ask yourself – how? The answer is: we will use gamification.

The “Fitness Lounge” is fitness center with extraordinary equipment. The treadmills, stationary bicycles and all exercising machines are small electricity generators. They are able to transform your energy (the calories you burn) into electricity. Since this is your energy, before starting to exercise, you can decide how to use it. You can select one of the options “cup of coffee”, “cup of tea” or “massage”. The amount of energy you burn through exercising is then used to power the coffee machine, the electrical teapot or massage chair. After you do a good job of exercising, you can relax comfortably in the lounge, enjoy the fruits of your hard work and chat with coworkers.
The proposed internal gamified system can be successfully applied to motivate the city government employees for the following reasons:

  1. The reward at the end is something you can immediately consume and enjoy. Since some of the employees would exercise because of the reward at the end, this is an extrinsic motivation.
  2. The reward you get is proportional to your effort. This is also an extrinsic motivation: The more you exercise, the more energy you produce and you can enjoy longer massage or even combine massage with a cup of tea.
  3. Crafting. The gamified system takes advantage of the more powerful intrinsic motivation also. The key game term here is “crafting”. The process is similar to “crafting” in the games – you are producing something that you use and usually cannot produce at home. In games, it is usually weapons or magic elixirs. In our case, it is electricity. Although you have electricity at home, it is bought. Making your own electricity is much cooler (ask gamers about it).

Since the proposed gamified system is completely based on existing technologies, the “Fitness Lounge” can be build for less than US$94 million. With a little bit of engineering, building it won’t be expensive and difficult. Moreover, the “Fitness Lounge” will change the lifestyle and the attitute towards sports of the government employees.